Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


osu1083779224.pdf (1.16 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Outlines and apologias: literary authority, intertextual trauma, and the structure of Victorian and Edwardian sage autobiography

Heady, Chene R.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1083779224

Abstract Details

2004, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
The Victorian and Edwardian sages were authors who worked, following the decline of organized religion among the educated classes in Britain, to restore a sense of unitary meaning to the world. As George Landow observes, the sage’s system is, by its very nature as a philosophy that attempts to explain the entire world, unprovable, and the sage’s authority is thus derived from his ability to interpret the world vividly, plausibly, and as a whole. Since the sage’s authority cannot be established by conventional means, it ultimately derives, as Susan Morgan notes, from the sage’s “lived experience.” This dissertation analyzes the implications of sage rhetoric for the genre of autobiography. The sage autobiographer must show that every aspect of his life serves as proof of his theories and, being a public figure, he invariably has experienced incidents—primarily lost literary controversies and poor textual reception—that seem to refute his theories. The premise of this dissertation is that these literary disasters constitute “intertextual traumas” that disrupt the sage’s literary authority and textual identity, that serve as signs that the sage seemingly cannot interpret. Sage autobiographies, I argue, are elaborately intertextual attempts to narrate, and thus to interpret and to control, such incidents of intertextual trauma. Unlike most autobiographers, the sage references and interprets preexisting biographies of himself and other rival accounts of his life because to do otherwise would be to permanently cede his authority to interpret the world.
David Riede (Advisor)
461 p.
Literature, English
sage discourse; Victorian autobiography; Edwardian autobiography; trauma theory; intertextuality; literary authority; Thomas Carlyle; John Henry Newman; H. G. Wells; G. K. Chesterton; Mahatma Gandhi

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Heady, C. R. (2004). Outlines and apologias: literary authority, intertextual trauma, and the structure of Victorian and Edwardian sage autobiography [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1083779224

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Heady, Chene. Outlines and apologias: literary authority, intertextual trauma, and the structure of Victorian and Edwardian sage autobiography. 2004. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1083779224.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Heady, Chene. "Outlines and apologias: literary authority, intertextual trauma, and the structure of Victorian and Edwardian sage autobiography." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1083779224

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1083779224
3,481
© 2004, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.