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This thesis examines the literary relationship between James Joyce and Victorian nonsense, particularly Lewis Carroll. Tracing the defining characteristics of literary nonsense beyond the Victorian period, it aims to assess what we mean by 'literary nonsense', and to evaluate the terms of Joyce's nonsense inheritance. The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter One: "'A letters from a person to a place about a thing": The Nonsense Letter.' This chapter looks at central nonsense themes of miscommunication, the (mis)construction of meaning, textual play, and the inadequacies and absurdities of epistolary conventions. My research draws on personal letters from Joyce, Carroll, and Edward Lear, as well as examining the relationship between fictional letters and their host texts, and delivering a detailed analysis of the Finnegans Wake letter in its various guises. Chapter Two: "'Mocked majesty": Games and Authority.' This chapter explores the various forms of authority in nonsense, from autocratic monarchs to omniscient authors, and from the parental or pedagogic authority of adults over children to the rigid and unspoken rules of children's games and discourses. The various species of games we find in the work of both Carroll and Joyce are analysed, from the tightly ordered playworlds of chess, cards, and games with logic and language, to the rough-and-tumble hijinks of the Finnegans Wake children's twilight street games. Chapter Three: '''Jest jibberweek's joke": Comic Nonsense.' This chapter begins by exploring the Kantian model of incongruous humour we find in the nonsense double act, examining how both Joyce and Carroll emphasise and exploit the double nature of the joke, using it to generate the vaudevillean dialogues and comic contrasts between the many 'collateral and incompatible' pseudocouples who populate the nonsense terrain. It goes on to address the dark underbelly of the comic, identifying a Hobbesian meanness at the heart of nonsense humour. A treatise on the bad pun concludes the. chapter, moving from Carroll's portmanteau words to the pun-infatuated jokescape of Finnegans Wake. Chapter Four: 'Nonsense and the Fall.' This chapter offers a unique reading of literary nonsense asa philosophical answer to the FalL Nonsense texts betray an almost morbid obsession with falling; literal and symbolic falls are a central theme of both the Wake and the Alice books, and falls into language, madness, chaos, and forbidden knowledge are staples of the nonsense condition. Ontological crisis and semantic collapse are among this chapter's themes, as it investigates why it is a general and necessary condition of literary nonsense to be always hovering on the edge of the abyss, and forever toying with its own destruction.

This thesis considers the influence of the writing of Samuel Beckett on that of Paul Auster, John Banville and J.M. Coetzee through the lens of Romantic irony, as formulated by Friedrich Schlegel and, later, Paul de Man. The broad argument is that the form of irony first articulated by the Jena Romantics is brought in Beckett’s work to something of an extreme, and that this extremity represents both one of his most characteristic achievements and a unique and specifically troublesome challenge for those who come after him. The thesis hence explores how Auster, Banville and Coetzee respond to and negotiate this irony in their own work, and contrasts their respective responses. Put briefly, I find that all three writers to one extent or another deflect Beckett’s irony, while engaging with it: Auster adopts certain stylistic and structural aspects of Beckett’s work, but on the whole reaches fundamentally different epistemological and existential conclusions; Banville engages closely with the epistemological and existential challenge posed by Beckett’s irony, and attempts to balance this with a contrasting sense of the capacity of art and the imagination to make meaning of the world; and Coetzee, after an initial attempt at stylistic imitation, moves away from this but remains fundamentally influenced by certain insights into subjectivity and ethical relation he derives from Beckett’s work. Of Auster’s work, I consider most closely ‘White Spaces’ and The New York Trilogy, arguing that the former represents a transitional development toward the tone, perspective and voice of the latter; of Banville’s, Doctor Copernicus and Eclipse, contrasting the former’s confidence in human capacities for knowledge of the world and the self with the latter’s more Beckettian skepticism and disenchantment; and of Coetzee’s, In the Heart of the Country with Waiting for the Barbarians, showing how the latter abandons the former’s marked Beckettian stylistic traces while continuing to evidence the influence of Beckett’s work in the depiction of matters such as subjectivity, language and interpersonal relation. By way of conclusion, I consider how such later writing might reshape or alter our understanding of Beckett’s work, and propose directions for further research into the place of Romantic irony in Modern and contemporary fiction.

I will compare British and American literary responses to the European revolutions of 1848-51, focussing particularly on the 1848 French and 1849 Italian revolutions. Such a comparison has not previously been made, despite the fact that writers on both sides of the Atlantic were inspired to think about political and social issues through the lens of mid-nineteenth-century European events. Although they often thought differently about revolutionary history and key ideas such as democracy and republicanism, many writers from Britain and America supported the European revolutions through their works. Some, including Arthur Hugh Clough, Margaret Fuller, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), witnessed the revolutions firsthand, either as travellers or expatriates. Even those who did not, such as Wait Whitman and Matthew Arnold, were affected by them and drew analogies between events in Europe and in their own countries. I argue that the European revolutions were central to the formation of some of the best-known works of nineteenth-century poetry, including Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1849), EBB's Casa Guidi Windows (1848-5 1), and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). The political influences that shaped these works have often been overlooked in literary history and criticism, and yet the political landscape was not only influential but vital to the creativity of writers in the mid-nineteenth century. My introduction outlines the intersection of politics and literature that occurred during the revolutions. Chapters on Arnold and Clough, on Margaret Fuller, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, and on Whitman, make the case for a political reading of the literary works I discuss. Although the thesis is author-based, I emphasise throughout the links between writers and texts, direct and indirect, which set them in dialogue with each other.

This dissertation seeks to place Anglo-Norman narrative more firmly in its contemporary literary context by examining how vernacular writers in England during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries borrowed elements of contemporary Latin writings. More importantly, it is a study of the cultural transformations that took place when vernacular writers used material traditionally found in clerical contexts. I argue that by using Latin discourses in their own narratives, Anglo-Norman writers made clerical material more suitable for wider textual communities - including lay audiences. My work develops the research of scholars who have argued that the interaction between vernacular and Latin literary traditions in England during the high Middle Ages needs to be examined more fully. It also complements scholarship which has sought to define medieval translation as a form of cultural adaptation as well as simply linguistic change. Over the course of this dissertation I examine how vernacular hagiographers and authors of romance transform material borrowed from clerical literary traditions. In particular, I explore how Anglo-Norman writers integrated the monastic discourse of contemptus mundi, antifeminist polemic and crusading rhetoric into their narratives. I argue that by transferring this material into their own works, vernacular writers enacted a process of cultural transformation, altering the meaning, significance and purpose of clerical themes, ideas and rhetoric for new audiences. Anglo-Norman narrative was not distinct from contemporary Latin traditions, but neither was it slavishly dependent on them. The interplay between the two traditions was sophisticated, intelligent and meaningful.

This thesis claims that the sublime constitutes an influence on a variety of canonical works in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that Kant's theory of a sublime which reveals to the subject its capacity for autonomous action initiates a variety of discursive treatments regarding the relation of ambivalent feeling to agency. It therefore reads a range of post-Kantian philosophical or theoretical texts which make interventions in, and developments of, the discourse of the sublime alongside literary texts which reflect or otherwise interrogate these developments. The introduction describes the role of autonomy and of affective ambivalence in the aesthetics of the sublime and discusses these themes with reference to key texts by Kant and Lyotard. The first chapter argues that The Communist Manifesto is influenced by the sublime description of the industrial landscape in Thomas Carlyle's Chartism and that it enlists this in its revolutionary praxis by provoking the sense of agency which it requires of the communist worker. The second chapter concerns H.G. Wells's The Time Machine and Wells's non-fiction writings, arguing that the novel treats expanses of time in a way that is comparable to Kant's mathematical sublime and which stands in a complex but ultimately contradictory relationship to Wells's model of agency. The third chapter focuses on Joseph Conrad's ironic treatment of the sublime in The Secret Agent, arguing that the novel draws out the implications of Arthur Schopenhauer's theory and asserts an ironic agency comparable to Friedrich Nietzsche's Dionysiac. The final chapter reads Freud's "The 'Uncanny'" alongside the "Circe" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, arguing that both these texts present the sublime object as signifier of the unconscious and encode a profound ambivalence towards the sense of agency.

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