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This thesis examines women writers' contributions to the development of Whig literary culture in the bitterly partisan era known as 'The Rage of the Party'. It takes as its focus the drama and poetry of three contemporaneous female authors - Catharine Trotter, Susanna Centlivre, and Sarah Fyge Egerton - a circle of self-confident female wits, who emerged in the decades after the Glorious Revolution, and wrote in support of Whig ideology and aesthetics. This project, then, challenges the received notion that Toryism was more conducive to early modern women's public voice. It also contributes to the study of Whig cultural formation, which has hitherto focused on male writers and the genre of poetry. Pioneering scholarship on literary Whiggism has revealed the existence of a dynamic Whig literary culture long occluded by a 'Scriblerian' notion of literary history. Through the recovery of female interventions in Whig public discourse, this study modifies our view of early Whig culture, revealing a richer, more complex picture of the breadth and variety of the Whig cultural programme than previously conceived. A major focus of my research is the significance of the post-Revolution stage as an important site of Whig cultural production and a vital source of support for women writers, who capitalized on the patronage and industry networks of the theatre to enable and support their literary careers. This study's engagement with female responses to partisan debates produces some surprising results. Trotter's identity as a Catholic did not preclude her from articulating vigorous support for the tenets of the Revolution, nor did it prevent her from receiving the patronage of a number of Whig luminaries. This illuminates the richness and variety of early Whig culture, which accommodates surprisingly divergent religio-political positions. The focus on Egerton's political poetry reveals a hitherto unacknowledged picture of her as a patriotic Whig poet, whose well-known feminist views are enabled and informed by the ideology and tropes of Whig verse. While readings of women's Whiggish interest have largely focused on their concerns with marriage and a Lockean social contract, my research illustrates how Whiggish women's political identities are more often articulated through their attitudes to partisan national issues: war, peace, martial heroism, commerce, speculation and religious toleration. Women engaged with these masculinist themes in explicit dialogue with their male contemporaries, refashioning the norms of the dominant culture, and alerting us to the nature and extent of female political agency.

This thesis considers some of the ways in which the sea was written about and written with in English nineteenth-century prose fiction. It has become a commonplace of literary criticism that, in the century preceding modernism, prose fiction about the sea was unthinking and uninteresting: indentured to outworn generic codes, tied to certain clichés of national identity, Empire, or slipshod sublimity, and vaguely evoking some or all of them. This thesis does not attempt a general contradiction of this view. What this thesis does suggest is that Victorian fiction is not always naïve about its subject and, at times, displays an awareness of the generic and stylistic hazards attendant upon writing about the sea. To write about the sea was to risk writing vaguely. However, to Victorian novelists who wished to draw on vagueness, the sea offered a subject and a style that could be put to use. The introduction sets out the terms of my discussion both of vagueness, and of the attitudes of Victorian writers and readers to the sea as a setting and theme for fiction. The terms of philosophical vagueness are compared with the nineteenth century’s most influential aesthetics of obscurity: the sublime. The purchase of these theories is then tested, first in relation to Ruskin’s lifelong interest in representing the sea in painting and prose, and second with reference to novels by George Eliot, Thackeray, and Gaskell. Prior critical approaches are also considered, as is the topic of empire, which I explain is not my primary focus. The body of the thesis is devoted primarily to three author studies: Frederick Marryat, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad. Each author wrote vaguely about the sea, though vagueness is shown to be, in all three cases, a resource that can be drawn upon with degrees of self-consciousness; if, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, vague language was considered appropriate to the sea, the linguistic resources that the sea in turn offered began to seem increasingly applicable to experiences characterised by uncertainty. I suggest that the sea establishes conditions that invite a rereading of the many repetitions in Marryat’s novels. These repetitions can be viewed, I argue, as traces of Marryat’s struggle to find a language appropriate to the ocean. In Dickens’s writing, the sea is often present as a source both of metaphor and of experience. I suggest that the slippery doubleness of the literary sea is a means by which both Dickens’s characters, and the individuals he encounters as a journalist, can be made to coexist with their ideal or literary doubles. In my chapter on Conrad, I argue that the sea forms a crucial element of the kind of literary impressionism Conrad recommends in his preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and elsewhere. Vagueness arises when the border between linguistic concepts becomes blurred. Two short interludes, on the subject of shores and depths respectively, consider such permeable thresholds. These interludes also provide a means of charting changes that occurred across the period, a counterpoint to the more temporally specific focus of the author studies. I conclude with a brief discussion of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Critics have distinguished the high modernist sea from what came before; this coda insists that the sort of vagueness valued by Woolf has an earlier origin.

This study examines the constructions and uses of the figure of Ovid in French writing of the second half of the seventeenth century, and explores how they were modulated by contemporary aesthetic and cultural concerns. As the influence of Ovid’s poetry made itself felt in various ways – in the mythopoeia of the Sun-King and the fashionable galant salons – interest in the story of Ovid’s life blossomed. This, I argue, was facilitated by new forms of ‘life-writing’, the nouvelle historique and histoire galante, and fuelled in unexpected ways by the escalating querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Research has been done on the reception and influence of Ovid’s poetry in this period, but little attention has been paid to the figure of Ovid. This thesis offers a new perspective and, informed by recent renewed interest in life-writing, argues that analysis of biographical depictions is vital for establishing a coherent picture of the uses of Ovid in the ‘Grand Siècle’. I explore a diverse range of textual descriptions of Ovid (Vies; prefatory material attached to translations and editions of his work; correspondence; dialogues des morts; biographical dictionaries and historical novels), organized according to their different, though intersecting, ways of writing about this poet. He was constructed as a historical figure, an author, a fictional character and a ‘parallèle’ – a point of identification or contrast for contemporary writers. Through close analysis of a multi-authored corpus, this thesis identifies and examines two instances of paradox: though an ancient poet, Ovid became emblematic of 'Moderne' movements and was used to explore aspects of galanterie; and, though his creative work was mobilized in the service of royal propaganda, Ovid, as a figure for the exiled poet, was also used to express anxieties about the sway of power and the machinations and pitfalls of the world of the court.

John Bellenden's Chronicles of Scotland (1531-r. 1537) is a humanist Scots translation of Hector Boece's Scotorum Historia (1527). As the first full-scale printed national history in the vernacular, the Chronicles assumed a pivotal role in sixteenth-century Scottish literary culture. Despite its contemporary importance,however, relatively little critical attention has been paid to Bellenden's work itself, primarily due to the misconception that it is a neutral translation of the Scotorum Historia. However, as Bellenden successively revised his text in several stages with stylistical, ideological and material alterations, the Chronicles needs to be evaluated as an individual literary work. The Chronicles reveals much about translation practice, cultural attitudes and book history in early modern Scotland. This thesis situates John Bellenden as a leading vernacular humanist whose concern to heighten the quality of vernacular Scots gave major impetus to the vernacular tradition in Scottish historiography. Chapter 1 shows how Bellenden's overall translation policy is indebted to humanist literary precepts and shows how its embodiment evolves through the course of his revision work. The following three chapters, which deal with Books 1, 12 and 16 of the Chronicles respectively, demonstrate the changing nature of Bellenden's translation and revision practice. A comparative analysis of the first manuscript version, three intermediary manuscript versions and the final printed version exhibits how Bellenden's attitude towards the Chronicles is affected by his ultimate respect for humanistic quality, and his consideration of his patrons and his audience. Chapter 5 examines the contemporary reception of the Chronicles. The conclusion seeks to reevaluate the congruity of the Chronicles with the contemporary cultural milieu and its influence on subsequent historiography and literature within and outwith early modern Scotland.

Despite the recent increase in scholarship on the subject of the female experience in exile, there is still much to be done. Exile scholars now have at their disposal an abundance of broad, general overviews of the circumstances and fates of displaced women writers, but a dearth of scholarship that considers specific literary works in an individualised fashion still exists. This is especially true of those female writers who have only recently been 'rediscovered', such as the three under discussion in this thesis. This thesis explores in detail the exile writings of Veza Canetti, Anna Gmeyner, and Lili Korber, about which little scholarship exists, and uses them as case studies to illuminate the situation of exiled women writers in general The exile works of these three authors repay study both for their own literary merits and for what they can tell us about the individual experience of exile. In their broad similarities, these writers also provide us with case studies of the larger experience of authorial exile - particularly, but by no means exclusively, the gendered experience - that allow us to derive more general lessons about the influence of forced flight on literary art. By giving due consideration to work produced in exile, this thesis calls into question some of the generalisations commonly found in recent scholarship and demonstrates that, despite hardsrnps and setbacks and contrary to common scholarly contention, all three women continued to write well into their exile years and that in those years they took their writing in new, skilful, and creative directions.

This thesis aims to address the Greek attitude to their dream experience in the classical period, as it was conceived in theories and engaged with in dream practices. The emphasis is on the relationship between these elements and the wider cultural frames which surrounded them, in order both to illustrate the manner in which culture influences the conception of dreams, and also to use dreams themselves as a mirror to reflect parts of Greek culture. As a study it has been heavily shaped by the approaches to dreams developed by anthropologists, outlined in Chapter 2, who have emphasised the importance of studying dreams intra-culturally. In Chapter 3 I analyse the language that the Greeks used to express their dreaming experience, drawing from it the important way in which language was both determined by, and determined, the Greeks' understanding of the phenomenon. This forms a base for engaging with dream theories in Chapter 4, both the implicit allusions in literature and explicit explanations proposed by philosophers and medical writers. I then explore the theories at work within Greek culture via dreams as we see them active in the lived religion of the polis: I examine in Chapter 5 the dedications set up by individuals on account of spontaneous dreams, and in Chapter 6 the practice of incubation. I then turn to examine specific relationships: in Chapter 7, the association of dreams with status, i.e. the possibility that powerful people would have equally powerful dreams; in Chapter 8, dreams and gender, assessing the possibility that women considered their dreams to be more important than their male counterparts. In Chapter 9, I position dreams within the context of the other divinatory practices of the period, which allows us to see the unique ways in which dream practices functioned in comparison to the other divinatory forms.

This thesis presents a theory of film representation as a process of organizing relations in order to connote the image's status as a type of representation. It is, thus, a study of film form, the form of its representations. Building from such theoretical sources as Merleau- Ponty and Deleuze, I hope here to use a phenomenological base to build a theory of film semiotics that focuses on the immanent field of film representation, which I will postulate as a structuring of the inter-dependent relationship between the content of representation and the signified source of representation. This relationship is infused through a film text according to various modes of differentiation: between the viewer and viewed, speaker and spoken or what, using principles of phenomenology, I call the problem of subject-object relations. In this study I use this framework of subject-object relations in order to re-conceptualize the problem of film representation and to systematize the fundamental debates in film theory. I will argue that even oppositional theories of film representation can be reconciled through their attempt to understand this immanent field as being organized so as to structure a relationship between the representation and an origin of meaning, or subject-function. This relationship is what I call a system of reference. The filmic subject-function is traditionally located within the camera itself or hi the diegetic subjectivity of a character; I will call these two systems of reference, respectively, objective and subjective representation. And, through a reconstruction of Deleuze's Cinéma project, I will argue that the immanent field of film representation is a constant fluctuation between these two poles, a dialogic circulation of interacting agencies and discourses. This thesis illustrates this fluctuation through a comparative analysis of two French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. I will argue that, illustrating similar goals as one finds in the works of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, these two filmmakers radically deconstruct film codes in order to destroy the conventional division between interior and exterior that is imposed by classical notions of subjectivity.

This thesis illustrates and analyses the appeal of folly to writers of, principally, the late- Soviet era (1960s-1980s). This appeal expressed itself not only in numerous portrayals of evidently foolish characters, but also in the widespread use of first-person narrative in which various masks of folly are worn by narrators to assert their detachment from societal norms and from the scholarly and 'objective' discourse which Soviet culture sought to promote. These tendencies towards folly and subjectivity are examined in their various historical, religious and philosophical implications. Parallels are sought both in the Russian literarycultural heritage, which has accorded exceptional importance to various models of folly, and in West-European literary traditions, especially that established by Erasmus. It is argued that, while the Russian paradigm of holy foolery (yurodstvo) has undoubtedly retained its importance as a literary theme and code, loose analogies with yurodstvo may lead to misleading or simplistic interpretations. In the Introduction I outline further my aims and methodology, while also providing an account of the cultural and literary background to the topic, before and after 1917. In Chapter One I discuss fiction by Vladimir Voinovich, Vasily Shukshin and Venedikt Erofeev, in order to indicate aspects of the general shape of my topic in the given period: how the 'praise of folly' developed and gained in complexity at the end of the 1960s. The bulk of the thesis (Chapters Two to Five) is devoted to more detailed casestudies of the work of three significant, but critically neglected, writers: Yuz Aleshkovsky, Yury Mamleev and the philosopher, Dmitry Galkovsky. The varied 'fool narratives' of each of these writers manifests, in contrasting ways, a profound and paradoxical engagement with the mind, wisdom and learning. If Aleshkovskian folly develops in a sharply drawn historical context (Stalinism and its aftermath) and bears a markedly Christian flavour, Mamleev seeks to exclude Soviet and Christian thematics entirely, seeking deliverance from thought and reason. Dmitry Galkovsky, meanwhile, assesses the entire history of the Russian intelligentsia's love affair with folly from his own radically subjective and unreliable perspective in his 'philosophical novel' Beskonechnyi tupik. The Epilogue is devoted to Viktor Erofeev's highly cynical interpretation of Russia's 'praise of folly', before concluding with examples of the renewal of its traditions in post- Soviet prose.

Edward Said stresses the politically and ideologically skewed nature of western imperial responses to colonised or formerly colonised cultures and peoples, articulated in a variety of media, including scholarly and imaginative writings, which are inflected by the various kinds of power (political, intellectual, cultural and moral) that the West has wielded and continues to wield over non-Western regions of the world. While recognising the pathbreaking import of Said's work, critics have pointed out his blindness to the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of the discourse of Empire within the western-authored texts that he discusses. Even where he does consider the issue of resistance and opposition to Empire by western intellectuals, he still stresses the complicity of their texts with the processes of Empire. If one were to pursue the logic of such criticisms to its limit and apply it to the intellectual resistance generated from the centre in the context of the post-War dismantling of European overseas empires and its aftermath, one might be tempted to conclude that such resistance constitutes an unqualified disruption of colonial modes of apprehending difference. Against the backdrop of such readings of Said, this thesis examines the issue of cross-cultural representation in a selection of mainstream metropolitan French writings relating to black Africa produced between 1945 and the present. It brings together scholars and writers like Gide, Sartre and Griaule, some of whose works relating to black Africa belong to the first decade of the post-War period marked by France's continued colonial presence in the continent. It also considers other scholars and writers like Dumont, Conchon, Verchave and Le Clézio, whose books appeared in the second and succeeding decades of the period. The overall aim is to identify the ways in which these writers respond individually and collectively to black Africa often construed as a paradigm of cultural difference, and to consider whether such cross-cultural responses, given their historical context, can be described as being invariably a function of the changing relations between France and black Africa. What forms do the cross-cultural responses take? What cultural assumptions and ideological motivations shape those responses? Are the responses entirely disruptive of colonial modes of relating to difference? If not, what are their aporias, their ambiguities and paradoxes? My conclusion is that while Sartre and others relate to black Africa with unmistakeable empathy, their positive cross-cultural disposition does not necessarily enable them to attain a relationship with the peoples and cultures of Africa which is an equipollent relationship between equals.

This thesis investigates the representation of land and landownership in medieval Icelandic texts. I shall demonstrate that there is scant homogeneity in this representation; the variation between different narratives is startling and unusual. I seek to categorise this variability by identifying the lack of a secure tradition surrounding land and landownership, and exploring the possibilities open to the saga author to use land practices and myths as literary devices or to glorify the past. I also examine variability caused by the differences in the realm of 'actual' experience. I shall explore a range of narratives, from stories of the initial settlement of Iceland, to issues of inheritance, to conveyance and to dispute over territory. The last chapter takes a flip-side view of landownership to consider the representation of the landless of family saga narrative. The texts which I shall examine are the Íslendingasögur, Landnádmabók and Íslendingabók. Throughout the thesis I also make reference to Grágás for illumination and comparison. In the first and second chapters I also include archaeological evidence for discussion.

This thesis examines post-1945 German prose fiction dealing with the Third Reich in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World. My review of the secondary literature in Chapter 1 shows how few Germanists have examined the role of the carnivalesque in such fiction or used Bakhtin's work systematically. Having set out the shortcomings of Bakhtin's theory and shown Carnival's ambivalent position in the Third Reich, Chapter 2 builds on this theoretical and historical foundation by giving an overview of the different ways in which authors deploy the Fool and the carnivalesque in post-1945 prose fiction. This overview provides a context for the rest of the thesis, in which I discuss in detail how four authors use the topoi of the Fool and the carnivalesque in different ways to confront the past and encourage social change. Thus, Chapter 3 analyses Hans Hellmut Kirst's 08/15 trilogy (1954-55) which describes Asch's carnivalesque subversion of the NCOs who abuse power within the Army, and his subsequent development into a positive figure of authority. Chapter 4 argues that, beneath its bleak surface, Günter Grass's Hundejahre (1963) deploys the carnivalesque to transmit a sense of mourning and rebirth after the Holocaust. Chapter 5 deals with Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi and der Friseur (1977), whose Fool-protagonist provokes the reader to laugh at earlier attempts to make sense of the Holocaust in order to prioritize the act of anamnesis as an end in itself. Chapter 6 examines Gert Hermann's Veilchenfeld (1987) and Der Kinoerzähler (1990). Veilchenfeld is a carnivalesque signifier of Nature whose persecution at the hands of the people of Limbach parallels the town's ecological destruction, so that the novel can be read as a critique of the exploitation of Nature. In Der Kinoerzähler Hofmann uses Karl, a Fool-figure who narrates silent films, to encourage the development of critical faculties which combat the fatalism and authoritarianism that hamper social change. It becomes clear that the authors of the above works have anticipated the shortcomings of Carnival as a model of resistance and have thus redefined the Fool and the carnivalesque. So in my view, although the way the authors deploy these topoi maps only partially with Bakhtin's ideas about Carnival, these authors have understood the central concepts of the carnivalesque's ambivalence and its powers to subvert authority and use them productively to deal with the issues raised by the Third Reich.

The thesis examines Greek short stories written and published since the fall of the dictatorship in Greece in 1974, a year marking the beginning of the country's increasing opening to western lifestyles, mentalities and preoccupations. The present research explores two questions: How do Greek short stories of this period respond to the challenges of the postmodern condition, and what is the picture of the postmodern that one could draw from these texts. To this goal more than a hundred short stories are examined, by Sotiris Dimitriou, Michel Fais, Rhea Galanaki, E. Ch. Gonatas, Yiorgos loannou, Christophoros Milionis, Dimitris Nollas, I. Ch. Papadimitrakopoulos, Ersi Sotiropoulou, Christos Vakalopoulos, and Zyranna Zateli. The thesis is structured on a thematic basis, studying the major themes of reality and the subject, in order to evaluate the kind and degree of subversion that this fundamental bipolar axis of modern thought is undergoing in the postmodern condition. The readings are informed by contemporary theory, ranging from microhistory and Bakhtinian dialogism to poststructuralism and deconstruction, Levinas's ethical theory and Wittgensteinian language games. The textual analysis reveals that the traditional notion of reality as a unified totality is coming under severe strain; the critique mounted by the texts ranges from negative recognition of cosmological plurality through epistemological failure to an increasingly positive recognition of multiple incommensurate universes, be that by means of metafiction or, more radically still, a magic realism that transcends the world of the text to imbue performatively the world of the reader. The reality of the past in the form of historical truth is another target of scrutiny, as the unearthing of multiple insignificant, private and a-systemic events undermines the formerly dominant monolithic representations of the past and uncover its discursive construction, thereby facilitating the emergence of marginal historical subjects by means of fictional terms. Accordingly, the subject is no longer represented as a dominant and autonomous agent but as discursively constructed within a web of power relations. Yet this predicament creates the potential for a narrative identity and an alternative ethics founded on the acknowledgment of difference and interpersonal relations. Lastly, games, and especially language games, as a particular trope of merging reality and the subject, signal the cultural determination of irredeemable difference and plurality that is a constant in postmodern critique. Apart from suggesting the significance of the texts studied and proposing novel approaches to them, the thesis also promotes the re-evaluation of the short story as a genre in the study of the contemporary, while at the same time offering a detailed account of particular instances of postmodern critique on the fundaments of modern thought.

Fiktion der Handlung? This highly conventional genre can, I claim, through both embracing and problematising its very conventionality express itself with irony and subtlety that is at least as effective as open self-praise by poets in comic genres that allow it.

The thesis sets out to explain the presence of women writers in the book market of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to do so, it examines the position of women writers in Germany - in the context both of their discursive and of their social reality. The thesis investigates the ideological and material background for women's writing, by exploring the areas of gender ideology, contemporary concepts of authorship, women's reading, and the literary market. The final chapter examines women's freedom of expression in different public circumstances. The thesis argues that women's position in the business of culture in general and literature in particular is not as unpromising as has often been claimed. By investigating less well-known texts on gender roles, such as eighteenth-century journal articles, it is possible to show that the rhetoric of prohibitions, for example regarding women's reading and writing, was by no means uniform, but fragmentary and frequently contradictory. Women's own responses to the conditions under which they were working are highlighted throughout the thesis, and examined on the basis of a range of texts, including unpublished correspondence. The examination of non-literary factors, such as the expansion of the literary market and the emergence of a newly diverse reading public, enables the identification of causes other than gender as determining women's position as writers during this period. In the course of this study, numerous neglected texts are considered, which broaden our understanding of this period of literature. The creative and successful use which women writers made of the opportunities they were afforded is emphasised throughout, thereby making an important contribution to the study of women writers.

The thesis argues that a certain 'locus' of poetry is perceptible diachronically in the French literary field of the 20th Century and that this locus (elusive, fragmented, multilayered) may be meaningfully focused upon via the interaction of the questionings centered around the terms 'speech' and 'utopia'. In the introduction an argument is made for the conceptual validity of the term 'utopia' in relation to the diverse literary practices accruing around the pole of the 'poetic', which results in the derivation of the idea of a Utopian dynamic - a vectoral addition to the conventionally static, figure-bound 'utopia'. Concentrating on three poets (Victor Segalen, René Daumal and Yves Bonnefoy) from three distinct generations and periods (pre-WWI, inter-War and post-WWII) which are standardly represented as discontinuous, the thesis proposes an analysis, ordered along three canonical sub-divisions of the Utopian preoccupation (which are three distinct modalities of Utopian space), of the Utopian dynamic argued to be characteristic of the work of poetic writing. The three parts of the thesis thus examine the 'poetic' as occurring within social space (lieu commun), physical space (haut lieu) and textual space (non lieu) over the combined duration of the corpus. Arguing for an intelligible continuity of preoccupation among the three poetic oeuvres discussed, the thesis concludes that that continuity enables, in return, a modification of our understanding of the Utopian, of which a lucid practice of poetic writing can thus become the embodiment. Utopia, from being a synonym for illusionment in a century at all times supremely alive to the need for irony, becomes a creative embrace of disenchantment. The point of resolution (poetic foundation) at each stage in the individual oeuvres analysed being the ongoing representation of the 'human' as inner and outer limit to the poetic subject's practice and to the aspiration from which it moves.

This thesis is the first systematic study of short stories published in the New Statesman [NS] weekly magazine from its foundation in 1913 to 1939. The main question it seeks to address is what type of fiction did a mainstream socialist publication like the NS publish then? By chronologically charting dominant literary figures and themes, the thesis aims to discern significant cultural tendencies and editorial principles of selection. Following Raymond Williams' 'cultural materialism', fiction is read in its relation to social history, as a 'representation of history'. Chapter 1 deals with the foundation of the journal and its first year of publication, mapping out the contradictions between Fabian collectivist ideology and ethical socialism, urban realism and literary Georgianism, country and city. A focus on urban problems of poverty unemployment, philanthropy, and machinofacture is at the heart of the NS's literary concern, in 1913. Chapter 2 focuses on stories published during World War I, and goes up to 1926. It argues that the reality of the War was falsified as a time of rest and relaxation, in line with the journal's political policy of supporting the war effort. The immediate post-war period is read as a time of disappointment and intensified social conflict and struggle. The General Strike of 1926 is a turning point in interwar history. It also ushers in a period of unprecedented cultural activity in the NS. As Chapters 4 and 5 show, the post-Strike period is characterised by the consolidation of the working-class fiction of socialist R. M. Fox; by the rise of the countryside realism of H. E. Bates; and by the rise of the colonial fiction of E. R. Morrough on Egypt (which is examined in the context of Leslie Mitchell's, E. M. Forster's, and William Plomer's responses to empire). Significant contributions by women writers (such as Faith Compton Mackenzie) about travel, duty, and oppression are also made in the late 20s, early 30s. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the magnificent place that Russian fiction occupies in the 30s through the work of Michael Zoshchenko. Though written during the free and experimental 20s, his satiric fiction is published as a sample of Soviet literature of the 30s, thus consolidating the Stalinist line dictated by the political editor, Kingsley Martin, that 'self-criticism' is a central part of Soviet politics and society. Chapter 7 is a tribute to the NS's contribution to reconstructing British realism away from both Victorian moralism and European naturalism. The stories of Bates, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Chamberlain are dominant, conveying different ways of negotiating the pressures of documentary realism and the political developments of the 30s. Also discussed is the unique modernist contribution of neglected Stella Benson, which presents a strong challenge to the usual representationalism of NS fiction. The concluding chapter reads NS fiction in the whole period between 1913 and 1939 as the cultural expression of the new petty bourgeoisie, especially its progressive, politically and socially engaged side. With its focus on ordinariness and lived experience, and its formal experimentation and innovation, NS fiction exemplifies artistic commitment par excellence, a conscious cultural alignment with the actuality and potentiality of the new petty bourgeoisie.

The thesis, the topic of which is restricted to the polemical didactic poems, Apotheosis, Hamartigenia and Contra Symmachum 1-2, aims to establish the attitudes of Prudentius to the literary tradition and argues for his relationship with the Latin classical poets. Its main argument is that the hexameter poems as a group can be profitably studied from a stylistic angle, since they show how Prudentius combined, and used with innovation, the styles of several poets, namely Lucretius, Virgil and Juvenal, and in many cases engaged with the literary tradition as a whole. Chapter I surveys, as reflected in the poems, Prudentius' awareness of the political, religious and literary milieu in the Christian Empire of the West in his day. Chapter II examines how Prudentius employed the style of argument and imagery in the D.R.N. to present Christian doctrines on the body and the soul, and to reject pagan superstition. Chapter III shows how with much imagination and respect Prudentius adapted Virgil's phraseology and techniques to give new Christian interpretations of some mythical and historical themes in the Aen., such as the 'Golden Age' and the battle of Actium, and of topics on agriculture from the Georg. Chapter IV argues that, like other fourth century Christian writers, the poet entered into the spirit of Satire and alluded to Juvenal's themes and language in his treatment of the topics of sin and sexuality. Finally, in Chapter V Prudentius' adaptations of the biblical accounts in Gen. 19 and of Ps. 136 are used to demonstrate how allegory, which is a main feature of his poetry, was combined successfully with different classical techniques. In conclusion, the hexameter poems demonstrate that Prudentius did not reject classical poetry on the basis of its content, but used both its themes and poetic techniques in order to merge the ancient with the Christian literary tradition.

The end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth saw many women writers from numerous social ranks, political affiliations and religious denominations reading, writing, circulating and publishing polemical prose and poetry in defence of their sex. During this surge of protofeminist activity, many of these women decried 'Customs Tyranny' by advocating a more egalitarian status for themselves, especially in regard to marriage, education and religion. This thesis, then, is a socio-historic study of the lives and writings of several polemical women writers, namely, Mary Astell (1666-1731), Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) and Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731). It also considers how and why protofeminism evolved in the late seventeenth century and reached a climax between 1694, when Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and 1710, when Chudleigh published Essays upon Several Subjects. Until now, scholars of early women writers have labelled Astell the foremost English feminist of her day. Consequently, many of her contemporary protofeminist writers have been neglected. By contextualizing their lives and texts within the political and literary activity at the turn of the eighteenth century, this thesis ultimately argues that women polemicists, such as Chudleigh and Thomas, who followed Astell into print, were not merely echoes and disciples. Rather, they furthered the evolution and secularization of a genre that anticipates feminism proper, which began to develop in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to uncover and rediscover the personal and professional details of these women's lives their class, education, friendships and patronage relationships this thesis relied heavily upon material evidence such as letters, parish records, legal records, prison records and wills. As a result, it combines feminist, materialist inclinations with traditional methodology, such as historical and archival research.

This thesis focuses on a writer who was a constant presence in the French literary field for a large part of the 20th Century and who, by the time of his death, had established himself as one of the major post-war intellectuals, yet who is increasingly typecast simply as a 'Catholic Novelist'. The thesis aim to counter this tendency by highlighting other, intriguing and overlooked aspects of his work and career : the pervasive presence of the body in his novels, his Sartrean sensitivity to the problem of intersubjectivity, or his post-war intervention over decolonisation, and the ethical questions this forced him to confront. The distinctiveness of the thesis lies in its stress on the need to resituate literary texts and other works of art in their socio-cultural contexts - that is to say, in the context of other discourses or representations of the world in circulation at the same time. Thus, Part 1 explores how both his artistic theory and practice are shaped, in unpredictable ways, by the ideological framework of Catholicism into which he is inserted in his early years. Part 2 argues that despite, or perhaps because of, his innate conservatism, Mauriac emerges as a writer who is sensitive to, and captures the nature of, the modern world, and the experience of living in that world. His modern sensibility is reflected in his preoccupation with intersubjectivity, one he shares with other writers of the period who are, perhaps, more recognisably modern. Part 3 examines how his political interventions, and his corresponding transformation from novelist to intellectual, are managed by L'Express magazine, and how in fact he came to collaborate with a journal whose politics were radically different from his own. Overall, through an approach which can be described as materialist and, from a religious perspective, agnostic, the thesis aims to demonstrate how Mauriac can still be seen to have relevant and interesting things to say to a contemporary audience.

This study is framed by questions about the wider implications of a belief in Boulez's independent indeterminate aesthetic for divergent trends such as Europeanism vs. Americanism, modernism vs. postmodernism and serial structure vs. non-serial structure. In conclusion it suggests that an ongoing tendency toward historical revisionism in Boulez's texts may be a function of the difficulty in articulating an intentional indeterminate aesthetic in light of the serial inheritance.

This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical uses of evaluative language in Greek lyric and elegiac poetry and inscribed epigram of the period from the seventh to the fifth century B.C.E. The discussion focuses on the poets' evaluations of human worth in three areas, each of which forms a separate chapter: martial valour, the relationship between physical appearance and inner virtue, and political or social values. Within each chapter, particular aspects of the subject under discussion are treated under separate headings. Although the literary material has been treated in various ways in the past, the inclusion of inscribed epigram alongside the other literature in this case offers evidence from a related but distinct branch of poetic tradition for the development and expression of these values; divergences between the literary and the inscriptional tradition can be quite marked, as can the different approaches taken by poets of various genres within the literary material. The attempts of previous scholarship to define clear and consistent systems or codes of value represented in the poetry and to trace their development over this period have been generally unconvincing, but the poets' deployment of evaluative language does show some discernible patterns which appear to be related more to genre and poetic tradition than to the purely chronological processes of development that have been proposed by other scholars.

This thesis focuses on the abundance of necrophilic imagery in nineteenthcentury French literary texts. Its aim is to take an aspect of the century's writing which is often overlooked, perhaps because of its disturbing nature, and to reread key texts in the light of this predominant motif. This creates a paradigm for reading mainstream literary production through the lens of perverse desire. The first chapter situates the literary texts in a historical context, by examining briefly the morbid preoccupations of art, social theory and the psychiatric discourses in the period. Psychoanalysis is discussed, both as a product of its contemporary imaginative moment, and as a useful tool for the study of desire in literature. The following three chapters each focus on the literary works and aesthetic theories of a single French writer, namely Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Rachilde. By means of close textual analysis of stylistic features, form and imagecontent, the changing treatment of the theme of necrophilia through the century is examined. The aesthetic theories of Gautier and Baudelaire are read at the psycho-libidinal level, alongside psychoanalytic theory, to reveal death-driven aims. The chapter on Rachilde examines issues of gender and misogyny, by focusing on a female author whose work shows evidence of necrophilic themes. I ask whether her work imitates a masculine position, or whether the necrophilic imagination may transcend questions of gender. This discussion calls into question previous critics' readings of aesthetic necrophilia as a purely misogynist trend. In the French texts under examination, the subject's ambivalent relation to death comes into focus. By exploiting literary devices, a new way of understanding the desire for death is proposed. Textual necrophilia is read as going beyond gender positioning and individual sexual curiosity, to signal an awareness of death and destruction-seeking energies tout court.

Finally, I have tried to establish a causal connection between Oriya identity and the political process of Orissa during the period of study.

This dissertation presents a study of the ways in which concepts of pain were treated across a broad range of late Victorian writing, placing literary texts alongside sermons, medical textbooks and campaigning leaflets, in order to suggest a pattern of representation and evasion to be perceived throughout the different texts assembled. In the first two chapters I establish the cultural and historical background to physical suffering in the late nineteenth century, as the Christian paradigm for suffering (the subject of the first chapter) lost its pre-eminance to that of medicine (Chapter Two). The next two chapters are concerned with the problem of the expressibility of pain. In Chapter Three I argue that despite popular belief, voiced most clearly by Virginia Woolf, that 'there is no language for pain', sufferers find language that is both metaphorical and directly referential to express their bodily suffering. Chapter Four takes up the cultural restrictions placed on the expression of pain, using the acrimonious debate over vivisection that arose at the end of the century. Bringing together the prolific texts of both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists, I display the possibilities and limitations of particular literary forms, arguing, for example, that language appropriate to medical textbooks proved to be too shocking in books with a wider circulation. The final chapter is concerned with the ways in which pain was schematised in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I explore the basis of belief in pain as a shared, cross-cultural phenomenon and make the case, using the examples of invertebrate neurology, fire-walking and tattooing, that the understanding of pain is sharply affected by class, gender, race and supposed degree of criminality, despite the fact that pain is often invoked as a marker of shared human identity.

The prayers and oaths of the Middle English verse romances draw upon a range of pious formulae. These stock invocations rehearse key episodes from salvation history. Such formulae are widely viewed as mere line-fillers and they are rarely credited with stylistic influence. Yet the startling power of their apposite usage in charged narrative moments prompts further investigation. The thesis aims to demonstrate how the use of pious formulae in the romances is not inevitably mechanical. It comprises a catalogue and stylistic study of such formulae. The catalogue records all examples appearing in a single witness to each of the pre-1500 verse romances. By furnishing information on prosodic context, it offers a reference tool with which to measure the extent of technical determination in the appearance of a formula. The thesis analyses this material and advances claims for the aesthetic value of pious formulae. Chapter 1 reviews the evidence of the catalogue. It is shown how pious formulae embody an impressive range of devotional imagery. Chapter 2 illustrates that cognate formulae are widely employed in Middle English religious literature. It is shown how therein they exhibit a theological significance and a stylistic saliency. Chapter 3 shows how intermittent reflections of this serious stylistic usage are apparent in the pious romance, Guy of Warwick. Chapters 4 and 5 show how the affective resonance of such formulae is consistently exploited in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and William of Palerne respectively. Chapter 6 provides a brief summary. It concludes that the pious formulae of the romances can convey a strong aesthetic charge. They serve as more than mere line-fillers. Three appendices are included. Appendix A explores the relation between pious formulae and medieval profane oaths. Appendix B lists the variant readings of the formulae of four romances. Appendix C comprises the catalogue.

The present study opens up the field of Catalan connections with English literature. The importance of Edwardian influences on the general transmission of English authors and works is demonstrated. Original data on the reception of G.K. Chesterton, the Edwardian figure with a most remarkable impact in Catalonia, is brought to light (Chapter 1, Appendix 1), followed by discussion of the presence of H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw and an account of the reception of Well's early fiction (Chapter 2); their influence sheds new light on the aspiration of an élite to modernise Catalan culture. Catalan translations of English fictional works produced in the period 1918-38 (Chapter 3, Appendix II) are linked to the reception of the roman anglais in the context of the crisis of the roman à thèse, and the meditating influence of French criticism is revealed. The values of romance, adventure, and the common man (from Defoe to Stevenson, from Stevenson to Conrad) constitute the recurrent thread associated with the English tradition and with the Edwardian fictional canon, as these were mediated from France to Catalonia. This panorama of transmission enhances an understanding of Catalan views of the novel, in the light of Edwardian values (Chapter 4), as exemplified in Carles Riba's critical appraisal of two Catalan authors, in the appeal of Joseph Conrad's narrative technique and its influence on J.M. de Sagarra, as well as in the comparison of Frank Swinnerton's Nocturne (a best-seller of 1917) and its Catalan counterpart, M. Teresa Vernet's Les algues roges. This thesis also includes a chronology of the reception of Chesterton and a list of Catalan translations of English works of fiction.

This thesis investigates the construction and reflection of gender identities in the religious sphere, namely the gods, their worshippers, and the rituals which link them. Religiously-interested Greek texts written by Artemidoros, Pausanias, Plutarch and Heliodoros in the second and third centuries A.D. form the basis of four chapter- studies. The introduction explores how deploying gender as a tool for investigating the texts reveals the author's own perceptions of how male and female operate within his discourse, and considers how these perceptions relate to the world beyond the text. Chapter two examines Artemidoros' Interpretation of Dreams: his analytical system of dream interpretation reveals contemporary thought patterns. Artemidoros places striking reliance on gender in his structuring of divine and human power, and employs two differing divine models of gender, which have significant implications for the social construction of human gender. Chapter three emphasizes Pausanias' fascination with the marvellous in his Guide to Greece, and focuses on why he considers female priests more noteworthy than male. The problematic sexuality of female priests is frequently his focus in descriptions of myth and rite. The fourth chapter considers Plutarch's Pythian dialogues and Isis and Osiris. It is the marriage-like nature of their relationship with their gods that makes both human and divine females perfect mediators between worshippers and their male god, the Pythia with Apollo, and Isis with Osiris. Chapter five finds a middle way between opposing views that Heliodoros' An Ethiopian Story is either a religious mystery text or entertainment without religious meaning. It focuses on how the relationship between the two lovers, Theagenes and Charikleia, is patterned by their relationship to their gods, Apollo and Artemis. The concluding chapter draws out the significance of gendered hierarchy amongst the gods, and the importance of gender in the role and function of priests and prophets. It also considers the implications of the thesis' findings and approach for Jewish and Christian texts of the same period.

This thesis demonstrates how a specific tradition of English poetry written by Indians in the nineteenth-century borrowed its subject matter from Orientalist research into Indian antiquity, and its style and forms from the English poetic tradition. After an examination of the political, historical and social motivations that resulted in the birth of colonial poetry in India, the poets dealt with comprise Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31), the first Indian poet writing in English ; Kasiprasad Ghosh (1809-73), the first Bengali Hindu to write English verse; and Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73), who converted to Christianity in the hope of reaching England and becoming a great 'English' poet. A subsequent chapter examines the Dutt Family Album (London, 1870) in the changing political context of the latter half of the century. In the Conclusion it is shown how the advent of Modernism in England, and the birth of an active nationalism in India, finally brought about the end of all aspects of what is here called 'Orientalist' verse. This area has not been dealt with comprehensively by critics; only one book, Lotika Basu's Indian Writers of English Verse (1933), exists on this subject to date. This thesis, besides filling the gaps that exist in the knowledge available in this area, also brings an additional insight to bear on the current debate on colonialism and literature. After Said's Orientalism (1978), a spate of theoretical work has been published on literary studies and colonial power in British India. Without restricting the argument to the constraints of the Saidian model, this study addresses the issues raised by these works, showing that a subtler reading is possible, through the medium of this poetry, of the interaction that took place in India between the production of literature and colonialism. In particular, this thesis demonstrates that although Orientalist poetry was in many ways derivative, it also evinces an active and developing response to the imposition of British culture upon India.

The thesis consists of a detailed examination of the contents of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 86, (Trinity), with particular attention being given to several lengthy English confessional items which it contains. This is complemented by a more general consideration of late Middle English prose forms of confession and the manuscripts in which they occur. Part One consists of a survey of all surviving independent prose forms of confession preserved in late Middle English manuscripts. I divide the texts into groups according to their probable audience and readership, assessed from both internal and external evidence. This is preceded by a brief introductory section on the background to late Middle English guides to preparation for confession. In three appendices, I provide: a full description of London, British Library, MS Sloane 1584, with transcriptions of three confessional texts; a transcription of a form of confession from London, British Library, MS Harley 2383, with variants from all known manuscripts; a transcription of a form of confession from Yale, University Library, MS Beinecke 317. Part Two consists of a close study of Trinity: a full description of the manuscript, supplementing existing catalogues; editions of four confessional texts from the manuscript, accompanied by detailed discussions of their form and probable function; an analysis of a series of short devotional texts which, taken together, constitute an elementary manual of religious instruction. I include full critical editions, with variants from all known manuscripts, of two of these texts, The Sixteen Conditions of Charity and The Eight Blessings of God, both of which originate in passages extracted from the Wycliffite Bible, and which survive, in varying versions, in thirty-four and nine manuscripts respectively. The thesis concludes with a summary of the probable origin and function of this manuscript collection.

The research field addressed by this thesis is the commedia dell'arte and its iconography in the period preceding Callot's Balli di Sfessania engravings of c. 1621. Its main aim is to provide a broad overview of the surviving early pictures in order to contribute towards a more detailed understanding of the history of the commedia deH'arte in the opening decades of its existence, 1560-1620, by using late renaissance pictures as a documentary source. My research method has three main steps. These are firstly, the identification of relevant pictures, on the basis of a detailed understanding of the early history of the commedia dell'arte, and taking a deliberately inclusive approach; secondly, the classification of such pictures according to art-historical methods, in order to associate them with specific named artists so that they can be placed in the context of an oeuvre and place of production; thirdly, interpretation of their theatrical content. Integral to the thesis are the 340 plates. Many feature pictures which were anonymous or implausibly attributed, and unknown to theatre historians, before they appeared here or in my publications. My inclusive approach has contributed towards the marked rehabilitation of carnival pictures which is evident in the most recent scholarship in this area. My new discoveries, and attributions and re-attributions of some of the 340 plates, summarized in the plate list, have enabled me to identify significant bodies of commedia-related pictures by a number of named late renaissance artists not previously associated with theatre iconography, and provide a broad overview of the early stock types, their costumes and settings; contributions which are stimulating further research in this area. Section I summarises the rise and spread of professional acting in sixteenth century Italy, some forerunners of the commedia dell'arte, and its early stock types. It also presents new documentary material, discovered in the course of my archival researches, which is relevant to the earliest commedia performance for which a comprehensive description survives, staged in Munich in 1568. Section II presents art-historical analyses of three groups of prints in Stockholm, and six paintings which are the subject of an article published in 1943. It also presents an overview of a large group of Flemish pictures whose relation to two Italian prints demonstrates the progressive stereotyping of commedia-related motifs which was already occurring around 1600. Section III offers theatrical interpretations of the pictures, concentrating on scenery, set and stages; actresses; a selection of stock characters, including Harlequin, Zanni and Pantalone, and also some less wellknown figures such as tedescos and matachins; and multiple and serial images. The renaissance Italian comedians' multiple roots in amateur humanist comedy, professional entertainment and popular carnival ritual gave them their early creativity and wide appeal, and left their mark on the iconography which, by the seventeenth century, like the commedia dell'arte itself, was, for the most part, settling into a predictable routine based on precedents and conventions.

As a subject of research, Vietnamese Francophone literature has remained relatively unexplored. There are only two major works, and a number of articles, on the subject. The two works, both theses which appeared in 1982, are Jack A. Yeager's The Vietnamese Novel in French, a general overview of the Vietnamese Francophone novel, and a thesis by Nguyen Hong Nhiem on the writer Pham Van Ky. My purpose in this thesis is to focus on four primary themes which particularly distinguish the Vietnamese Francophone novel, and to analyse a number of novels in the light of these four themes. I will examine sixteen novels by twelve writers. The earliest is Bà-Dâm, published in 1930, and the latest Retour à la saison des pluies, published in 1990. The first theme is the influence of the Vietnamese classic, the Kim-Van-Kieu, on these modern novels. The second theme is the portrayal of women, the double colonization of women within a colonial and post-colonial context. I will contrast a woman writer, Ly Thu Ho, with a prominent male writer, Pham Van Ky. The third theme is the nature of interracial relationships, in particular between Vietnamese men and Frenchwomen. The last theme is alienation: alienation within the self and within one's environment. The novels are the writers' individual response to the dilemma of being Vietnamese writing in French. In examining them, one must move beyond the concept of a conflict between East and West. The novels reveal the influence of both East and West. They are an amalgamation of Eastern and Western elements: philosophical, cultural, and literary. They express an interplay of both thoughts and words across cultures.

The present project sets out to discover what the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan ('A Tale of Marriage Destinies that will Bring Society to its Senses'), an anonymous novel of manners from seventeenth-century China, can tell us about life in the world out of which it emerged. Seventeenth-century records depict China on the verge of modernity as a world torn between the traditional agricultural society and the new challenges of urban life, commerce and a money economy. The shifts from conventional norms and values gave rise to concepts of Utopia and anti-utopia: to nostalgia for the lost paradise of the past and to apocalyptic satire on present conditions. Scholars have noted the prominence of utopianism in seventeenthcentury fiction but no detailed study has been undertaken so far. Utopianism is here explored in terms of the indigenous Chinese traditions. The text of the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan is analysed to see how it perceives and reflects the seventeenth century Chinese world. Utopia serves as an analytical construct to recreate a glimpse of society and the moral evaluation of the world through the eyes of a contemporary observer. The body of the thesis analyses three major motifs in the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan: the healers, the elite and the mother. Critical comparison with other contemporary literary and historical sources attempts to place the novel into its context. The visions of Utopia and anti-utopia provide insight into the dreams and nightmares as seventeenth-century Chinese minds may have perceived them, shedding light on the vernacular culture as opposed to the officially recognised and imperially ordained culture of China.

There are fifty-one instrumental pieces by Philips, many of which occur in versions for ensemble, keyboard and lute. The sources have a wide geographical and chronological span. This research is based upon an extensive first-hand examination of the sources of Philips's instrumental music, and a detailed comparative study of the textual variants of each piece. The thesis divides into three parts. In the first, a biographical chapter relates Philips's instrumental music to the changing nature of his employment. Then the main sources of his instrumental music, the manuscripts copied by Francis Tregian, are discussed at length. The remaining keyboard sources are considered, followed by consort and lute sources. In Part 2 the technique of intabulation is shown to be central to Philips's keyboard style. A distinction is made between arrangements made by Philips of his own works, those made by him of other composers' works, and settings of his music made by others. A case study of the 'Dolorosa Pavan' is used to illustrate how widely Philips's music was disseminated, and allows us to establish a stemma of sources which helps us to elucidate - and improve - our understanding of their inter-relationships. A second case study attempts to establish the origins of the pavan dated by Tregian to 1580: the original 'model' on which the keyboard piece is based has not survived. The thesis ends with an attempt to place Philips's instrumental repertory in the context of his contemporaries, using Philips's music as a 'touchstone' to refer to relationships (mostly stylistic) with other composers. Part 3 comprises transcriptions of Philips's instrumental pieces. The texts of each source for a piece are given in parallel with the minimum of editorial adjustment: Part 3 is intended to be a reference tool, not an edition.

This study seeks to identify and describe the characteristic elements of European Jewish fiction during the period 1890-1945. Writings that deal with overtly religious themes or which have Zionist publicistic tendencies have been excluded and emphasis is placed on works with settings that are sim- ilar to those to be found in contemporary European fiction by non-Jewish writers. In order to provide a broad comparison, the study incorporates representative literary material by Jews from both Western and Eastern intellectual traditions, and includes texts in the three major languages of artistic expression in these communities: German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. On the basis of this material, it is argued that, in three respects at least, there is an identifiable unity in secular Jewish writing. Firstly, there is a thematic preoccupation with thwarted idealism, which is elaborated in a complex interaction among such themes as social alienation, ambivalence in interpersonal relationships, political altruism and impotence. Secondly, there is a consistent treatment of the characterisation of women, the devel- opment of their relationships to men, and the role of the family. Finally, there is a special reliance on the literary device of irony, in both its verbal and situational forms. The introductory chapter provides historical background and gives a general outline of the thesis. Subsequent chapters are organised as a sequence of thematic and stylistic comparisons; firstly between represen- tative texts from Eastern and Western Jewish communities and finally between the writings of a Jewish and a non-Jewish author, in an analysis of the use of irony in the works of Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Mann. The German texts studied are Der Weg ins Freie by Arthur Schnitzler, Junge Frau von 1914 by Arnold Zweig, Kafka's Das Schlofl, Georg and Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer and Die Flucht ohne Ende by Joseph Roth. The Yid- dish writings are Di mishpokhe Karnovski and Khaver Nakhmen by I.J. Singer, Tsvishn emigrantn, Nokh Alemen and Mides-hadin by Dovid Bergelson and Di gas by Yisroel Rabon and the Hebrew texts are Nokhah hayam and Hayey nisu'im by David Vogel.

The main part of this thesis is a survey of Pindar's treatment, in his epinicians, of myths involving the mythological family of the Aiakids. I establish what may be known of Pindar's sources for these stories, and then compare his own accounts. I consider (together with some minor incidents) Aiakos' assist- ance in building the walls of Troy; Phokos' murder; Peleus' experience with Hippolyta and Akastos, and his marriage to Thetis; Telamon's participation in Herakles' expedition against Troy; Achilles' infancy, his combats against Telephos, Kyknos, Hektor and Memnon, and his own fate; Aias' birth and suicide; and finally the story of Neoptolemos' visit to Delphi (chapters 1-7). My major conclusion is that his versions of these myths are more firmly grounded in the mythological tradition than is widely believed: they are constantly allusive, and contain little innovation. What changes there are may be ascribed to a broad rationalizing tendency, rather than to sophisticated poetic purposes. Pindar seems to prefer lesser known, often locally preserved, strands of tradition, but is concerned to produce authoritative accounts of them. The defensive tone of N. 7 may be satisfactorily explained by his care to produce such an account from confused and undignified material; the poem does not contain an apology for a hostile treatment of Neo- ptolemos in Pae.6. In chapter 8, I confirm my conclusions by examining three difficult cases: the myths of P. 3, O.I, and the break-off from the first myth of 0. 9. These examples confirm that traditional material has intrinsic value in epinician, and suggest the conclusion that the explication of a paradeigmatic relation between myth and victory is not the only valid explan- ation of the function of myth in Pindar. Myth may also serve to provide a publicly acceptable warrant for the praise of the victor.

The thesis reviews the techniques employed by Latin authors up to the second century A.D. to report the spoken words and articulated thoughts of their characters. The study is principally devoted to continuous narratives of a fictitious kind: epic, 'epyllia' and prose fiction, although some consideration has been given to narratives in other genres for comparative purposes. Several means are at the disposal of a narrator for presenting the discourse of his or her characters. What is supposed to have been said or thought may be conveyed by quotation in direct speech, some form of indirect or free indirect discourse, or by the simple mention that a speech act has occurred. The Introduction sets out the terminology used in this enquiry and surveys the modes of reporting speech in Latin. Some attention is given to the views of ancient literary critics and theorists on speech presentation. The first chapter on martial epic examines the reporting of speech in Virgil and Lucan in particular. The second chapter on poetry reviews epyllion and Ovidian narrative, and compares the practices of authors working in different genres. Divergences in style between authors working in the same genre are also considered: the techniques of four poets who report speech in scenes involving the dictation and delivery of messages are compared. The final chapter treats the prose fiction of Petronius and Apuleius. For all the texts taken into account, it will be shown that concentration on speech presentation can broaden our insight into some fundamental features of Latin narrative.

This thesis is an exploration of the links between modernist literature and film and society at a period of historical crisis, in Gramscian terms a moment of national 'popular will'. In general, these works are informed by a greater organicity of form, replacing the previous avant-garde model of a serial or mechanical structure. This organicity, however, maintains an element of disjunction, in which, as with filmic montage, the organicity is constituted on the level of the work seen as a totality. Herbert Read's aesthetics are shown to develop with these changes in the Thirties and the war years. The work of H.D. and T.S. Eliot is explored in the light of these new structural elements, and the formal questioning of the subject through the interplay of 'we' and montages of location and address in the poems. The pre-war years are portrayed in these works as a time of shame, and the war as a possible means of redemption, perhaps through suffering, or through the new subjectivity of the wartime community. The documentary movement provides an opportunity to trace these formal changes in a historical and institutional context, and with the work of Dylan Thomas, the relations between mass and high culture, film and poetry, are investigated, as well as the representation of the Blitz, in which guilt is sublimated into celebratory transcendence. These aspects, and the adaptation of a European avant-garde to meet British cultural needs, are examined in the work of the Apocalyptic movement. The last structure of feeling is reconstruction, which is related to Herbert Read's thought, but shown to inform all these other works and to be a linking-point between ideology and the structure of the text, formed as an organic unity that promises a reconstructed post-war society.

'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.

Gregory was the first monk to be pope; proverbially, he would have preferred to have remained a monk; the audience he addressed was almost always made up of monks. However, no sustained attempt has been made to establish the contexts for Gregory as a monastic writer. The thesis represents an initial attempt to do so, and in particular, to question the image of Gregory as a monk unable to cope with the assumption of episcopal power. The sources principally chosen for study are as follows: Augustine's Praeceptum; Cassian's Institutes and Conferences; the writings of the early Lerins circle; the Sermons and Rules of Caesarius of Aries; the Rule of St. Benedict, together with the Rules of the Master and Eugippius of Lucullanum. The thesis has been structured as a series of comparisons between these texts, and the situations in which they were produced, with Gregory's writings and his situation in late sixth century Rome. Gregory's ecclesial and eschatalogical perspectives, to which he adhered before papal election, are seen to set him apart from earlier monastic writers, and into confrontation with contemporary ascetics and clerics, the Roman clerical establishment in particular. These aspects of Gregory's thought are related to his rhetorical performance, and the voice he develops is compared to those of earlier ascetics. It is argued that the central concern of the texts considered is that of language: western ascetic projects are seen to focus on holiness of rhetoric, especially in the sixth century. In choosing to speak and write primarily as an exegete, Gregory signalled that he did not wish to contribute to the Gaulish or Italian monastic cultures developing around written Rules. He was concerned instead to articulate a personal holy authority.

The thesis aims to explore philistinism as a German literary topos, in the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the extra-literary metaphorical usage of key words like Philister and proceeds to a summary of its impact on writers in the period. By so doing, I have tried to present an image of the developing tradition of the literary depiction of philistines. The main part of the thesis is devoted to three writers - Richendorff, Keller, Fontane - whose work presents us with contrasting responses to the problem of philistinism. Unlike previous investigations, my approach is not only through explicit linguistic and visual markers, but also implicit depictions of philistines in the work of the three writers. To achieve this, attention is focussed on tone and literary devices, comic mode, irony, metaphor. I aim thereby to show the function of philistinism in these writings, an analysis not previously attempted. Eichendorff's work is shown to be imbued with a fundamental antithesis between the lives of Dichter and Philister, so comprehensive as to include eschatological implications. In Keller we notice a questioning of such a dichotomy, an unwillingness to acquiesce in its distinctions and an emphasis on society in determining the worth of his characters. Fontane's work represents the most radical reassessment of the Romantic position and displays a clear shift from categorical thinking to a pervasive ambivalence. Whilst philistinism is an issue for all three writers, the differences in their approach and consequent portrayals are revealing: my Epilogue suggests that their different modes of presentation reflect changes of ethos from Romanticism to realism, which in turn reflect changes in social values over the course of the nineteenth century. The interest of the present thesis is its demonstration that such changes can, in German literary culture, be so precisely observed in the changing treatment of the topos of philistinism.

A protean doctrine, claiming cultural pride and demanding self-expression for those who espouse it, nationalism yet casts its defining symbols and reserves its privileges and powers according to gendered criteria. Nationalism, if seen as symbolically constructed, may be interpreted as a gendered discourse in which subjects in history and also in literature are assumed to be male. Especially in the Manichean worlds of colonial and newly post-colonial societies, nationalist narratives - such as those produced at the time of African independence - read as family dramas in which honour and duty are patrilineally bequeathed, and national sons honour iconic mothers. The invisibilities in nationalist discourse, often left obscure in the interests of an ironic 'liberation', may be redressed both through the displacement of dominant subject positions in literature - where 'non-nationals' tell their own fictions - and through the remoulding of inherited tropes and symbolic scenarios. In this way new plots are written into history; nationalist romances give way to literary fictions. An investigation of the status of nationalism as symbolic language of gender, this thesis concentrates first on the inscription of nationalist icons in post-colonial African literature and on the gendered tropic patterns which govern that inscription. Writers considered include Peter Abrahams, Leopold Senghor, Camara Laye, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The iconic role of artist as nationalist hero is explored in particular in a discussion of essays and plays by Wole Soyinka. In its latter half, the thesis looks at African women's writing - novels by Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ and Bessie Head - and the work of a second generation of African writers, considering the ways in which this literature has begun to rescript the dramas of nationalism, to redream its visions of wholeness and healing.

The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.

This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).

This dissertation coordinates two problems which have hitherto resisted adequate synthesis: the form-critical problem of describing proverbial-sounding Synoptic sayings and the tradition-historical problem of assessing the rhetorical habits of Jesus and his immediate successors in oral tradition. The approach taken here to linking these qualifies not only form-critical assumptions of continuity between written forms - in Kleinliteratur - and identifies oral Sitze im Leben of mnemotechnical scholasticism, but also of the recent emphases on radical discontinuity between oral and writing modes of tradition. The connection proposed here between re-description of so- called Wisdom-sayings and oral traditional aspects of the gospels is in the Hellen educational category of gnome. Defined, exemplified and prescribed in basic Graeco-Roman educational texts as well as in technical, philosophical manuals of Rhetoric and in a rich collection-literature, gnome is superbly attested as an exercise in primary education, in all kinds of public-speaking and in cross-cultural (including Jewish) tradition. Moreover, Hellenistic cultivation of gnome primarily as a speech-type, indeed as a conversational means of argumentation in any Sitz im Leben, and only secondarily though still extensively as a literary technique makes it a particularly pertinent term of comparison for New Testament criticism. Recognizing gnomic continuity between oral and written Synoptic tradition allows discussion of the authenticity not only of individual sayings (on criteria of dissimilarity), but also collectively of the gnomic manner (on criteria of oral-literate continuity and multiple attestation): quite apart from the (in)authenticity of each gnome, gnomic style is central to Jesus' self-expression and earliest tradition. In this sense gnomai are a particularly valuable data-set for reassessing the critically controverted relationship between Jesus' rhetoric and law: in Synoptic tradition gnome is exploited suggestively as a non-legal means of addressing conventionally legal topics.

This thesis examines a practice of nineteenth-century novelists which has often been mentioned by critics but never studied in detail - the setting of much of their work in a period a generation or two before the time of writing. Its main focus is on the fiction of George Eliot set in the recent past: Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-58), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), and Middlemarch (1871-72). However I begin by looking briefly at the pioneering novel in the field, Waverley (1814), and go on to discuss three more novels by Scott - Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816) and Redgauntlet (1824) - as well as three by Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50) and The Newcomes (1853-55). Since I aim to discover the attitudes these writers adopted to the recent past, and conveyed to their first readers, this study involves discussion not only of the periods in which the novels are set, but also of the periods in which they were written, so as to establish the knowledge and preconceptions which the books' early readers brought to bear on the fiction. Where possible I quote the responses of actual contemporary readers, notably those of the early reviewers. This thesis draws attention to the various functions a setting in the recent past could serve in nineteenth-century fiction: to arouse nostalgic feelings for a vanished but remembered past, or sympathy for the people of the past, to point out that change is sometimes more apparent than real, to comment obliquely on contemporary issues, to highlight the unchanging features of human nature and human predicaments, to examine the role of the individual in effecting change.

From the 1740s to 1800 there was a great increase both in the output of novels, and the number of women novelists. At the same time, an idealized view of femininity was prevailing in society. The relationship between these two features of eighteenth-century life helps us to assess the contribution of some eighteenth-century women to the development of the novel. In this period women's novels show some distinctive features, particularly in their portrayal of women. The idealized eighteenth-century view of women saw them as naturally virtuous, chaste, and full of the sensibility which was increasingly seen as an important positive quality. Therefore an idealized woman is the central figure in many sentimental novels. This idealized figure, used especially by women novelists, is of ambiguous significance. She raises women's status by demonstrating female superiority, but does so by modesty and submissiveness, qualities which eighteenth-century feminists perceived as inimical to women's emancipation. Women's novels often contain contradictions between explicit support of female emancipation, and idealized portraits of submissive heroines. Chapter 1 discusses the reasons for the rise of the woman novelist. Chapter 2 discusses her role and the reviewers' part in defining that role. Chapter 3 discusses women novelists in relation to feminism. The following chapters focus on particular writers. Sarah Fielding is a didactic writer with a certain feminist consciousness. The novels of Frances Brooke and Elizabeth Griffith epitomize the idealization of the heroine. The comic attack on the heroine is described with reference to Charlotte Lennox's work. The"relationship between sentimental- ism, didacticism and feminism is studied with reference to Clara Reeve and Harriet Lee. Chapter 8 introduces the 1790s, when politics dominates fiction and sentimentalism is attacked, and chapters on Jane West, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charlotte Smith suggest the variety of women novelists' responses to these developments.

This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.

The subject of this thesis is the unusual nature, in the presentation of courtship and marriage, of Trollope's depiction of women as compared with that of other novelists of the first part of the Victorian age. To demonstrate Trollope's remarkable objectivity and realism, I consider first the treatment by him and by three other male novelists of the period of the motivations towards marriage of women. In the first chapter I sketch out the concept of marriage that actually prevailed and suggest thereby the importance of its achievement for women; and also give a rough idea of the restrictions imposed on the treatment of the subject by the critical consensus of the times. In the next four chapters I illustrate the artificiality, according with these restrictions, with which Dickens, Thackeray and Kingsley deal with the subject of courtship, and contrast with this the sympathetic understanding towards women that Trollope exhibits. I examine in detail in the sixth chapter critical reactions to the works of these writers, in an attempt to show to what extent the distinctions I have made were noted by the Victorians and by more recent critics. In the second part of the thesis I deal with the treatment of relations in marriage itself. Having first considered the singularly few instances in the novelists discussed earlier of the workings of marriage treated on an independent basis, I examine the approach of George Eliot who, along with Trollope, expands upon the subject at length. Arguing that a dogmatic view of the marital relation vitiates her treatment, in the final chapter I explore the contrast offered by Trollope's realistic presentation of the topic.

Maurice Maeterlinck fulfilled a unique role in England at the end of the nineteenth century. He interpreted the symbolist vision for the English. His symbolist plays established the expressive power of a very simple style and offered an alternative to melodrama and realism. The mystical direction of his art appealed to the writers of the Celtic Renaissance. W.B. Yeats drew on Maeterlinck's theory and practice until the end of his career. During the 1890s, it was Maeterlinck's translation of the symbolist aesthetic in terms of the dramatic form which appealed to Yeats. The Shadowy Waters is Yeats's most extended exercise in a style indebted to "Symbolisme". During the years of Yeats's involvement in the Irish Literary Theatre, Maeterlinck's dramatic theories took over from his plays as the prime source of interest to Yeats. In addition, Yeats was strongly interested in the scenic innovations associated with Maeterlinck's work. The second chapter deals with the important speculations about anti-illusionist modes of dramatic presentation which were developed in France and England at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and which were anticipated in the prose writings of Charles Lamb. Chapter three consists of a discussion of Arthur Symons's unpublished play, Barbara Roscorla's Child, which registers Maeterlinck's influence. Chapter four examines Harley Granville Barker's encounter with Maeterlinck. It shows that Barker was particularly impressed by Maeterlinck's stress on inwardness. Barker's writings on acting and dramatic theory reflect his familiarity with Maeterlinck's Le Trésor des humbles, in particular the essay "Le Tragique quotidien". The chapter includes a discussion of Barker's unpublished play, A Miracle. Finally, the chapter on Henry James concentrates on the manner in which Maeterlinck provides one of the chief contexts of The Wings of the Dove. The frequent invocation of Maeterlinck's theory and practice is one of the important ways in which James suggests meaning and shapes the reader's response.