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“A Thousand Peculiar and Varied Forms”: Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel

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“A Thousand Peculiar and Varied Forms”: Space and Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century British Historical Novel “A THOUSAND PECULIAR AND VARIED FORMS”: SPACE AND NARRATIVE IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH HISTORICAL NOVEL By THOMAS GLYNN BRAGG, JR. A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2009 1 © 2009 Thomas Glynn Bragg, Jr. 2 To Sandy 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I give thanks to Pam Gilbert and Bob Thomson for their many hours of help, advice and encouragement; you have both been utterly professional but with a pleasantly personal touch. Warm thanks also to Phil Wegner and Jessica Harland-Jacobs, for investing so much time and effort into reading my work and offering me creative and challenging feedback. I’d like to thank my parents, Tommy and Robbie, for encouraging my academic growth as a child and my siblings, Kathy and Mike, for respecting my different career path. To Connie, Paul, and Father John, many kind thanks for your patient and caring help in cultivating my other-than-intellectual well-being. Grateful thanks to Richard and Diana Brantley and to Fiona Barnes, for your unwavering support and for having (and expressing!) faith in my abilities. Thanks to Bob Steffek, for assuring me I could go back to school if I really wanted to (and for not tolerating excuses). Warmest thanks to Sam Kimball, for being “a Tom Bragg Fan”—your final comment on my first English paper was good for many a mental and emotional mile travelled. Finally, my deepest gratitude for my wife Sandy, to whom I dedicate this work; I could never have put it together without your help putting myself together. Sincere thanks and respect must also go to a host of people without whom none of my work would be possible: Alex, Art C., Walt, Bill, Eddie, Jim F., George P., Vic, Clive, Gil, Francis and Thomas. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 1 HISTORY AND “THE LAND OF ROMANCE” ....................................................................9 What The Historical Novel Is (And What It Might Be) .........................................................13 The Palimpsests Of Narrative And Space ..............................................................................16 The Rhetoric Of Contrasts And The Shape Of A Genre ........................................................20 2 “A CERTAIN KIND OF SPACE”: WALTER SCOTT AND THE POETICS OF HISTORICAL NOVEL SPACE .............................................................................................26 “A Maximum of Elaboration”: Waverley and the Poetics of Space .......................................33 Genre and the Text of Space: Waverley .................................................................................42 Genre and the Text of Space: The Talisman and The Monastery ...........................................51 The “Splendid Theatre”: Stage Space in the Waverley Novel ...............................................55 “Violent Divisions”: Scott Country and the Critics ................................................................67 3 (MIS)READING THE PALIMPSEST: READERS OF WAVERLEY SPACE ...................73 Reading Males, Leading Males: Waverley Space and the Hero ............................................79 Reading Ruins: The Historians and Edie Ochiltree ................................................................93 “The Elementals”: Irrational Readers in The Talisman and Kenilworth ..............................104 4 “ARCHITECTURAL INCONGRUITIES”: HISTORY AND THE SPACE OF CONTRAST IN THE NOVELS OF W. H. AINSWORTH .................................................121 Vivid Contrasts: Ainsworth’s Popular History .....................................................................127 Basic Strategies: Structure Organizing Narrative .................................................................132 “The Skillful Architect” and the Gothic Structure of Romance ...........................................142 “In the Midst of All”: The Panorama in Ainsworth .............................................................147 “The English Victor Hugo”: the Reader as Tourist ..............................................................155 Conclusion: Structures Full of “Good Things” ....................................................................161 5 “THE HUMBLER TASK”: BULWER-LYTTON AND THE SPACE OF ARCHAEOLOGY ................................................................................................................165 Space and Order: Teleology in Bulwer’s Pompeii ...............................................................170 Historical Space: The Real and the Typical in Last Days and Harold .................................177 Comparison: Emma Marshall’s Real Space ..................................................................180 Bulwer’s Theoretical Space ...........................................................................................181 5 Comparison: Baring-Gould’s Theoretical Space ...........................................................188 “I Can Well Judge From What I Have Seen”: Space and Masculine Discernment .............190 Comparison and Legacy: Masculine Space and Readers in Stevenson and Whistler ...197 “New Regions”: Bulwer’s Dream Lands and the Space of Fantasy .....................................200 6 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................210 WORKS CONSULTED ..............................................................................................................218 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................226 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy “A THOUSAND PECULIAR AND VARIED FORMS”: SPACE AND NARRATIVE IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH HISTORICAL NOVEL By Thomas Glynn Bragg, Jr. August 2009 Chair: Pamela K. Gilbert Major: English This dissertation examines the poetics of spatial description in the nineteenth-century historical novel, demonstrating connections between its spaces and some characteristic narrative modes and techniques. Beginning with Scott and proceeding to two Victorian successors, Ainsworth and Bulwer-Lytton, the study identifies techniques common to the genre throughout the century, like the malleability of historical novel spaces and their tendency to reflect authorial assumptions about history, narrative, and knowledge. The dissertation’s specific narratological focus is to understand better how the spaces in historical novels function to achieve the genre’s typical (and the author’s particular) aims. Doing so will argue for a reassessment of the form at large: both to redefine its practices, purposes and types and to urge its inclusion in broader accounts of mainstream fictional narrative. The examination of common genre features necessitates more inclusive definitions and surveys of the historical novel to account for the romantic, religious and juvenile variations commonly excluded from studies, but which make up so much of the nineteenth century’s total output. I argue that the nineteenth-century historical novel’s characteristic form is the ready-made palimpsest: a combination of generic material including fiction, history, pseudo-history, poetry, 7 drama, ballad, and both mock and authentic editorial remarks. The borders between these different, often oppositional categories are often blurred, as in an actual palimpsest. Similarly, the genre’s characteristic spaces are shifting, unstable spaces which transform to suit the author’s particular needs. The flexible, uncertain nature of historical novel space and the novelist’s willingness to make use of such space with rhetorical and poetical license are not merely arbitrary features of the genre, but are by-products of the world-building that all historical novelists must achieve to convey a historical setting. In this way, scenery comes to represent or organize the different types of knowledge in play in historical novels. In the depiction of scenery the historical novelist can engage matters that do not fall within the purview of the historian or the realistic novelist, such as more romantic, fanciful or legendary interpretations of nature and metaphysics, object lessons in developing masculine and aristocratic virtues, or confirmation of a providentially-guided worldview. 8 CHAPTER 1 HISTORY AND “THE LAND OF ROMANCE” It was up the course of this last stream that Waverley, like a knight of romance, was conducted by the fair Highland damsel, his silent guide. A small path, which had been rendered easy in many places for Flora's accommodation, led him through scenery of a very different description from that which he had just quitted. Around the castle, all was cold, bare, and desolate, yet tame even in desolation; but this narrow glen, at so short a distance, seemed to open into the land of romance. The rocks assumed a thousand peculiar and varied forms. --Walter Scott, Waverley This dissertation is a study of the poetic dynamics of spatial description in the British historical novel, focusing particularly on the work of three novelists working at the genre’s inception
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