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STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THOMAS HARDY'S NOVELS
SUCHANOVÁ, Kateřina
The bachelor thesis focuses on the position of women in the Victorian Era, concretely found in the fiction of Thomas Hardy. The principle of this work is to analyse and characterise Hardy's heroines who, in defiance of the established Victorian social standards, stand out in a crowd. Thomas Hardy brought the female-related issues, at the time mostly overlooked, into focus. We reveal the dissimilarity of the heroines by comparing them to the traditional Victorian portrayal of women. The core of the thesis is the analysis of three feminine-centred novels with their protagonists - Bathsheba Everdene from Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Eustacia Vye from The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess Durbeyfield from Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). The first chapter centres on the description of the Victorian era and its society, especially women and their status in a patriarchal society. The following chapters will be devoted to the above-mentioned female characters and their modern mindsets and attempts to defy the Victorian ideal. These women face the traditional gender roles of Victorian society and struggle for emancipation.
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Women Writers during the Romantic Era with Respect to the Victorian Tradition
MALÁ, Monika
The aim of the thesis is to characterise the work of contemporary British women writers and their legacy during the 19th century whose literary work conveys elements of Romanticism and elements of critical realism typical for the Victorian literary tradition. Firstly, the thesis focuses on the description and background of the literary period of British Romanticism, its key features, representatives, and its contribution to literature. The core of the thesis focuses on literary analysis of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice and the novels of the Brontë sisters, particularly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. The emphasis is on comparison of the romantic and realistic elements found in the novels. In the end, the thesis tries to evaluate the impact of British female writers on the contemporary society and the shift towards equal rights in the context of Victorian England.
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Romantic Impulses in Victorian Literature
Beran, Zdeněk ; Hilský, Martin (advisor) ; Mánek, Bohuslav (referee) ; Peprník, Michal (referee)
The thesis attempts to discuss the character of late Romantic literature and art as it developed in England throughout the Victorian period. It follows the assertion made by G. Hough that it is possible to identify a continuous presence of Romantic ideas and methods in the writings of some major Victorian authors, and reflects the fact that there was actually no consensus or prevailing unequivocal view of Romanticism at that time, as is evidenced in the contradicting statements of such writers as John Ruskin and Walter Pater. The first objective of the thesis is thus to define the characteristic features of English Romanticism as they can be tracked down in the formative period of the 18th century and the time of High Romanticism of the first decades of the following century, and to see what transforming changes these characteristics underwent during the Victorian era. The sources of Romantic sensibility are located in the revolutionary role of the scientific discoveries of the 17th century and a new focus of the philosophical writings of that period, concerning mainly operations of the human mind. This development resulted in new aesthetic conceptions based on the two prevailing approaches, empiricism and Neo-Platonism. These theories conditioned the main concern of Romantic thought, i.e. an...
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Polarities in the Works of Oscar Wilde
Burianová, Petra ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Reading through the works of Oscar Wilde, one soon notices the many instances of polarity: the recurring themes of the body versus soul, good versus evil, city versus nature, artificial versus natural and many more. It is to be found in his plays as well as in his prose and fairy- tales. Yet these polarities do not necessarily have to oppose each other: the Wildean dialectic allows contraries to coexist, and thus we have the Star-Child who, through repentance, turns from evil to good; however this turn of character does not ensure a happy-ending, and makes us question whether "good really is good". A great number of Wilde's characters either live a double-life, have two distinct sides to their personality, or even several personalities, and in the case of Dorian Gray the split is literal. What led the author to constantly toy with this motif is a question worth examining. In Wilde's case, the artist's life cannot be entirely separated from his works since so much of what he was and what formed him is reflected in the texts he wrote. His statement that "what people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities" (Ransome, 162) shows that for Wilde, truth was not the opposite of "lie", but there may have been several different versions of truth. His aesthetic views,...
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Polarities in the Works of Oscar Wilde
Burianová, Petra ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Reading through the works of Oscar Wilde, one soon notices the many instances of polarity: the recurring themes of the body versus soul, good versus evil, city versus nature, artificial versus natural and many more. It is to be found in his plays as well as in his prose and fairy- tales. Yet these polarities do not necessarily have to oppose each other: the Wildean dialectic allows contraries to coexist, and thus we have the Star-Child who, through repentance, turns from evil to good; however this turn of character does not ensure a happy-ending, and makes us question whether "good really is good". A great number of Wilde's characters either live a double-life, have two distinct sides to their personality, or even several personalities, and in the case of Dorian Gray the split is literal. What led the author to constantly toy with this motif is a question worth examining. In Wilde's case, the artist's life cannot be entirely separated from his works since so much of what he was and what formed him is reflected in the texts he wrote. His statement that "what people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities" (Ransome, 162) shows that for Wilde, truth was not the opposite of "lie", but there may have been several different versions of truth. His aesthetic views,...
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Romantic Impulses in Victorian Literature
Beran, Zdeněk ; Hilský, Martin (advisor) ; Mánek, Bohuslav (referee) ; Peprník, Michal (referee)
The thesis attempts to discuss the character of late Romantic literature and art as it developed in England throughout the Victorian period. It follows the assertion made by G. Hough that it is possible to identify a continuous presence of Romantic ideas and methods in the writings of some major Victorian authors, and reflects the fact that there was actually no consensus or prevailing unequivocal view of Romanticism at that time, as is evidenced in the contradicting statements of such writers as John Ruskin and Walter Pater. The first objective of the thesis is thus to define the characteristic features of English Romanticism as they can be tracked down in the formative period of the 18th century and the time of High Romanticism of the first decades of the following century, and to see what transforming changes these characteristics underwent during the Victorian era. The sources of Romantic sensibility are located in the revolutionary role of the scientific discoveries of the 17th century and a new focus of the philosophical writings of that period, concerning mainly operations of the human mind. This development resulted in new aesthetic conceptions based on the two prevailing approaches, empiricism and Neo-Platonism. These theories conditioned the main concern of Romantic thought, i.e. an...
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