Date Thesis Awarded
2013
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
English
Advisor
Suzanne Raitt
Committee Members
Giulia Pacini
Melanie Dawson
Simon Joyce
Abstract
This thesis explores the use of correspondence (letters) in three late nineteenth-century novels; Guy de Maupassant's Une Vie, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Though the epistolary novel had fallen out of fashion by the time they published their works, Maupassant, James, and Hardy all explore, question, or subvert traditional epistolary themes: namely, the construction of individual subjectivity and desire. At the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time when new psychological research and concerns about modernity were questioning the foundations of subjectivity and of social relations, letters offer these writers a way to explore the psychology of intimacy, sentimentality, and sociability: in short, the psychology of desire.
Recommended Citation
Grant, Kayla, "Letters, Desire, and the Novel in the Late Nineteenth Century" (2013). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 642.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/642
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.