Advisor(s)

Laura M Green

Contributor(s)

Mary K. Loeffelholz, Patrick Mullen

Date of Award

2012

Date Accepted

4-2012

Degree Grantor

Northeastern University

Degree Level

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department or Academic Unit

College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of English

Keywords

literature, gender studies, British and Irish literature, intimacy, modernist, psychological, realism, space, Victorian

Disciplines

English Language and Literature | Modern Literature

Abstract

What we now call "psychological realism" centers upon representations of intimacy as the genre's authors strive toward "narrative realism and the mimesis of consciousness" (Cohn 8). According to Dorrit Cohn, psychological realism spans the years between 1850 and 1950, and its "inward turn" searches out the least accessible aspects of character. Intimate knowledge of characters in fiction make those characters "rounder," more "realistic," though this kind of intimate representation depends upon what Cohn calls "fabrication," what authors imagine unknown inner lives are like (6). The multiplicity of intimate inner lives and intimate relationships represented in novels of psychological realism creates the impression that intimacy exceeds its contemporary social categories, both in novels and in life. Beginning with two late novels by George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2) and (1876), moving to the turn of the century with Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895), and finally into Virginia Woolf's modernism with Mrs Dalloway (1926) and The Waves (1931), this project traces the mutual impact of psychological realism's inward turn and the ways we understand intimacy. All three of these authors conceive of intimacy as not only emotional, but also spatial, and it is through this spatial dimension that the dense diversity of intimacies is made most clear.

Document Type

Dissertation

Rights Information

copyright 2012

Rights Holder

Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze


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