• About
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of Institutional RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartment

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Reclaiming Memory: Literature, Science, and the Rise of Memory as Property, 1860-1945

    Covington, Elizabeth Reeves
    : https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/etd-07202011-222506
    http://hdl.handle.net/1803/13316
    : 2011-08-03

    Abstract

    This project explores the relationship of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature to the experimental sciences of memory. Many critics have demonstrated the effect of psychoanalysis on literary thought, but early experimental psychology—and specifically findings related to human memory—is an unexplored field in literary studies. After 1860, researchers in the burgeoning field of experimental psychology began to investigate the ways that memory works and proposed theories indicating that recall of past experience is fragile, vulnerable to suggestion and alteration, and liable to be forgotten. The dissertation demonstrates the ways that late Victorian and modernist literature was particularly resistant to contentions that memory is unstable and changeable, clinging instead to the Lockean theory of personal identity based on persistent and stable memories over time. Drawing on texts from the late-Victorian writer Samuel Butler, and modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, and T.S. Eliot, the dissertation describes literary memory models that are secure and unchanging. These writers discuss memories in terms that suggest that memory is the property of the rememberer, thus extending the protections of personal property to those of memory. Further, authors during this period increasingly incorporated their own memories into fictional work, a move that amounts to the literal propertization of memory. This study demonstrates that late Victorian and modernist literature provides a competing account of memory function that contradicts the findings of the experimental memory sciences.
    Show full item record

    Files in this item

    Icon
    Name:
    COVINGTON_DISSERTATION_FINAL.pdf
    Size:
    1.624Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    View/Open

    This item appears in the following collection(s):

    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    Connect with Vanderbilt Libraries

    Your Vanderbilt

    • Alumni
    • Current Students
    • Faculty & Staff
    • International Students
    • Media
    • Parents & Family
    • Prospective Students
    • Researchers
    • Sports Fans
    • Visitors & Neighbors

    Support the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries

    Support the Library...Give Now

    Gifts to the Libraries support the learning and research needs of the entire Vanderbilt community. Learn more about giving to the Libraries.

    Become a Friend of the Libraries

    Quick Links

    • Hours
    • About
    • Employment
    • Staff Directory
    • Accessibility Services
    • Contact
    • Vanderbilt Home
    • Privacy Policy