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Dissertation Information for Emily Walker Heady

NAME:
- Emily Walker Heady

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- English

SCHOOL:
- Indiana University (USA) (2005)

ADVISORS:
- Patrick Brantlinger

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Andrew Miller
- Ivan Kreilkamp
- Mary Favret

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Conversion in crisis: Realism and religious experience in the Victorian novel

Abstract: Conversion in Crisis examines a problem that would-be writers of narratives about religious conversion in Victorian England faced: how could they write a spiritual story in terms that their materialist society would find convincing? For the Victorians, religious experience--or experience in general, rather--was a notoriously unreliable category, given that the Romantic poets had, in their minds at least, already played the "experience" card one too many times. Yet the Victorian alternative to experiential authority--scientific objectivity--was not much better, since empirical evidence of experiences such as religious conversion was not easily produced. The authors I focus on sensed this difficulty, and, dissatisfied with what they saw as a culture-wide turn toward materialism, invoked religious conversion in an effort to shift their readers' focus from the visible world to the more ineffable realm of experience. Yet this literary project was tremendously difficult, for the dominant trend in Victorian literature--novelistic realism--is itself an empiricist, materialist form. Thus, my project first traces the ways in which conversion allowed religious and secular authors such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Harris, J. H. Newman, Mary Augusta Ward, and Charlotte Yonge to draw their readers' attention away from the claims of the material world, and, in so doing, stretched the conventions of realism. Further, in moving away from realism, the texts I analyze here also demonstrate some of the ways in which Victorians questioned the wisdom of their culture's devotion to material progress. Their critique of the realist genre was, in short, also a form of political protest.

MPACT Scores for Emily Walker Heady

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-10-05 17:00:19

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