James Miller was born the son of a Dorset rector in 1704. He was himself ordained, but acquired no benefice until just before his early death, probably because of a scathing portrayal of the Bishop of London in one of his verse satires. At Oxford he wrote a vivacious comedy of humours, set in the University. Its production in 1730 began his dramatic career, at a time when the number of London theatres had just doubled, and new dramatic forms were being invented. In 1731 his poem Harlequin-Horace, a witty inversion of the Ars Poetica, attacked pantomime and opera, but also painted a lively portrait of the entire theatrical world, in the tradition of the Dunciad. After collaborating in a translation of Moliere's works Miller wrote two plays based on this author. Of all his dramatic works these were the most successful with his contemporaries, and were followed by a modernisation of Much Ado, and a ballad-opera adapted from an afterpiece by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, and rendered highly topical. Miller made similar use of a recent French comedy showing a Red Indian's reactions to civilisation, a satiric "fable" by Walsh and Voltaire's Mahomet. A large quantity of original material was incorporated into most of these, and this is generally satirical in nature. The Indian is made to voice almost egalitarian sentiments. An afterpiece, "The Camp Visitants", satirised military inaction in the war, and was apparently banned. The manuscripts of the six plays produced after the Licensing Act bear the examiner's deletions, and illustrate the nature of the censorship at this time. Miller's greatest strength is probably his flexible, vigorously colloquial dialogue. His political satire is mostly contained in the poetry, which attacks Walpole's administration with increasing vehemence through the seventeen-thirties, until its fall. In 1740 two poems that used Pope in symbolic contrast to Walpole caused a sensation. In both poetry and plays Miller is also a social satirist, who lays unusually strong emphasis on false taste and the deterioration of culture.

This thesis uses print and manuscript sources to analyse and interpret women's life writing at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I explore printed works by Catharine Phillips, Mary Dudley, Priscilla Hannah Gurney, Ann Freeman, Elizabeth Steele, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, and Charlotte West and discuss the manuscripts of Mary Fletcher, Mary Tooth, Sarah Ryan, and Elizabeth Fox. Of these sources, five have never been analysed in the critical literature and six have received little attention. Considered as a group, this large corpus of texts offers new insights into the personal and political implications of different models of female selfhood and social being. In chapter one, I compare the religious identities presented in the spiritual autobiographies of Quakers and Methodists. For these women, religious identification provides a powerful sense of social belonging and enables public participation. However, it may also lead to a loss of self in the demand for religious conformity and self-abnegation. In chapter two, I consider the life writing of late eighteenth-century courtesans. These women adapt available models of femininity and female authorship in order to establish themselves as socially connected subjects. However, their narratives also reveal that dependence on the sexual and literary marketplace puts female selfhood under pressure. In chapter three, I explore the eyewitness accounts of British women in the French Revolution. I argue that, for these writers, connecting personal identity to political history is an enabling source of self-definition but it also exposes them to the risks of self-fragmentation. In my focus on the social function of women's life writing, I present an alternative to the traditional alignment of the eighteenth-century autobiographical subject with the autonomous self of individualism. These narratives allow us to reconsider the productive and problematic dialectic between personal expression and representative selfhood, self-authorship and collective narratives, and individualism and social being. They suggest that women's life writing has the potential to be both the self-expression of a unique heroine and the self-inscription of a politicised subject.

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In Eighteenth-Century Medical Discourse and Sensible Bodies: Sensibility and Selfhood in the Works of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, I examine how medical, philosophical and theological discourses on sensibility and on selfhood mutually informed one another in the historical moment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England. The key to unravelling the complex notion of sensibility principally lies in the medical discourse that investigated the source of motion, knowledge, and moral feelings. I focus on the medical tracts which can be seen as discursive responses to Locke’s epistemology. In addition, I read eighteenth-century philosophical texts and analysed some of the political debates on the French Revolution. The theory of associationism which is predicted on the study of nerves and sense-impressions throws some light on a particular aspect of sensibility which explores epistemological issues and character formation. I show how the nerve theory operated in gender specific ways, so exposing the gender bias of supposedly objective medical science. The specific writers I discuss, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Shelley, all address the associations theory directly. A close examination of their appropriation of medical language reveals that the image of the sensible body was a constant source of inspiration, and that their literary production was a continual process of re-figuring such a medicalised body. My project attempts to make sense of the equivocal position of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, who, while upholding rationalism, avow sensibility in their literary and non-literary works. The underlying contradictions between the associationism and the authority of the individual’s mind run deep. Rather than illustrating feminine reticence in Shelley’s Frankenstein as a cultural reflection of a “proper lady,” I argue that her characterisation of the monster and of female characters must be read as complex articulations of her sentiments about the discourses on sensibility and the problem of human agency.

The dissertation identifies two major lines of thought within the idea of 'solitude': the theme of retirement, a concern with social setting and environment, leading to retreat to the country; and the theme of isolation, a philosophical concern with individual identity and relationship with the world. It traces the development, through the eighteenth century and specifically in Coleridge and Wordsworth, from the overwhelming predominance of the retirement theme, to a concentration on the issues of isolation, springing out of but superseding those of retirement. The idea of solitude moves from a conoern with physical environment to an inspection of the processes of mind and its interaction with the world. Four eighteenth-century poets are discusaed, and the tensions that develop within their work: Thomson's reconciliation of retirement and action; Gray's concentration on the problem of serviceability in the world; Beattie's Minstrel who moves from isolation to the lessons of social experience; and Cowper's retreat which must yet generate useful employment. The dissertation turns briefly, for a comparison of differences in approach, to the works of Zimmerman and Rousseau, before focusing on the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. It explores Coleridge's Conversation Poems, and the Ancient Mariner, referring also to the later prose writing and notebooks, and discusses Coleridge's concern with an individual's attempts to impose his own approach upon reality; the need to learn both individuality and acquiescence; and the search, continually renewed, for a resolving synthesis between them. Wordsworth's poetry is examined in detail, in particular his approach to the great solitary figures and to his own solitude; his probing of the balance between individual, distinct existence and absorption in the world; his realisation, ultimately, of the need for an understanding, not a resolution, of the tensions within the dilemma of self and relationship.

This thesis introduces the figure of the Romantic revenant-veteran to the discourse surrounding Romanticism and war, charting the development of this character type in relation to depictions of returning soldiers in the eighteenth century. The project begins with an exploration of the literary Broken Soldier, a traditional image of the war veteran that evolves into a revenant form as the Revolutionary War with France begins. This new and strange revenant figure is a ghostly borderer who, embodying the indescribable, challenges language itself within the struggle to articulate the realities of wartime anxiety. In these terms, the study considers the artistic mediation of the effects of war returning to the home-front during a period of unprecedented global conflict, and demonstrates the deployment of spectral tropes that elucidate a range of anxieties present in British society during the 1790s. The accompanying image of the bereft woman found amid literary accounts of separation and death during this period extends the revenant’s reach. Thus, we see how a number of authors attempt to defamiliarise images of war presented to the public in the last decade of the century, bringing about a reconsideration of home-front war experience filtered through literature. Romantic revenant-veterans signify physical, emotional and socio-economic turmoil, highlighting the fates of surviving victims of war condemned to a post-bellum death-in-life. These spectral figures investigate the consequences of war at the level of the physical and political, the ethical and spiritual, as well as from psychological and economic viewpoints; these works show that the imaginative efficacy of language to mediate war is ruptured, leaving only unstable images of the uncertain limits of violence in a new era of ideological and potentially boundless warfare.

There are three appendices - an analysis of Erasmus Schmid's policy in establishing his text of the first Pythian, a note on Milton and Pindar, and a transcription of Thomas Gray's notes on Pindar.

In this dissertation I consider the travels, and the travel and other non-fictional writings, of five women who travelled within Scotland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the anonymous author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland; Sarah Murray (later known as Sarah Aust); Anne Grant of Laggan, Dorothy Wordsworth; and Sarah Hazlitt. During this period, travel and tourism in Scotland changed radically from a time when there were few travellers and little provision for those few, through to Scotland's emergence as a fully organised tourist destination. Simultaneous with these changes came changes in writing. I examine the changes in the ways in which travellers travelled in, perceived and wrote about Scotland during the period 1770-1830. I explore the specific ways in which five women travel writers represented themselves and their travels. I investigate the relationship of gender to the travel writings produced by these five women, relating that to issues of production and reception as well as to questions of discourse. Finally, I explore the relationship between the geographical location of travels and travel writing.

This thesis addresses the relationship between colonial literature and disease. Focusing on literary and medical texts written in and about the British Caribbean during the period 1764-1834, I use the framing concept of ‘medicalization’ to emphasize the cultural imperative to respond to colonial disease and to establish the points of intersection between literary and medical encounters with illness in the tropics. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has examined a literary paradigm engaged with medical knowledge, and critics have embraced the idea of illness as an experience which is shaped by language and culture. There remains a critical gap, however, in accounts of medicine in terms of its generic characteristics, and of how literary forms impact upon medical knowledge. Furthermore, while several scholars have developed accounts of colonial disease in terms of their metropolitan literary repercussions, writing from the colonies has played only a subsidiary role. My interdisciplinary approach engages with disease, literature and medicine as forms of narrative. Understanding both disease and medicine as culturally constituted ‘narratives’, I situate them in relation to textual narratives, in order to address the relationship between literature and medicine in three key ways. Firstly, I consider the thematic and stylistic points of overlap between literary and medical rhetorical strategies; secondly, I examine the textual consequences of writing about illness, and, thirdly, I use the idea of ‘contagion’ to connect ideas about language and disease. By addressing not only the issues of why the vocabulary of medicine featured so prominently in colonial literary texts and how this medical impetus took shape, but also the effects of literary modes on medical textuality, I trace the points of conceptual and structural transfer between literary and medical writing.

From the introduction: So vast is the body of published work on Burns that one must justify yet another study of the poet. From 1786 to the present, his life and poetry have always had popular appeal. In his lifetime, he was an object of attention to all classes of society, from Ayrshire peasants to the habitue of Edinburgh drawing-roans, and detractors, idolaters, and disinterested parties have continued to scrutinize his achievements and failings. Popular attention has never wavered. In the nineteenth century especially, many and varied editions of Burns's poetry were published to satisfy this curiosity. Some were lavish, some cheap; some accurate, others, wildly imaginative. Nor has this demand noticeably slackened in the present century. Not a year passes without some book or pamphlet, albeit ephemeral, being published on Burns. To the scholarly mind, "popular", when applied to Burns studies, usually implies superficiality and this assumption all too often proves correct. It can hardly be said that the best minds of each age since Burns's death have considered him worthy of their critical attention in the way that Shakespeare, or Dante, or Milton have engaged scholars, editors, and publishers in succeeding generations. Byron, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Emerson, Carlyle, and Mac=armid have commented on Burns, and in the nineteenth century important and durable editorial work was undertaken. Nevertheless, it remains true that it was not until the twentieth century, and then only in bursts, that there developed a scholarly, academic interest to match the popular enthusiasm for Robert Burns.