R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Patten, Robert L."

Browsing by Author "Patten, Robert L."

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Adultery and revision in Tennyson's 1859 "Idylls of the King"
(1997) Hewitt, Janice L.; Patten, Robert L.
Tennyson's 1859 Idylls of the King responds to and comments on a complex of mid-Victorian fears centered on female sexuality, adultery, and the rising assertiveness and power of women. Tennyson revises his medieval sources in order to make adultery the unifying element in all four early idylls. By making his characters severally revise the appearance of Guinevere's adultery, Tennyson illustrates England's growing difficulty in determining truth. Because Tennyson's poem is now usually read as idylls excerpted from the whole or as the completed work of twelve idylls, it is difficult to see the centrality of the Woman Question in the 1859 idylls each named for a woman: "Enid," "Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinevere." Critics often read the women as schematic versions of "true" or "false": Enid the true wife, Vivien the false harlot, Elaine the true and innocent virgin, Guinevere the falsely adulterous wife. Tennyson, however, undercuts each of these stereotypes, while at the same time illustrating the hazards of individualism. All four women defy traditional authority in ways not found in Tennyson's sources. Geraint believes that Enid, like Guinevere, is potentially adulterous. Enid is not, but she moves from being properly assertive to becoming dangerously controlling. Vivien is not the unprincipled harlot that Merlin names her, but she seizes powerful knowledge that had previously belonged only to males. Elaine, kept from marriage by Lancelot's adulterous love for Guinevere, is not the sweet medieval maiden who dies for lack of love. Instead, her sexual willfulness becomes monomania; she chooses death and controls her family. Guinevere's adultery is indeed contagious, but Tennyson shows clearly that, nonetheless, Guinevere has a far clearer-eyed view of reality, of life's "lights and shadows" than does her "blameless" husband. The kingdom falls not because of Guinevere's adultery, as Arthur believes, but because of many misguidedly selfish decisions, including those of Arthur himself. By the end of the 1859 Idylls, it is evident that Tennyson is investigating the transition in nineteenth-century England from traditional authority to individual choice, with all its "wealth and all the woe." Women's increasing assertiveness is central to that worrisome process.
Animal Remainders, Remaining Animal: Cross-Species Collaborative Encounters in Victorian Literature and Culture
(2014-04-24) Basnett, Kattie; Michie, Helena; Wolfe, Cary; Parsons, William B.; Patten, Robert L.
“Animal Remainders” responds to the challenge of—and challenges to—Victorian animal studies, a sub-field of Victorian scholarship that has not seen the same popular critical reception as modernist or contemporary literary animal studies. Departing from the Victorian critical trend of reading literary animals as salient figures only so long as they can be imagined as symbolic or metaphoric for humans and human concerns, “Animal Remainders” takes literary animals—whether domestic pet or insect—seriously as animals. Moreover, these literary animals are acknowledged as agents of ethical production and transformation structured through a “chimerical collaboration.” The chimerical collaboration is inherently cross-species in nature and, within this collaboration, animals are capable of co-authoring the human and cross-species relations through the act of co-constitution, as well as being capable of explicitly or implicitly co-authoring texts such as literature and music in spite of communications barriers. By reading literary animals as collaborators with, rather than metaphors for, the human I demonstrate that the humanism and anthropocentrism we credit the Victorians and their literatures with as a discipline breaks down—at least in part—as Victorian literary animals are more radical than they have been given credit for. In this spirit, each chapter of “Animal Remainders” focuses primarily on critically marginalized readings of cross-species collaborations as they manifest in Victorian texts—including Charles Dickens’ early novels, Wilkie Collins’s antivivisection novel Heart and Science, animal autobiographies by Virginia Woolf and Anna Sewell, and the poetry of Michael Field—as well as in contemporary literature, experimental music, and the digital humanities. “Animal Remainders” foregrounds important methodological questions about the forces which discipline Victorian scholarship and the history informing our historicism, as well as more intimate questions about ourselves as scholars and living beings in a cross-species world. It enacts a fundamental un-knowing of the Victorian human and its—real or represented—animal other by asking, who is this nineteenth-century human (or) animal we study, but also who is the “we” doing the studying and through what histories and structures of knowledge have we come to know ourselves (and others) as such?
Between generations: Imagination, collaboration, and the nineteenth-century child
(2010) Smith, Victoria Ford; Patten, Robert L.
Shifting ideas about the qualities of children's imaginations transformed relationships between adults and children in nineteenth-century Britain. This dissertation contends that these new paradigms of children's fancy led authors of children's literature to partner with the young as creative collaborators, which accounts for frequent representations of children as an adult author's auditor, coauthor, illustrator, or guiding genius. These intergenerational collaborations were new models of authorship and evidence of a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active agents shaping their own social worlds. Alert to the fact that depictions of children are historically variable, I situate children's literature with and against discourses from psychology to education reform, demonstrating how the perceived powers of fancy granted children agency in a variety of cultural arenas. My project, then, offers an alternative to critical accounts that represent children as ciphers fulfilling adults' psychological and sexual desires. My introduction examines children's literature of the early nineteenth century, which I contend was a collaboration between adults Debates about the child's imagination, however, indicate a shift in expectations regarding adults' relationships to children. The remaining chapters detail the consequences of this shift, exploring four ways children were acknowledged as creative collaborators. Chapter one explores how many authors for children, inspired by fairy tale collections and cultural associations between children and preliterate cultures, structured their fictions according to models of oral narration. These authors defined children not as silent listeners but as participants in the narrative. Chapter two investigates coauthorship in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, who understood composition as a collaboration between multiple familial, literary, and psychological personas. Partnering with his stepson, Stevenson developed a vocabulary of images that resurface throughout his works and express a social model of authorship. My third chapter explores the unruly child, examining children's literature that depicts collaborations between disobedient children and dim-witted adults in the context of education reforms that privileged imagination over adult authority. The figure of the disorderly child suggests anxieties about the imaginative power of those considered socially vulnerable. I conclude with a chapter on illustration, situating images by Edward Lear and Rudyard Kipling against ideas about children and art, arguing that these author-illustrators fuse childlike spontaneity and adult order, representing collaboration through playful images.
Communities of Place: Making Regions in the Victorian Novel
(2013-09-16) Miner, Heather; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Wiener, Martin J.; Logan, Thad
Mid-way through George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the heroine of the novel develops a plan to move from her country estate in England’s Midlands to the northern industrial county of Yorkshire, where she intends to found a model factory town. Dorothea Brooke’s utopian fantasy of class relations, ultimately abandoned, hints at the broader regional and geospatial discourse at work in this canonical Victorian novel, but is as equally ignored by critics as by other characters in Eliot’s realist masterpiece. In Communities of Place, I explore a new current of scholarship in Victorian studies by examining the role that England’s historic and geographic regions played in the development of the novel. Scholars of British literature and history have long argued that Victorian national and cultural identity was largely forged and promulgated from England’s urban centers. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the center became synonymous with London and, in the national metropolitan imagination, counties outside of London seemingly became homogenized into peripheral, anti-modern spaces. The critical tradition reinforces this historical narrative by arguing that the rise of nationalism precludes the development of regionalism. Thus, theorists of British nationalism have glossed over England’s intranational identity and have directed attention beyond England’s borders, to France or Scotland, to analyze national identity within Great Britain as a whole. Scholars of intra-English culture, meanwhile, often narrowly focused on county histories and the working classes in isolation. Both types of studies effectively argue that the English middle class, and the middle-class Victorian novel, lack regional affiliation; as Raymond Williams argues, middle-class Victorians were “external” to regional life. With Communities of Place, I join a scholarly conversation that offers an alternative to these scholarly cul-de-sacs: a critically engaged and historically responsive account of English regionalism. My project demonstrates how the development of distinctive English regional cultures paralleled, and occasionally destabilized, the formation of English national identity in the Victorian period. Central to this project is my assertion that the English upper and middle classes, like the working classes, were in part defined by their regional affiliations. Communities of Place, then, offers a historically specific understanding of regionalism as an important structuring framework for the social, geographic, and environmental relations in post-Romantic English literature, by drawing attention to four formulations of English regionalism: the early-Victorian defenses of industrial Northern Englishness, mid-Victorian regional conceptions of mixed rural and factory spaces, the repurposing of non-industrial landscapes for leisure, and the late-century return to the materiality of countryside, now emptied of Romantic naturalism. In each chapter I study geographically-specific cultural regions, from Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial Lancashire to Thomas Hardy’s rural Wessex, in order to explore more generally how local class relations, topography, and recreational activities helped to shape discrete notions of Englishness outside of London. This methodology offers a productive alternative to center/peripheral models for understanding relations within England. By focusing on the depiction of regional responses to topics of national discussion, ranging from industrialism to the rise of consumer culture, I show how these issues were negotiated by the middle classes Victorian literature. These responses influence contemporary discussions about regional authority over landscape policy, the cultural status of the vernacular, and the preservation of green spaces in the urban nation.
Contested cargoes: Free trade and fantasies of the global in British literature and political economy, 1814–1865
(2006) Celikkol, Ayse; Patten, Robert L.
Literary depictions of commodity circulation across national borders and tropes of free trade in economic discourses reveal that in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Britain, international commerce metonymically represented unstoppable traffic of all kinds between distant lands. Discursively, legal and illegal forms of free trade, from smuggling to government-sanctioned importation, became signifiers of unrestrained intellectual, sexual, and affective exchange. Textual representations of border-crossing commerce facilitated meditations Britain's relationship to the rest of the world, helped imagine cosmopolitan experience, and produced competing models for a world bound by capitalist exchange. The evaluation of global capitalism in early- and mid-nineteenth century Britain relied on moral structures instated by existing nationalist, gender-related, and religious ideologies even as it produced new ways of understanding the world as a totality. Narratives and tropes of treasonous betrayal (chapter one) and rampant sexuality (chapter two), as well as those of marital union (chapter three) and religious devotion (chapter four), helped ascribe both negative and positive moral valences to free trade. The figures of the smuggler, the Jew, the prostitute, and the cosmopolitan merchant, appearing in diverse genres such as the historical novel, nautical fiction, melodrama, epic poetry, and the social problem novel, mediated discussions of the social and subjective effects of laissez-faire. From Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels and John Galt's Annals of the Parish to Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Captain Marryat's Snarleyyow, from Harriet Martineau's Dawn Island and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley to Ebenezer Elliott's Corn-Law Rhymes and R. H. Horne's Orion, literary works addressed how international commerce would transform subjective experience. Free trade appeared to correspond to such diverse experiences as the dissipation of political allegiances, the breaking down of self-control, the cultivation of romantic attachment, and religious faith. The ideological function of the translation of economic phenomena into subjective experience was to criticize or justify global capitalism, not on the grounds of whether it would render Britons more prosperous, but based upon its imagined effects on inter-personal and international relations. The understanding of global commerce as a morally socially transformative force, which informs present-day debates about globalization, was already present at the free-market economy's moment of origin.
Dispatches from Japanglia: Anglo-Japanese Literary Imbrication, 1880-1920
(2012) Scholtz, Amelia Catherine; Patten, Robert L.
This project considers the ways in which English authors and a diverse group of Japanese subjects co-produced literary representations of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that Anglo-Japanese encounters were defined by imbrication: by a number of overlapping phenomena that developed both coincidentally and as a result of contact between the two countries. Among coincidental developments, I include urbanisation and the development of a prosperous middle class in both Japan and England. Developments that appear to arise as a result of Anglo-Japanese contact include the prevalence of Social Darwinism in intellectual circles in both countries, as well as the growth of transnational bureaucratic networks. I refer to these phenomena collectively as "Japanglia," The literary implications of these overlaps--some highly ephemeral, others longer lasting--form the focus of this dissertation. In the four case studies presented here, I find that Japanglian phenomena compel us to adopt variously intertextual, inter-artistic, tropological, and somatically-focused approaches to our reading. My first chapter focuses on intertextuality in the work of Sir Christopher Dresser and Meiji bureaucrat Ishida Tametake. I find that the existence of Japanglian bureaucratic networks (formed in the overlap of English and Japanese bureaucracies) resulted in the publication of interpenetrative English and Japanese accounts of the same events. Japanglian texts may also be inter-artistic, using culturally blurred visual and decorative artforms as models for their own representations of Japan. This becomes apparent in my second case study, which considers the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado and Japanese ukiyo-e prints . Tropologically focused reading is also of use when reading these texts, for common tropes circulated between writers of English and Japanese origins. This common tropology features in the work of Rudyard Kipling and Okakura Kakuzo ̄. Finally, as my study of the Japan writings of Marie Stopes suggests, blurring between the categories of Englishness and Japaneseness may register in the phenomenology of somatic experience.
Explosive intimacies: Family and gender roles in Dickens's early novels
(1991) Coleman, Rosemary G.; Patten, Robert L.
Charles Dickens's early novels are engendered by what David Copperfield calls an "old unhappy want or loss of something," and the "something" wanted is the paradigmatic mother, providing perfect love, plenitude, and unity, while avoiding the female threats of desire and domination. Dickens's almost obsessive need to construct nurturing mothers from wives, sisters, daughters, and aunts, combined with his refusal to acknowledge his heroes' passivity, creates photographic double exposures in which a "happy family" overlays an isolated young mother/madonna and her adult male child, a domestic text half hides subtextual layers, and incestuous desires are disguised by returns to childhood innocence. When we read each narrative as if it were a palimpsest, using a three-layered psychoanalytic model, his representations of family and gender roles are startlingly different from accepted Victorian paradigms. The topmost layer of meaning, the manifest content, is that in which the realistic world of the novel is represented: family structures are created here, and family roles and relationships form the patterns of meaning. The second layer is comprised of primitive fantasies, wherein male fantasies of need for the nurturing breast, desire for the erotic breast, and fear of the smothering bad breast, pull the surface meanings into new designs. Here, gender roles and relationships form the crucial patterns. The third layer may be likened to dream work: meaning is encoded in representations of the body, its illnesses, and its metonymies. Each of the layers glosses and subverts the others, creating stories of crippled, ill bodies, mythic female roles, and narratival ambivalence. Oliver Twist constructs the paradigmatic hero who finds a mother after the mutilation of both male and female bodies. Nicholas Nickleby's hero avoids adult sexual stains by a return to his childhood and his sister. The Old Curiosity Shop offers serial primal fantasies wherein the heroine's body becomes increasingly dangerous and must be constrained. Finally, Dombey and Son constructs a heroine who becomes a mythic madonna and a hero who returns to passive infancy. The early novels thus enact a meta-narrative in which both male and female bodies are controlled by illness and disfigurement.
Fantastic Journeys: Resisting Growth in Golden Age Children's Novels
(2014-04-11) Elliott, Heather D; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Fette, Julie
During the Golden Age of children’s literature (1865-1914), authors both clung to the Romantic ideal of the innocent child and desired to acknowledge the child’s capacity for agency. This Romantic ideal of innocence was necessarily threatened by the child’s potential for agency—the more power the child wielded, the more likely she was to have her innocence tainted by experience and knowledge. This dissertation contends that the tension between the ideas of the child as innocent and the child as powerful led to the invention of a trope that I have named the “fantastic journey.” The fantastic journey occurs when a child character travels to a marvelous space (such as fairyland), has an adventure there, and returns to her ordinary world without her adult guardians ever discovering that she has been away because the journey has been either an out-of-body or an out-of-time experience. The journey may be explained as a dream or vision, or as an instance of time travel where the child returns to the same moment that she left in her ordinary world. The purpose of the fantastic journey is to allow a child to wield agency without any damage to her essential child identity. Each journey does this in different ways, but all allow child characters to gain knowledge and experience or to perform actions that would normally cause them to move closer to adulthood without losing any part of their child identity. Additionally, the journey also results in metamorphosis—abrupt change that is not the result of progress or process—for the child. This change always either enhances or protects the protagonist’s essential child identity. It is not change toward adult maturity. This dissertation traces the development of the fantastic journey through five texts, beginning with its initial formation in The Water-Babies; continuing through its various forms in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Story of the Amulet; and concluding with its deconstruction in Peter Pan.
"In Maiden Meditation": Readership and the Victorian Girl
(2013-11-08) Weeks, Jennifer; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Wiener, Martin J.; Logan, Jill T.
My project argues that a private, autodidactic model of girls' readership is challenged within mid-Victorian culture, as formal education for girls became more accepted and itself underwent reform. While discourses of public and private spheres dominated Victorian ideology related to women and girls, the schoolroom became an imagined space where larger concerns about the social and political role of women were played out as understandings of the role of reading shifted. I examine the ways that readership and education interacted in the period as the purpose of reading was culturally determined and redetermined. My dissertation uses literary criticism and cultural history to investigate different models of education: fictional and real, formal and informal. Fictional portrayals of girls' reading and their education provides a way to chart changes in the public understanding of what girlhood meant in the Victorian period. While I examine models of readership provided for girls by various authorities, I also use women's and girls' life-writing to shape my understanding of how girls perceived their own reading. My work intervenes in the field of readership studies primarily, complicating current understandings of how girls shaped and were shaped by their literature.
Inhabiting liberalism: politics, culture, and the spaces of masculine professionalism, 1823-1903
(2009) Morrison, Kevin A.; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Wiener, Martin J.; Hennessy, Rosemary
Inhabiting Liberalism: Politics, Culture, and the Spaces of Masculine Professionalism, 1823-1903 investigates the physical, social, and epistemological spaces of Victorian liberalism. It argues that liberalism is locatable and that its locations matter. By locatable, I mean that the tenets of liberalism—a set of contentions about how one should live in the world—were formulated from within preexisting physical environments and also served as the basis for new ones. These environments were the places where liberalism was conceived or put into practice, its sites of meaning. This dissertation, therefore, takes up the following questions: How did the structures constitutive of particular environments shape Victorian intellectuals' conceptions of liberal norms and practices? What kinds of spatial configurations did they think were ideally suited to liberalism? Why do liberal characterological and temperamental ideals—detachment, objectivity, many-sidedness—seem so inextricably intertwined with the physically objectified social spaces that these intellectuals inhabited but often thought themselves to have transcended? And, if the places where liberalism was conceptualized or put into practice provide the background conditions of its intelligibility, then what might this mean for the recuperative approach to liberal theory recently advanced by a number of scholars working on the period? Although the following chapters explore various answers to these questions, my underlying premise is that social space, or the arrangement of differentiated positions, is instantiated by physical structures and inscribed within cognitive faculties that are themselves constituted, at least in part, by these structures. Through an examination of key architectural sites—including India House, the House of Commons, the country estate, the Athenaeum Club, and the People's Palace—as John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Besant adapted, imagined, or lived in them and represented them in literary texts, I delineate the relationship between liberalism and the physical locations of its production and reception.
Material fictions: Readers and texuality in the British novel, 1814--1852
(2009) Hasell, Duncan Ingraham; Patten, Robert L.
I argue in the first chapter that the British novel's material textuality, that is the physical features of the texts that carry semantic weight and the multiple forms in which texts are created and distributed, often challenges and subverts present conceptions of the cultural roles of the novel in the nineteenth century. My project looks at how the multiple forms of the novel within nineteenth-century Britain both reflected and sought to change the relations between the novel and its readers. I suggest that different material instantiations of a literary work reveal historical contingencies that are unrecoverable from any one edition by itself. I consider the ways that the material characteristics of the physical document such as paper, size, and typeface, its mode of production, and other materialities, such as price and print run size constrain reading. While no reading is totally constrained by the text, every text represents possible uses of the written word in which we can recognize the constraints or discipline that these texts seek to exercise on their readers. The remaining chapters are a series of case studies that analyze how material textuality affects our understanding of Walter Scott's Waverley, Frederick Marryat's Peter Simple, and W. M. Thackeray's History of Henry Esmond .
Pickwick Papers and the Development of Serial Fiction
(Rice University, 1975-01) Patten, Robert L.; Electronic version made possible with funding from the Rice Historical Society and Thomas R. Williams, Ph.D., class of 2000.
Secondhand Economies: Recycling, Reuse, and Exchange in the Victorian Novel
(2011) Womack, Elizabeth Coggin; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.
This dissertation examines patterns of secondhand exchange in the Victorian novel as a critical counterpoint to the more frequently discussed literary representations of industrial production and consumption. Analyzing representations and transfers of well-used, secondhand, and even discarded objects as they change hands in the work of writers including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry Mayhew together with archival material, I argue that the secondhand economy reveals a cultural ambivalence toward the devaluation of material objects accompanying new modes of production, strongly tinged with a nostalgia for supposed precapitalist affective ties between persons and things. The significance of my exploration of the secondhand economy in literature is not limited to representations of material objects, however; it also facilitates a more nuanced understanding of Victorian class and especially class mobility as it relates to moments of exchange in the novel. While redirecting our attention to economically marginalized characters and the often neglected patterns of circulation that govern their social roles, it also problematizes rigid notions of class by tracing the mobility of both objects and persons as sellers and purchasers of all classes negotiate social position with the exchange of objects. Following an introduction that situates my project at the nexus of economic criticism and material culture studies, I argue that Victorian writers including Carlyle, Dickens, and Mayhew used the circulation of secondhand clothing to signify a rupture from the past and from sartorial social ties. The second chapter examines literary representations of the pawnshop in the work of Dickens and George Eliot; while the pawned object symbolizes the uncertain fate of fallen or endangered women, the site of the pawnshop itself stores forgotten history and facilitates the redemption of both persons and pledges. The third chapter examines auction narratives in the work of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, identifying in these texts the narrators' efforts to guide readers toward a more acute perception of irony and proper feelings of sympathy in response to these spectacles of dispossession. The concluding chapter revisits Mayhew, Carlyle, and Dickens to examine profitable second lives of persons and things.
Social Memory and Nineteenth-Century British Historical Fiction
(2011) Marler-Kennedy, Kara G.; Patten, Robert L.; Michie, Helena
This dissertation examines the representation of social memory in British historical fiction from 1810 to 1880. I argue that social memory is crucial to the analysis of historical fiction during this period because it affords us an opportunity to see how authors in the nineteenth century viewed the social dimensions of memory as constructed by communities that envision their pasts in relation to prevailing ideologies and dominant authorities. Specifically, literary representations of social memory are important in understanding how communities come together to achieve common goals or resist dominant authorities through their sense of a common past in one of the most popular genres of nineteenth-century literature, the historical novel. The significance of social memory for the study of nineteenth-century British historical novels centers in the fact that it reveals the processes by which kinship or kindred groups and other social groups can be formed and by which historical consciousness is developed and communicated among those groups within the novel and to the reader. Social memory is defined here as a shared vision of the past, its narratives, and its symbols that embodies the cultural and communal influences on an individual's and broader groups contemporary identity. Social memory can represent a positive, unifying force in an individual's lift and a community's day-to-day lived experiences, a force that can be used to achieve common purposes or resist common foes. The activation of social memory, though, offers a paradox: on the one hand, individuals are united by a powerful sense of togetherness as understood by their relationship to the past and its significance to their present, lived experience; yet, on the other hand, individuals may resist this totalizing or homogenizing sense of the past when it threatens the uniqueness of individual subjectivity, specific characteristics of group culture, or forecloses on the possibilities of social action by those on the margins. This dissertation looks at how social memory is represented in non-canonical and canonical historical novels by Sir Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, and Philip Meadows Taylor.
The 'Terror of the Tiny': Contagion and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Literature
(2013-11-06) O'Leary, Joanna; Patten, Robert L.; Michie, Helena; Wiener, Martin J.
The ‘Terror of the Tiny’: Contagion and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Literature Why do things that physically underwhelm us emotionally overwhelm us? Why and when is power disproportionate to presence? What does it mean to be dominated by and afraid of things we (almost) cannot see? This dissertation seeks to provide partial answers to these questions by exploring the association between the development of contagion theory and representations of the “terror of the tiny” in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British and American texts. A fear of small things is hardly mysterious if such creatures are always already posited as simply disease-causing agents. However, as this dissertation will show, “the tiny” encompass much more than germs, and thus the fear these creatures inspire is far more complex and diverse in its origins and influences. Through analysis of depictions of contagion and infectious illness that occur alongside anxiety over the small things in literature, I will show how the rise of germ theory impacted the national psyche by undermining scientific as well as cultural, political, and socio-economic beliefs. This project further distinguishes itself from other critical analyses of illness and literature via its focus on genre, specifically how certain modes of characterization and representation of infectious diseases and epidemics that are common across different novels, stories, non-fiction prose, etc., effectively function to challenge the conventional categorization of those works of literature. Similar depictions and treatments of contagion in fiction, I argue, not only enable these separate pieces to individually transcend their ‘home’ genres (of detective fiction, sensation novel, ghost story, etc), but also, in some cases, leads them collectively to inaugurate an entirely new generic category. These new and/or transformed genres, I further contend, ultimately reflect a desire, if not need, to rethink what constitutes England and Empire, Great Britain and America, “child” and “adult”, and, indeed “big” and “small” given the omnipresent threat of infectious disease.
The double life of Jane Fairfax: a study of the shadow novel in Jane Austen's Emma
(1984) Markey, Joan, Sister; Patten, Robert L.; Gillman, Susan; Stout, Janis P.
Jane Austen incorporates a novel within a novel in Emma. Jane Fairfax's romance shadows the main storv. The two texts provide a double perspective, allowing Austen to include in her rational, sociallv sanctioned love story, a method of self-conscious comment. The double narrative shows the interplay in both texts between consciousness and convention. Austen uses the conventional romance form but presents the romance unconventionally. Jane Fairfax, the heroine of her own shadow novel, personifies the tension between the novel's "light" and "dark" landscapes. The solution of the shadow novel's mystery frees the characters from double-dealing and delusion, and effects the reconciliation,leading to the appropriate, happy ending.
The influence of anxiety: Bricolage Bronte style
(1993) Jenkins, Keith Allen; Patten, Robert L.
Driven by her anxiety to create an alternative world view to that offered her by the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century England, enabled by the decline of biblical authority encouraged by the expansion of scientific discovery and the rise of the Higher Criticism, and guided by the Bible's own internal reinterpretative tradition, Charlotte Bronte appropriates the authoritative voice of scripture in order to redirect its energies into new avenues so that she can script a life for herself which transcends the possibilities available to her in the external world. However, if she wishes to redress issues of exclusion and oppression which have their roots in the traditional, male-dominated interpretation of the Bible, then one of her most effective weapons is the Bible's own challenging word, which, though often suppressed by her culture, she reclaims and uses. What Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence" is certainly involved in her apparently willful misreading of the precedent tradition of biblical interpretation in order to clear out a space within which her voice can be heard. The influence of such a powerful and sacrosanct source as the Bible would undoubtedly produce in Bronte the anxiety of which Bloom speaks. However, rather than abandoning or completely rejecting it, she saw her work as a necessary renewing of the biblical tradition because the conventional methods of viewing it no longer fit the situation of women in the nineteenth century, including her own. From the dominant society's point of view, she commits what can be perceived as acts of "violence" on the Bible and a substantial body of its interpretation. Breaking its stories down into their component parts of character, plot, and setting, she then reassembles them in startling and exciting ways using the process of bricolage. This study traces Charlotte Bronte's reinscription of the Bible through her four novels, paying special attention to her use of three strategies: (1) gender reversal, (2) undermining of God's role in controlling human history, and (3) recasting "otherworldly" locales in this worldly settings.
"The line invisible": Intertextuality and the men and women poets of British Romanticism
(1997) Pipkin, John George; Patten, Robert L.
This dissertation challenges the canon in British Romantic Poetry by establishing an interpretive methodology to account for the intertextual relationships that Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Tighe maintain with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats. The interpretive model that I develop in the opening chapter builds upon the "rhizome" theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in order to replace the "influence" of Harold Bloom's Oedipal model with a complex network of root-like intertextual relationships. By subsuming Bloom's linear structure under a non-hierarchical discourse network, this model encourages us to look at literary history as an intricate "root-system," extending in multiple directions from a plurality of disparate nodes. The resulting paradigm shift enables this dissertation to re-examine one of the dominant aesthetic concepts of the Romantic Period--the sublime--in order to show how the figurative construction of women as signifiers of materiality effects their cultural exclusion from commercial engagement with the Romantic aesthetic of transcendental sublimity. The "material sublime" is the term I use to denote those moments either when the physical world disruptively announces itself within the textual gesture toward transcendence, or when the text itself foregrounds the materiality upon which the sublime experience is based. After developing these two theoretical constructs, this dissertation then argues that Smith's Elegiac Sonnets engages in the discourse of the material sublime by expressing the terror and alienation she encounters upon leaving her spendthrift husband in order to raise their ten children on her own. The chapter examining Baillie's 1798 "Introductory Discourse" to A Series of Plays argues that her aesthetic theory anticipates Wordsworth's valorization of powerful emotions, natural language, and rustic themes, and that it is her methodical formulation of the "sympathetic curiosity" that compels Wordsworth to codify his own theories in the "Preface" of 1800. The final chapter explores the thematic and stylistic concerns of Tighe's Psyche, a rare example of an extended narrative poem by a woman during the Romantic period, in order to map her recuperation of beauty as an aesthetic category.
The transformation of God: Religion and culture in the post-Darwinian novel
(1996) Roberts, Bettie Weaver; Patten, Robert L.
The transformation of God as it develops in late-Victorian British literature comprehends a simultaneous double movement: first, it seeks to demonstrate and to discredit the transcendence of God assumed by pre-romantics, a transcendence that Hillis Miller has argued reaches its culmination in the Victorian period; simultaneously, it embraces an immanence which, though dependent on the dynamics of the romantic movement, moves significantly beyond romantic limitations. This immanence, a force deep within nature and within individual and collective humanity, manifests itself in post-Darwinian dynamics such as Darwin's "struggle for life" and Nietzsche's "will to power." Because these post-Darwinian energies share with the romantics a structure analogous to the idealist Absolute, and because their biological base enables them, unlike the romantics, reliably to unite the physical, emotional, and volitional with the epistemological, they successfully rejoin in a quasi-monistic whole what Descartes had sundered. George Eliot models her rebellion against the father on her prior rejection of the Christian God she initially reveres but eventually finds inadequate, and this rebellion ramifies from her personal writings to inform the text of Middlemarch. Thomas Hardy, who seeks in both religion and the secular society a post-Darwinian alternative to the transcendence of supernaturalism on the one hand and the abyss of atheism on the other, details his objections to what Angel Clare calls an "untenable redemptive theolatry" throughout Tess of the d'Urber-villes. For Henry James, religion correlates psychologically to the intertial drag of his father's influence; yet the Jamesian urge to "live all you can" impels his novelistic career and contributes to the success of Maggie Verver, who in The Golden Bowl uses post-Darwinian dynamics to overcome textual transcendences and reunite, through both passion and perception, the components splintered by Cartesian rationalism.
The Victorian short story: A textual culture's forgotten genre
(2004) Lewis, Karen L.; Patten, Robert L.
This study claims a space for the Victorian short story in the literary canon. It explores what forces were at work between 1830, when the rise of the magazine created a venue for short story publication, and 1884, when critics codified the British short story. Contemporary criticism tends to compare the short story to the novel to show what it lacks. This project examines the short story in relation to the novel to see what it reveals about the novel as well as what it offers short story writers. Ultimately, the short story develops as a reaction against the limitations imposed upon authors by the novel and by the culture that so strongly valorizes the novel. Although British writers failed to theorize overtly about the short story's form, close readings indicate that they delineate the short story's aesthetic in an economy of narrative and thematic confinement. Significantly, that confinement allows them to take liberties with subject and plot in the short story that they could not take in the novel. In fact, writers of the short story revise the novel's realist aesthetic. The rise of photography assists writers with this revision. As the photograph captures the Victorian imagination, a shared aesthetic develops between the two art forms that teaches readers and writers that meaning is subject to interpretation. The stories suggest that the novel's objective, omniscient third-person narrator may not accurately reflect the reality of the Victorians after all. This project suggests several opportunities for scholarship and teaching. For scholarship, it brings to light texts previously unknown to many readers, offering them new insights into well-known authors' oeuvres. Second, it suggests lines of inquiry for those interested in the ways a text can be shaped by its publication and market. For teaching, it delineates ways of complementing studies of the novel, either through the themes of confinement and freedom or the themes of marriage and community. Finally, it provides a fascinating look at the self-conscious development of a genre as it finds its own generic aesthetic.

Browsing by Author "Patten, Robert L."

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