Dissertation
The margins and the metropole: displaced and reimagined communities in Late-Victorian literature
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Summer 2020
DOI: 10.17077/etd.005584
Abstract
The Scot, the criminal, and the Jew are three outsiders in Great Britain that challenge the meaning of what it was to be British in the late-nineteenth century. These hyperbolized figures deconstruct the fantasy of the British city by challenging and redefining what it means to be British in the social and geographical margins. In my dissertation, “Memory and the Metropole” I argue that the fantasy of the British metropole, as the synecdoche of British identity, is created through late Victorian literary depictions of geographical and cultural displacement and alienation. My dissertation traces five authors’ mobilization of various genres across contemporary ethnic and social maps as each author addresses social and environmental exploitation between 1885 and 1899. My chapters begin with the formation of “the Scotsman” as a romantic and tragic figure in the British imagination in Mathilde Blind’s epic, “The Heather on Fire” (1886) and native Highlander Mary MacPherson’s oral ballad “Incitement of the Gaels” (1882, 1891). My second chapter traces the closed circuits of the slums and the Jago to identify the poverty-stricken and devolved criminal in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) and Arthur Morrison’s The Child of the Jago (1899). In chapter three, I examine the placelessness of the Anglo-Jew in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892) and short story “Satan Mekatrig,” from his collection Ghetto Tragedies (1893/1899). These three figures—the Scot, criminal, and the Jew—play a crucial role in the economic, cultural, and moral composition of British identity at the end of the century as Britain begins to question its imperial posture and its internal cohesion. Each chapter identifies, validates, and questions the fictional networks of these “aliens” as they resist marginalization and imagine new ways of belonging to the British metropole.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The margins and the metropole: displaced and reimagined communities in Late-Victorian literature
- Creators
- Katherine Eileen Ostdiek
- Contributors
- Florence Boos (Advisor)Teresa Mangum (Committee Member)Barbara Eckstein (Committee Member)Laura Rigal (Committee Member)Anne Stapleton (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Summer 2020
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.005584
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xviii, 253 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2020 Katherine Eileen Ostdiek
- Language
- English
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (page 223-253).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
The Scot, the criminal, and the Jew are three outsiders in Great Britain that challenge the meaning of what it was to be British in the late-nineteenth century. In my dissertation, “Memory and the Metropole” I trace five authors’ as they write and rewrite genres to address experiences of belonging and exile between 1885 and 1899.
My chapters begin with the understudied poetry of native Highlander Mary MacPherson and Mathilde Blind and their representations of the Highland Clearances of the nineteenth century and the evictions of the Highland farmers in MacPherson’s oral ballad “Incitement of the Gaels” (1885) and Blind’s epic, “The Heather on Fire” (1886). My second chapter traces the restrictive neighborhoods and entrenched urban poverty of London’s East End in the fictional worlds of George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) and Arthur Morrison’s The Child of the Jago (1899). In chapter three, I examine the placelessness of the Anglo-Jew in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892) and short story “Satan Mekatrig,” from his collection Ghetto Tragedies (1893/1899).
These three figures–the Scot, criminal, and the Jew–play a crucial role in how Britain’s economic, cultural, and moral future is represented at the end of the century by exposing how the nation understands its citizens and forces outsiders to fall in line or leave. Each chapter identifies, validates, and questions the narratives of these aliens as they refuse to be pushed aside and, instead, imagine new ways to belong to or recreate the British metropole.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9983988297502771
Metrics
33 File views/ downloads
86 Record Views