CONVENTIONS OF DOMESTIC REALISM: THEORY, CONTEXT, AND TEXT
Abstract
This study explores the possibility that conventions constitute generic categories, establishing a taxonomy and methodology of conventional formation, reformation, and deformation and their constitutive role in generic development and dissolution. The theoretical basis of this taxonomy and methodology is outlined in Chapters One and Two. Chapter One offers a new definition of "convention" and a new system for the classification of conventions so defined. Chapter Two attempts to place this analysis of conventions within a generic context. First, second, and third order genres are postulated as a more precise alternative to traditional generic and sub-generic classification. In Chapters Three, Four, Five, and Six this theory is applied to representative samples of domestic novels of manners: Belinda (1801), Patronage (1814), Jane Eyre (1847), North and South (1854-55), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Middlemarch (1871-72). The evolution of their conventional resemblance is primarily traced in the development and ultimate deformation of the master convention of domestic realism, the conventional characterization of the imaginative heroine, and the convention of self-referentiality. This study concludes by suggesting, briefly, potential conventional continuities from Middlemarch to later nineteenth-century British novels.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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