The Arabian Nights has been present in the literature of the West since the beginning of the eighteenth century and the translation of Antoine Galland in 1704. Critics have identified its stories in the work of a wide variety of Western writers, most notably, William Beckford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Goethe, Alexandre Dumas, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Jorge Luis Borges, A. S. Byatt, and Marina Warner. However, relatively little has been said about the implications of The Arabian Nights for modern and modernist writers from James Joyce to Jean Rhys. Even less has been written on the relationship between the ancient epic and the emergence of the modern short story form. Focusing on the work of three short fiction writers who published on the cusp of modernism: Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and Joseph Conrad, this thesis explores the place of The Arabian Nights in the emergence of modern short fiction in Britain. My study is not an attempt to trace the origins of The Arabian Nights as it features in modern short fiction. The project is more centrally concerned with how The Arabian Nights allows us to re-read the modern short story rather than the other way round. This thesis is less concerned with The Arabian Nights per se, than it is with how The Arabian Nights has been borrowed, taken up, appropriated, translated, adopted and adapted within a specific strand of modern short fiction published between 1877 and 1899. The borrowings I consider are both conscious and unconscious, casual and sustained, and it is not the aim of the thesis to trace back ‘Arabian Nights’ allusions to a precise origin, assuming such a thing were possible. Rather this thesis is more interested in The Arabian Nights as a recurring intertext of the short story. If, as I will argue, both The Arabian Nights and the modern short story have their origins in the oral tale, their intimacy also needs to be explained within the context of modern print culture. The turn of the century periodical incorporated and propagated tastes for exotic tales of the East for metropolitan audiences, a fact which undoubtedly informed the short fiction of Stevenson, Wilde and Conrad. Those same periodicals were looking to the past as much as the present, outwards as much as inwards. This is perhaps also true of the modern short story itself, which does not merely embrace the modern and embody it in short print forms, but also looks to the elongated oral tales associated with the likes of The Arabian Nights. Stevenson, Wilde, and Conrad represent a particularly concentrated response to The Arabian Nights at the turn of the century, when the modern short story in Britain was in its infancy. Through these writers, my study works to relocate the modern British short story (which I argue has been too readily restricted to the confines of England and Europe), within a broader transnational frame.

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This thesis explores the relationship between orthodox Christianity, quasi-religious movements, pseudo-science and the supernatural in both a pre- and post-Darwinian world, tracing it through fiction and non-fiction, and in novels, novellas and short stories by canonical authors Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, by the lesser known writers Catherine Crowe, and Arthur Machen, and in the non-Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Across this variety of literary forms, these very different authors all engage with the supernatural, with quasi religious creeds and with pseudo-science. Chapter One focuses on the presence of the supernatural and the spirit world in Edward Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni (1846), and The Haunted and the Haunters; or the House and the Brain (1859), Catherine Crowe's The Night-Side of Nature (1848), and Charles Dickens' Christmas stories. Chapter two explores George Eliot's use of superstition and medieval and Jewish mysticism in The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Daniel Deronda (1876), before considering Thomas Hardy's Anglo-centric approach to similar issues in The Return of the Native (1878), and "The Withered Arm" (1888). Chapter three discusses the late nineteenth century interest in spiritualism, Egyptology, and ancient religion as represented in Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The King of Thoth" (1890) and "Lot No. 249" (1894). Overall, the thesis is concerned with the way "rational" Victorian society is constantly undermined by its engagement with the supernatural: the nineteenth century desire for empirical evidence of life after death proves, paradoxically, Victorian irrationality.

Since the late 1960s, the marginalised status of women within literary studies has been addressed. Critics such as Kate Millett set the standard for studies of male-authored fiction that read them for signs of their oppressive, patriarchal assumptions. Somewhat differently, Elaine Showaiter's 1977 text A Literature of Their Own proved seminal for its shift in focus towards women's writing, and the aim of detecting female experiences of society. The effort to retrieve lost or neglected fiction by women mobilised many critics, such Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, yet of most significance for the subject matter of this thesis is Ellen Moers. Moers's Literary Women (1976) essentially suggests an expansion of the types of female-authored fiction that should be recovered. For Moers, women's writing does not have to be about isolated, feminist rejections of male-oriented society in order to be worth retrieving. Female novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were taking advantage of one of the few outlets available to them to make money, and their works were defined by intertextuality. Moers writes about a 'sounding board' of mutual awareness and resonance that exists between women writers across periods and genres a female tradition of writing is formed by the 'many voices, of different rhythms, pitches, and timbres' by which women writers are encircled. Collectively, existing works such as those by Showalter and Moers offer justification for retrieving a range of lesser-known, seemingly mundane female-authored works from the past, as these contain connections with surrounding works as well as a narrative on women's experiences of society. Currently, however, there is a critical hiatus in which this opportunity is not being satisfied, and many women writers remain neglected. The gap in our knowledge of the female literary tradition can be filled in part by increased familiarisation with the Moral-Domestic genre of the 1820s and 1830s. This genre relates to fictional forbears such as Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, as well as later Victorian authors. It also offers a female perspective on a publishing scene whose significance is arguably yet to be fully realised. In this way, the female-authored, Moral-Domestic novels that proliferated in the late-Romantic period represent one, as yet unrecognised voice in Moers's 'sounding board'.

Drawing upon the poststructuralist theories of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, this thesis analyses the multiple significations attached to food in nineteenth-century culture, and the art and literature of the Victorian bourgeoisie in particular. Chapter one utilises Lacanian theories of vision and desire in order to suggest that nineteenth-century representations of food are frequently caught up in a politics of display, constituting a feast for the eyes as well as the palate. It goes on to argue that the preoccupation with display in the middle-class dining room reveals something of the nature of bourgeois desire, as well as the fundamental instability of subjectivity. Chapter two examines the class-specific locations in which food was consumed, focusing on the special status accorded to the dining room in bourgeois culture. It also suggests that the picnic - a phenomenon which transported the middle classes outside of the security of the domestic realm - holds a disruptive, disorderly potential in representation, which ultimately undoes the inside/outside binary used to order Victorian eating spaces. Chapter three considers the relationship between food and nation in nineteenth-century art and literature, arguing that racial and cultural others are often portrayed in terms of food, functioning simultaneously as objects of desire - appetising dishes to enhance the white, British palate - and sources of anxiety, having a destabilising effect upon the hegemonic cultural identity when 'consumed'. Considered collectively, these chapters demonstrate that the act of eating is by no means an innocent one. Freighted with cultural significations both manifest and covert, caught up in complex networks of meaning relating to hierarchies of gender, race and class, food and its associated practices work to construct, as well as to nourish, the consuming subject.

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