| By 1851, the majority of Britons resided in the cities rather than the countryside; for the first time ever, England was primarily an urban nation rather than a rural one. The literature of the period reflected this change, as authors wrote increasingly of the cities and their inhabitants, yet much of Victorian literature retained a rural focus. That focus had broadened, however, to include representations of country people of all classes and a variety of English regional landscapes. While most people lived in the rapidly-growing cities, the countryside did not lose its place in Victorian literature; rather the importance of the land and of rural ways of life became central topics for a group of novelists and memoir-writers who did more than write about landscapes--they presented landscapes as individual forces in their own right.; This thesis concentrates on the role of "spirit of place," or genius loci, in five works of fiction and three of non-fiction. It contains chapters on the following novels and memoirs: The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, Far from the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy, The Golden Arrow and Precious Bane by Mary Webb, Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson, and William Smith, Potter and Farmer, 1790-1858 and A Farmer's Life by George Sturt. Genius loci, a Latin term, has been defined as "the invisible spirit that watches over a place" but the authors considered here reach beyond that definition to create spirits of place which encompass attitudes toward the countryside and nature, effects of nostalgia in the face of changing customs and agricultural practices, and connections between the inhabitants of rural England and the land itself, whether it be wild or cultivated. Recognizing and understanding the authors' uses of the genius loci theme in all their complexity yields new perspectives on these vivid portrayals of the Victorian countryside. |
