Abstract
Literature in the nineteenth century often featured highly structured scenes of domestic entertaining. Party Politics makes a case for these parties as both literary devices and cultural touchstones, at once practices indicative of the period’s commitment to strict standards of etiquette and capacious arenas in which to test the already blurred boundary between the public and private spheres. Ultimately, this project contends that parties are staples of Victorian sociability and its depiction in literature; they therefore allow authors and their characters to register social, moral, economic, political, and even international developments of the period in the lives of middle- and upper-class individuals.
Degree Date
Spring 5-2018
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
Advisor
Beth Newman
Second Advisor
Rajani Sudan
Third Advisor
Tim Cassedy
Number of Pages
251
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Forrester, Andrew, "Party Politics: Domestic Entertaining and the Reaches of Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Literature" (2018). English Theses and Dissertations. 3.
https://scholar.smu.edu/hum_sci_english_etds/3
Included in
Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons
