No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis provides a detailed overview of the popular fiction of 'Richard Marsh' (pseudonym of Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857-1915). The most extensive such study extant, it examines the author's literary production, in 1880-83 under his given name Bernard Heldmann, and in 1888-1915 under the pseudonym 'Richard Marsh'. By methodically presenting previously uncollected material on . Heldmannl Marsh, the thesis provides a substantial research tool for scholars interested in the author's work. The thesis further analyses the dynamics of the mass market of the turn of the century through a detailed study of Heldmannl Marsh's popular fiction. While the literary production of Bernard Heldmann is considered in the first chapter of the thesis, the remaining three chapters focus on the career and fiction of 'Richard Marsh'. The thesis argues that after his early literary work as Bernard Heldmann in the 1880s, Richard Marsh emerged in the 1890s as a professional provider of popular fiction. The thesis examines his prolificacy, his keen business acumen, his ability to respond to popular demand, and his professional practice as a commercial author. It explores the genres in which Heldmannl Marsh wrote, including boys' adventure and school stories, gothic, and crime fiction, emphasising their topicality and arguing that Heldmannl Marsh's fiction provides us with important insights into public interests and popular culture in the period 1880-1915. While the thesis examines a range of fiction produced by Marsh, it particularly focuses on the generic overlapping that frequently occurs in the author's work. Through a detailed discussion of Marsh's urban gothic and short prison fiction, the thesis analyses how Marsh mixes popular genre fiction with elements from other types of commercially successful, often factual prose. The thesis argues that by fusing material from several genres in this way, Marsh widens the appeal of his fiction which, to contemporary audiences, would have been resonant with factual as well as fictional echoes

Coleridge's Transnatural Poetics examines the simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge's poetry and the fabric of his philosophy. Drawing upon a little-known but extremely rich notebook entry of 1812, the thesis constructs its critical vocabulary through the 'transnatural' and the 'daemonic', as Coleridge uses the terms to define each other and the peculiar qualities of his mind: an imagination fascinated by the transnatural, which in consequence, conceives of itself as daemonic. The thesis proceeds to demonstrate the significance of the principle this represents, as the basis for a new reading of his work. This study focuses primarily on the 1790s, as the period in which Coleridge's spiritual and poetic concerns took shape, but incorporates material from across his notebooks, letters and other prose, in order to demonstrate the continuity as well as the modulation of Coleridge's work. In critical method, the thesis seeks to integrate an informed awareness of social and historical contingencies with a sensitivity to the capacity of language itself to constitute experience. By showing how the 'transnatural' and the 'daemonic' combine to illustrate both the abiding tensions and restless productivity of Coleridge's writing, the thesis throws new light on his relationship with Christianity and Unitarianism; his mythological syncretism; the 'one life' and his organic metaphors of becoming; his psychology of the will and theories of the imagination; his ideas on the Fall and the Prometheus myth; his responses to Shakespeare, Milton and Locke; his crucial relations with Wordsworth, and the vexed concept of 'nature'; his ideas on the poetics of language; his relationship to the literature of the supernatural; and the creative principle of 'poetic faith'. Developing its theme through Coleridge's poetry, including lesser-known works such as 'Melancholy', 'Lewti' and 'The Wanderings of Cain', the exposition builds from 'The Eolian Harp' to 'The FosterMother's Tale', Osorio, 'Frost at Midnight', 'The Nightingale', and a new interpretation of the poems in which Coleridge produced his most compelling myths: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabe1'.

This thesis offers a revisionary analysis of the work of Mona Caird, centred around her rejection of socially-determined gender construction. Caird's contention that the happiness of individuals and the continuing evolution of society depended on releasing both sexes from pressure to conform to artificial gender roles, rather than conformity to 'natural' gendered behaviour, means that she holds a distinctiye position within late-Victorian debates about women's emancipation and post-war discussions about male violence and warfare. Chapters 1 and 2 position Caird within social, literary, and critical contexts, establishing her fundamental belief in individual rights and analysing how her opinions shaped her challenges to the concept that biology decreed destiny. By contextualising Caird's ideas within debates on marriage reform and women's suffrage, as well as among New Woman writers who promoted emancipation through embracing 'natural' roles rooted in women's ability to reproduce, the thesis situates her within fin de siecle controversies while exploring how she diverged from the prevailing views of her time. This study provides a foundation for the body chapters, which use Caird' s fiction to demonstrate her arguments against. and alternatives to, gender construction. Chapter 3 examines her theories on the construction of the individual, focusing on the self-sacrifice demanded of both sexes, while chapters 4 and 5 analyse how the social demand to subdue the individual to the . greater good' became tailored to ideals of femininity and masculinity. Chapter 4 studies Caird' s rejection of woman's 'natural' roles, particularly her subordinate position to her husband, in favour of an 'ideal marriage' which allows women to remain free to develop as individuals. Chapter 5 examines her post-war analysis on the emphasis on violence in the construction of men, the cultivation of which leads to war and the potential annihilation of humanity. Ultimately, Caird reinterprets the idea that struggle leads to evolution, arguing instead that development can occur only when society gives free rein to the creative powers of the individual.