Both Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon achieved their first real poetic successes during the Great War. Linked together as fellow officers and friends, and flushed with the promise of greater poetic achievement ahead, both writers perceived the war initially as a vehicle by which they could rid themselves of Victorian influences and produce startling results as realists. But as the war continued and both men began to suffer its effects, they realized that their verses had failed to alert a victory-determined British populace to its jingoistic mentality. By mid 1919, both poets were trying to adjust to civilian status and to re-organize their lives after the upheaval of the war: Graves attempted at first to expiate his memories of the Western Front by moving to the Oxfordshire countryside and by writing sentimental verse, but dissatisfaction with his marriage and an inability to exorcise his neurasthenic nightmares led him to experiment with psychological self-analysis in his poetry. Sassoon's response to the war, in contrast, motivated largely by a homo-erotic attachment to the enlisted men under his command and a conviction of social injustice, turned him briefly to socialism and social satire for a thematic approach to his poetry in the early Twenties. In their joint discontent, Sassoon and Graves searched throughout the mid-Twenties for personal order and artistic direction. Graves delved into Eastern philosophy and biblical exegesis until, with the arrival of Laura Riding, his domestic and creative life was turned around; from Riding, Graves gained the strength to reject the values imposed upon him by his background and his literary peers. Similarly, Sassoon struggled to find a poetic cause commensurate with his talents, but his disillusionment with the modern world caused him to turn inward for inspiration. This introspection led Sassoon to a contemplation of his past, through which he was eventually to find the symmetry and positive cultural values that were lacking in the modern world. Thus, in their individual searches for creative inspiration, both Graves and Sassoon severed relations with contemporary British society and each turned to his own form of self-imposed exile. Graves chose to escape into the uncharted brave new world of the then undiscovered Majorca, while Sassoon opted for the bucolic world of rural England in remembrance of things past. The roads chosen at this juncture were to determine the direction and tone of both writers' future works. The recent publication of two biographies of Graves and of Sassoon's diaries (1915-1925), together with collections of their unpublished letters, allow a much clearer understanding of the two poets' work throughout the war years and the Twenties, and reflect the inexorable road to self-exile and autobiography that was eventually to provide the only means of exorcising the war from their personal lives and artistic endeavours.

This thesis places Forster's fiction in the homosexual tradition of English literature and presents, for the first time, a full exposition of the homoerotic motifs in each of Forster's novels. Homoerotic desire has been only partially recognized in Forster's texts, but as the following chapters show the desire for male love is pervasive and affects the structure and techniques of Forster's writing. Homoerotic desire in Forster's fiction attaches to the ideal of friendship and the theme of friendship is invariably connected with the metaphor of journey. Forster uses the metaphor of journey to transport his narratives beyond the confines of English middle-class values to a region where relations between men are acceptable. A homosexual reading of Forster's texts has several implications for his work. Firstly, it emerges that Forster's novels are covert texts which convey the ideal of male love evasively, by strategies of deferment and delay. Secondly, the author's interest in another country, Italy or India, is not for the sake of those countries but allied to homoerotic desire. Lastly, for all the apparent dissimilarities between them, all of Forster's novels variously approach homoerotic desire; the themes of journey and friendship are common to all the novels. The chapters of this thesis demonstrate the way homoerotic desire operates in Forster's narratives. This involves a close reading of the text and an alertness to the novelist's manipulation of language. The thesis reinterprets passages from Forster's novels that previously have either been overlooked or dismissed as obscure. Forster's treatment of homoerotic love in all his novels, except Maurice, is problematic. The narrator's attempts to conceal the real tendency of his narratives creates a tension between the explicit statements and the undercurrents in his texts. The conflict is never resolved, but it gives the novels the odd, peculiar quality that is characteristic of Forster's writing. Forster occupies a unique, if dubious position, in English literature as a homosexual writer whose work has been entirely assimilated into the mainstream, heterosexual tradition.

There is a tradition that Hardy's reception as a novelist was primarily characterized by attacks on the morality and philosophy of his novels or on his failure to produce works which conformed to the conventional popular novel of the day. This belief is most detrimental when it is argued that Hardy indiscriminately bowdlerized his novels to counteract these attacks and to appease editors, readers, and critics. This narrow approach to the critical reception of Hardy's novels ignores the broader artistic considerations, the concern with various concepts of the art of the novel, in the criticism of his novels from the time of the publication of his first novel in 1871 until that of his last major revisions for the Wessex Edition in 1912.To arrive at a precise understanding of criticism of Hardy's novels during the time he was writing and of the nature of Hardy's reaction, this study begins with a discussion of Hardy's response to criticism. The second chapter defines the critical climate into which Hardy's novels were first introduced through an examination of the status of the novel and its functions. The remaining chapters analyze various areas of concern in the criticism of Hardy's novels, indicating to what extent specific criticism reflects or deviates from tendencies in general criticism. Concepts of representation and the controversy over realism and idealism, discussed in the third and fourth chapters, greatly influenced considerations of the relationship of art and morality, the relationship of art and philosophy, and concepts of tragedy. They also formed the basis of many discussions of artistic and technical questions concerning plot, character and characterization, use of setting, point of view, and style. This study thus illustrates the importance of various concepts of the art of the novel which governed the critical reception of Hardy's novels as well as the intimate relationship between this reception and the transitional nature of novel criticism in the late nineteenth century.

Browning's poetry is notable for the number and importance of its references to other arts. This thesis attempts to assess the influence of painting and painterly ideas on Browning's poetry, with special reference to his contacts with painting in the early part of his life. His father's taste for and knowledge of painting are discussed, and connections are made between them and formal or technical details of Browning's style. His father's own artistic abilities and his interest in engraving are also considered in this light. This entails some consideration of the methodology of comparison between painting and poetry, both as Browning would have known it and, with reference to ray own explorations, in a modern context. Stress is laid on the fact that Browning's father's taste provided the poet with an alternative set of artistic models to those Romantic literary ones which are usually assumed to be of primary importance to his art. Specific comparison is made between features of Browning's work and Hogarth's, who was his father's favourite artist. This leads into a consideration of Browning's use of irony, based on principles shared with visual art. The final chapter deals with aspects of Browning's artistic relationship with his friend, Lord Leighton. Throughout, the comparisons of particular poems with paintings are intended rather as examples of Browning's usage than as claims of specific and confined borrowing or influence.

The following study is an examination of Byron's work, his letters and journals as well as his poetry, to discover his poetic theory. While he opposed 'systems and system-spinners' and held as inviolable truth that the poet was not bound by any rules of poetry, Byron nevertheless thought about and commented frequently on those concerns that ordinarily engage aesthetic theorists. It is difficult to think of a poet who left so many observations on the nature of poets, the purpose and value of poetry, the creative process, and the relation between the poet and his audience, without expressing his views in a formalised statement. When his random and often contradictory opinions about poetry are collected together, we have evidence of a poetic theory steadily evolving from his juvenile years towards the inimitable perfection of his final days to demonstrate that Byron took poetry more seriously than has been generally assumed. He has left a fairly comprehensive aesthetics of poetry that shows him sometimes aligned in theory with his contemporaries, at other times adhering to practices of the previous age, but frequently anticipating the views of modern poets. In the end, Byron's poetics is an eclectic theory that serves his personal need to see poetry as a worthwhile action. His final poetic theory was hard-won in contention against his own resistance to a poetic career, against public opinion and his susceptibility to that, and against a publisher concerned for profito. We can trace his poetics through the changes in the early, middle, and last stages, as Byron comes to terms with all the forces which both oppose and goad him on in his longing "to do some good" in the world.

Most theoretical discussions of the novel published in the eighties were crude and unimpressive, but the criticism of individual novels was more interesting. Discussing novelists such as Payn and Oliphant critics showed that they were not prepared to accept any novel just because it was constructed along traditional lines. Meredith was the most respected novelist. He defended accepted moral values but in a way that struck his contemporaries as ambitious and original. Other novelists were less acceptable because they challenged the moral convictions of the critics. Zola's novels provoked intense controversy, but the excitement was short-lived. However, his realism did inspire a whole new movement of reaction---the revival of romance. This fiction was escapist and therefore unpopular with critics, who preferred realistic fiction, but realistic fiction that endorsed traditional moral values. They particularly admired philan-thropic themes and admired Gissing for his use of them. But Gissing dealt with the failure of philanthropy. This led onto wider doubts about the social system and a new emphasis on the individual. Suchan emphasis was unacceptable to critics who preferred a picture of\social integration. James made a greater emphasis on the individual than any other novelist in the period and his work baffled critics. Hardy started with concepts of community and shared values but showed their disintegration. Critics refused to accept his vision and misinterpreted his works as pictures of a structured social order. Wishing novelists would present a vision of social cohesion critics referred back to George Eliot, although her vision was not as straightforwardly positive as most critics seemed to believe. Critics would have liked novelists in the 'eighties to emulate her though socialpicture. They wanted to see a picture of society functioning well, not a pessimistic picture of social chaos.

This thesis is a critical examination of Daniel Deronda, together with an attempt to relate it to George Eliot's fiction, to its fictional time, and to some selected fiction of its time. The Introduction defines the scope of this study, and Chapter I traces briefly, through correspondence, the writing of Daniel Deronda, passing on to consider certain selected criticisms of it since its publication in 1876. Chapter II is an investigation of the widespread nature of its unity, and demonstrates that it possesses a principle of manifold association. Chapters III and IV trace comparisons in usage, plot, situation, character and ethical direction, between George Eliot's fiction and Daniel Doronda, indicating development or mutation in the author's creative art where appropriate. Chapter V displays the retrospective technique which has so large a part in Daniel Deronda, and considers in detail the two basic methods of presenting character in that novel. Chapter VI examines the direct and indirect inodes of commentary in Daniel Deronda, indicating at the same time the extent of the author's moral preoccupation. Chapter VII further underlines this preoccupation by placing Daniel Deronda against its period (1864-6) and examining its Judaism and the nature of George Eliot's humanism for man and community. Chapter VIII takes the qualities of some selected fiction of the 1870's,which appears to have some bases for comparison with Daniel Deronda , and seeks to establish the latter's superiority to these novels. In the Conclusion a revaluation of Daniel Deronda is attempted, and the qualities which make it a great novel are indicated.

While other researchers have sought to put poetry of the First World War into perspective in the general context of twentieth century verse, it is proposed that this study will focus principally on the contemporary response - of readers, reviewers and critics - to this remarkable poetic efflorescence between the years 1914 and 1918. A general survey of the situation in English poetry on the threshold of the War is initially presented, taking into account the reading public's expectation of poetry and the current critical dicta pertaining to the composition of verse˙ The three subsequent chapters examine in some detail the different types of War Poetry - Georgian-influenced, Imagist-inclined, non-combatant - in con-junction with analysis of the particular readership to which each appealed and the response of reviewers to the different modes, while the final chapter traces the evolution of certain themes characteristic of First World War Poetry, such as the changing concept of sacrifice and the development of the important camaraderie-motif. The brief Epilogue which completes the study assesses the overall response of readers, reviewers and literary critics of the time to First World War Poetry, and briefly evaluates the extent to which such verse contributed to the formulation of a 'new poetic' in the decades after 1918.

This critical study of Juliana Ewing traces her development and examines the considerable range of her prose and verse. As a talented and imaginative, though uneven, writer, experimenting with diverse forms and techniques, she helped to shape and extend children's fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century. The introduction indicates the unpublished and published materials for such an undertaking, gives a brief account of the critical reception of her work arid provides a selective biography describing the social and intellectual climate in which her work grew, and her formative relationship with her mother, the writer Margaret Gatty. Her juvenilia and her apprentice work in the sixties show her restless experimentation with the inherited models of children's fiction and with some of the dated, threadbare types of adult fiction. Only gradually and through her knowledge of the greatest contemporary novelists did she evolve more personal forms, adapted to young readers, but with no sacrifice of honesty or subtlety. In the short story, her earliest successes were dream fantasies that transformed the older didactic magic into more expansive psychological accounts. Subsequently, she consciously recreated the spare style, fundamental situations and wayward magic of folk tradition in her imitative tales, and she reworked versions of the legend and parable, making an intelligent contribution to the age's rediscovery of fairy tale. Her particular achievement in domestic fiction was her development in the seventies and eighties of a nouvelle structure and of controlling images as principles of organisation. The resulting form, taut and rich, avoided the problems of her five novels of education which lay in reconciling her intense and accurate recreations of children's experience with the novel's demand for some terminus of maturity. Tales, nouvelles and novels present a combination of formal artistry with sympathetic penetration of children's lives that is distinctive in juvenile literature of this date.

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