Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

English (Ph.D.)

Department

English

First Advisor

Rachel Hollander

Second Advisor

Amy King

Third Advisor

Kathleen Lubey

Abstract

This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century British novels imagine and negotiate queer formulations of family at moments when biological kinship, marriage, and inheritance were increasingly formalized as social and legal imperatives. Reading canonical texts by Austen, Shelley, Wilde, Brontë, and Hardy, alongside the proto-modern and modernist work of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, I argue that these novels resist consanguinity as the sole basis of family and instead theorize queer kinship as something found, founded, or forged through affinity, care, and shared orientation rather than blood or reproduction. Drawing on queer theory, feminist criticism, phenomenology, and Foucauldian accounts of power and sexuality, the project reads narrative form, temporality, and minor character trajectories as central to how these texts display the possibility for these nonnormative relations. In Emma, Austen models queer family through fluid domestic roles that reorder marriage, authority, and residence. Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray uncouple creation from birth, producing forged families organized by influence, art, and science, while queering narrative time and development. Jane Eyre stages and dismantles fragile experiments in female community that expose the colonial and patriarchal foundations of the marriage plot, with Bertha Mason emerging as a queer and colonial disruptor of familial futurity. Jude the Obscure offers the most devastating critique of reproductive futurism, presenting family as a historically contingent and often violent structure whose failures nonetheless gesture toward alternative relational possibilities. The coda traces these concerns into modernism, where globalization, trauma, and technological violence further displace family as a stable organizing principle. By foregrounding queer kinship in the nineteenth-century novel, this dissertation reconceives family as a mutable social formation and demonstrates how Victorian and early modernist fiction imaginatively opens space for relational futures that exceed the limits of heteronormative inheritance, marriage, and reproductive destiny.

Download

Share

COinS