19th Century Literature

[Ella2909]

Hi Everyone!

I am about to start my third year at Uni and am trying to think/narrow down some sort of dissertation title.

I want to do 19th century novels but so far I have had many general idea but am having trouble narrowing them down! Any help u have would be fantastic!

So far my ideas are

- Male power and masculinities
- The perception of the heroine
- Hero's and Heroines - realism? fairy tales?
- Class and social politics
- Historical influences such as the Industrial Revolution
- Authorial control

But i am as in no clue how to mix and match authors/characters etc so any help would be so good right now! am in a right pickle!

I chose 19th century because it contains many authors I love such as Austen, James, Allcott, Wells, Dickens, Wilde, Bronte, Doyale, Trollope, Hardy, Thackeray - Im just stuck now on what to choose!

Thanks in advance for any comments.

[Themistocles18]

I've always thought it'd be interesting to compare major heroines written by male authors to major heroines written by female authors? I went on a kick a few months ago where I read a whole bunch of 19th century books with strong female characters and I was intrigued by the differences between, say, Hardy's heroines and Eliots.

[Ella2909]

Yeah I had thought of something like that but not sure if id be able to go deep enough..unless perhaps I centered upon one book by two novels say dickens and bronte?

so the model would look more like this

Male Authors Female Authors
| |
Female Heroines Female Heroines

COMPARE

- Stereotypes
- Feminism
- Male Gaze

However apart from the above and their literary styles im a bit fazed on how more indepth I could go...any suggestions?

[Themistocles18]

Yeah I had thought of something like that but not sure if id be able to go deep enough..unless perhaps I centered upon one book by two novels say dickens and bronte?

so the model would look more like this

Male Authors Female Authors
| |
Female Heroines Female Heroines

COMPARE

- Stereotypes
- Feminism
- Male Gaze

However apart from the above and their literary styles im a bit fazed on how more indepth I could go...any suggestions?

I wasn't a lit major so I'm not sure what you mean by "Male Gaze" but I think, and this may tie into stereotypes, that male 19th century authors tended to use female heroines more as symbols as opposed to characters. Hester Pryne and Tess Durbeyfield are two excellent examples though there are others. I don't know the sort of depth expected in British undergrad dissertations, but I imagine you could get a pretty serious paper out examining females as symbol and females as, you know, actual characters. This isn't necessarily a knock on the male authors. Make characters stand-ins for ideas is a pretty venerable tradition going back to Ancient Greece. Dostoyevsky used it on his almost entirely male casts. It's simply a different approach to telling a story and you could examine, perhaps, why male authors tended to turn female characters into symbols and why female authors usually didn't. Just an idea. I'm sure you'll get some better suggestions. I took exactly two lit classes in college and only one within the last 3 years so my advice is bound to be of limited utility.

[kelby_lake]

The perception of women, possibly. What interests you about 19th century novels?

[Ella2909]

The perception of women, possibly. What interests you about 19th century novels?

They are just my favorite time, I love the style of writing, fashion, tone of them, they just seem to be more romantic in their setting and obviously have themes that last through time. I have thought about doing something regarding setting but got a bit stumped lol

However these are all too big to write about so trying to determine a question is hard as can imagine!

[Ella2909]

I wasn't a lit major so I'm not sure what you mean by "Male Gaze" but I think, and this may tie into stereotypes, that male 19th century authors tended to use female heroines more as symbols as opposed to characters. Hester Pryne and Tess Durbeyfield are two excellent examples though there are others. I don't know the sort of depth expected in British undergrad dissertations, but I imagine you could get a pretty serious paper out examining females as symbol and females as, you know, actual characters. This isn't necessarily a knock on the male authors. Make characters stand-ins for ideas is a pretty venerable tradition going back to Ancient Greece. Dostoyevsky used it on his almost entirely male casts. It's simply a different approach to telling a story and you could examine, perhaps, why male authors tended to turn female characters into symbols and why female authors usually didn't. Just an idea. I'm sure you'll get some better suggestions. I took exactly two lit classes in college and only one within the last 3 years so my advice is bound to be of limited utility.

Hey - love your idea! I think that it could be developed into something great. :)

If i looked at female characters as symbols rather than necessarily living breathing women centering on their perception of them and why this was...maybe I could link this historically? and bring in some feminism?

Have been trying to think of a few novels where I could bring this in and am having a block lol the holidays have made me loose the ability to think...

Maybe Thackray? Tolstoy? Dickens?...not sure if hardy really does do that? esp in his representation of tess...what do you rekon?

[mal4mac]

Why not compare heroes in Austen and Dickens? Darcy compared to Nickleby?

[kelby_lake]

They are just my favorite time, I love the style of writing, fashion, tone of them, they just seem to be more romantic in their setting and obviously have themes that last through time. I have thought about doing something regarding setting but got a bit stumped lol

However these are all too big to write about so trying to determine a question is hard as can imagine!

You could do some question about Romanticism- wasn't that big back then, as a style?

[Patrick_Bateman]

I refuse to read Victorian literature at the moment mainly because my friend who did English Literature at University has tried to force it down my throat and I won't usually respond to recommendations as I prefer to discover on my own.
Apart from Oscar Wilde most of my 19th century literature reading is from the continent (Balzac, Dostoevsky, Chekhov etc)

[Wilde woman]

-The perception of the heroine
-Hero's and Heroines - realism? fairy tales?

I like the idea of looking at heroes or heroines in fairy tales/romance, since there seems to be a resurgence of interest in fairy tales (and antiquity in general) in the 19th century. I have a particular interest in Cinderella and Snow White. There's some interesting stuff you could do with gender or the body. And there's always the comparative approach; you could look at earlier folklore versions versus 19th-century translations. I have a friend whose dissertation topic will be kinship in fairy tales, so she's looking at things like orphans, stepmothers/stepsisters, father-daughter incest, etc.

Of the authors you mentioned, I know Wilde wrote some versions of fairy-tales, but you could also use Austen or Bronte. Other names that jump to mind are the Grimm Brothers (obviously), but maybe also Tennyson, Swinburne, and the Rossettis. I'm not sure that all of them did rewritings of fairy tales, but they all seem to share a Victorian interest in medieval/Classical stuff. I have a secondary interest in these writers too as samples of medievalism (since I'm a medievalist).

Good luck!

[andresarpi]

Man, it's impossible to write like a 19th century novel in the 21 st century. As all ways :stans up: Borges :sits down: has the answer for all your problems:


Hacia 1905, Hermann Bahr decidió: "El único deber, ser moderno". Veintitantos años después, yo me impuse también esa obligación del todo superflua. Ser moderno es ser contemporáneo, ser actual: todos fatalmente lo somos. Nadie -fuera de cierto aventurero que soñó Wells- ha descubierto el arte de vivir en el futuro o en el pasado. No hay obra que no sea de su tiempo: la escrupulosa novela histórica Salammbô, cuyos protagonistas son los mercenarios de las guerras púnicas, es una típica novel francesa del siglo XIX. Nada sabemos de la literatura de Cartago, que verosímilmente fue rica, salvo que no podía incluir un libro como el de Flaubert.

Olvidadizo de que ya lo era, quise también ser argentino. Incurrí en la arriesgada adquisición de uno o dos diccionarios de argentinismos, que me suministraron palabras que hoy puedo apenas descifrar: "madrejón", "espadaña", "estaca pampa..."

La ciudad de Fervor de Buenos Aires no deja nunca de ser íntima; la de este volumen tiene algo de ostentoso y de público. No quiero ser injusto con él. Una que otra composición -"El general Quiroga va en coche al muere"- posee acaso la vistosa belleza de una calcomanía; otras -"Manuscrito hallado en un libro de Joseph Conrad"- no deshonran, me permito afirmar, a quien las compuso. El hecho es que las siento ajenas; no me conciernen sus errores ni sus eventuales virtudes.

Poco he modificado este libro. Ahora, ya no es mío.


In 1905, Hermann Bahr stated: “There’s no obligation but to be modern”. Twenty years later, I took that self-contradictory statement too seriously. To be modern is to be contemporary, to be present-day: we are modern no matter we want to. No one- except that adventurer dreamt by Wells- has mastered the art of living in the future or the past. There’s no oeuvre that does not belong to the time in which it was written: the historic novel Salammbô, that has as protagonists some mercenaries that lived while the Punic Wars took place, is a typical French novel from the XIX century. We know nothing about that literature except that it couldn’t had produced a novel like Flaubert’s.

[Themistocles18]

Hey - love your idea! I think that it could be developed into something great. :)

If i looked at female characters as symbols rather than necessarily living breathing women centering on their perception of them and why this was...maybe I could link this historically? and bring in some feminism?

Have been trying to think of a few novels where I could bring this in and am having a block lol the holidays have made me loose the ability to think...

Maybe Thackray? Tolstoy? Dickens?...not sure if hardy really does do that? esp in his representation of tess...what do you rekon?

I haven't read any Thackeray, sadly. I'm not sure I'd put Tolstoy in that category. You could argue that Anna's a symbol...until the last 50 or so pages when we really get to see more of her character. It's been awhile since I've read Dickens, but you might want to take a look at Estella in Great Expectations. Other Dickens heroines, like Agnes and Dora in David Copperfield, are pretty flat but not really symbols. I do think Hardy does this though. I love Tess of D'Urbervilles but Tess HAS to be a symbol for Hardy's thesis to work. All that florid description of her, the sacrificial feel to the ending- Tess is not just A pure woman, she is all pure women ruined by a society which values convention over nature. Tragedy is generally awash in symbolic characters (which is something you could examine as part of the history bit, probably).

[kelby_lake]

Hardy definitely does it. Thackery...not really.