2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
THE MADNESS OF URBAN INHABITANTS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE ; ASTUDY OF ITS SOCIAL ANT)PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTEXTS
| Project/Area Number |
17520162
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
ヨーロッパ語系文学
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| Research Institution | Nagoya University |
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Principal Investigator |
MATSUOKA Mitsuharu Nagoya University, Graduate Schcol of Languages and Cultums, Professor (70181708)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2005 – 2007
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| Keywords | Victorian Era / Madness / Urban Inhabitants / Dickens / Gissing / Suicide / Bullying / Ghosts |
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| Research Abstract |
This research, whose primary sources are Victorian literary works, focuses on aspects of madness observed among urban inhabitants in Victorian England, thereby attempting to ascertain the principle of madmen's behavior and to clarify the correlation between a given social context and the psychology of an individual in it.
Part one discusses notions of madness in the works of Dickens. There is actually no either-or choice between birth and breeding in his description of madness and its causes. This part has a pair of articles as offshoots from the discussion of Dickens's notions of madness. One is a study of suicide as an act of madness against God that created man in his own image, and the other is an examination of bullying - a phenomenon of madness that may be described as the maintenance of / equilibrium by the transfer of oppression.
Part two targets at some of Gissing's works and Dickens's Great Expectations. Gissing, like his mentor Dickens, portrays those in the late Victorian era who lost their feudalistic sense of belonging after the Industrial Revolution and fell into a crisis of identity owing to a sense of alienation created by urban space.
Part three argues that a ghost can be interpreted as the subjective projection of a character's own madness or troubled sense of identity. Here, madness and ghosts in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Dickens's Great Expectations are analyzed with special reference to the presentation of childhood. And besides, this part includes a pair of Victorian ghost stories put into Japanese: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "An Account of Some Disturbances in Aungier Street' (1853) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "At Chrighton Abbey"(1871).
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