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The legend of the vampire in the works of 19th century British literature
Hezinová, Jana ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
The figure of the vampire is one of the strongest images in present-day culture. It appears in films books, merchandise, and even has an entire subculture associated with the modern gothic. The process of the development of this figure has a long and complex history that reflects the development of culture and society. The popularity of the use of this figure is partially based on its versatility, adaptability and ability to broach various themes and features that reflect the present day society. This fascination with the vampire trope is also due to the development of this figure from folklore in to literature in the nineteenth century and its subsequent use in the popular works of the time. This thesis attempts to briefly explore the early development of the figure of the vampire in the European context and compare it to its early appearances in literature. Namely, it will focus on the appearance of the vampire in nineteenth century British literature. The thesis of this work will attempt to determine the nature of the vampire in the cultural concepts of the time. It will also follow how the changes in the traditional narratives are reflected and transformed in the concept of the narrative of the "urban Gothic". The formulation of the basic structural background of Victorian society in politics,...
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"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me": Female Independence in the English Novel 1795 - 1820
Jiránková, Lucie ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
In the 1790s, the framework of women's protests against the injustice they faced underwent a distinctive change, which inevitably imprinted itself into contemporary literature. The period discussed in this thesis was chosen to exemplify the beginnings of feminist awakening present in the novels of three women writers: Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen. The aim of this thesis is to explore different attitudes towards attaining emotional, intellectual, social, and economic independence, while simultaneously discussing the period's construction of femininity, the discourse of natural rights, the issue of education, romantic love, and sensibility. The introductory chapter describes the historical background and looks closely on the position of women in contemporary society in terms of their familiar and social status, economic dependence, education, character shaping, and their objectification of the marriage market. It also presents the view of women as depicted in conduct manuals and the works of the Jacobin (and also Anti-Jacobin) novelists. Finally, it introduces the novelists in question and elaborates on the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women on the authors under analysis. The second chapter focuses its attention on the depiction of female independence in...
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"A Ball of String Full of Knots": Narrative Strategies in Jeanette Winterson's Early Novels and Their Later Development
Krejčí, Patrik ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to describe the employment of narrative strategies in the novels of Jeanette Winterson with the focus on their development over time. The specific novels to be addressed are: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, Art & Lies, Gut Symmetries and The PowerBook. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit serves as the thematic source for all the other texts, thus determining the sustained concentration on the issues of storytelling, time history. It also contains first narratological experiments, most notably the embedded narratives that are arguably the most crucial of the strategies Winterson utilizes, for they appear in some form in all of her novels. A significant contribution of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry is their historical setting, which accentuates the clash between fantasy (storytelling) and facts (history). Moreover, they introduce a second narrator in order to enrich the texts with an additional perspective and they use the ensuing duality of the narrators to problematize gender. In the last four novels, Winterson reaches the peak of her experimentation, since they take the themes of the previous novels even further, as if exploring what are the limits of storytelling. The complexity of the narrative structures has deepened,...
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Jeanette Winterson`s Postmodern Historical Novels: Sexing the Cherry and The Passion as Historiografic Metafictions.
Araslanova, Anna ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Nineteenth and early twentieth century theorists believed that history was based on actual facts traced by written evidence which justified those facts` apparent objectivity. Later theorists, under the influence of the poststructuralists` ideas of textuality of reality, doubted those concepts assuming that the historical data cannot be perceived objectively. This led to the further assumption that history is a construct, a discourse created by the historian who narrates it to the others. Consequently, in the Postmodern understanding, history is a subjective rather than an objective concept. Under those fairly new concepts the historical novels evolve into another form, a new kind of "fictional history". According to Linda Hutcheon, this form of Postmodern historical novel can be called historiographic metafiction. She uses that term to describe fiction which is both metafictional and historical: it is a specific form of metafiction that "draws attention to its status as an artefact" in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. Those fictions "situate [themselves] within historical discourse" while still claiming to be fictitious. Thus, they problematize the very distinction between history and fiction by showing the parallels between writing literature and writing...
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"Am I Not a Man and a Brother?": Representations of Slavery in the West Indies and Abolitionist Rhetoric on the Road to Emancipation
Bartová, Nikola ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
This thesis is concerned with literature connected with the abolition of slavery in British colonies. The thesis will treat the topic of the abolitionist movement from the perspective of social, cultural and literary history from the beginnings until the abolition of slavery in British colonies in the Caribbean in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act. The thesis will focus on the discourse of race and slavery. The chosen authors represent different opinions and perspectives as the discussion will focus on sentimental poetry, travel writings as well as slave narratives. The chief aim is to identify and define the strategies of abolitionist discourse and the rhetorical practices which it employed especially in shaping the image of Africans and how the hegemonic discourse of sentimentalism influenced their writing. The first part of the thesis is concerned with establishing a theoretical background and the establishing of the literary traditions and customs of the eighteenth century, definition of the sentimental discourse and philosophies of the Enlightenment. This will be framed by a definition of Edward Said's "Orientalism" as well as Paul Gilroy's theory of the "Black Atlantic," which will enable us to define the space between Britain, Africa and the Caribbean, where the history of slavery of...
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Transformation of the Gothic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
Mikulová, Martina ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Thesis abstract: Despite the fact that some critics view the period of the true Gothic as ending in the year 1820, others consider it to be a genre, as well as an aesthetic, which can still be perceived across various different cultural aspects to this day. Possibly the best way to approach the Gothic within the realm of literature is to observe several key examples of the Gothic topos, which was grounded in the original Gothic pieces of the eighteenth century. During the course of the nineteenth century, a historical period which from the cultural point of view appears almost inherently Gothic, British Gothic writing has undergone considerable changes and development, maintaining several of the key Gothic features, namely those of setting, isolation, and character types, modifying them in the process. Through this, it can be observed to what extent the aspects remain, and just how far-reaching their transformation was within the six exemplary works - Frankenstein, The Vampyre, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Carmilla, and Dracula. Another important aspect overlaying the selected works is that of monstrosity - a rather physical interpretation of the inner monstrosities of humans, or indeed an entire culture. The literary works, no matter how different at first glance they may appear to be, all utilize typical...
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Questioning Gender Through the Test of History: the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Ali Smith
Burianová, Petra ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
This thesis focuses on the work of two contemporary authors, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson, and their treatment of the concepts of history and gender in their fiction. I argue that, by openly speculating about the nature of time and history, and by making their readers think about the origin of these notions, Smith and Winterson uncover the seemingly stable but, in actuality, very fragile roots of the 'truths' we take for granted. They explore the potentiality of the past, which, in turn opens up the present and the future. To support my argument, I turned to Hayden White and his theory of historiography and Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of time and history. The latter part of the thesis deals with gender, as well as biological sex and sexual orientation, and the way in which Smith and Winterson's texts put into practice Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, and work towards the subversion of gender norms as well as the destabilisation of heteronormativity. Both parts of the thesis are closely connected; history serves to keep the laws that define gender, sex and sexuality intact, and, in turn, these laws are often adhered to solely by the virtue of their historicity. What is more, myth and language are equally exposed to be supporting these norms. The aim of this thesis is to...
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Women's Rights to Property in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England: Cultural Attitudes
Vondráková, Michala ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
Thesis Abstract The inequality of sexes in England has been a sore point in society for centuries. Since the seventeenth century, with the rise of the genre of the novel, writers touched upon this unevenness of rights. During the eighteenth century, there was an increase in the number of female writers and some of them made the issue of female rights their central theme. But to understand the problem, it is necessary to understand the laws concerning women in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis follows the course of a life of a woman, from before birth until the time after marriage has ended and the rights to property she possessed over the course of her life. It is concerned consecutively with the period before, during and after a marriage, as whatever rights a woman had changed dramatically with the change of her marital status. Since rights to property differed through time, but also through the social layers of the society, there is also a division into social classes. The focus of this work is the period in between 1753 and 1857, years that mark the two important Acts of Parliament that changed the matrimonial law and with it women's rights. In 1753, it was the Act for Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriages that put an end to the widespread clandestine and contract...
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Portrayal of the World War I in British Literature in the 20th Century
Pondělíček, Jiří ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
The main goal of this thesis is to analyse the way in which British authors describe the First World War. The primary aim is to define how its description has changed in more than ninety years since it ended. For this purpose, the thesis will analyse two novels written by direct participants who took part in the trench fighting on the Western Front in the ranks of the British Army, and two novels by the authors writing on the brink of the twentieth and the twenty first centuries. Using secondary sources from the fields of literary criticism, historical and cultural studies, along with the analysis of the primary texts, this work reveals how and why the manner of depiction and perception of the first global conflict has changed. The main focus lies on the differences between the treatment of the traditional war-literature motives; heroism, sacrifice and the meaning of the war. This interdisciplinary analysis forms chapters two and three. The topic of the fourth chapter is partly the motivation of the authors to write about the conflict and, with relation to that, the way in which the war functions in them as in works of literature. The conclusion then assesses all the above mentioned differences not only between the two periods but also between the respective authors. The thesis proves that, apart...
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Comic Discourse in Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Taubrová, Eva ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
This thesis discusses the comic discourse in Laurence Sterne's novel The life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It shows the way in which the theories of the comic of Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud are applied in this novel. In Tristram Shandy, the principles of the comic of Bergson and Freud do not function in their usual manner; they are fulfilled by the structure and the process of narration. The comic in this novel is also enhanced by the fact that aspects of narration that are usually static and unchanging throughout a novel (such as the nature of the narrator) gained dynamism in Tristram Shandy. This dynamism offers a space for the structural comic to origin. The comic of Tristram Shandy also draws from the principle of association. This novel inspired later theories of humour and the comic in general.
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