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This thesis argues that eighteenth-century British narratives of the nation's past and of the history of women significantly inform and shape early women's Gothic fiction. Foregrounding the idea of the Gothic as a genre preoccupied with national identity, it looks again at the coordinates of Gothic fiction to investigate novels set in Britain. It analyzes in detail novels written between 1777 and c.1802 by Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays. The study examines the uses of Gothic tropes in such texts in the light of British political crises and societal tensions, exploring how these intersect with specifically gendered concerns. Such an approach shifts the emphasis in discussions of national identity in the genre; it no longer has to be primarily seen as negotiated in relation to a foreign other. Instead, this refocusing throws light on the detail of the national historical narratives that the mode manipulates. My awareness of the multivalency of the Gothic in historico-political contexts also exposes the diversity of its use in women's fiction. The project thus aims to produce a more nuanced, historically-aware map of early women's Gothic writing.

For metropolitan Britons, the American War of Independence began as a traumatic civil war and ended as a global conflict that threatened the integrity of home and empire. This thesis examines the ways in which writers of popular fiction engaged with that crisis, considers why their preoccupation with the dispute continued for so many years after the peace treaty was signed, and suggests some reasons why the subject ceased to resonate as the century drew to a close. Through a series of individual case studies it explores the diverse ways in which the war is presented in a selection of novels published in Britain during the 1780s and 1790s, and reveals how they are shaped in response to contemporary political imperatives. There has been a tendency to associate the overt politicization of the novel with the intellectual and political ferment of the 1790s but my research shows that this was not the case. Political critique was a key element in fictional representations of the American War. Topical controversies were hotly debated, the morality of the conflict was fiercely contested, and competing constructions of patriotism, nation and empire were interrogated and explored. Few of these works have been studied, however. Charlotte Smith, Robert Bage and Helen Maria Williams are better known for their radical responses to the French Revolution than for their fictional engagement with the events of the American War, whilst writers such as Samuel Jackson Pratt, Eliza Parsons and George Walker are now almost entirely forgotten. Nevertheless, the novels in this study are worthy of attention. Irrespective of their literary merit, which in some cases is considerable, they offer unique insights into the ways in which British writers and readers engaged with the politics of war, empire and revolution both before and after the momentous events of 1789.

This thesis argues that Sterne's fiction is an ambiguous representation with religious and libidinal subtexts of a struggle to give a coherent metaphysical account both of the significance of compassion for suffering and of causality. This implies that Sterne's fiction cannot be fully understood without reference to eighteenth-century arguments about the compatibility of belief in the power and goodness of God with the existence of evil otherwise known as the theodicy debate. This becomes clear when analysed with Slavoj 'i–ek's concept of the fetish: the lie which enables one to live with an unendurable truth. The thesis is organised into six chapters. After setting Sterne's fiction in the context of contemporaneous theodicies, these examine in turn its theodictic features, its narrative procedures, its representations of mortality and class hierarchy, and its relationship to Sentimentalism. It shows that in each of these areas two of the major themes of contemporaneous theodicies are also fetishised subtexts in Sterne's fiction: the religious attachment to the Newtonian idea of a perfectly ordered cosmos and the anxiety that the unmanaged appetite for pleasure might provoke divine displeasure. An array of concepts from 'i–ek identify the theodictic implications of the fictions – the author as the omniscient 'subject supposed to know�; the 'Master-Signifier' that is meant to define the narrator's role but fails because of a repressed remainder that it cannot encompass; the mechanisms by which subjects interpret experiences as messages from the divine; the idea of language as a reality that can outlive the subject; and the theory that the prospect of rational social order can be psychologically unendurable. Sterne's fiction highlights the fact that fiction often trades on the reader's need for comprehensible patterns of causality: its refusal to provide this is theodictic and this fact has hitherto received no extended critical attention.

The 1720s was a decade of crisis in Ireland. Jonathan Swift's occasional writings from these years extend the country's political and economic crises into dramas of personal and national identity. Part One of this thesis investigates the material conditions of the relationship between Swift, his Irish audience, and the underlying problems of identity that such an audience simultaneously poses and occludes. Part Two is an anatomy of the literary modes through which that relationship is figured. The first chapter offers the 1720 Declaratory Act as an important subtext for Swift's 'inaugural' work of the decade, the 1720 Proposalfor the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture. Challenging retrospective constructions of the author's textual and political authority, the chapter examines how Swift the 'Hibernian patriot' was largely an invention of the crisis surrounding the act. Chapter Two argues that The Drapier's Letters reconfigure the language that had been used in the past to depict the Catholic threat to Protestant Ireland, and use it to depict the threat emerging from England. Part Two moves to the question of identity, which Chapter Three designates a kind of 'style', both a mode of expression and a trend in polite society. The writing of history and the social signification of language are the main concerns of this chapter, which investigates how Irish historiography becomes the focus for a range of concerns in the 1720s. Chapter Four nominates the pastoral genre as an alternative vehicle for the reading and writing of history in Swift's Ireland. It identifies a Virgilian dialectic of expropriation and protection by a patron as an important method of 'reading' oneself into history and identity. Looking at various manifestations of crisis in Ireland in 1729 - famine, fuel shortages and emigration, the final chapter argues that A Modest Proposal uses techniques of allegory to produce a crisis of interpretation. By promoting and perpetuating misreading, it mirrors the pervasive climate of error that produced this text. As a whole the thesis documents three transitions. It traces the emergence of a parodic method of literary and political representation which eventually overwhelms any claims Swift's writing might once have made to positive advocacy. Once considered the dominant and definitive voice of 1720s Ireland, Swift is re-appraised as one writer among many, and his writing as a product of his society rather than an authoritative comment on it. Finally, the Presbyterians of Ireland are shown to emerge by the end of the decade as the primary focus for the anxieties and aggressions that animate Swift's occasional writings.