This thesis considers the teaching of English literature within extramural organisations for adults in England between 1885 and 1910. This challenges the assumption that the beginnings of English as a tertiary-level academic subject can be traced back only as far as the foundation of the Oxford English School at the end of the nineteenth century; in fact extramural English courses had been flourishing for decades before this, and these reached their zenith in the final years before it was introduced at Oxbridge. Oxford created an Honours School of English in 1894, and the Cambridge English Tripos was established in 1917; in ideological terms, such developments were of course crucial, yet it has too often been the case that the extramural literary teaching being conducted contemporaneously has been sidelined in studies of the period. My first chapter will consider the development of English in various institutional and non-institutional environments before 1885, including Edinburgh University, Dissenting Academies, and Mechanics’ Institutes. Thereafter I will explore the campaign, led by University Extension lecturer John Churton Collins, to incorporate English literature as an honours degree at Oxford. Focusing on the period between 1885 and 1891, this second chapter will assess the veracity of some of Collins’s most vehement claims regarding the apparently low critical and pedagogical standards in existence at the time, which he felt could only be improved if Oxford would agree to institutionalise the subject, and thereby raise the standard of teaching more generally. Collins’s campaign enjoyed more success when he drew attention to the scholarly teaching available within the University Extension Movement; my third chapter is underpinned by research and analysis of previously unexplored material at the archives of London University, such as syllabuses, examination papers, and lecturers’ reports. I examine the way in which English literature, the most popular subject among Extension students, was actually being taught outside the universities while still excluded from Oxbridge. Thereafter my penultimate chapter focuses on an extramural reading group formed by Cambridge Extension lecturer Richard G. Moulton. This section considers Moulton’s formulation of an innovative mode of literary interpretation, tailored specifically to suit the abilities of extramural students, and which also lent itself particularly to the study of novels. Uncollected T. P.’s Weekly articles written by Arnold Bennett highlight the emphasis that he placed on pleasure, rather than scholarship. My final chapter considers Bennett’s self-imposed demarcation from the more serious extramural pedagogues of literature, such as Collins and Moulton, and his extraordinary impact on Edwardian reading habits. A brief coda will compare the findings of the 1921 “Newbolt Report” with my own assessment of fin-de-siècle extramural education.

This thesis explores the dynamics of intersubjectivity and relationality in a corpus of contemporary literature by twelve Indigenous women writers in order to trace modes of subject-formation and communication along four main axes: violence, care, language, and memory. Each chapter establishes a comparative discussion across the Tasman Sea between Indigenous texts and world theory, the local and the global, self and community. The texts range from 1984 to 2011 to cover a period of growth in publishing and international recognition of Indigenous writing. Chapter 1 examines instances of colonial oppression in the primary corpus and links them with manifestations of violence on institutional, familial, epistemic, and literary levels in Aboriginal authors Melissa Lucashenko and Tara June Winch’s debut novels Steam Pigs (1997) and Swallow the Air (2006). They address the cycle of violence and the archetypal motif of return to bring to light the life of urban Aboriginal women whose ancestral land has been lost and whose home is the western, modern Australian city. Maori short story writer Alice Tawhai’s collections Festival of Miracles (2005), Luminous (2007), and Dark Jelly (2011), on the other hand, deny the characters and reader closure, and establish an atmosphere characterised by a lack of hope and the absence of any political or personal will to effect change. Chapter 2 explores caring relationships between characters displaying symptoms that may be ascribed to various forms of intellectual and mental disability, and the relatives who look after them. I situate the texts within a postcolonial disability framework and address the figure of the informal carer in relation to her “caree.” Patricia Grace’s short story “Eben,” from her collection Small Holes in the Silence (2006), tells the life of a man with physical and intellectual disability from birth (the eponymous Eben) and his relationship with his adoptive mother Pani. The main character of Lisa Cherrington’s novel The People-Faces (2004) is a young Maori woman called Nikki whose brother Joshua is in and out of psychiatric facilities. Finally, the central characters of Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye (2002) display a wide range of congenital and acquired cognitive impairments, allowing the author to explore how the compounded trauma of racism and sexism participates in (and is influenced by) mental disability. Chapter 3 examines the materiality and corporeality of language to reveal its role in the formation of (inter)subjectivity. I argue that the use of language in Aboriginal and Maori women’s writing is anchored in the racialised, sexualised bodies of Indigenous women, as well as the locale of their ancestral land. The relationship between language, body, and country in Keri Hulme’s the bone people (1984) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) are analysed in relation to orality, gesture, and mapping in order to reveal their role in the formation of Indigenous selfhood. Chapter 4 explores how the reflexive practice of life-writing (including fictional auto/biography) participates in the decolonisation of the Indigenous self and community, as well as the process of individual survival and cultural survivance, through the selective remembering and forgetting of traumatic histories. Sally Morgan’s Aboriginal life-writing narrative My Place (1987), Terri Janke’s Torres Strait Islander novel Butterfly Song (2005), as well as Paula Morris and Kelly Ana Morey’s Maori texts Rangatira (2011) and Bloom (2003) address these issues in various forms. Through the interactions between memory and memoirs, I bring to light the literary processes of decolonisation of the writing/written self in the settler countries of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This study intends to raise the profile of the authors mentioned above and to encourage the public and scholarly community to pay attention and respect to Indigenous women’s writing. One of the ambitions of this thesis is also to expose the limits and correct the shortcomings of western, postcolonial, and gender theory in relation to Indigenous women writers and the Fourth World.

Le conte entretient un rapport spécifique au temps : il ancre les événements de l’histoire dans un cadre spatio-temporel éloigné et vague, dont le narrateur se distancie. Les personnages évoluent alors dans une temporalité dont la rupture avec le monde réel est affichée par différents marqueurs et procédés linguistiques, à l’instar de la locution adverbiale « Once upon a time », qui caractérise le genre. Il s’inscrit donc dans une certaine temporalité, mais il vise tout récepteur au-delà de toute considération pour l’époque ou le lieu dans lesquels il s’inscrit. Notre étude consiste alors à déterminer les caractéristiques de l’ambivalence du conte entre temporalité et atemporalité. Pour tenter de répondre à cette problématique, nos recherches s’articulent autour de trois axes principaux : les caractéristiques temporelles liées au genre du conte, les marqueurs et procédés linguistiques qui permettent d’exprimer la temporalité, et, pour finir, l’étude de cas particuliers pertinents dans l’expression et la représentation du temps, dont le rapport entre parataxe et hypotaxe, le connecteur and et les propositions en when font partie. Nous nous basons sur un corpus constitué de 104 contes en langue anglaise écrits par Joseph Jacobs. / The link that fairy-tales have with the notion of time is specific : the story is rooted in a spatiotemporal frame which is presented as far and vague and which the narrator keeps at a distance. The characters then live in a temporality which clearly shows a break with the real world through the use of different linguistic markers and processes, like the adverbial phrase “Once upon a time”, which is typical of fairy-tales. Thus, they have an internal temporality, but they aim at reaching readers who belong to any time and place. This thesis then involves the study of the ambivalence of the fairy-tale between temporality and atemporality. To try and answer the questions linked to this ambivalence, our research focuses on three main lines : the temporal characteristics of the fairy-tale as a literary genre, the linguistic markers and processes which express temporality, and the study of specific cases which are pertinent in the expression and representation of time, including the relation between parataxis and hypotaxis, when-clauses and the connector AND. Our corpus is composed of 104 English tales written by Joseph Jacobs.

British imperial culture and indigenous patriarchy both work to subjugate women. There is very little room for resistance. Madness as protest is a dominant theme in Victorian literature as well as late twentieth-century postcolonial writing by women. This thesis refashions our understanding of the madwoman trope by investigating writers’ use of it to capture the diverse experiences of ‘other’ madwomen. Instead of a strictly Eurocentric approach to female protagonists’ experiences of madness, the thesis places British imperial literary culture in the nineteenth century alongside postcolonial writing by women, whether in the Caribbean (Dominica), South Asia (India) or the Middle East and North Africa (Jordan and Egypt). Jeans Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt and Miral Al-Tahawy’s The Tent are placed alongside Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. A transnational approach is necessary to establish commonality between Eastern and Western women’s literary experiences of madness. Such commonality persistently emerges, once one is alert to its possibility, despite the often obvious differences between literary madwomen’s experiences in a transnational frame. The relationship between madness and empire, madness and patriarchy, and madwomen as agents of resistance is exemplified throughout the thesis by closely analysing each literary text.

Cette thèse traite des transformations de la monstruosité et de la matérialité dans la Grande-Bretagne victorienne du dix-neuvième siècle, ainsi que du lien que ces transformations entretiennent avec la notion de sujet désirant, masculin et victorien. Elle met en lumière un changement au sein du langage victorien (le langage étant ici compris comme un système de signes, et non comme une langue spécifique) alors que, à la ‘perpendicularité [foucaldienne] de la représentation,’ se substitue une structure signifiante différentielle. Une particule non-représentable et inatteignable est apparue dans le langage – un double désir de mort et de cohérence sémiotique – qui donne naissance à un sujet fondamentalement divisé. Parcourant le langage labyrinthique de la culture victorienne et post-victorienne, ce sujet divisé, et sa quête métaphysique de complétude, s’exprime en diverses formes monstrueuses. Cette thèse éclaire la transformation du langage victorien de la représentation en combinant les théories foucaldienne (l’historicité du langage) et lacanienne (la division du sujet et le stade du miroir) pour analyser des récits articulés autour de la figure du miroir et de la sirène. Contrairement aux théories les plus répandues de la monstruosité, qui situent celle-ci aux marges du possible, cette thèse affirme que, sollicitée et marquée par l’incohérence du langage victorien, la monstruosité de l’époque se retrouve au cœur même du sujet désirant masculin. Bien qu’il ait été représenté pendant des millénaires comme l’Autre de la rencontre périlleuse, le monstre des récits analysés – la sirène victorienne – devient ici le protagoniste de sa propre (et triste) histoire. En lisant les corps monstrueux comme des topologies du sujet qui les a créés, cette thèse pense la sirène victorienne non pas comme limite/frontière du sujet et de ses possibles, mais comme l’expression même de ce sujet créateur et désirant qu’est le sujet masculin victorien. / The thesis discusses changes in monstrosity and materiality in the Victorian, nineteenth-century, Britain and the relationship of these changes to the notion of a male Victorian desiring subject. It argues that a change happened at the level of the Victorian language (language understood as a system of signs, not a specific language), and that previous Foucaldian ‘perpendicularity of representation’ was substituted by a differential structure of meaning. An unrepresentable and unattainable particle appeared inside of language – a desire for death and semiotic coherence – giving birth to a fundamentally split subject. This subject expressed himself, and his metaphysical search for wholeness, in many different monstrous forms, entering a labyrinth of language specific to the Victorian and post-Victorian culture. By combining Foucaldian (the historicity of language) and Lacanian (the split subject and the mirror stage) theoretical frameworks, the thesis deals with the change in Victorian representational language by analyzing mirror and siren narratives of the nineteenth century. Contrary to popular theoretical approach to monstrosity as something dwelling on the margins of the possible, the thesis argues that, called upon and marked by the incoherence of the Victorian language, the monstrosity of the age emerges as the male desiring subject himself. Though for millennia represented as the Other to be encountered, the monster of the analyzed narratives – the Victorian siren – becomes the protagonist of its own sad stories. Reading siren bodies as topologies of the subject who created them, the Victorian sirens are understood in this thesis not as limits/outskirts of the subject’s possibility, but as expressions of the very subject who created them – the male Victorian desiring subject.

This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well. Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.

This thesis explores a contemporary literary movement that has been called ‘the new nature writing’, framing it in its wider historical and cultural context of the last forty years. Drawing on recent developments in cultural geography, it explores the way such terms as ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ have been engaged with and reinterpreted in a diverse project of literary re-mapping in the British and Irish archipelago. It argues that the rise of environmentalism since the late 1960s has changed and destabilised the way the British and Irish relate to the world around them. It is, however, concerned with challenging the term ‘nature writing’ and argues that the literature of landscape and place of the last forty years is not solely concerned with ‘nature’, a term that has come under some degree of scrutiny recently. It sets out an argument for reframing this movement as an ‘archipelagic literature’ in order to incorporate the question of community. In understanding the present uncertainties that pervade the questions around landscape and place today it also considers the effects of such political changes as the partial devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the British and Irish relationship to the land. The literature that it takes as its subject often explores the way personal and communal senses of identity have found a renewed focus in a critical localism in opposition to more footloose forms of globalisation. Through a careful negotiation of Marxist and phenomenological readings of landscape, it offers an overview of what is a considerable body of literature now and what is developing into one of the most consistent and defined literary movements of the twenty-first century.

This thesis takes as its object of study a certain strand of Early Modern English writing characterised by its cornucopian invention, immethodical structure, and creatively exuberant, often chaotic, means of expression. It takes as its point of departure the Erasmian theory of ‘copia' (rhetorical abundance), expanding upon it freely in order to formulate new and independent notions of copious vernacular writing as it is practised in 16th- and 17th-century contexts. Throughout I argue for the continuity and pervasiveness of the pursuit of linguistic plenitude, in contrast to a prevailing belief that the outpouring of 'words' and 'things' started to dissipate in the transition from one century (16th) to the next (17th). The writers to be discussed are Thomas Nashe, Robert Burton, John Taylor the ‘Water-Poet', and Sir Thomas Urquhart. Each of the genres in which these writers operate–prose-poetry, the essay, the pamphlet, and the universal language–emerge either toward the end of the 16th century or during the course of the 17th century, and so can be said to take copious writing in new and experimental directions not fully accounted for in the current scholarship. My contribution to the literature lies principally in its focus on the emergence of these literary forms in an Early Modern English context, with an emphasis on the role played by copiousness of expression in their stylistic development and how they in turn develop the practice of copia.

This thesis offers an approach to the history of mythographical discourse through the figure of Theseus and his appearances in texts from England, Italy and France. Analysing a range of poetic, historical, and allegorical works that feature Theseus alongside their classical and contemporary intertexts, it is a study of the conceptions of Greco-Roman mythology prevalent in European literature from 1300-1600. Focusing on mythology’s pervasive presence as a background to medieval and early modern literary and intellectual culture, it draws attention to the fragmentary, fluid and polymorphous nature of mythology in relation to its use for different purposes in a wide range of texts. The first impact of this study is to draw attention to the distinction between mythology and mythography, as a means of focusing on the full range of interpretative processes associated with the ancient myths in their textual forms. Returning attention to the processes by which writers and readers came to know the Greco-Roman myths, it widens the commonly accepted critical definition of ‘mythography’ to include any writing of or on mythology, while restricting ‘mythology’ to its abstract sense, meaning a traditional collection of tales that exceeds any one text. This distinction allows the analyses of the study’s primary texts to display the full range of interpretative processes and possibilities involved in rewriting mythology, and to outline a spectrum of linked but distinctive mythographical genres that define those possibilities. Breaking down into two parts of three chapters each, the thesis examines Theseus’ appearances across these mythographical genres, first in the period from 1300 to the birth of print, and then from the birth of print up to 1600. Taking as its primary texts works by Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate and William Shakespeare along with their classical intertexts, it situates each of them in regard to their multiple defining contexts. Paying close attention to the European traditions of commentary, translation and response to classical sources, it shows mythographical discourse as a vibrant aspect of medieval and early modern literary culture, equally embedded in classical traditions and contemporary traditions that transcended national and linguistic boundaries.