Regret: Martial, marital mortal.

摘要

My dissertation is a study of the linguistic and narrative structure of regret in the nineteenth-century British novel. In it I investigate three kinds of regret: Martial (regret over the act of killing), Marital (regret over the act of marrying), and Mortal (regret over the death of a loved one). In each case, the experience of regret motivates and organizes a narrative propelled, respectively, by fear, rage, and intense grief.;I employ three theoretical constructs throughout my analysis: the phenomenon of agent-regret (that has received its richest analysis from philosophers), what I call surge of affect (an aesthetic construct), and the desire for reparation (as theorized by object-relations theorists). Through a close reading of three texts (Conrad's Lord Jim, Eliot's Middlemarch, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, respectively), I generate a model of regret that is both specific to and transcendent of that text's moral problem or theme---whether it be war, marriage, or death.;Regret is at once a feeling and a mode of analysis. In narrative, regret produces a structure that is both stable (a blueprint for the narrative or poem) and dynamic (filling the text with a set of fictional possibilities). Although regret is transhistorical, the Victorian novel gives a rich perspective on the poetics regret; for example, nineteenth-century constructs---such as tort law, divorce reform and burial rites---provide an historically grounded context to regret. At the same time, I remain attentive to the human habit of wishing that is perennial, both in art, and in life.