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George MacDonald exhausted his genius before he fully discovered it. A novelist by neceasity, he was a myth-maker by nature and became by choice a preacher and a poet. It is his mythopoeic talent, first recognized by the late Professor C.S. Lewis, that is the main interest in this thesis. There is a strong temptation for any sensitive reader of MacDonald's life and writings to present him as a saint; in this study, however, his qualifications for sainthood, have been carefully overlooked. Nevertheless, the biographical material in. his works is extensive; and because his son, Dr. Greville MacDonald's George MacDonald and His Wife1 is cumbersome in form and cautious in content, I have included biographical data, pertinent to MacDonald' s poetry, in Chapter One and at the beginning of subsequent chapters. Almost all of MacDonald's writings are now out of print. I have, however, consulted (when available) first editiona, incomplete collections, periodicals, and the few recent reprints, Photographic material represents, for the most part, iteins either not found in the Biography or otherwise difficult to obtain, and therefore of interest for more than biographical reasona. My study of the poetry specifically has been centred in a reading of manuscript sources, Most of which are unpublished. These sources I have listed in an "Index to MSS Located and Consulted" as part of the bibliography. Throughout the thesis, in accordance with helograph letters, I have regularized the spelling, by capitalization of the "d" of MacDonald's surname.

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This thesis examines the life and prose works of Amelia Opie. It explores the moral and social ideology of the novels and tales, setting them in the context of Opie's own ideological development as she moves from the radicalism of the 1790s, through a period of intellectual and religious uncertainty to her conversion to Quakerism in 1825. It draws on a detailed analysis of all Opie's extant writing in prose, including a comprehensive survey of her letters. Biographical criticism has been rather unfashionable in recent years, though this is beginning to change. The argument put forward here is that only through detailed biographical case studies is it possible to understand the complex and shifting alignments and allegiances of the period 1790 to 1830. This has often been characterised as an era in which both society and literature were highly polarised, with a clear division between radicals and conservatives. Careful analysis of Opie's life and work reveals the difficulties involved in categorising her in either camp, and her case exemplifies the way in which this very limited, and limiting, perspective can misrepresent or oversimplify the position of individuals within this period. Opie's position was both complex at any given time, embodying elements of both radical and conservative thought, and developed and changed over time in response to public and private events. Attempts to see her as a radical, on the one hand, or conservative, on the other, are bound to distort the interpretation of her writings and the assessment of her wider significance as a writer. This thesis therefore aims to provide a new insight into the work of Amelia Opie and also to represent the importance and value of a biographically sensitive criticism to a full understanding of both individual writers and the periods in which they work. An appendix to the thesis provides an annotated register of approximately four hundred of her letters, giving details of their location.

In his 1973 essay ‘Reflections on Meaning and Structure’, B.F. Skinner asks ‘what is gained from dancing in chains’: he wonders why poets ‘submit to the restrictions imposed by a prior specification of form or structure’. Through an examination of the poetry and poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, this thesis offers an answer to Skinner’s inquiry. Hopkins is an especially appropriate subject for such a study because the ‘restrictions’ that he submits to, both metrical (sprung rhythm) and non-metrical (his dense phonetic parallelisms), are particularly severe. The complicated and uncertain basis for Hopkins’s prosody provokes questions about the nature of metricality, and so the first chapter concerns itself with a general appraisal of prosodic theory. The principles argued for here provide the conceptual foundation for the subsequent analysis of sprung rhythm. Chapter 2 explores Hopkins’s wider aesthetic, focusing on his conviction that artistic success requires not only symmetry, but also variety; and that, crucially, this variety must be met by, and subordinated to, a corresponding strictness. His non-metrical effects are also considered through an extended comparisons with nonsense poetry, which yields the radical suggestion that in Hopkins’s poetry (in an inversion of the traditional rubric) sense may seem an echo to the sound. Chapter 3 examines Hopkins’s account of his prosody and finds that he has been widely misunderstood, from Bridges to the present day, notably regarding his recommendations for scansion. Learning from this, the final chapter investigates the metrical character of sprung rhythm in order to assess if it really is, as Hopkins insisted, ‘stricter, not looser than the common prosody’. Quantitative and stress-based restrictions are considered, rendering two, complementary explanations: that sprung rhythm is isochronous; and that this ‘strictness’ is further refined by rules pertaining to the ‘length or strength’ of syllables within the so-called ‘weak’ and ‘strong positions’ of his lines. In vindicating Hopkins’s claim to metrical ‘strictness’, these interpretations challenge the predominant critical opinion that sprung rhythm is merely an unbuttoned, and idiosyncratic, expression of simple accentual metre.

This thesis examines the relation between Scott's fiction and the late eighteenth-century feminine domestic novel as it appears at the interlinked levels of discourse and plot in the Scottish Waverley novels themselves. Scott's fiction brought a new sort of realism to the novel in its enlightenment understanding of society and history as objects of knowledge, but the plots of the novels are not used to signify social or historical reality. Because social history has no ending, narrative closure is provided instead by extra-historical agents in the text. In Part One I examine how this autonomous agency is derived from the autonomy of young women characters in <I>Waverley, Guy Mannering</I> and <I>The Black Dwarf</I>, an autonomy they owe to their status as signifiers of the domestic fiction which dominated the novel in the decades before 1814. The language of the feminine domestic novel appears within the first half of each text in opposition to the realist discourse of the general narrator. This feminine discourse then disappears from the text, but remains as an other to its realist discourse in the form of an agency which can bring the plot to a proper ending as its realist discourse alone cannot. In the last two instances this agency is associated with folk-culture and the supernatural, and I suggest that its owes its survival within the text to its availability as an object of knowledge in that realist discourse, even while it owes its efficacy to the discourse of the domestic novel. Thus the plots of these novels suppress feminine discourse while ultimately depending on it for their closure. It might be, of course, that Scott is obliged to locate his new type of fiction in relation to this established genre in the early novels as a way of making his texts accessible to an as-yet unestablished readership.

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