dc.contributor.advisor | Mendelssohn, Michele | en |
dc.contributor.advisor | Taylor, Andrew | en |
dc.contributor.advisor | Fielding, Penny | en |
dc.contributor.author | Crockford, Alison Nicole | en |
dc.date.accessioned | 2013-09-25T13:58:55Z | |
dc.date.available | 2013-09-25T13:58:55Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2012-06-28 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7883 | |
dc.description.abstract | The Victorian obsession with the child is also often, in the world of literary
criticism at least, an obsession with death, whether the death of the child itself or
simply the inevitable death of childhood as a seemingly Edenic state of being. This
study seeks to consider the way in which the child figure, in texts by four authors
published at the end of the nineteenth century, is aligned with an inversion of this
relationship. For Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James,
the child is bound up instead with un-death, with a construction of death which seeks
to remove the finitude, even the mortality, of death itself, or else a death which is
expected or anticipated, yet always deferred.
While in “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892),
Pater places the child at the nexus of his construction of a death which is, rather than
a finite ending, a return or a re-beginning, Lee's interest in the child figure's unique
access to a world of art, explored in “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) and
“Christkindchen” (1897) culminates in a dazzling vision of aesthetic transcendence
with “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child” (1906). MacDonald, for whom death is
already never really death, uses the never-dead child figure in At The Back of the
North Wind (1871) and Lilith (1895) as an embodiment of his own distinct
engagement with aestheticism, as well as a means by which to express the
simultaneous anticipation and depression he experienced in contemplation of death.
Finally James, in What Maisie Knew (1897), explores the child's inherent monstrosity
as he crafts the possibility of a childhood which consciously refuses to die.
This study explores a trajectory in which the child’s place within such
reconsiderations of death grows increasingly intense, reaching an apex with
MacDonald’s fantastic worlds, before considering James’s problematisation of the
concept of the un-dead child in What Maisie Knew. | en |
dc.language.iso | en | |
dc.publisher | The University of Edinburgh | en |
dc.subject | child figure | en |
dc.subject | death | en |
dc.subject | nineteenth century literature | en |
dc.subject | James, Henry | en |
dc.subject | MacDonald, George | en |
dc.subject | Lee, Vernon | en |
dc.subject | Pater, Walter | en |
dc.title | Undead children : reconsidering death and the child figure in late nineteenth-century fiction | en |
dc.type | Thesis or Dissertation | en |
dc.relation.references | Walter Pater, "The Child in the House” (1878) | en |
dc.relation.references | Walter Pater, “Emerald Uthwart” (1892) | en |
dc.relation.references | Vernon Lee, “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) | en |
dc.relation.references | George MacDonald, "At The Back of the North Wind" (1871) | en |
dc.relation.references | Henry James, "What Maisie Knew" (1897) | en |
dc.type.qualificationlevel | Doctoral | en |
dc.type.qualificationname | PhD Doctor of Philosophy | en |