Curiosity, fraternity, and nineteenth-century fiction (Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle)

This dissertation traces curiosity as an intertextual, formal, and thematic force in early American and British Victorian fictional narratives. The nineteenth-century writers discussed in this dissertation---Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle---exploit curiosity's blend of objective and subjective meanings to explore questions of literary and cultural influence, plotting, character, and narration in ways that shape fictional form.; In Chapter 1, I analyze how early American fiction oscillates between the poles of antiquarian and gothic curiosity. While antiquarian curiosity adopts a genteel interest in objects, particularly textual objects, gothic curiosity marks the compulsive desire to know about other persons. Brown's fiction reveals the narrative challenges posed by both kinds of curiosity, as well as the connection between curiosity, conspiratorial fraternity, and American cultural belatedness. The remainder of the chapter investigates antiquarian curiosity and the sketch form as practiced by Irving and Hawthorne.; Chapter 2 considers "domestic" curiosity in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop and Bleak House. These novels differ from the American works discussed earlier insofar as they do not portray curiosity as a fear of foreign influence or domination. Dickens's elite male curiosity is much more "domestic" in another sense: it is deeply interested in family and household matters, especially illegitimacy. In Dickens, shadowy secret societies resurface in the guise of more respectable fraternal networks that serve as the site of collective curiosity.; In Chapter 3, I examine the relationship between curiosity, omniscience, and narration through the lens of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Watson channels his curiosity about the omniscient detective into the collection of tales he curates (and narrates), and the prominence of connoisseurs and exotic curios in the later Holmes tales establishes collecting as the ultimate form of curiosity. The dissertation concludes with a reading of Doyle's American-themed novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear ---works that reflect a marked fear of the United States' growing political and cultural influence in the twentieth century.