Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

5-21-2018

Keywords

Language, literature and linguistics, African american literature, Class status, Critical race studies, Transatlantic studies, Victorian literature

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric

First Advisor

Jessie Reeder

Subject Heading(s)

Language; literature and linguistics; African american literature; Class status; Critical race studies; Transatlantic studies; Victorian literature; English Language and Literature

Abstract

This paper examines the problematic nature of western reliance on class-based societies through looking at postbellum United States and Victorian England through a transatlantic lens. I prove how the classification system produces a group of “unclassed” peoples based on a racial and intellectual status, by looking at Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood. These two nineteenth-century novels expose the production of unclassifiable who are outcast based on what I call a “class-race-intellect disagreement.” By revealing the life and struggles of the mixed-raced individual, I will show how the class systems used by western nations not only maintained the financial, social, professional, educational, etc. disparity between the upper and lower classes, but created an entire class of outsiders who are not welcome to participate in the world in which they live. This paper will not only show how these “unclassed” individuals were produced in the nineteenth-century, but how their status has maintained across oceans, borders and time.

Download

Share

COinS