Reading objects in literature and culture: Daniel Deronda, the portait of a lady and effi Briest

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Reading objects in late nineteenth century literature

Publication . Robalo, Maria Inês Mateus; Fernandes, Ângela Maria Valadas; Meneghelli, Donata

This thesis focuses on the examination of the relationship between the Realist novel and the notion of object, with the aim of understanding some metafictional mechanisms at play in the nineteenth century narrative and the resulting conceptions of representation and interpretation of the world. Thus, I will offer an analysis of four novels published during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Europe: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane, and Los Pazos de Ulloa and Madre Naturaleza by Emilia Pardo Bazán. The underlying assumption for bringing these texts together aligns itself with the idea that a renewed understanding of the nineteenth century novel entails presenting “the object” as a key-textual-clue to the staging of the perception of a representational and interpretational crisis. Throughout the nineteenth century, both the idea of representation and experience, as well as the conception of an a priori subject and of an immutable object are transformed into ammunition in the battlefield of an aesthetic and epistemological crisis, whose echoes are repercussed in the novels of Eliot, Fontane and Pardo Bazán. If, on the one hand, the Realist novel comes to be seen as the proverbial mirror of the real, on the other hand, through the pen of the authors studied here both fiction and reality are transformed into an object of semiotic disquiet.

2023-11-09Tese de doutoramento

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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Número da atribuição

PD/BD/127929/2016