Repetition and difference in nineteenth-century British narrative
Thomas, Mark Ellis
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/21665
Description
Title
Repetition and difference in nineteenth-century British narrative
Author(s)
Thomas, Mark Ellis
Issue Date
1992
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Garrett, Peter K.
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, English
Language
eng
Abstract
Repetition and Difference in Nineteenth-Century British Narrative analyzes narrative repetition in historically specific terms of similarity and difference, thereby historicizing repetition: first by analyzing repetition into similarity and difference; secondly by understanding repetition as a negotiation between similarity and difference; and thirdly by recognizing that those are not transcendental categories but cultural constructions--linguistic expressions of limited social perspectives made at particular moments in history. This work asserts that, as the values of difference changed during the nineteenth century, the traditional, grounded repetition-of-similarity was increasingly contested by an emergent, destabilizing repetition-of-difference, which grew in response to industrial, cultural, economic, and other political developments at the time. In critical practice, this historical view situates formalistic readings and the insights of psychoanalysis into the structural and temporal aspects of narrative and repetition. A theoretical introduction constructs an interpretive model of repetition, which is then applied to both Gothic and Conradian doubling narratives as well as to novels by Emily Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Hogg, Wilde, and others.
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