The 'cosmopolite' in strange places: provincial cosmopolitanism and a sense of the past in the writings of George Eliot, Henry James, and William Archer's Henrik Ibsen

Thesis

‘Cosmopolitan’ is a disputed term, one of praise and occasionally of abuse. The etymology (kosmopolitês; Greek, ‘citizen of the world’) carries an inbuilt tension between world (kosmos) and citizen or inhabitant of a city (politês). I argue in my thesis that this tension, as played out in the texts I have chosen to study, is not merely between the world and the citizen, but more specifically between the accident of circumstances and the pe...

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Authors: Wood, SH

• DOI: 10.5287/bodleian:vmKb5GYVP
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: provincialism; Victorian; historical novel; provincial; modernism; idealism; pragmatism; cosmopolitanism; empiricism; fin-de-siècle; cosmopolite
• Subjects: Cosmopolitanism in literature; Historical fiction; English literature--19th century; Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906--Characters