This dissertation contributes to studies of Frances Burney’s prose fiction, by establishing the importance of the combined influence of theatrical models and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in shaping Burney’s novels. Reading the collection of novels by Burney as a rebellion against the tragic plot into which the acclaimed heroine of Richardson’s second novel is ensnared, it argues that Burney’s works blend together dramatic and novelistic conventions to produce narratives with ambivalently successful conclusions. It shows, through analyses of all four of Burney’s novels, that the author positions turning points with sentimental crises and peculiar circumstances within the narratives as dramatic climaxes which allow the heroines temporarily to overlook conventional social expectations of women to make important decisions to help them make positive changes in their lives before they resign control once again. In allowing female characters these small freedoms to act for themselves, I argue that there is an underlying message in Burney’s fiction that it is necessary for women to become more assertive in order to gain more conscious control of their destiny. The main thesis of my work is that it is with incremental adjustments in female conduct, and with the blending of the comic and tragic forms, that Burney’s fiction dramatizes the ways in which women make the most of their circumstances and resources to find peace, if not happiness, in a dignified manner in a society which restricts their freedom of choice and expression.

In ‘Telemachus’, the first episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus declares himself ‘servant of two masters [...] The imperial British state and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’. Amid clanging church bells there follows in the text, as if in answer to Stephen’s invocation, a ‘horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father’. From the outset critics have tussled with the role of religion in James Joyce’s texts, and with the nature of his attitude towards Catholicism. But though recent years have seen, according to Geert Lernout, attempts to ‘recuperate’ Joyce for a ‘liberal form of Catholicism’, scholarship still dwells on Joyce’s upbringing and the social contexts of his youth, framing the question as one of belief rather than practise. Ignoring the evidence of ‘Telemachus’, which implies their centrality for any discussion of Joyce and the church, the heretics themselves have received scant attention. Against recent scholarship, including Roy Gottfried’s Joyce’s Misbelief and Geert Lernout’s Help My Unbelief, this thesis will show how specific heretics from the early church appear and persist throughout Joyce’s literature. Charting a course from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake, I will focus on a chronological reading of Ulysses and the figures of Arius and Photius. Saint Patrick figures at the conflux of east and west, as I argue that Joyce moved from a combative attitude towards Catholicism to one which used its material as connective tissue. In the process I define Joyce’s ‘early church’ as one stretching until the ninth century. This thesis will significantly expand the scope of Joyce’s library, showing through close reading the hitherto unidentified sources from which Joyce drew his understanding of Arius and Photius.

This thesis explores the nexus between the aesthetics of the sublime and the politics of post/colonial contexts in the novels of Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and Jean Rhys. Until now, the sublime has not been sufficiently problematised in terms of its relevance to the post/colonial scene. I discuss theories of the sublime in Longinus, Burke, Kant and Lyotard, and other relevant thinkers. I then explore representations of the sublime in <i>Heart of Darkness</i>, <i>A Passage to India</i>, and <i>Wide Sargasso Sea</i>. Each novel features scenes in which typically sublime encounters with the landscape are conflated by the perceiving protagonist with perceptions of the human element along socio-political lines, most commonly according to race, class, gender, colonial status, or some other subaltern classification. Thus encounters with the sublime become unconscious metaphors for destructive socio-political relations. From Longinus to Hegel the “true” sublime was defined only by negating the “other” and by reliance on a Hebraic divine. Kant argues for a “disinterested” universal aesthetics, but fails to provide proof of freedom of the will, or the purity of reason, on which his definition of the sublime relies. Conrad, Forster and Rhys deploy the post/colonial sublime to interrogate this tradition of Western aesthetics and metaphysics, denying totalizing hermeneutics and resisting the aesthetic and literal domestication of the colonial landscape and its people through their representation of the sublime as that which cannot be fully represented. Following Lyotard, I argue that Conrad, Forster and Rhys engage the post/colonial sublime as a means of enabling a liberatory politics by asking us to witness the differend of the colonized. They deploy the post/colonial sublime to detonate the disinterestedness of their metropolitan readership by representing the differend of colonial politics in representing the differend of its aesthetics.

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This thesis analyses the relationship between knowledge and love in late-Victorian culture. It argues that love, considered as secondary throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, came to be seen as equally fundamental as rational knowledge in the life of the single individual and for the development of the whole society. Previous critics have not pointed out in detail that many thinkers of the fin de siecle affirmed that feelings, and particularly love, constituted a source of knowledge as valuable as that furnished by reason (constituting the basis of the nineteenth-century ideas of science and the scientific method of analysis of reality). In the same respect, love came to be seen as central in all debates regarding sexuality and the ethical life of the individual. These discourses on love were, however, set against as much as accompanied by rational attempts to describe and understand the reality external and internal to human beings. This is what represents in-betweenness: the moments and situations in which two terms usually considered as opposite come to have an equal place and consideration. I will therefore analyse in detail the conception of rationality and knowledge as formulated by the scientific naturalists, agnostics and the British idealists during the 1880s and 1890s as well as their ethical interest in human feelings as dictated by science's inability to furnish any definitive and ultimate knowledge. Subsequently, I will examine the discourses on love (love as a new knowledge to be spread to the general public in order to bring about the betterment of the entire society) advocated by the period's feminists and homosexual apologists. The two themes of knowledge. and love will be specifically drawn together when studying the works of English spiritualists and of the members of the Society for Psychical Research. My original argument consists in a reading of these works as moved by both a rational method of analysis of the ghostly apparitions and a very human need (prompted by the feeling of love) to contact the lost loved ones. This specific argument will then be extended to my analyses of literary ghost stories of the fin de siecle, which continually refer to knowledge and love as the central themes involved in the apparition of a ghost. In this thesis, ghosts are considered as the very epitome of inbetweenness, as capable of breaking the boundaries of many different opposite terms and therefore exemplifying the in-betweenness which characterizes the whole period under consideration.

Narratives help to affix identities to places. During the mid-nineteenth and the midtwentieth centuries, the North appears frequently in novels and plays and is particularly prominent in national imagination. Such fictional texts are narratives which help to create and maintain stereotypes of West Yorkshire and Manchester and to foster the concept of northern identity. Qualities of the North become more significant during these periods but qualities of northemness alter across time. The North's reputation as an uncivilized, but authentic place, as a land of bleakness, dearth and poverty, as an environment where only hard men and strong women survive, can be seen to permeate the writing of the mid-nineteenth century. However, tropes and stereotypes of the North are not unchanging; new stereotypes emerge and older stereotypes adapt to the newer settings of the mid-twentieth century. What might seem like a monolithic North is in fact an ever-changing imaginary land where few of the stereotypes remain unchanged. As with the narrative of England, the mythologies of the North modify and are politically inflected. Northern character is a narrative with longstanding political motivations in which individuals and geographical regions are 'placed' within hierarchies of power and prestige. This placing of the North has significance for those inside and outside the region. Northernness is a donned identity; it is also a rejected Other and it is a desired shadow or projection. Tropes and stereotypes alter across time but because of the nature of myth and stereotype, the concept of a North remains. The strength and longevity of a stereotype is closely linked to repetition and depictions of the North in fiction and film function as repetitions. Consequently, we should be wary of essentialising regions in the same way that we fight against essentialising genders or races. Key texts for the mid-nineteenth century include Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849), Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1849), North and South (1855) and The Life of Charlotte Brontl3 (1856), Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854), and Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845). Texts for the twentieth century include John Braine's Room at the Top (1957), David Storey's This Sporting Life (1960), Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving (1960), Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar (1959) and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958

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This thesis explores a strain in twentieth-century ethical reflection: the writings of poets on the social and spiritual value of their art. Beginning with T. S. Eliot's idea of 'poetic integrity', and tracing its use and development in the prose and poems ofJoseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill, the thesis employs 'poethics' as a term combining the literary and the ethical imperatives without subordinating one to the other. Thus the ethics arrived at by these four poets can be treated outside the political and/or deontological apparatuses favoured by much contemporary 'ethical' criticism,. retaining the poets' own emphasis on the primacy of the linguistic in literary art. Chapter One presents T. S. Eliot as the inaugurator of the poethical synthesis with his doctrines ofpoetic 'integrity' and 'duty to language' and shows how these seemingly :estheticist precepts allow him eventually to .prescribe a vital social role for the poet. Next, the two most provocative aspects ofJoseph Brodsky's prose-his hyper-individualist :esthetic and his repeated assertion that a:sthetics precedes and is superior to ethics-are read, first within a traditionally Kantian interpretation of autonomy, and then in light of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In the third chapter, Seamus Heaney is shown to enact diachronically and dichotomously the dual ethical role that Eliot imagined for poetry: £irst as protector oflocal culture and second as facilitator of intercultural exchange. Finally, Geoffrey Hill's 'theology of language' is described as a double struggle against the two limits of language: the unspeakable-the horror of man's evil-and the unsayable-the sublime and holy Word. His view of language as a medium tainted by sin and fraught with peril is analysed alongside his ethically ambitious poems on death and suffering, including on the Holocaust. The conclusion proposes poethics as a critical category for modem and contemporary poetry.

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