In this thesis I exam me how fin de siècle British socialists engaged with Walt Whitman and his work. These were generally considered to be one and the same: the speaker in Leaves of Grass was understood to be Whitman, and Leaves of Grass was read as an extension of his personality. This underscores the appropriation of Whitman for the labour cause: his admirers not only used his words, but claimed the poet himself, often as a prophet as well as a poet. I argue that just as Leaves of Grass influenced the development of radical mystical and socio-political thinking, so were its reading and reception shaped by these ideological frameworks. I explore this relationship through articles, poems, books and speeches, many of which have received little or no critical attention, demonstrating how personal responses to Leaves o{Grass had an effect on the wider socialist community. Each chapter is concerned with a different socialist, or group of socialists, who read and responded to Whitman: first, Bolton's 'Eagle Street College', a reading group devoted to the poet; second, Edward Carpenter and his Whitmanesque poems in Towards Democracy; third, a selection of journalists who wrote in socialist publications; fourth, William Clarke and his book-length critique of Whitman. I finish with a comparative study of the use of 'Pioneers! 0 Pioneers!' by different figures within the socialist movement. My critical approach focuses specifically on the literary and political impact of the relationships between Whitman and his nineteenth-century 'disciples', complementing recent biographical scholarship in this field. The significance of Whitman to British socialism has long been recognised; however, though aspects of it have been critically discussed, this is the first extended study of the ways in which Whitman was responded to, interpreted, and used by British socialists.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the impact of contemporary political upheavals on the formation of the idea of America in the writings of Robert Southey (1774-1843), Joel Barlow (1754-1812) and Wait Whitman (1819-1892). Focusing on three epic poems, the thesis considers Southey, Barlow and Whitman as epic writers during a period of great national and international turmoil, and analyses the relationship between the articulation of national identity and the conflicted politics of the day. I will argue that each of these writers, affected by contemporary events and dangers that threatened the unity and stability of the nation, attempted, through his work, to achieve national unity or create national identity. These attempts, I will argue, led to the formation of an idea of America that would serve the national identity of early nineteenth-century Britain in Southey's Madoc (1805), post-Revolutionary America in Barlow's Columbiad (1807) and mid-nineteenth-century America in Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). The thesis examines how the epic provided the three writers with the means to reflect and comment on the political events which posed a threat to nationalism in their times. Chapter One explores Southey's endeavours in Madoc to inspire ambition and unify the nation in the face of a strong enemy. Chapter Two explores how far Barlow succeeds, in The Columbiad, in creating an American identity for the early Republic that would make her a model to be imitated by the whole world. Chapter Three examines Whitman' s new form which granted America literary independence. Through focussing on Whitman's treatment of the Mexicans, Native Americans and black people, in his prose and verse, the chapter argues that Whitman's attempt to create a new democratic identity for America was not altogether successful. The thesis argues that the idea of America is transformed from a colony in the first chapter, moving through half-independence in the second chapter, and towards complete independence and colonization in the third chapter. This will expose how the identities established by the three poets, through their depiction of America, become imperialist identities.

The American poet Sarah Piatt (1836-1919) addresses crucial dilemmas of modem identity, in particular the traumatic effects of war, the complexities of racial relationships and the unsettling dynamics of urban life. Although a respected poet in her day, Piatt's work disappeared after her death from the canon of American literature, and it is only in the last five years that scholars have begun to realise the importance of her poetry and to assess its depth and scope. This thesis contributes to the process of assessing the significance of Piatt's work, and contextualises her in relation to a number of other nineteenth-century American writers, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Chestnut and Frederick Douglass. I focus on the rift between Piatt's Southern plantation childhood and her married life in the industrial North, and upon how the Civil War created irreconcilable conflicts and divided loyalties in her life, which are played out in her writing. I emphasise the Civil War as a moment of personal and cultural trauma, which inaugurates what I term Piatfs 'politics of mourning'. I explore her politics of mourning in relation to psychoanalytic theory. While Freud sought to rid mourning of its ambivalence and interminability, and to displace these onto melancholia, Piatt's writing blurs the boundary between them. Instead of dispensing with mourning too quickly, too easily, Piatt recognises that one cannot avoid being haunted by the past and by the dead. She engages in a dialogue with the past and explores how the desire of the dead continues to be played out by the living. In contrast to Northern writers like Phelps, Stowe and Whitman, who seek to heal the nation by appealing to the idea of sacrifice, and the pastoral, in order to console the bereaved and envisage a redeemed body politic, Piatt turns away from consolation. Instead, she takes mourning in a direction that leads towards an exploration of the uncanny, the ghost-like and the hallucinatory. She explores the stifling effects of mourning in the South, and the way in which the North buried the unpleasant realities of the war, in the process of memorialising it. Piatt remained deeply emotionally invested in the South, yet she was also very critical of the Confederate Cause, and in her work she repeatedly interrogates her own investment in an idealised version of the antebellum South. I examine the ways in which Piatt scrutinises Southern discourses of race and slavery. I focus in particular on how she seeks to articulate a language of mourning for the South while also repeatedly exposing, and destabilising Southern fictions of mastery.