This study examined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which foreshadows the Victorian period, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which reflects on it. The two novels are both monster stories that share many similarities, including themes of creativity and morality. However…
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In Victorian Glasgow, marital cruelty was understood by both the civil legal system and broader society to include emotional, psychological, verbal, economic, and physical abuses. In contrast to existing historiography, this thesis rests on the quantitative analysis of records o…
Holy Stitches, Batman, or, Performative Villainy in Gothic/am is an interdisciplinary examination of gothic affect and deviant fashion in the narrative construction of villainy. It asks not just what a villain looks like, but what it means to look like a villain. A villain is a …
This dissertation argues that Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s (1834–1892) activism held that Christian work and active service to Christ are not optional, but rather essential to the Christian life, the mission of the church, and pastoral ministry. Such activism expressed itself in ea…
This thesis argues that Oscar Wilde anticipates Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading. In 2003’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Sedgwick argues that the hermeneutics of suspicion–whereby the reader exposes the unjust power structures lying be…
This thesis centres on one of the most widely read illustrated fiction magazinesof the nineteenth century, The London Journal. Despite its popularity, this pennyweekly has received scant attention from either media historians or critics, partlybecause of the lack of bibliographi…
This edition of unpublished letters is an attempt to illustrate the life and achievements of W. E. Henley, man of letters, and is the result of the location of over 2300 letters in both public and private hands. More than half are located in the U.S.A. and Canada and were found …
When Frank Prochaska first published his studies on philanthropy, he provided the most in-depth scholarship to date. But this research is now over 20 years old and is ready for review. It is also a purely historical analysis, with little archaeological content. This research see…
This thesis examines Oscar Wilde’s theories of art in connection with specific debates ongoing in Victorian psychology as it emerged in the periodical press. By cross examining Wilde’s periodical contributions with psychological theories, concepts and discussions disseminated th…
Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a professional scientific and medical community was coming into being. Exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere became important elements in the consolidation of …
This practice-led research project explores English and French sentimental jewellery of the Victorian period. ‘Sentimental jewellery’ or ‘message jewellery’ denotes jewellery created to function as a tangible expression of feeling between donor and recipient, mediated through co…
This dissertation examines the self-fashioning of the multiple personae of two subversive historical figures: the dandy and the demimonde in nineteenth-century British culture. Tracing the dandy and the demimonde from the Regency period to the end of the century, this project ex…
This dissertation argues that Victorian novels commonly depict newspaper reading in order to explain and critique the kind of national feeling elicited by the popular press. While Benedict Anderson considers the ways in which reading newspapers and novels fosters a sense of nati…
Recent media attention on the trial and conviction of Andrea Yates, the Texas woman convicted of drowning her five children, as well as on female suicide bombers in Israel, indicates not only “a morbid curiosity in the United States relating to mothers killing their children” (M…
Sabato Morais (1823–1897), an Italian-born Jewish minister who came to Philadelphia from London in 185 1, became the preeminent exponent in America of enlightened orthodox Judaism. To counter threats posed to Jewish group survival, Morais advanced a voluntaristic model of Jewish…
If crime stories continually pass before the public eye, a subset of those crimes become social dramas, upsetting and even transfixing a community for weeks and months at a time. Centered upon a series of murder cases in Virginia, this project charts the evolution of crime sensa…
Recent scholarship has attributed the popularity of the Arabian Nights tales in the Arabic-speaking world to the fulfillment of expectations of worldly justice and reward rather than to the presence of magic. In contrast, this study finds that the tales' reception in late-imperi…
With numerous contributions to geography and literature, Sir Richard Burton is a major Victorian figure. Burton's main importance to his age lies in the fact that he was one of the premier imperial communicators of his time, disseminating numerous aspects of indigenous societies…