Files
Abstract
This dissertation contends that references to textiles show how mid-nineteenth-century literary texts took part in contemporaneous questions of nationality, commerce, and ethical labor. By studying realist novels and short fiction published between 1850 and 1880, I emphasize how the anxieties of the age are woven into the transatlantic significance of fabricand I argue for a reconsideration of Henry Jamess and George Eliots web that moves beyond its use as a metaphor or conceit. As I discuss canonical American and British texts, I draw connections between realisms focus on the development of an individual and its attention to how consciousness reacts to and relies on a world of commodities. These goods not only go between one nation and another, but they also tie international economics to industrial life and household management. Such intersections make cloth production and consumption into critical components of what James termed the mid-nineteenth-century atmosphere of mind. Indeed, the textile web not only informs individual mores but also shapes narrative techniques and structures on both sides of the Atlantic. Extending the work of Bill Brown, Elaine Freedgood, and Talia Schaffer, whose scholarship has renewed critical interest in nineteenth-century things, I explore how ideas and material culture are inextricably linked and how the actual transatlantic circulation of textiles helped writers articulate the often-vexed notions of citizenship and belonging in the Atlantic world. After my introduction, which traces what I term entangled consciousness in Middlemarch and The Art of Fiction, my dissertation is organized in three sections: War; Nation; and Factory and Home. The first section (chapters one and two) explores how British novels obliquely respond to the American Civil War and the transatlantic cotton trade. Section two (chapters three and four) locates a relationship between self-sufficient heroines and burgeoning national allegiance. The final section (chapters five and six) focuses on how womens industrial and domestic needlework shapes their daily lives, fills their empty hours, and points to the limitations placed on a mid-nineteenth-century womans life regardless of her class.