ABSTRACT
This dissertation analyzes interruptions of realist narrative in the work of four
women writers from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries: Christina
Rossetti, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, and Virginia Woolf. I argue that these writers use
such interruptions—which take the form of alternate genres such as lyric poetry and the
expository essay—to subvert the authority of the third-person novelistic narrator and thus
question the dominant structure of the realist novel. By employing these asides, they
provide opportunities for first-person and present-tense discourse within a third-person,
past-tense narrative, which in turn leads to productive contrasts between subjectivity and
objectivity, emotion and thought, public and private spheres, inner and outer lives of
characters, and the novel and other genres. These cross-genre interruptions destabilize the
overall works in ways that reveal both the contradictions in female characters’ lives and
the anxieties surrounding being a female author. The practice also exposes limitations of
the novel as a form by raising in the reader an awareness of genre conventions. The result
is an anti-realist tendency, inspired and fueled by gender concerns, in the midst of the age
of greatest dominance of the realist novel.
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
MIXED COMPANY: GENRE CROSSINGS IN ROSSETTI, ELIOT, SCHREINER,
AND WOOLF
by
Lynne S. Nugent
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
December 2010
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Florence Boos
Copyright by
LYNNE S. NUGENT
2010
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of
Lynne S. Nugent
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the December 2010 graduation.
Thesis Committee: __________________________________
Florence Boos, Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________
David Depew
__________________________________
Mary Lou Emery
__________________________________
David Hamilton
__________________________________
Garrett Stewart
ii
To my family
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
More than anyone else, my advisor, Florence Boos, has made this dissertation
possible. Her support, confidence, and enthusiasm meant I left each meeting with her
excited to get back to work. I am extremely grateful to her and to the rest of my
committee: Garrett Stewart, Mary Lou Emery, David Hamilton, and David Depew. I
learned so much from taking classes with each of my committee members, and this
learning continued in all the feedback on chapter drafts and other help and
encouragement they generously provided in the long process of writing this dissertation.
Special thanks to David Hamilton for letting me illegally occupy his faculty study carrel
at the University Library for the past several years.
I am most appreciative of the support provided to me by the University of Iowa
Graduate College, including its Presidential Fellowship; by the English Department,
including its support for travel to the 2008 Dickens Universe; and to the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation and Garrett Stewart, for giving me the opportunity to participate in
Professor Stewart’s summer 2009 Mellon dissertation seminar on narrative.
Warm thanks to David Hamilton, Russell Valentino, and Gayle Sand, my bosses
at The Iowa Review and the University of Iowa English Department, for kindly
overlooking the fact that their employee’s attention has been divided between job and
dissertation. My colleagues in the English department staff—Elizabeth Curl, Erin
Hackathorn, Cherie Hansen-Rieskamp, Maggie McKnight, and Linda Stahle—have been
fabulous dissertation cheerleaders.
I am lucky to have found a wonderful and inspiring group of friends in my fellow
graduate students in the English PhD program, among them Deborah Manion, Laura
Capp, Anna Stenson, LeDon Sweeney, Bridget Draxler, Joanne Janssen, and Elizabeth
Corsun. They have been delightful fellow travelers, full of good ideas, good advice, and
good cheer.
iv
For the past year, Ella Walker and Finn Kolsrud have made it possible for me to
work both at my job and on my dissertation by running housekeeping and yardmaintenance
services that have kept my domestic world from chaos.
I am grateful to my parents, Sookja Chung Nugent and the late Mark Nugent, who
instilled me with intellectual curiosity through their own eager and lifelong thirst for
knowledge. My brother, Mark, always provided a sympathetic ear throughout my time in
graduate school.
Lastly, my love and thanks to Kembrew McLeod, who has put up with more than
his share of days of complaining and nights and weekends alone as I worked in the study
carrel, and to our soon-to-be-born child, who provided the ultimate motivation for
finishing.
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