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This thesis examines selected prose fiction works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in an effort to establish a clearer understanding of the creative principles informing her writing, based on more evidence than her well-known novel Frankenstein provides. Overturning the hitherto dismissive and/or reductive critiques of her lesser-known works, this thesis challenges negative assessments by reinterpreting the structure of Shelley's fiction. Concentrating particularly on the early Frankenstein(1818), Mathilda (written in 1819), and The Last Man (1826), with a focus on the use of insistent embedded quotations, this thesis begins by exploring Shelley's belief in textuality as a form of "grafting." As scholars have suggested, Shelley's literary borrowings are a result of her materialist-based views of human reality. The persistent use of embedded quotations is one way in which Shelley's fiction represents texts as collations of materials. The core of the argument posits that citational "grafting" has distinctive and striking effects in each of the works examined. In Frankenstein, quotations underscore existential alienation by pointing to the need for texts to fill in the lacunae of human understanding; in Mathilda, the narrator uses citations to create a sense of personal identity; and in The Last Man, citational excerpts are used with the assumption that they are shared pockets of meaning belonging to a community of human readers. This reconceptualization of Shelley's writing contributes to the generic taxonomies that are now being used to retheorize "the novel" in more inclusive and specific ways.

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The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the aesthetic strategy of the political philosophy of Edmund Burke, by considering the relation between the "artificial infinite" of the Enquiry Into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and the "immemorial custom" of the Reflections on the Revolution in France. The argument addresses misreadings of Burke found in recent critical theories on the "aestheticism" of "bourgeois ideology." / The thesis shows that the demotion of the sublime in favour of the beautiful which is considered by these critics to be characteristic of bourgeois aestheticism, does not happen in Burke's aesthetics. It also shows that the "naturalism" of bourgeois ideology is contradicted by the strategic artificiality of Burke's politico-aesthetic. Insofar as the ideologue seeks to resolve the contingent aspects of language and history, Burke cannot be considered an ideological thinker. Rather, Burke's political philosophy consistently fails to provide the coalescence of subjective and universal which is required for ideology. Finally, the irreconcilable contingency of Burke's view of political experience shows that his conservatism is not, as his critics would have it, static and unchanging.

Mary Shelley's gothic novel Frankenstein has traditionally been read by critics as a cautionary tale and social responsibility for their creations. However, like many of its gothic sisters, the novel also contains other substantial lodes which can be mined by the twentieth century literary critic.One largely ignored and potentially rich vein in the novel is the compulsive and self-destructive behavior of Dr. Frankenstein himself. No critic has yet borrowed Freud's black bag of psychoanalytical tools and used them to plumb the subterranean depths of the young scientist's labyrinthian unconscious.After the death of his mother, and despite his protestations to the contrary, Dr. Frankenstein's real desires are unconscious, the primary one being the need for closure of the family circle. These repressed desires are fulfilled by his alter ego, the homicidal monster he stitches together in an obsessive effort to reconcile life and death. The study seeks to reveal Dr. Frankenstein as an allegorical figure representing the dark side of man's nature.

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This thesis breaks new ground in Poor Law Studies. It isolates for detailed scrutiny the treatment of a particular social group, the aged poor. Traditional sources have been approached for new answers to new questions, and in so doing, new methods of source exploitation have been evolved and utilised. The sources have been asked to provide information about dependent old age; the relationship between poverty and the length of the working life; sex differences; the proportion of the population which ended life as parish paupers. Key research has centred around the parish pension, its function, size and real value; crucially, the ability or otherwise of the pensioner to subsist on it. Consideration has also been given to the other components of the network of relief measures adopted by the parishes; relief in kind; housing and the standard of living; medical and nursing care; the role of the workhouse. The investigation has been carried beyond the limits of relief provided by the mechanisms of the Old Poor Law alone, to include external supportive agencies, such as the support of family and charity, which includes both charitable trusts and indiscriminate giving. Some light is thrown on ways the aged contributed to their own maintenance. The thesis tests the general hypothesis that all these various supportive systems produced an interlocking apparatus which involved the whole community in the support of the old, while to discuss their treatment within the limits of the poor law only, results in a narrow, incomplete and distorted narrative, serving only to perpetuate the traditional historical view of a harsh, punitive treatment, needing reassessment in the light of recent historical developments.

This dissertation seeks t o achieve three objectives: (1) to draw attention to the genre of the "Dorfgeschichte," (2) to examine "Dorfgeschichten" which were highly acclaimed in nineteenth century Germany, but are dismissed by literary scholarship today, (3) and most importantly, to adjust decades of inveterate and misleading critical responses with regard to the writers Berthold Auerbach and Jeremias Gotthelf. Although Auerbach's Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichten were received with great enthusiasm by the literati in nineteenth century Germany, his contribution to the genre is diminished by literary critics and historians today. Some, such as Hermann Boeschenstein, claim that the author "was merely ... sugar-coating the realities of peasant life , while having no real contacts with it . "On the other hand, although the majority of Gotthelfs shorter narrative works receive little scholarly attention , the consensus of critical opinion in regard to the author is that he possessed an "unexcelled insight into the peasant's inner life ." On the basis of my close analysis of Auerbach's and Gotthelfs respective texts : Schwarzwalder Dorfgeschichten (1843-1854), and Kleinere Erzahlunaen (1838-1852), [More abstract follows] / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

The thesis is a response to critics who interpreted Uli as being too "worldly." Specifically, it attempts to show, by way of exploring the role of a particular category of virtues present in the novel, how these critics misunderstood the novel as well as the intent of the author.

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