Alternatives to the Married State in the Works of Margaret Oliphant

• Thesis title in Czech: Alternativy k manželskému stavu v dílech Margaret Oliphant
• Thesis title in English: Alternatives to the Married State in the Works of Margaret Oliphant
• Key words: Margaret Oliphant|Viktoriánská éra|Feminismus|Manželství|Genderové role
• English key words: Margaret Oliphant|The Victorian Era|Feminism|Marriage|Gender roles
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2021/2022
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Petra Johana Poncarová, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 01.12.2021
• Date of assignment: 01.12.2021
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 14.12.2021
• Date and time of defence: 16.06.2022 10:00
• Date of electronic submission: 22.05.2022
• Date of proceeded defence: 16.06.2022
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.

Guidelines

This thesis will focus on the portrayal of unmarried women in the works of Margaret Oliphant, one of the most prolific writers of the Victorian era historically neglected by the British literary canon. Oliphant has been largely left out of the discourse surrounding the depiction of female independence in nineteenth-century fiction, in spite of her novels’ featuring themes more radically feminist than those of many of her better-known contemporaries. Focusing on those of Oliphant’s novels still in print (primarily Miss Marjoribanks, Hester and Kirsteen), as well as on a selection of her shorter works, this thesis will attempt to subject Oliphant to the same treatment afforded to her fellow Victorian women writers by the likes of Elaine Showalter or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in the 1970s.
In this thesis, I will explore the different ways in which Margaret Oliphant represented the women who chose to disregard societal norms and chose to pursue their independence instead, eschewing the institution of marriage and the traditional familial structures connected to it in the process. I will be focusing on the motivations of the individual female characters, as well as the responses to their unconventional lifestyles on the part of the society. In addition to employing scholarship focused on Oliphant herself, which has been rather scarce so far, my research will also rely on secondary sources written about her contemporaries over the course of the last five decades. Using this method, I hope to shine a spotlight on Oliphant’s contribution to feminist literature of the nineteenth century, as well as aid in the establishment of Oliphant as a canonical writer.

References

Primary sources
Oliphant, Margaret. Hester. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009.
Oliphant, Margaret. Kirsteen. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. 2010.
Oliphant, Margaret. Miss Marjoribanks. London: Penguin Books. 1998.
Oliphant, Margaret. Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant. Leicester: Leicester University Press. 1974.

Secondary sources
Adams, James Eli. A History of Victorian Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 2009.
David, Deidre, ed. The Cambridge Companion to The Victorian Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene. 2000.
Goodman, Robin Truth. Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015.
Manning, Susan and Ian Brown, eds. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature Volume Two: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707-1918). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Shields, Juliet. Scottish Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1977.
Tucker, Herbert, F., ed. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 2014.