Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation charts the development of the “curse narrative” across British literature of the long-nineteenth century, roughly spanning the period between the French Revolution and the dawn of the First World War (1789-1914). Curse narratives valorize the privileged individual while anxiously registering an enduring loss of certainty reified by its self-presentation as an instrument of manufactured fate. Such plots enshrine a self-reflexive lyricism that attempts to take history itself as a canvas, to force the completion of the grand narratives of progress and/or decay that proliferated across the intellectual life of the period, from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to the murky frontiers of Social Darwinism. Curse narratives reify the present into a recursive abyss, a black hole through which the uncertain future can appear as inevitable as the undead past. Rhetorical malediction demonstrates the promise and futility of literary labor as conceptualized by nineteenth century liberalism; the absolute authority of the past becomes an enduring curse. Chapter 1 establishes the parameters of the curse narrative through a reading of William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen, which stages the gnostic genesis of universal monarchy. Chapter 2 reads Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound as a hopeful revision in which the protagonist can reclaim the structuring power of an unspeakable curse. Chapter 3 explores how Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s The Last Man exposes the masculinist, imperialist assumptions of narratives like Prometheus Unbound, imagining a future in which historical curses can be broken only by annihilation. Chapter 4 reads the story of Rosa Dartle within Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as a curse narrative about the persistence of patriarchal authority. Chapter 5 demonstrates how Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone uses a diamond’s supposed curse to subvert the authority of imperial institutions. Chapter 6 reads Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as a self-reflexive send-up of its subgenre’s implacable fixation with primal reactionary politics.
Date
3-12-2026
Recommended Citation
Dodd, Spencer, "Malediction and the Politics of Inevitability: Curse Narratives in British Literature 1789-1900" (2026). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 7006.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/7006
Committee Chair
Rovee, Christopher K.
LSU Acknowledgement
1
LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment
1