This thesis explores the connection between luxury and corruption – an eighteenth-century axiom – in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Literary critics have mostly interpreted nineteenth-century luxury in terms of material culture: fetishised commodity (Andrew Miller) or, an example of recent reaction to this approach, historical metonym (Freedgood). There is little interest in broader understandings, as if a concept held responsible for the downfall of civilizations disappeared overnight. My own work aims to open out our sense of its nineteenth-century meanings by extending Sekora’s intellectual history of luxury (1977), which concludes with Smollett, and Berry’s politically focused study (1994), to discover what happened between the age of luxury as pathology and fall and nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle notions of luxury as biological degeneration and decadence. This study is structured around five key novels and corresponding themes that reveal nineteenth-century attitudes to luxury: Austen’s Mansfield Park, 1814 (slavery), Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, 1848 (temperance), Gaskell’s Mary Barton, 1848 (prostitution), and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, 1865 with Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, 1875 (national decline). Combining an historicist approach with close reading, the thesis foregrounds political and economic ideas, from Ferguson’s classical republicanism to Malthus’s population theory. It attends closely to nuanced language use in representing human wants: valorised ‘necessities’, moralised ‘luxuries’, sometimes evasive ‘comforts’ and ‘refinements’. Despite luxury’s apparent rehabilitation in an economically liberal age, persisting concerns are found regarding its corruption of individuals and nations, especially at the beginning and towards the end of the nineteenth century, when national decline was more feared. This thesis finds a liberty-slavery dichotomy as the nineteenth-century luxury issue, whether manifested negatively – other-enslavement to procure luxury, self-enslavement to luxurious appetites, or national enslavement caused by luxury-led emasculation and political decay – or positively – free trade, affirmation of acquisitive desire or celebration of luxurious excess as antidote to rigid control.

This thesis argues that the French Revolution marks a watershed in the treatment of masculinities by European writers, after which the man of feeling becomes central to dialogues about nationhood. It traces fractures and continuities in the relationship between feeling masculinity and the wider community across time and place, analysing political writings, novels, and poems, and works in French, German and Italian as well as English. The man of feeling is introduced in Chapter One using Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), both of which focus on the individual’s relationship with society, rather than the nation. Similarly, Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), subject of Chapter Two, depicts St. Preux’s education from a ‘good’ to a ‘virtuous’ masculinity located in the regional ‘fatherland’, rather than the nation. In the final three chapters the man of feeling becomes implicated in discourses of nation. Chapter Three traces the movement in Burke’s writings from an inherited and organic to a civic, voluntarist nationhood dependent on men of feeling operating within society’s boundaries and enacting virtuous conduct. Although in Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802) Ortis is isolated and politically disenfranchised, a direct result of the absence of an Italian nation, Chapter Four argues that such spatially and temporally dislocated men can be united by shared sentiment. Finally, Chapter Five shows how in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, specifically in Canto III (1816), Byron exposes the tyrannical exploitation of feeling masculinity to serve civic nationhood; liberty and the nation are therefore potentially incompatible. This thesis opens up new ways of understanding masculinities by investigating the politicisation of the man of feeling and his involvement in debates about nationhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A.L. McLeod's comment on the literature of Hong Kong, a former Commonwealth colony of Britain, represents the consensus that Hong Kong has 'produced no literature'. Also pertinent is his view that Hong Kong has 'no sense of national identity, no cause to follow, no common goal'. The Handover in 1997 represented a new era for Hong Kong as it came under a new sovereign with a new identity. It is now time to rethink the relevance of McLeod's assertion, made some four decades ago. Hong Kong has long been regarded as a 'cultural desert', which is not a favorable environment to create any impetus to cultivate development in culture and arts. However, following reunification with China, Hong Kong is now permeated by a Chinese national identity that is less ambiguous and more legitimate than its former colonial counterpart. Decolonisation has, without a shadow of doubt, provided all Hongkongers with a 'common goal' to anticipate, inducing them to question whether recent history has given Hong Kong a new identity; and, whether there are incentives for claiming it. However, the key question is whether present day Hong Kong has given inspiration and 'calligraphic ink' for Hong Kong literature; in particular, how Hong Kong's new identity has been reflected in literary works. This research relates postcolonial thinking to literature emanating from Hong Kong, its thrust is to dissect and explore the implicit meanings evident in the use of the English language by native Hong Kong writers as they expound the identity of Hong Kong. Does Anglophone writing in these instances express the identity of Hong Kong? Addressing the writings of Hong Kong native Xu Xi (writer of Hong Kong Rose), Agnes Lam (Woman to Woman and Other Poems) and Louise Ho (New Ends, Old Beginnings), the research also considers how such adaptations result collaterally in cultural displacements, diasporic experience and a linguistic identity crisis, which leads to the .consideration of whether a uniquely Hong Kong cultural identity may be said to emerge ex post facto from the postcolonial situation, or whether a hybrid identity existed prior to the political upheaval of 1997. The earlier part of the thesis focuses on the investigation of subjects' nostalgic feelings towards their past. Chapter one provides a general overview of the political situation of Hong Kong that gave rise to a special cultural phenomenon which this thesis examines: the special nostalgia in Hong Kong's memory is due to its unique political situation. It discusses the presentation and the perspective on time taken by the three writers. Identifying Xu Xi as idealistic, Agnes Lam as individualistic and Louise Ho as skeptical, this thesis further consider how these different writers deal with the postcolonial experiences of their time in the perception and construction oftheir identity. One of the major focuses of this thesis is the notion of a postcolonial time sense, that is, the perplexing competition between the time and memory of the coloniser and that of the colonised. The focus of this research then turns to language. Pursuing the idea that language creates a voice and an identity, this thesis considers how these three writers deal with the various languages current in Hong Kong and their opinion on languages which empower and disempower them. The capacity of language to marginalise is one of the focuses of discussion. The study of marginal identity will be revisited in the last chapter and the angle will change to bring into view the marginality that is brought about by space. Another primary area of analysis in this thesis is postcolonial geography. Following on from the discussion of nostalgia, the analysis of this feeling of inertia will extend from time to space and in an examination of the significance of 'homeland' in these postcolonial works. In its conclusion, the thesis explores the procedures which these writers have adopted in constructing a postcolonial identity for Hong Kong by examining their dealings with the displacement brought by migration, colonisation and globalisation, together with the attempted transcendence of physical distance and psychological boundaries.

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In a comparative analysis of three texts in which the narrators question and revise the dominant cultural discourses of the countries in which they are born, this thesis investigates contemporary women's autobiographical negotiations with 'history' (a Foucauldian sense) and sexual, racial and national identities. Concentrating on the works of Maxine Hong Kingston, Jeanette Winterson and Audre Lorde, this dissertation is concerned with the difficulty of theorising women's autobiography as a radical imaginative space. Utilising the term the 'autobiographical novel', this work traces how the authors' deployment of fantasy, myth and desire in ways that are politically radical, destabilise conventional notions of the self and hegemonic historical narratives. As such, this thesis develops a new paradigm within which to explore autobiography. It utilises poststructuralist theory, whilst confronting the paradox of how one argues for the validity of identity within this framework. Rethinking the relationship between autobiography and the 'indifferent' subject position associated with poststructuralism, this thesis argues that the relationship between black Women critics and deconstructionism offers a path in which to subvert dominant paradigms of subjectivity, identity and expression. By challenging the conventional distinctions between the tenns 'writer', 'critic' and 'theorist', black writers create an autobiographical space which challenges categories of the 'writing I'. Experience and theory can, therefore, become conflated as the generic constraints of writing associated with the autobiographical self are subvel1ed. Kingston, Winterson and Lorde, it is argued, problematise cultural and representational hegemonies through their postmoden narratives. (Continues...).

This thesis is a critical study of the conceptual foundations of the work of a number of twentieth-century academic literary critics and theorists, with the aim of exploring the ground of some of the disputes between exponents of different approaches to literary analysis. It asks to what extent, and how, the fundamental assumptions and principles concerning the nature and value of literature and literary analysis vary between these analysts, and how these notions affect their analytical methods. To this end, it presents a close comparative reading of some of the more prominent British and American literary analysts of the past hundred years or so who have been associated with a variety of methodological camps, namely, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, F. R. Leavis, and I. A. Richards ('Practical', or 'New', Criticism) Homi K. Bhabha (postcolonialism) Terry Eagleton (Marxism) J. Hillis Miller (deconstruction) and Elaine Showalter (feminism). In the process, the thesis also investigates whether the old guard of Practical Criticism is as old-fashioned and unimportant as many of its successors have claimed it to be. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first two are concerned, roughly chronologically, with key critical writings by Richards, Leavis, Eliot, and Empson (Part I), and by Eagleton, Showalter, Bhabha, and Miller (Part II). Parts I and II are further divided into separate chapters, each of which focuses on one literary analyst at a time and dissects, individually and comparatively, the following three elements in their writings: their definition of the concept of literature, the value they place on both literature and the task of literary analysis, and their analytical practice. The final part of the thesis consists of a case-study of Thomas Hardy, which shows how the treatment of the work of a single author by these eight analysts, and any analyst, is deeply affected by the assumptions and principles concerning the nature and value of literature and literary analysis which drive their work.

This thesis aims to conceptualise the Virgin through a focus on post-Reformation representations of her bodily assumption and coronation as Queen of Heaven. The Reformation’s emphasis on the Word was a driving force behind a diminishing of significance of the Virgin, underpinning a shift in perception of her image from Heaven’s Queen to humble handmaid. This thesis will show how in spite of its eradication from state-approved liturgy, iconography of the assumption and coronation of the Virgin continued to be of cultural significance. Through historicised close reading of works by writers from a range of confessional standpoints, it will show how these contentious aspects of Mariology aroused powerful and complex responses in post-Reformation England. The timescale of the thesis commences midway through the reign of Elizabeth I, in the year that marked the start of the Jesuit mission, and finishes midway through the reign of James I, in a year which saw the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales. Thematically rather than chronologically structured, the thesis itself journeys on a spectrum of faith, encompassing views that range from Protestant polemicist to Jesuit Catholic. It will show how iconography of the assumption and coronation was symptomatic of the continued confessional complexity of post-Reformation England. The thesis commences with two chapters exploring oppositional representations of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven in Protestant writing. Chapters focusing on individual voices follow: Elizabeth Cary, the writers of recusant rosary books, Sir John Harington, Henry Constable and Robert Southwell. In a variety of ways, both oblique and direct, these writers engaged with images of the Virgin’s assumption and coronation, and their representation of the Virgin’s image reflects cultural and political as well as religious concerns.

This thesis examines how representations of London in wartime and postwar literature challenge popular conceptions of the city as a national symbol of collective stoicism and resilience. It looks at writing by Nigel Balchin, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Rose Macaulay, Louis MacNeice and William Sansom, to name a few, exploring how the ‘London can take it’ attitude is qualified by literature’s ambiguous reworking of propagandistic city images, including St Paul’s, Tube station shelterers and war workers. The research encompasses prose, verse, film and diaries. The introduction sets the critical context, summing up existing interpretations of the period and showing how the thesis adds to this body of work. The first chapter focuses on the immediate prewar and Phoney War period, when a resistance to the looming crisis sees London depicted as a place of sleepy complacency. The following chapters consider how literature tests London’s reputation as a place of high-minded heroics and new-found egalitarian sentiment. The prevalence of vulnerable and unstable characters is also analyzed, as is the role London’s literary journals play in alleviating the mood of conformity and regimentation. The concluding chapter explains how post-war depictions of London defuse triumphalism by concentrating on lingering traces of war. The contention is not that home-front writing was a radical literature of opposition – rather that London was used to articulate the richness of individual, subjective experience in an otherwise uniformed and tin-hatted society. If war was sometimes felt to be an impersonal drama that threatened to eclipse the individual, then representations of London help to redress this imbalance in the 1940s city, providing an antidote to the vast, dehumanizing aspects of wartime life.

This thesis examines the selves represented by early-twentieth century modernist writers in the light of neurological developments which occurred during the late-nineteenth century. After the 1860s, the nervous system was understood in newly evolutionary terms. This meant that the lowest and fundamentally non-mental aspects of the nervous system became the basis of the conscious mind and mentality. The central concern of the thesis is with what I call the modernist anti-mental. This manifests itself in three clear ways. Firstly, I use the anti-mental as a term to describe a non- Freudian (or perhaps ambiguously Freudian) and explicitly physical mode of unconsciousness . Secondly, I argue that a certain strand of modernism itself, as a set of stylistic qualities and ideas emerging in both literature and medical science, was concerned with representing and often celebrating mindlessness and the primitive, and therefore debunked the rational mind. Thirdly, I use the term the anti-mental, or anti-mentality, to gather together the ways in which modernist writers, neurologists, and medical psychologists alike were concerned with placing the non-mental at the core and/or foundation of selfhood. The introduction establishes modernist anti-mentality and the anti-mental as an alternative to the idea of the unconscious mind as well as examining the complex relationship between neurology and psychology during the period in question. The first chapter considers the foundational figure of the thesis, the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, and argues that although he pathologised anti-mentality, his account of the nervous system also meant that it became the bedrock of human selfhood. Hughlings Jackson's neurology is considered in relation to D. H. Lawrence's writings which have the anti-mental at their heart. Chapter two examines the potential for the anti-mental to be spiritual and physical all at once, exploring various oceanic states and metaphors in the works of sexologist Havelock Ellis and writer H.D. Chapter three considers how the anti-mental becomes a key concern for the modernist practices of sensory self-observation carried out in very different contexts by Virginia Woolf and the neurologist Henry Head. Chapter four questions the limits of textual expression of supposedly anti-mental states. It uses the diaries of Anaïs Nin and psychological writings by Otto Rank in order to challenge the modernist attempt to portray anti-mentality in textual forms.

This thesis explores the implications of architecture in English Romanticism. Writings and buildings can be connected by virtue of certain affinities. Specifically, literary texts and architectural structures respond to a common set of cultural and socio-political conditions. I have largely confined my study to metropolitan architecture; in so doing, I aim to contribute to the on-going dialogue about the importance of the city in Romanticism. The architectural changes that took place in London in the opening decades of the nineteenth century occurred alongside the major shifts in social, political, economic and intellectual life. The volatility of the age is reflected in the Romantic use of architectural imagery and metaphor to illustrate different forms of instability in various contexts: the instability of power, of personal life and of art forms (whether written, built or painted). In other words, the Romantic engagement with the architectural is a representation of, or reaction to, processes of change. Crucially, the building boom in the early 1800s, notwithstanding its importance to the development of London, ironically intensified the Romantic obsession with impermanence, and the literary or artistic use of architecture is frequently characterized by the tension between construction and collapse. Buildings, as material artefacts of collective and personal history, can act as records of an age, a nation or an individual life. This thesis examines architecture on two levels, firstly in relation to national identity, and secondly in relation to the individual subject. The discussions aim to highlight the socio-political implications of certain buildings, as well as the affective side of the built environment, as portrayed in imaginative writings that communicate an intensely personal understanding of the changing city and its architecture. Material drawn from literary works and the history of actual buildings is woven together with extracts from periodicals and architectural theory to document the relevance of architecture to Romanticism. The selected works of a number of authors and artists, including Keats, De Quincey, Shelley, Soane and Turner, are read in relation to the literature-architecture interconnections.