Miranda Burgess

In a world becoming increasingly “postnormal” (Sardar 435), I aim to investigate how human-nature relations in Lord Byron’s 1817 dramatic poem Manfred provide an unconventional but enlightening environmental ethics in the late Anthropocene. Questioning existing perceptions of Byron as a purely socio-political writer in the vein of emerging eco-Byron scholars, I consider how an ecological reading of this intensely Byronic text can provide critical lessons to accept negative emotions, identify hypocrisy, and investigate why, with simultaneous sympathy and judgement, systemic change is so difficult to enact even as global ecocatastrophe ensues. Byron’s perceived and potential positions in Romantic nature poetry will be considered in the context of current inefficacies of reading nature in positive and moralistic modes, as individuals experience what is now called eco-anxiety (Ray 6). To understand how Manfred ironizes “green thinking,” close readings will be presented of the titular hero’s disastrous attempts to exploit the elemental Seven Spirits through the lens of elemental ecocriticism and philosophy (Cohen & Duckert; Macauley). Manfred complicates critical tenets of elemental thinking in its depictions of human and elemental subjects as fundamentally incompatible. Byron's contempt for hypocrisy unexpectedly complements Indigenous critique of capitalism (L. Simpson 76-77), pointing towards where some critical Indigenous perspectives and Byronic contrariness align in critiquing the limitedness of Western environmentalism. Manfred’s self-perception as an elemental conflict of “lightning” spirit and “clay” body (Byron 1.1.155; 157) and his quest for “self-oblivion” (1.1.145) will be explored as a grim blueprint for what I call the “a/Anthropocentric individual” – those in the late Anthropocene who experience eco-anxiety from the conflicted understanding that everyday life contributes to a “web” of unethical relations between human and nonhuman entities (Barad 384). This thesis will posit that Manfred reflects the ethical conundrum of living in the Anthropocene, but that the text cannot present solutions. Reading Manfred ecologically through Byronic understanding of constant self-evaluation and criticism signifies the gaps between Indigenous, academic and public understandings of human-nature relations that enables the mainstream perception that the environment is ultimately "supplementary" (Rajan) to the prosperity of human beings.

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British empire is often read as purely circumstantial to Jane Austen’s novels, lacking any active politicized engagements from the author. Influential work from scholars like Edward Said task contemporary readers with uncovering the nuances of how empire underscores her marriage plots. The novel for Said that warrants this sort of literary and historical excavation of Austen is Mansfield Park (1814). My project joins a discourse of feminist responses to this reading from Laura Brown, Miranda Burgess, Susan Fraiman, Yoon Sun Lee, Emily Rohrbach, Chi-ming Yang, and Eugenia Zuroski. I argue that Austen requires no excavation for something that was never buried but instead, actively interwoven and illuminating through the many threads of Mansfield Park. The novel to me features a rich and reflexive registration of gendered empire found in its rhetorical provocations in Johnsonian tripartites like: “no reading, no China, no composure for Fanny” (Austen 185). Specifically, my thesis identifies metonymy as a colonial literary device of the text that metaphorically displaces and then aims to connect what begins as disparate into referents towards a patriarchal whole. In the case of this tripartite, “China” refers to heroine Fanny Price’s possession of journals from the failed Macartney Embassy to China. “China” becomes a metonymy for Britain’s colonial pursuits assembled with a woman’s “reading” or education and self-composure. The preceding “no’s” before each word of the tripartite also disassembles what is meant to be convened and conflated into a single reference for empire. I use metonymy therefore to identify this motion and attempt to suspend colonial and patriarchal appropriations of foreignness. It is in these suspensions of empire that I find Austen most strategically and productively inconclusive as opposed to passive. The irresolution of metonymies of words and worded objects in Mansfield Park interrupts the efficacies of empire towards an ongoing reading of how its gendered legacies are constantly in composition and somehow oriented in how English women are to “read China”.

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The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.

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This thesis examines the process of reading in Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man(1826). The novel illustrates a limiting conception of reading, as characters become bound to the futures that they consume via literature. However, there is a breach between the type of reading represented in the novel, and the model of reading that Shelley demands of her audience. By analysing the text’s competing aesthetics of ruin and artifice, I argue that Shelley advocates for a system of reading that recognizes the audience’s potential for agency and intervention. Just as Reinhart Kosseleck theorized that the post-French Revolution world marked a new sense of time, Neuzeit, which corresponded with the burgeoning era of modernity, Shelley advocates for auniquely modern system of reading.By reading The Last Man in this way, the novel’s critique of imperialism expansion istransformed from a prophetic vision of the future into a practically actionable critique. There exists much scholarship concerning the novel’s criticism of England’s early-nineteenth century project of colonial expansion. Notably, critics like Paul Cantor, Alan Bewell and Siobhan Carroll have conceptualized the plague as a cosmopolitan imperial force, spreading disease just as late-Romantic explorers, politicians, and merchants spread ideas, bodies, plants, and consumer goods. Yet, Shelley’s critique of global interconnectivity extends beyond the plague to the world it leaves behind. Ecologically abundant and primed for human occupation, the post-apocalyptic world is deeply reminiscent of the early-nineteenth century ideal of colonial space. However,while late-Romantic imperialists conceived of these spaces as edenically new, Shelley writes a traumatic history explaining their emptiness. This narrative leaves readers as witnesses to humanity’s apocalyptic end. Only through a new system of critical readership can the audience distance itself from this annihilating future view to envision alternate futures for England.

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This study assesses the relationship between the diffusion of free indirect discourse and the decline of the British epistolary novel in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Studying the works of a single stylist, Jane Austen, and her engagement with the mobility of the letter genre at the turn of the century, it synthesizes literary-historical, linguistic, and narratological perspectives on discourse representation in order to evaluate claims that Austen was the “pioneer” of this free indirect style, and to comment on how her simultaneous shift in genre from the first-person epistolary mode to third-person classical realism informs that style’s development.

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My thesis proposes a reconsideration of the ways in which we deploy formal analysis to analyze canonically minor texts and genres. In doing so, it reacts to and departs from a Jamesonian vein of material-historical formalism that treats minor texts as the mere evolutionary dead-end, or the ossified remnants of what was once “authentic artistic expression.” Unlike canonical texts, which have both the potential to be historicized and the ability to make claims to deep philosophical insight and formal innovativeness, minor texts tend to signify in more circumscribed ways. My thesis asks: how can we shift the terms upon which we evaluate minor genres without completely flattening out distinctions between texts or rendering aesthetic judgment void or purely subjective? Following in the footsteps of diverse theorists such as Franco Moretti, Anne-Lise François, Eve Sedgwick, and Sianne Ngai, and inspired by the inventive ways in which they broach the analysis of minor texts, my project seeks to generate formal-theoretical frameworks to apply to the analysis of the it-narrative, frameworks that would be able to sustain the considerable pressures of originality and significant signification associated with formal analysis. Rather than approaching minor genres and major works as separate but equally valued objects of study, my study brackets questions of value in favour of (1) scale: questions of relative size which, while still dependent on notions of form, depend less on a critic’s sense of aesthetic discrimination and (2) ecological attention: issues of critical disposition, and how a critic’s relation to the forms that he or she interacts with manifests itself in practice.

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Much work has been done recently on the way late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British women novelists portray female experience. A considerable portion of this work on Jane Austen emphasizes a link between contemporary books on feminine conduct and the novel’s portrayal of its heroine’s subjectivity as well as the impact of the theatre and ideas about the theatre on her novels’ representations of feminine propriety. Nancy Armstrong argues that conduct literature for women in the eighteenth century became “such a common phenomenon that many different kinds of writers felt compelled to add their wrinkles to the female character” (65). Austen’s conception of the female ideal draws on conduct literature but she combines theatrical elements in her portrayals to introduce elements of social change. Recent studies have demonstrated Austen’s deep and abiding interest in theatrical representation and theatrical sociability. Critics, such as Joseph Litvak, argue that Austen’s novels share certain representational strategies with the theatre and “their very implication in a widespread social network of vigilance and visibility – of looking and of being looked at – renders them inherently, if covertly, theatrical” (x). This essay builds on this research; however, it focuses on another less discussed influence upon Austen’s novels. Specifically, it considers the influence of the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, particularly the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith, on the novel’s use of theatricality to represent the feminine ideal. Focusing on Sense and Sensibility, my argument is that Austen eschews Humean sympathy and uncontrollable passion in favour of Smith’s impartial spectator. Austen’s novel suggests a conservative model of proper feminine conduct that is characterized by perspicuity and a morality defined by Christian principles. Her emphasis on Christian principles, particularly conformity and self-denial stems, I argue, from her Tory Anglican beliefs and conscientious efforts to underscore the importance for females to adhere to tradition and regulate their desires. Supporting a Johnsonian perspective about human nature that private interests and desires must be curtailed, Austen stresses moral behaviour to support the Burkean model of preserving tradition and maintaining the existing hierarchical model of social structure.

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