This thesis provides a comprehensive and distinctive analysis of the Anglo-Irish agrarian novel. It argues that these novels constitute a significant sub-genre within Irish Studies - albeit one that has been neglected and perhaps misconstrued. The thesis is divided into three main parts, each reflecting different literary and political approaches to the Irish Land Question. All contribute to an understanding of the opportunities and problems facing authors who together created a tradition covering almost the entire nineteenth century. The thesis seeks to establish a canon consisting of eight agrarian novelists and upwards of sixteen novels. Of necessity, this canon is interrogated primarily in ideological rather than in stylistic terms. The scope is deliberately broad. Instead of focussing on minute deconstruction of the textual dynamics of a single work, the thesis explores the wider connections and complex correspondences among a substantial group of writers. Though flawed, their joint contribution to the debate on the Land Question was significant and provides valuable historical and literary insights. There have been those who minimize its significance but this thesis maintains that the Anglo-Irish agrarian novel is a genuine literary terrain that deserves proper exploration. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to the task of mapping the territory of the agrarian novel and incorporates elements of cultural materialist methodology. This is clearly evidenced in Chapter One - which partly places the sub-genre within the context of other areas in Europe that were contested in terms of land, religion or culture. The first section explores the impact of Maria Edgeworth, the first writer to present the central issues of the Land Question in prose fiction; she was also the first to offer a blueprint for a solution. The thesis seeks to demonstrate that it was Edgeworth's agenda that dominated Anglo-Irish fiction before the Famine and continued to exert a powerful influence during the remainder of the century. Gerald Griffin and the Banim brothers, the first Catholic agrarian novelists, sought to bring new dimensions to Edgeworth's essentially landowner-orientated agenda. Yet their attempts to broaden it and to make it more Irish encountered difficulties. Their desire to radicalize Edgeworth's analysis was frustrated by a loss of faith in the tenantry and arguably by an inability to use the conventional format of the three-volume novel to portray the political realities they perceived. William Carleton was the most successful agrarian novelist after Edgeworth but, despite his more flexible representation of the Land Question - involving what some critics regarded as apostasy - Carleton still remained a prisoner of Edgeworth's agenda. Significantly, all the writers discussed in this section eventually abandoned their attempts to solve the Land Question through the medium of prose fiction and turned to other areas of interest. The second section begins by examining the culturally lean years that followed the Famine. It shows that the political and literary famine was broken first by the emergence of Fenianism and then by its literary portrayal in the works of Charles Kickham and indeed in those of his apparent polar opposite - the honorary Irishman Anthony Trollope. Despite their differences however, neither Kickham nor Trollope believed that the solution to the Land Question could be found within Ireland. Rather, they looked overseas - to America (Kickham) or to England (Trollope). Regardless of their wider horizons and distinctive contributions, the solutions proposed by Kickham and Trollope proved at least as confused and contradictory as those suggested by the authors examined in the first section. The third section focuses on Thomas Moore and Bram Stoker. Earlier identification of the problems encountered by those who sought a solution to the Land Question in the context of realist literary forms raises the possibility of an alternative approach - that of fantasy. This is a common feature of Moore and Stoker's work. While Moore's book predates all the authors apart from Edgeworth, the unique, fantasy quality of his Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824), separates him from the more or less rational worlds of Edgeworth and of those who, like her, at least glimpsed a solution. Thus we must look to Moore to discover the origins of the only other work in the canon that challengeso r even surpassesE dgeworth's preeminence - Stoker's Dracula (1897). Superficially, Stoker merely transplants exploration of the Land Question from Ireland to Transylvania, but the novel also deals with issues ignored by other writers. Dracula not only looks to the past but also to the future and forms a bridge between the conventional agrarian novel and the innovative, urbanized, literary forms later pioneered by lames Joyce. This analysis facilitates a new interpretation of the categorization of the Anglo-Irish agrarian novel. The thesis concludes that earlier attempts at categorization, especially the theories of accents proposed by W. B. Yeats, Daniel Corkery and subsequent commentators (chapters I and 9), fail to understand either the most important similarities or the differences between the agrarian novelists. Instead, it proposes a new schema whose format is suggested in the three parts of the thesis described above: namely that the real divisions are between those who follow the tradition of Edgeworth, those who look to foreign solutions and those who privilege the fantastic or surreal.

In nineteenth-century England one of the most popular types of civil legal actions was the suit for breach of promise of marriage, wherein the plaintiff, most often a woman, could bring an action to recover financial damages from a man to whom she was engaged if he failed to fulfil his promise to marry her. When brought to trial these actions provided a point of intersection for competing ideologies of marriage, gender, and common law, and as such generated a substantial amount of interest from the politicians who legislated them, the legal community that regulated their practice, and the general reading public whose behaviour they governed. This interest resulted in the production of a variety of texts that incorporated or reported on issues of breach of promise, including legal practice manuals instructing solicitors and barristers on how to handle the cases when in court, published proceedings and newspaper articles giving reports of culturally interesting or significant trials, and novels that incorporated actions for breach of promise into their romantic plots. However, because of the monologic nature of the legal environment, which I term the chronotope of the courtroom, the majority of these genres frequently represented actions for breach of promise in a manner that reproduced the unassailable, authoritarian discourses of the courtroom rather than attempting to explore the inherently problematic nature of such discourses and the legal fictions they construct. The exception to this is the dialogic novel, which I argue was developing throughout the time period under investigation in this thesis. For, by drawing on the theories of language and the novel developed by Mikhail Bakhtin and other members of the Bakhtin Circle, this thesis suggests that it is only that developing genre that is capable of portraying the struggle that occurs between the centripetal and centrifugal forces of culture within a given text, and hence of representing the essential 'messiness' of actions for breach of promise of marriage. In this thesis these characteristics will be examined at various moments in the evolution of the genre, by considering texts from three prominent authors at different periods of their artistic careers. Hence the key fictional texts of this thesis are Charles Dickens's novels Pickwick Papers and Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell's first and last novels, Mary Barton and Wives and Daughters, and Anthony Trollope's first novel The Macdermots of Ballycloran and his later works The Small House at Allington and The Eustace Diamonds.

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Both Coleridge and Mill are diverse minds, who assimilated and in turn influenced vast tracts of thought. To offer to study these two men together is to invite the sort of disaster which overcame so many of Coleridge's over-large projects. Because of the need to keep the subject within limits. I have had to sacrifice three types of material. Firstly, there was no space to analyse the contributions of other thinkers who influenced Mill and Coleridge, or both. Discussions of Burke, Carlyle, Macaulay, Bentham, James Mill, Comte, and Tocqueville fell by the wayside early on. Secondly, a comparison of the philosophies of Mill and Coleridge suggested many tempting lanes of thought which would have led deep into the traditional battlefields of philosophy. This thesis, however. is about Coleridge's influence. I have therefore restricted the account of their philosophy to what exposition was necessary to form a background to this study. Thirdly, many points, denied space in the text, could have flourished unchecked in the notes. I have, however, adopted the principle that where a comment was relevant it should be made in the text, and the notes have been kept exclusively for references. records alphabetically works actually cited. I have not made a separate list of primary sources, or of the works of Mill or Coleridge, because there are already adequate bibliographies available. The second part has two purposes. Firstly, it records what I have consulted in the course of the work. Secondly, it offers a list of references for anyone else pursuing a similar topic.

This thesis studies Dickens' changing response to the city over his writing career, from the early 1830s to 1870. By examining certain events in his life, and by utilising his journalism, letters and minor writings, and. also by exploring some of the changes in the city and attitudes toward. it during the nineteenth century, a broad pattern of development has been discerned in the novels. Dickens' literary career began with the fictional discovery of the city in Sketches by Boz, which helped inaugurate a radically new mode of urban literature. His early novels, from Pickwick Papers to The Old. Curiosity Shop, are dominated by an urge to escape the city, and to find peace in a semi-fictional pastoral retreat. Beginning with Barnaby Budge, and with more explicitness in Martin Chuzzlewit, the early middle novels return to the city, and embrace it as the quintessentiafly modern form of social life. Dickens' later middle novels, Bleak House and Hard Times, again reject the city, but do so with a much more sophisticated social and political critique, as an environment which has through governmental and societal inaction become overwhelmed by the pressing problems of rapid change. Little Dorrit is Dickens' most despairing novel, in which London becomes the pbysical correlative of Dickens' crisis of will in the late l850s. A Tale of Two Cities, The Uncommercial Traveller, and Great Expectations represent a fictional and literal search for a mature accommodation with London and city life, a search which freed Dickens to write his most complex and profound endorsement of the city in Our Mutual Friend. Dickens' last writings, including the unfinished Edwin Drood, point toward a new attitude toward the city, a consideration of which increases our understanding of the nature of Dickens' unique accomplishment as a city writer.

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This thesis is a psycho-analysis working backwards: beginning with biographical details, it analyses the peculiar brilliance of Carroll's works as inventions which allow him to master his psychic conflict. An acute, perfect equilibrium of desire and morality is understood as underlying Carroll's paralysis as a social and speaking subject (his stutter, his celibacy). The extraordinary genius of the Alice books is seen as the result of a creative overcoming of this conflict, rather than merely an expression of unconscious desires. The thesis takes its bearings from a detailed exploration of two aspects of Carroll's work: the virtual and the portmanteau. In tracing the etymology and senses of the term 'virtual', I uncover and deploy a new definition in which the 'virtual' refers simultaneously to desire and to the morality which prohibits it. Reading Carroll from this new perspective, the portmanteau emerges as virtual in both form and effect. The portmanteau collapses two or more words together in a way that refuses to grant priority. It is then read as a triumphant refusal to disturb the perfect balance of Carroll's psychic conflict. This use of the virtual is conversely, virtually a portmanteau, that is: 'in essence or effect, although not formally or actually' ('virtual' sense 4. a. OED). The virtual and the portmanteau thus intersect and interpenetrate in an original configuration, throwing new light on Carroll's continuing legacy in relation to both literature and film. This virtual-portmanteau formation is thus used to read Carroll's literary work (as well as his illustrations and his photography) and its ongoing effects in three virtual reality texts: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Jeff Noon's Automated Alice, and Larry and Andy Wachowski's Matrix film trilogy.

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