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This thesis seeks to retrieve the ‘auditive intelligence’ in the work of Henry James, but it does so by first recognising some of the theoretical and historical obstacles that lie in the way of such a recovery. Structural linguistics has been responsible for encouraging the assumption that there are no better or worse ways of speaking, that the differences between writing and speech are of little significance, and that tone is merely a subset of language. James’s formulation of the ‘auditive intelligence’ in his revised essay on the French actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin (1915) emerges in opposition to further, historically situated, impediments: the lack of any ‘serious study’ of tone, the false choice between saying and doing, the theatrical vogue for pictorialism, and the priority of the eye over the ear. The ‘auditive intelligence’ makes it possible to conceive of tone as in itself a complete drama, a revelatory instant where previously concealed relations suddenly adopt an emphatic salience. In The Tragic Muse (1890) the discrimination of tone, both as a quality of the voice and of its discernment, emerges as one form this intelligence takes. This mode of personal and cultural edification is developed with reference to ‘The Question of Our Speech’ (1905), James’s essays on the speech and manners of American women (1906-1907), The Awkward Age (1899), and The Ambassadors (1903). The discrimination of tone depends upon the accumulation and fulfilment of experience, and this is particularly evident when tone remains long after the death of its speaker, or else is capable of preserving life itself. This is explored in ‘Frances Anne Kemble’ (1893) and The Golden Bowl (1904). This thesis hopes to identify an overlooked element of James’s style, one that represents a largely unprecedented moment in English literary history; because in James’s writing intonation possesses a prosodic sophistication typically reserved for verse, the auditive intelligence forms part of his broader aspiration to transform the cultural status of the novel.

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.

Since devolution there has been a wealth of stimulating and exciting literary works by Welsh and Scottish women writers, produced as the boundaries of nationality were being dismantled and ideas of nationhood transformed. This comparative study brings together, for the first time, Scottish and Welsh women writers’ literary responses to these historic political and cultural developments. Chapter one situates the thesis in a historical context and discusses some of the connections between Wales and Scotland in terms of their relationship with ‘Britain’ and England. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical context and argues that postcolonial and feminist theories are the most appropriate frameworks in which to understand both Welsh and Scottish women’s writing in English, and their preoccupations with gendered inequalities and language during the pre- and post-devolutionary period. The third chapter examines Welsh and Scottish women’s writing from the first failed referendum (1979) to the second successful one (1997) to provide a sense of progression towards devolution. Since the process of devolution began there has been an important repositioning of Scottish and Welsh people’s perception of their culture and their place within it; the subsequent chapters – four, five, six and seven – analyse a diverse body of work from the symbolic transference of powers in 1999 to 2008. The writers discussed range from established authors such as Stevie Davies to first-time novelists such as Leela Soma. Through close comparative readings focusing on a range of issues such as marginalised identities and the politics of home and belonging, these chapters uncover and assess Welsh and Scottish women writers’ shared literary assertions, strategies and concerns as well as local and national differences. The conclusions drawn from this thesis suggest that, as a consequence of a history of sustained internal and external marginalization, post-devolution Welsh and Scottish women’s writing share important similarities regarding the politics of representation. The authors discussed in this study are resisting writers who textually illustrate the necessity of constantly rewriting national narratives and in so doing enable their audience to read the two nations and their peoples in fresh, innovative and divergent ways.

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.