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Conventions Were Outraged: Country, House, Fiction

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dc.contributor.advisorHiggins, Lesley J.
dc.creatorAmes, Kristen Kelly
dc.date.accessioned2015-01-26T14:19:09Z
dc.date.available2015-01-26T14:19:09Z
dc.date.copyright2014-06-02
dc.date.issued2015-01-26
dc.date.updated2015-01-26T14:19:09Z
dc.degree.disciplineEnglish
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThe dissertation traces intersections among subjectivity, gender, desire, and nation in English country house novels from 1921 to 1949. Inter-war and wartime fiction by Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Mitford, P. G. Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, and Evelyn Waugh performs and critiques conventional domestic ideals and, by extension, interrupts the discourses of power that underpin militaristic political certainties. I consider country house novels to be campy endorsements of the English home, in which characters can reimagine, but not escape, their roles within mythologized domestic and national spaces. The Introduction correlates theoretical critiques of nationalism, class, and gender to illuminate continuities among the naïve patriotism of the country house novel and its ironic figurations of rigid class and gender categories. Chapter 1 provides generic and critical contexts through a study of du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the narrator’s subversion of social hierarchies relies upon the persistence, however ironic, of patriarchal nationalism. That queer desire is the necessary center around which oppressive norms operate only partially mitigates their force. Chapter 2 examines figures of absence in “A Haunted House,” To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Woolf’s queering of the country house novel relies upon her Gothic figuration of Englishness, in which characters are only included within nationalist spaces by virtue of their exclusion. In Chapter 3, continuities between Orlando and Between the Acts test Woolf’s call to “indifference” to war in Three Guineas. The country house reifies the nostalgic crisis of Woolf’s feminist pacifism: political agency must occupy the borderland between nostalgic idealism and cynical self-abnegation. Chapter 4 examines popular country house novels by Wodehouse, Mitford, Bowen, and Waugh that explicitly engage, with various degrees of seriousness, with political conflicts of the 1930s and ’40s. Exposing disavowed affinities among the country house ethos, English patriotism, and fascist nostalgia provides opportunities to negotiate, if not resolve, ethical quandaries of wartime neutrality, irony, and indifference. By forcing readers to confront their own circumscription by nationalist and gendered expectations, these country house novels ultimately foreclose the possibility of escaping them – but they also demand readers’ renewed commitment to figures of difference and narratives of failure.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/28184
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectBritish and Irish literature
dc.subjectGender studies
dc.subjectEuropean history
dc.subject.keywordsPacifismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsTwentieth Century British Literatureen_US
dc.subject.keywordsWorld War IIen_US
dc.subject.keywordsQueer Theoryen_US
dc.subject.keywordsBiopoliticsen_US
dc.subject.keywordsCountry House Novelsen_US
dc.subject.keywordsCountry House Literatureen_US
dc.subject.keywordsNostalgiaen_US
dc.subject.keywordsMemoryen_US
dc.subject.keywordsFascismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsAnti-Fascismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsFeminismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsArchitectureen_US
dc.subject.keywordsGothic Literatureen_US
dc.subject.keywordsSatireen_US
dc.subject.keywordsCampen_US
dc.subject.keywordsDomesticityen_US
dc.subject.keywordsDaphne du Maurieren_US
dc.subject.keywordsVirginia Woolfen_US
dc.subject.keywordsElizabeth Bowenen_US
dc.subject.keywordsP. G. Wodehouseen_US
dc.subject.keywordsNancy Mitforden_US
dc.subject.keywordsEvelyn Waughen_US
dc.subject.keywordsMichel Foucaulten_US
dc.subject.keywordsMichel de Certeauen_US
dc.subject.keywordsGiorgio Agambenen_US
dc.subject.keywordsBenedict Andersonen_US
dc.subject.keywordsNationalismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsPatriotismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsModernismen_US
dc.titleConventions Were Outraged: Country, House, Fiction
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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