The state in Soviet Russia and in National Socialist Germany sought to usurp and monopolise public discourse in all areas of life, striving towards ideological homogeneity and orthodoxy. Soviet anti-religious and German anti-Semitic campaigns, which arose in this context, were influenced by 19th and 20th century academic and public debates about the origins and the significance of the Bible. Echoes of these debates can be found in Mikhail Bulgakov's Master i Margarita (written 1928-1940, published 1966) and in Thomas Mann's Joseph und seine Brüder (published 1933 - 1943). The thesis explores to what extent the narrative strategies developed by the writers to represent divine characters, Yahweh and Bulgakov's Christ figure Yeshua Ha-Notsri, may have been shaped by these debates. It considers the de-sacralisation of the figure of Jesus in Bulgakov's novel and the mythologisation of human experience central to Mann's depiction of Yahweh. It also interrogates how far the coherence of these figures may be shaped by the narrativisation of individual experience by the characters of the novels. Finally, the centrality of subjectivity to the representation of the divine is read as a critical response to the totalitarian politics of the state and its attempts to monopolise the production of meaning.

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'Innumerable Iguanas' is a study of St. Lucia's modern literary landscape. It focuses on four figures representative of St. Lucian writing over the last forty years: Derek Walcott, his twin brother Roderick Walcott, Kendel Hippolyte and Earl Long. The first chapter concentrates on two of Derek Walcott's poems, 'Tales of the Islands' and 'The Schooner Flight'. The former of these poems is indicative of an early stage in Walcott's writing career and mainly looks at the St. Lucian experience through the eyes of the continental visitor. The poem is an example of Walcott's developing views on St. Lucia and towards the end of the sequence, his own 'leavetaking moves towards dispelling the myth of the insular island. In 'The Schooner Flight', Walcott places St. Lucia in the wider context of the Caribbean, tracing a larger circle of shared experience. Together, the poems encompass themes pertinent in St. Lucian literature, which are indeed prominent in this thesis. The second chapter discusses Roderick Walcott's use of folklore in particular relation to an unpublished play, Papa Diable, or the Devil at Christmas. Attention is given to how Roderick Walcott gives space to both religion and folklore in the play. The third chapter looks at Kendel Hippolyte's play The Drum-maker and his poem 'De Land - a Caribbean Nursery Rhyme', both of which deal with the theme of the dispossession of people from the land. The material is examined in the context of twenty first century St. Lucia and the problems the island faces because of tourism and mass development. The final chapter discusses Earl Long's novel Voices from a Drum, playing close attention to its intricate narrative strands and to the historical figure of the maroon. An Afterword maps out St. Lucia's contemporary literary scene, briefly introducing a selection of new St. Lucian writers who are making their mark on the island's literary landscape, their work informed by the writers discussed in this thesis.

This Thesis study is concerned with the perception of the medieval Muslim garden within its wider view as an image of Paradise. The study examines the built evidence of gardens in the 17<SUP>th</SUP> century setting of Muslim Deccan, sharpening a perception of the Deccani Muslim garden through study of contemporary poetry supplemented with, more general, survey of traditional medicine and horticulture. By identifying concepts which bridge between these various disciplines and through particular attention to a cherished Muslim value - fragrance - the study examines the Deccani garden enclosure for patterns of scent, evaluating the degree to which its (Persian-based) scent composition is tempered with Indian fragrances. The Thesis is made up of two sections. On the one hand, the physical and cultural setting of Deccani Muslim gardens is explored through study of Hyderabad, a 17<SUP>th</SUP> century built capital of the Qutb Shahi sultans modelled after the contemporary Iranian capital, Isfahan. Secondly, an image of the garden is conceived by examining garden ornament in terms of the Muslim gardener and by considering the significance of fragrance - as an aspect of garden ornament - in terms of the Muslim physician. On the one hand, therefore, gardening texts are examined; on the other hand, medico-botanical literature, particularly texts concerned with the cardiac (psychosomatic) virtues of plant and animal-based fragrances. The image of the garden is fully fashioned through reference to accounts of gardens in the Persian-inspired narrative romance (romantic <I>masnawi</I>), where the garen as the usual setting of love is described in utmost detail.

This study aims to locate, examine and account for the many, and varied, forms of resistance to sentimental culture advanced by eighteenth-century women writers. Through reference to essays, novels, poems and memoirs, the thesis traces the evolution of this opposition over a sixty-year period. It contends that the subtly subversive representations of unsentimental conduct depicted by women writers at mid-century anticipate and shape the more explicitly antisentimental rhetoric espoused by more openly radical figures in later decades. The thesis aims to unite these two elements by tracing the evolution of this critique from its earliest beginnings - embedded, opaquely, in the literature of the 1740s - to its free expression in the' transparently antisentimental writings of the 1790s and beyond. The first chapter argues that Jane Collier's 1753 work An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting anticipates the antisentimental themes discussed in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The second chapter examines six novels published by Collier's close friend and collaborator, Sarah Fielding, between 1744 and 1760. It argues that Fielding played an important role in the inception of an unsentimental tradition in eighteenth-century fiction. The third chapter addresses the considerable body of poetry written by women on the theme of indifference. It contends that indifference functioned as a further thematic site upon which the gendered prescriptions of sentimental culture could be contested. The fourth chapter examines a range of memoirs written by socially transgressive women which exploit, subvert and contest sentimental values. The final chapter discusses the development of the antisentimental novel in the 1780s and 1790s and considers the extent to which it can be read as distinct from earlier critiques of sentimental culture.

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This thesis examines the relations between literature and the Bible through the myth of three characters, who construct the collective of 'the Jew' as a dangerous and fascinating Other in the nineteenth-century European mind. It examines the evolution of the representations of these characters, and their convergences and divergences in French, English and German nineteenth-century novels. The mythocritique method, taking into account the collective unconscious, reveals that the chosen characters re-enact three major myths, which demonstrate their vitality, not only in literature and theology, but also in art. A response can be found in comparative Jewish literature to these myths, completing the study and revealing a constructive dialogue and self-examination.

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This thesis offers a historicist engagement with both canonical and non-canonical authors of the 1790s with the aim of revealing the investment of the period’s imaginative writing in contemporary cultures of popular magic. It is a subject Romantic Studies has too long neglected. The Introduction profiles this neglect and reveals the richness of the field for historicist literary study. The first chapter proceeds to offer a profile of the dynamic contours and intersections of various modalities of popular occult practice, from cunning men and women to astrologers and conjurors, and taxonomises the available evidence. The emphasis is on both the material economies of such practices and the forms in which they gained complex literary representation. In Chapter 2, an analysis of the cultural resonance of popular magic in the formative public debates of the 1790s is followed by a case study of John Thelwall’s adoption of the persona of ‘conjuror’ as a response to political exile and personal disillusionment. This leads, in chapters 3 and 4, to an excavation of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads that brings into view its complex and conflicted attitudes to popular magic. A radical disjunction between the two poets is identified in their differing responses to, and deployments of, material occult culture in fascinatingly transatlantic contexts. While Wordsworth came to look on the adoption of occult identities as potentially empowering for disenfranchised subjects, Coleridge anxiously regarded the superstition on which such identities relied as mentally incarcerating – a view complicated by his own guilty apostasy. Chapter 5 moves to consider Robert Southey’s negotiations with Lyrical Ballads and his engagement with a non-domestic occult through which he articulated his own contested public identity at the close of the 1790s. One of the main aims of the thesis is to defamiliarise orthodox readings of Romantic literature by offering a new lens through which to read the period’s imaginative productions against the background of sub-cultures neglected by literary critics and only recently recovered by social historians.