Realism at risk: The representation of the arts in Victorian fiction.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Byerly, Alison Ruth.

Contributor:

Scarry, Elaine, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature.

Irish literature.

British literature.

Art.

0357.

0593.

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--English.

English--Penn dissertations.

0357.

0593.

Physical Description:

320 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 51-01A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

The dissertation argues that the preoccupation with art in the Victorian novel is, paradoxically, an articulation of the nineteenth-century movement towards realism. Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy endanger their own claim to "truth" by repeatedly calling attention to the fictive status of painting, theater, and music. The characteristic Victorian practice of exposing the illusiveness of art should put the realism of the novel itself at risk; instead, the effect of openly invoking the problem of representation is ultimately to defuse it.

Focusing on novels that incorporate a variety of arts, from sculpture to opera, the dissertation shows that it is the Victorian juxtaposition of multiple arts which enables the novelists to construct densely realistic fictional worlds out of such unlikely materials. Chapter One clarifies the Victorian use of artistic cross-referencing by contrasting it with the Romantic reliance on single-art analogies. The ascendance of music metaphors in Romantic literature reflects a growing interest in natural experience that is explicitly contrasted with the aesthetic experience represented by the picturesque. This opposition between nature and art is reconfigured by the Victorians into an opposition between the "real" or true and the false.

Chapter Two suggests that Thackeray and Bronte collapse all distinctions between the arts, distinguishing only between "true" art and an illusive, "theatrical" mode. By freeing the arts from the positions they had long been assigned on the basis of their individual formal capabilities, Thackeray and Bronte allowed for the development of a new artistic hierarchy, one based on moral, rather than "aesthetic," considerations. Chapter Three shows how Eliot's association of different characters with specific arts produces a hierarchy in which visual art represents a detached and static simplification of reality, theatrical art is linked with deception, and music alone is capable of representing truth. Chapter Four demonstrates that for Hardy, aesthetic appreciation is a valid response to natural beauty, and concludes by suggesting that Hardy's willingness to regard people and things as "art" anticipates the transition from Victorian realism to Aestheticism.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in English) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1989.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-01, Section: A, page: 0167.

Supervisor: Elaine Scarry.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.