This thesis develops a critical approach to women’s experience by engaging with phenomenology and modernist poetics of place. It critiques the androcentricity of phenomenology and philosophical abstractions of gender and space, arguing that a feminist phenomenology with its focus on alternative modes of being in a diverse but socially and gender-stratified world can more aptly articulate experiential specificities that neither fortify nor fit into conventional paradigms of experience. This thesis discusses the imaginative and aesthetic rendering of women’s experiences of rooms in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover,” “Pink May,” and “Hand in Glove.”

This thesis is an investigation into the formation of white belonging in South Africa, focalised through what I call the institutions of literary colonialism – the public library, the postal service, and the colonial press. I also use George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, both of whom had personal connections to South Africa, as case studies. Their interactions with the three institutions of literary colonialism allow me to situate their works within the colonial institutional setting of which they formed a part, and also facilitate an investigation into how the exercise of white power over the indigenous African population was aided by literary and cultural institutions. However, rather than tracing a history of white settlement in the Cape, this thesis argues that white belonging was founded on a sense of unsettlement and ambivalence, which was articulated through the institutions of literary colonialism. At the heart of this project is a tension between the Cape colonists’ desire to imitate and emulate British literary practices, whilst at the same time begin to articulate a sense of ‘colonial nationalism’ though the development of white settler literary culture, institutions and forms of knowledge. I argue that this tension was the driving force behind the development of the Cape’s literary culture. Whilst the remoteness and insularity of the Cape meant that its cultural institutions were dependant on imported metropolitan cultural norms and products, its distance from the metropole also enabled the development of a distinct and unique literary culture. I explore this entanglement of desires for colonial autonomy and for sustained connections to Britain by interrogating how literary culture was ‘made’ in the Cape Colony.

This thesis aims to delineate the affordances and limitations of narrative, and narrative studies, for the project of developing new ways of understanding, interacting with, and caring for people with dementia. Engaging with a growing body of contemporary dementia narratives, it investigates the potential of life writing and fiction as a means for exploring the phenomenology of dementia. In particular, the study considers the extent to which dementia narratives align with or run counter to the dominant discourse of dementia as ‘loss of self.’ In considering the question of selfhood and identity, the study highlights the need to attend to embodied and relational aspects of identity in dementia—as well as in the stories we tell about dementia. Finally, even as the thesis disputes the idea that the modes of empathy fostered by narrative lead in any direct or simple way to more humane care practices, overall the analysis suggests ways in which both fictional and non-fictional narratives may contribute to the development of dementia care—particularly to the ethical exploration of caregiving dilemmas. From a broader perspective, in engaging with dementia narratives across genres and media, this thesis demonstrates how ideas from literary narratology bear relevantly on current debates about the role of narrative in the medical or health humanities.

No description available.

This thesis explores the central importance of locations to the soldiers' experience of the First World War. In particular, it examines the ways in which place forms their sense of identity during the War, and colours their memories after it. The Western Front, through years of concentrated bombardment, became a vast and confusing broken landscape. For the soldiers who inhabited this landmark-barren terrain a new geographical context was required to explain their condition and situation. As villages, woods and roads were beaten into non-existence the interlocking system of trenches was the only remaining geographical construct that held any meaning. The soldiers discovered and developed a geography of identity based on proximity to the front line. This new map of the trenches is not plotted through cartography, but through the literature the soldiers produced. Using trench journals (magazines written by and for the soldiers of a particular unit), popular fiction by serving soldiers, and the memoirs of war correspondents, I examine the ways in which the soldier identity is constructed and represented. While the landscape of the trenches is stringently associated with this soldier identity, it also acts as a topographical barrier to accurate and authentic observation of the 'real' soldier. The end of the war and the aba donment and reconstruction of the Western Front did not diminish the significance of the trenches for those who had fought there. I examine the writings of ex-servicemen, both fiction and memoir, and analyse the passing of their war-time identity, as well as the dislocation involved in considering a place that no longer exists. The thesis charts the relationship between the soldier and the geography of the trenches both during and after the war in an effort to understand the contrasting associations and dislocations that the landscape of the Western Front created as presented in the writings of soldiers.

No description available.

My purpose has been to discover and present all that is known of Moses Wall (1606?-1664+). In approximately 62,000 words this study addresses the three main aspects of his work. 1 HOUSE OF LORDS DEPOSITIONS. These documents were officially destroyed but secretly copied. I found and examined them in the House of Lords archive. I present detailed considerations of the material and the implications of Moses Wall's close involvement with Sir Harry Vane, as messenger and as spy for the Independents. 2 TRANSLATION OF SPES ISRAELIS. As a scholar and millennial idealist Moses Wall was the anonymous translator for the first English edition of Spes Israelis by the Dutch Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel. Responding to MP Edward Spencer's reply, the second edition contained a cogent and well-argued Discourse by Wall, establishing a rational and religious case for readmitting the Jews as citizens of England. I establish the context and consequences of this work. 3 CORRESPONDENCE with SAMUEL HARTLIB and JOHN MILTON. Fourteen letters written by Moses Wall between 1652 and 1660 are available from the Hartlib archive. They offer political, personal and practical information, with rare insights into daily survival under the Commonwealth. In my work these letters are edited and examined as a body for the first time. Together with supporting detail from other sources I show how these offer a living record of the man Moses Wall and his achievement. I offer the possibility that these letters conveyed more than their immediate meaning. One single letter from Moses Wall to John Milton survives, well known and discussed by Milton scholars. In the context of other material here presented, this is perceived as a source of inspiration and influence from 1659 to1980.

This thesis considers how women in the nineteenth century used a variety of literary genres to write theology, when formal theological channels were closed to them. Each chapter considers a different literary genre and different writers. Features of genre are foregrounded as I consider how each writer constructs meanings and addresses her audience, and what the implications were for them as women writing this way. It departs from the specifically feminist approach of many studies of women's theology, to explore a range of women's attempts to find an adequate spirituality. Emma Jane Worboise's popular novels and biography of Thomas Arnold construct parables in which 'feminine' Christian values are extended to the public world. The poetry of Anne Bronte debates with Calvinism, and with the Romantic and Evangelical ideals of intense personal communion with the divine. Harriet Martineau creates a religion for middle-class liberals through her essays for the Unitarian periodical the Monthly Repository. She embodies a new model of a theologian who has earned her authority through the press. The autobiographies of the intellectuals Frances Power Cobbe and Annie Besant also do this, as they present themselves as creators of post-Christian theologies. Autobiographies by Margaret Howitt and Margaret Oliphant rather evaluate the emotional adequacy of belief. Other writers anticipate some late twentieth-century developments in theology. The writers of collective biography, while addressing distinctly Victorian gender issues, also offer a form of feminist Bible criticism. Josephine Butler creates a 'liberation' theology in her political speeches against legalised prostitution. The perspective of women's theology, expressed in literary forms, brings to light writers who, while forgotten today, were significant in the nmeteenth-century context. It also enables a new appreciation of authors who are better-known for other achievements.

This thesis explores a conceptual understanding of the body as an economy of “energy”. It examines the range of real and imaginary practices that this understanding inspired, and the ways in which bodily energy was defined, discussed and culturally represented in Britain and the US across the period 1870-1925. Drawing selectively on a wide range of primary sources – scientific writing, popular science periodicals, newspaper commentaries, literary fiction and silent film – it identifies pervasive preoccupations with corporeal functionality and vitality, and considers these in relation to key social, cultural and economic changes. Employing a cultural materialist approach, and including marginal texts and little-studied archival materials in its enquiry, this study integrates cultural and scientific forms to illuminate the ways in which literary and filmic texts intersected with medical and commercial designs for the ideal body of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century capitalism: energized, productive, appetitive and youthful. Prevailing critical approaches both in the history of medicine and in literary studies of this period have predominantly been defined by an interest in narratives of “degeneration”. This thesis identifies discourses surrounding the regulation, restoration and rejuvenation of bodily energy as projects of corporeal “regeneration”, and scrutinizes the ideological and creative characteristics of the materials in which they were expressed. Part I considers discussions and representations of fatigue, neurasthenia and idleness as categories of “arrested” energy, alongside interventionist strategies such as electrotherapy and Taylorism, which sought to liberate the body’s productive potential. Part II examines the discursive formation of old age as a state of “expended” energy, together with corresponding interests in the medical and cultural possibilities of “rejuvenation”: the restoration of the body’s youthful vigour. This interdisciplinary approach, combining elements from the History of Medicine, Labour History, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, and Film Studies, facilitates distinct contributions to each of these areas. In addition, synthesizing materials from each field sheds new light on an expansive network of interlinked and mutually-illuminating discourses relating to bodily energy, the full extent of which has, until now, been largely obscured by a more conventional scholarly adherence to disciplinary boundaries.

This thesis interrogates the role of the sea’s agency in the construction and mediation of selfhood in travel narratives and poetry from the period 1768-1834. The sea in these texts functions to challenge and modify selfhood, both of seafarers and those mourning the loss of someone at sea. Its instability and inherent hostility to human life positions it as a threat, requiring a response in order to preserve the self. These challenges to selfhood are presented as a series of boundaries that are either crossed or reinforced. The sea facilitates travel that literally crosses boundaries – longitude, latitude, and nation, for example – as well as reaffirms them, such as the need for the solid footing of ship or shore to survive. Present in all these engagements with the sea is death, positioned as the final boundary to be transgressed. In chapter one the journals of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks are interrogated to expose the influence the sea has on selfhood during voyages of exploration, and how it influences Cook’s legacy. It also explores the potential connection between the journals and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. Chapter two explores the sublime in the narrative of John Byron, before looking at its function and the agency of the sea in the nautical poems of Lord Byron. Chapter three investigates the topic of elegy in the poetry of William Wordsworth, looking at whether, as a poetic form, the elegy can function as a grave for those who are lost at sea. Chapter four continues this interrogation of elegy in the works of Louisa Stuart Costello and Charlotte Smith. In the conclusion, I draw together these threads, using the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley to demonstrate the effect the sea’s agency has on selfhood.