The insistence of memory: Mnemonic transformations in the works of Thomas Hardy, Henry Adams, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf

This dissertation encompasses roughly the years between 1875 and 1925 and analyzes in detail works by Thomas Hardy, Henry Adams, Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf. It makes two primary claims about memory and Anglo-American modernist prose. Firstly, I assert that the depictions of memory in the works of Thomas Hardy, Henry Adams, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf are reflective of two broadly defined modes of memory: memory as the involuntary mental representation of past events, and memory as a set of organized cultural artifacts that are purported to have mnemonic value. Because of the scientific and philosophical discourses of memory and time in the period, both of these modes of memory are becoming increasingly important concerns for modernist thinkers. Secondly, and more crucially, I argue that the depictions of remembrance in these works can be understood as enacting the oppositional tension between these modern conceptions of memory. These works demonstrate an extreme skepticism about the potential to structure and manage memory by questioning, if never actually rejecting, traditional modes of transforming the subjective experience of time into the systematic and utilitarian. My dissertation explores the cultural processes by which memory coalesces in these works of modernist narrative, and investigates the various tensions, textual and otherwise, generated by that moment of structuration.; In the works of Hardy, Adams, Cather and Woolf, recollection is not easily recast as biographical or historical narrative, and the status of physical objects, such as relics and monuments, as symbolic or evidential vessels of memory is challenged. These authors strongly suggest that the value that such texts and objects possess as accurate reproductions of memory, or as exemplary lessons for the future, is compromised in the modern age. The authors' geographic, demographic and circumstantial separation from one another suggest an archaeology of mnemonic entanglement in the time period, indicating that for many Anglo-American writers of the era, these concerns with personal memory were imperative.