This thesis examines the particular situation of displaced children both in nineteenth-century culture and as represented in the mid-nineteenth century English novel. It covers the understanding of adoption in fiction and in practice before the Act of Adoption, 1926, particularly in the period 1837-1870. In the course of its development, it identifies the particular situation of displaced children and their ideological significance in selective fiction of 1837-1870 concerned with their representation. Displaced children may be orphans, strays, destitute, legitimate or illegitimate. What makes them identifiable as a distinct category is their placement and rearing outside their biological family; a process often erroneously referred to in the novels as adoption. Such children appear not to have, hitherto, been identified as a distinct group in literature. Wide-ranging models of such fictional displacees have been selected, mostly foregrounded children with a handful of memorable minor ones. The core-text novels are, with one exception, from canonical novelists whose main output was between 1837-70. Dickens has been privileged and the others are Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Thackeray and the non-canonical Hesba Stretton. The approach has been new historicist insofar as materials have been assembled which might enable reconstruction of the lost sensibilities of these displaced children and their nineteenth-century readers. To this end examples of paintings, journaIs, newspaper articles, Parliamentary debate, letters, ditties and cartoons have been used to illustrate and consolidate the content of the thesis. 1 The period 1837-70 has been chosen because it opens with Victoria's accession and the start of the Dickens output. The final date, 1870, marks the death of Dickens and the passing of Forster's Elementary Education Act whose provisions, albeit slowly implemented, turned the street urchins into the new school children. The intervening years take in major works from the canonical novelists drawn on here, and a wave of writers pressing for betterment of the lot of destitute children. The role of sustainers who, in both fact and fiction, run throughout as counter-point to the displaced children is discussed. In fiction the ail-important bonding between displacee and sustainer which transforms them into a duality is emphasised because it sets the seal on what is, initially, a trial and error relationship. Similarly, the growth of reciprocity as the displacee matures is given particular attention. State and charitable sustainers such as workhouses and Coram's Foundling Hospital are examined, as are the commercial and frequently corrupt baby-farms. A key question in the thesis is whether or not it was possible to take in a destitute child as spontaneously and easily as the novelists describe, without recourse to any legal or official procedure. To this end, fictional displacees and sustainers are scrutinised to see how far what the novelists depict correlates positively with actuality as recorded by social historians. Allied to this the displaced child and its enormous potential as a novelistic perennial favourite is considered. Displacement is of crucial importance in both fact and fiction affecting, as it does, the child's sense of identity, its precarious status and the liberating opportunities it affords. A further issue is the huge difference in the understanding and practise of adoption between the nineteenth-century reader and a modem one. With the realisation that in the nineteenth century adoption was, at best, a flimsy arrangement with no legal safeguards and, at worst, open to huge abuse and irregularities, the sensibilities of the earlier reader must have been greatly affected and their concern heightened when set alongside those of a later reader. There appears to have been no recognition of this difference in such a relationship in literary criticism to date.

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This study is an investigation of the relationships between music and the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Particularly it focuses on the nature of their musical subject matter and musical imagery in order to determine the extent to which they were influenced by aesthetic and philosophical musical theory, generally termed speculative music.

This thesis argues that François Villon becomes a significant, but overlooked, influence in the tradition of English poetry, and that this influence reveals itself in translations, adaptations, and responses to his work. By focusing on the way in which numerous high profile poets in the United Kingdom and the United States have reacted to Villon, this study will posit that the reasons behind the appeal of his oeuvre as a source text lie both in the protean nature of his narrative voice and in the myth of his life. The inter-lingual intertextual relationships established through translation and the residue of Villon in English poetic tradition will be presented by means of five case studies, all taking the work of a specific poet as their theme: Algernon Charles Swinburne; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Ezra Pound; Basil Bunting; and Robert Lowell. These five poets are presented as being exemplary of a greater tradition of translating Villon into English, and will take the reader from the first verse translations of his work in the nineteenth century, to postmodern adaptations and parodies of Villon in the twentieth. They will illustrate the specified intertextual relationships that exist both between source text and target text, and the work of one translator and another, thereby demonstrating the accumulation of influences at play in any one translation of this medieval French poet. In so doing, this thesis will also explore translation and adaptation as dialogical and transformative spaces, distinct from other genres in their ability to establish cross-cultural and interlingual intertexts. Translation and adaptation as spaces of cultural and linguistic hybridity will be demonstrated by observing some of the ways in which Villon has left his mark on English verse, and some of the Villons that anglophone poets have created in their turn.

The subject of this study concerns the history and development of the newspaper press in the town of Reading from 1855, the year of the repeal of the Newspaper Stamp Tax, until 1980. In particular the approach to this account of provincial press history has been primarily from the production viewpoint, in which the newspapers are seen as business enterprises, emphasis being placed on the patterns of ownership and processes of production rather than on readership and newspaper content.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar o romance O morro dos ventos uivantes, de Emily Brontë, tendo como foco suas contradições internas, que, em conjunto, foram nomeadas estrutura de tensões. É essa estrutura de tensões que transforma tal romance em uma obra dialética, na qual as tensões existem não somente no plano do conteúdo como também no da forma. Nosso estudo se concentra, respectivamente, na questão estilística e na questão da estrutura narrativa, sabendo que há outras questões de interesse, mas vendo nelas uma importância mais primária, pois remetem a aspectos formais mais imediatos. Num primeiro momento, procuramos entender o funcionamento das tensões que diferentes formas góticas, míticas e fantasmagóricas instauram no tecido realista da obra. Num segundo momento, o objetivo foi compreender a problemática do foco narrativo, concentrando-nos especialmente no discurso não confiável do narrador primário Lockwood, ao qual a crítica pareceu não dar a atenção devida. Por fim, procuramos argumentar que a obra de Emily Brontë não somente nasce de uma crise histórico-social, como também coloca em evidência aspectos da crise da forma romance, logrando expor alguns de seus limites ideológicos. / This work aims at analysing the novel Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, having as focus its internal contradictions, which, put together, were named structure of tensions. It is that structure of tensions that transforms the novel into a dialectical work, in which the tensions exist not only as far as the content is concerned, but also its form. Our study focuses, respectively, on the issue of style and also on the issue of the narrative structure, aware that there are other issues of interest, but seeing in them a more primary importance, because they are connected to more immediate formal aspects. At first, we sought to understand the functioning of the tensions that different gothic, mythical and phantasmagorical forms cause on the novels realist fabric. Secondly, our goal was to comprehend the problematics of the narrative focus, concentrating specially on the unreliable discourse of Lockwood, the primary narrator, to which critics have not paid due attention. Lastly, we sought to argue that Emily Brontës work is not only born from a socio-historical crisis, but that it also puts in evidence aspects of the crisis of the novel form, managing to expose some of its ideological limits.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar o romance O morro dos ventos uivantes, de Emily Brontë, tendo como foco suas contradições internas, que, em conjunto, foram nomeadas estrutura de tensões. É essa estrutura de tensões que transforma tal romance em uma obra dialética, na qual as tensões existem não somente no plano do conteúdo como também no da forma. Nosso estudo se concentra, respectivamente, na questão estilística e na questão da estrutura narrativa, sabendo que há outras questões de interesse, mas vendo nelas uma importância mais primária, pois remetem a aspectos formais mais imediatos. Num primeiro momento, procuramos entender o funcionamento das tensões que diferentes formas góticas, míticas e fantasmagóricas instauram no tecido realista da obra. Num segundo momento, o objetivo foi compreender a problemática do foco narrativo, concentrando-nos especialmente no discurso não confiável do narrador primário Lockwood, ao qual a crítica pareceu não dar a atenção devida. Por fim, procuramos argumentar que a obra de Emily Brontë não somente nasce de uma crise histórico-social, como também coloca em evidência aspectos da crise da forma romance, logrando expor alguns de seus limites ideológicos. / This work aims at analysing the novel Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, having as focus its internal contradictions, which, put together, were named structure of tensions. It is that structure of tensions that transforms the novel into a dialectical work, in which the tensions exist not only as far as the content is concerned, but also its form. Our study focuses, respectively, on the issue of style and also on the issue of the narrative structure, aware that there are other issues of interest, but seeing in them a more primary importance, because they are connected to more immediate formal aspects. At first, we sought to understand the functioning of the tensions that different gothic, mythical and phantasmagorical forms cause on the novels realist fabric. Secondly, our goal was to comprehend the problematics of the narrative focus, concentrating specially on the unreliable discourse of Lockwood, the primary narrator, to which critics have not paid due attention. Lastly, we sought to argue that Emily Brontës work is not only born from a socio-historical crisis, but that it also puts in evidence aspects of the crisis of the novel form, managing to expose some of its ideological limits.

<p>This corpus-based study examines adjectives and adjectival expressions used to describe characters in British children’s fiction. The focus is on diachronic variation, by comparing Victorian (19th-century) and contemporary (late 20th-century) children’s fiction, and on gender variation, by comparing the descriptions of female and male characters. I adopt a qualitative as well as a quantitative approach, and consider factors such as lexical diversity, adjectival density, collocation patterns, evaluative meaning, syntactic function and distribution across semantic domains. Most findings are related to a dichotomy set up between an idealistic and a realistic portrayal of characters. The study shows that an idealistic portrayal of characters is typical of the Victorian material and a realistic portrayal of characters typical of the contemporary material. Further, gender differences are much more pronounced, and reflect traditional gender role patterns more in the Victorian material than in the contemporary material. For instance, a pleasant appearance is typically described for Victorian female characters and social position for Victorian male characters. Moreover, descriptions of mental properties of Victorian female characters are conspicuously rare. Such gendered patterns are less distinct in the contemporary material, although appearance is still more extensively described for female than male characters. As regards how the qualities are attributed to characters, the descriptions of Victorian female characters were found to be the most formulaic compared to the descriptions of Victorian male, contemporary female and contemporary male characters.</p>

This corpus-based study examines adjectives and adjectival expressions used to describe characters in British children’s fiction. The focus is on diachronic variation, by comparing Victorian (19th-century) and contemporary (late 20th-century) children’s fiction, and on gender variation, by comparing the descriptions of female and male characters. I adopt a qualitative as well as a quantitative approach, and consider factors such as lexical diversity, adjectival density, collocation patterns, evaluative meaning, syntactic function and distribution across semantic domains. Most findings are related to a dichotomy set up between an idealistic and a realistic portrayal of characters. The study shows that an idealistic portrayal of characters is typical of the Victorian material and a realistic portrayal of characters typical of the contemporary material. Further, gender differences are much more pronounced, and reflect traditional gender role patterns more in the Victorian material than in the contemporary material. For instance, a pleasant appearance is typically described for Victorian female characters and social position for Victorian male characters. Moreover, descriptions of mental properties of Victorian female characters are conspicuously rare. Such gendered patterns are less distinct in the contemporary material, although appearance is still more extensively described for female than male characters. As regards how the qualities are attributed to characters, the descriptions of Victorian female characters were found to be the most formulaic compared to the descriptions of Victorian male, contemporary female and contemporary male characters.