This thesis examines the main influences responsible for Charles Dickens's impassioned campaign on behalf of victimised nineteenth-century children and his concerns relating to the death of childhood, a term which refers not only to those children denied a dependent childhood free from adult responsibilities, but to their actual deaths as well. While literary critics are in general agreement that Dickens was profoundly influenced by his own childhood experiences, the distinctive contribution of this thesis will be to place far greater emphasis than has been placed by any other critic on the influence of the newly emergent discourses of Romanticism and Evangelicalism, not only on the novelist's earlier childhood, but on his general attitude towards childhood as well. Close textual analysis of the texts uncovers the extent of these influences, confirming which discourse Dickens privileges throughout his writings. Additionally, this thesis argues that a variety of influences resulted in the creation of the unique Dickensian Child. The application of textual analysis also locates the gaps and silences both in the contemporary commentary and in Dickens's writings in relation to the living conditions which produced the savage street child. Since this child was to constitute an additional image of childhood alongside the already established images of Romantic and Evangelical child, and one which Dickens viewed as a serious contender to adult authority, an examination of Dickens's attitude towards the living and the dying street child is conducted with a particular emphasis on his role as social reformer. Finally, because Dickens insisted that the illustrations which accompanied the novels provided reinforcement to the meaning in the text, in order to investigate in even more depth the influence of Romantic and Evangelical discourses, a Bakhtinian visual versus textual analysis is applied to the semiotics of the illustrations. Additionally, comparisons with contemporary artistic representations of street children, with a particular emphasis on Punch cartoons assists in establishing whether, in line with the texts, the newly emergent discourse represented by the street child is featured as a serious threat to adult authority.

This thesis examines the physical effects of human emotion and the mind through selected texts written by the Shelley circle, including P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron. Emotion is a significant variable that dominates human existence. For this reason, the concept of emotion continues to intrigue numerous scientists working today in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, biology, and even robotics. With the rise of neuroscientific or cognitive approaches, the materiality of the mind has also been increasingly discussed in literary studies. Critics, including Alan Richardson, Noel Jackson, and Richard Holmes, revisit the mind and English Romanticism drawing on various scientific perspectives. Other critics, such as Adela Pinch, Thomas Pfau, and Richard C. Sha, have also reflected on emotional studies and Romanticism. Finding affinities with this kind of approach, recently defined as ‘cognitive historicism’, my thesis explores the legacy of eighteenth-century mental philosophy and science in the Shelley circle, 1812-1821. I argue that the Shelley circle’s scientific understanding of the mind and emotion is influenced by the materialism, empiricism, and aesthetics prevalent in the eighteenth century, which come into their own in the Romantic period to prefigure our current scientific understanding of emotion. Chapter One surveys the Shelley circle’s preoccupation with emotion and science and how this is manifest, to varying degrees, in a wide range of critical responses to Frankenstein and writings of other members of the group during this period. During the course of this critical survey I develop the concept of the ‘materiality of emotion’, which is used in subsequent chapters to re-examine the Shelley circle’s scientific philosophy and how it is represented in literary texts written by the group. Chapter Two argues that Shelley develops his views of the mind through his atheistic and materialist reasoning. This materialist thinking of the mind in Queen Mab exerts a seminal influence on how the Shelley circle thought about the workings of human emotion. Chapter Three focuses on Mary Shelley and contemporary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific debates to suggest that the representation of the mechanism of the body in Frankenstein points to the intricate relations between the mechanisms of the mind and emotion and offers a means to heal the schism between French materialism and vitalism. Chapter Four investigates the depiction of emotional effects on the mind in Byron’s Manfred and Shelley’s Alastor. Both poets draw on scientific reasoning and imagination to come to terms with grief, the failure of love, and the loss of ideals. Chapter Five claims that Shelley’s Frankenstein meditates on the effects of physiological elements of the beautiful and the ugly, as well as emotional responses to the sublime science. My final chapter draws on cultural history and gender theory to interpret Byron’s Don Juan (Canto One) and Shelley’s Epipsychidion in an attempt to reaffirm the beautiful and the sublime in their materialist concept of love or sexuality.

The present thesis examines the idea of aesthetic education of three eminent Victorians: John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. By focusing on the essence of what they meant with ‘the cultivation of the beautiful’ and, more importantly, the way their ideas of beauty informed their criticism of society, my study aims to contribute to our understanding of the idea of aesthetic education in the Victorian context and, further, to participate in a recent debate about the nature of beauty and aesthetic education. Chapter One focuses on John Stuart Mill’s concept of ‘feeling’ in a series of essays. I will demonstrate how Mill’s idea of ‘aesthetic education’ was an ‘education of feelings,’ and moreover, how this idea was integrated into his literary criticism, his later critique of democratisation, his description of an ideal liberal society and even his own style of writing. Chapter Two contains a comparative study of Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Schiller. Through a rereading of Arnold, I will argue that his idea of aesthetic education is essentially Schillerian and that their resemblance consists primarily in their stress on the importance of aesthetic unity for modern life, which was becoming increasingly fragmentary and multitudinous. Chapter Three examines John Ruskin’s idea of aesthetic education and concentrates particularly on the cultivation of perception. Perception, as I shall show, was pivotal in Ruskin’s idea of aesthetic education. Just as what happened in Mill and Arnold, the emphasis on the education of seeing continued from his early writings well into his art and social criticisms. It not only differentiated him from his fellow art critics; the conviction that people should perceive with a pure heart also enabled him to link observation of artistic details with moral criticism of contemporary society and, thereby, to turn the cultivation of the beautiful into a moral-aesthetic experience.

Story-telling is a mode central to the practice and achievement of John Keats. In ‘Sleep and Poetry’, he refers to life as ‘The reading of an ever-changing tale’. This line suggests his sense of the centrality of narrative to human experiences. Yet the Keatsian narrative is as a medium for Keats to investigate the nature and development of his poetic identity. His idea of poetry and of the poet, and his narrative figuring of himself as a poet are my subject, as they are his, when in the phrase the thesis takes for its title Keats writes of a poet in Endymion, ‘He sang the story up into the air’ (II, 838). Recent scholarship has interpreted Keats’s narrative techniques in different ways. Critical approaches have modified the Bloomian concept of the anxiety of influence by using a reader response approach, or have taken on board or swerved from a McGannian New Historicist perspective. In the process Keats’s formal achievement, once celebrated by critics such as Walter Jackson Bate and Helen Vendler, has received comparatively little attention. This thesis, adopting ideas and approaches associated with narratology (including its application to lyric poetry), analyses Keats’s poetic career, focusing on the poetry’s narrative techniques and its treatment of the narrator’s role. My approach might be described as aiming to accomplish a ‘poetics of attention’. This thesis consists of eight chapters. Chapter one discusses ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, poems that are crucial in understanding Keats’s use of narrative to explore his poetic identity. In chapter two, concentrating on Endymion’s enactment of imaginative struggle, I attempt to show the purposeful function of the poem’s ‘wandering’ and complex narrative structure, which allows Keats space to develop and examine his beliefs about mythology, beauty, and visionary quest. Chapters three and four examine narrative techniques and the narrator’s role in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ as Keats questions the nature and function of ‘old Romance’, even as he employs it, thus bringing a modern self-consciousness to bear on his task. Chapters five and six are devoted to the narrativity shown in the odes. Such an exploration of the ‘lyric narrative’ seeks to shed new light on our understanding of Keats’s odes. Chapter seven considers the ambivalence that Keats creates in ‘Lamia’. Lamia’s enigmatic identity as a woman and a serpent makes the narrative complex and the narrator perplexed. Chapter eight analyses ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, arguing that Keats uses these two poems as narratives to explore his idea of poetry and of the poet. In his short creative life, Keats demonstrates different and various narrative skills. These narrative skills shape his ideas and ideals of poetry as well as of the poet. Via his use of narrative, we are able to see the evolution of his poetic identity. He presents himself as what he recommended a poet should be, a shape-changing figure, who might be best described as a ‘camelion Poet’.

The tension between experiential chaos and artistic control is a constant if varying presence, and acts as a fertile, dangerous, but ultimately enriching principle, in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. Each poet is highly self-conscious about this tension, a self-consciousness traceable to their Romantic and post-Romantic understanding of the nature of poetry. Situating itself in the present post-McGannian critical landscape, my thesis looks at poetry through the lens of a new formalism. The thesis valorises aesthetic subtleties and lays emphasis on poetry’s performative intelligence. The Introduction describes in detail the approach, method, and contents of the thesis. Section one examines the poetics of Byron, Shelley and Yeats, focusing on how each poet figures his attempted control of the potentially chaotic text. The first chapter, on Byron’s poetics, centres on Don Juan, Beppo and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and argues for the presence of a coherent poetics in his oeuvre. Chapter two, on Shelley’s poetics, examines A Defence of Poetry and its relationship with Shelley’s poetry, giving particular attention to Alastor and “Mont Blanc.” Chapter three examines the self-consciousness of Yeats’s poetics, and explores the way in which he makes poetry express his effort towards mastery while retaining the chaos that permits creative freedom in The Wanderings of Oisin, the Byzantium poems, and “Easter 1916.” The struggle to assert poetic control is a form of heroism, and the second section examines the concept of the hero in works by each of the poets. I illustrate how traditional critical accounts of the poets underestimate the complexity that governs their versions of heroism. Chapter four, on Cain and The Giaour, and chapter five, on Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, trace Byron’s evolving challenge to any straightforward notion of heroism. Chapter six views Shelley’s Epipsychidion as a climactic exploration of the poet-as-hero, while chapter seven explores Adonais’s radical refiguring of the heroic and the elegiac. Chapters eight and nine focus on “The Tower,” on Yeats’s creation of a uniquely personal, yet carefully impersonal, poetic monument to the poet-hero. The chaos of the actual, from which Byron, Shelley, and Yeats create their poetry, wars constantly with, but also paradoxically enables, the control they attempt to establish. It is their staging of the quarrel between chaos and control that not only provides them with the material out of which they make poetry but also means that their practice foreshadows and at times outflanks our critical constructions.

This thesis examines Shelley’s art of sensuous imagery, or poetics of sensibility. To elucidate Shelley’s concept of sensibility which links his poetry to its ethical and aesthetic concerns, I combine close textual readings of Shelley’s imagery of the senses with his intellectual and cultural inheritance from the ‘Age of Sensibility’ which encompasses ‘moral philosophy’ (ethics and aesthetics) and ‘natural philosophy’ (science). Chapter I focuses on Shelley’s notions of sensuous pleasure and sympathy. _A Defence of Poetry_ is a pivotal text that expounds Shelley’s aesthetic and ethical taste, exemplified by his concept of sympathy. Taking up this argument, Chapter II investigates Shelley’s vegetarian politics in _Queen Mab_, rooted in what I call _(dis)gusto_, ‘taste’ in both its physical and aesthetic senses. Chapter III focuses on aural imagery in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc.’ Exploring the interplay between motion and emotion reveals how aesthetics and psychology, in Shelley’s lyrics, are associated with the vocalisation of poetic inspiration. Chapter IV considers the relation of sight to Shelley’s notion of the fragmentary in two ekphrastic texts concerned with visual representation, ‘The Coliseum’ and ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery,’ which illuminate Shelley’s idea of a circulating and sympathetic power that unifies humans or subject with object, alongside a fragmentary imperative within these texts. Chapter V investigates Shelley’s treatment of touch and Nature’s economy in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ by juxtaposing Shelley’s poem with Erasmus Darwin’s cyclical system of Nature known as ‘organic happiness,’ which is recognised only by sympathetic sensibility. Chapter VI considers the intermingled imagery of scent and sympathetic love in _Epipsychidion_ in conjunction with Shelley’s theory of nervous vibrations influenced by eighteenth-century psycho-physiological discourses, mediated through the imagery of Venus, whose duality embodies the interrelations between sensuous pleasure and ideal beauty in Shelley’s poetics of sensibility.

This PhD thesis explores the influence of Persian Sufi Literature on the development of the concepts of self and Other in English Romantic-period prose and poetry. The thesis considers the notions of self, idealisation, and annihilation in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon Byron as well as the Persian Sufi literature from which these Romantic poets have drawn their inspiration and influences. The Persian poets discussed include Hafez, Maulavi, and Nezami, whose works were translated and adapted by the eighteenth-century scholars such as William Jones and Isaac D‘Israeli. The thesis presents a comparison between the two schools of thought, Lacanianism and Sufism, in order to pave the way for a comparative analysis of Sufi and Romantic conceptions of the self and Other. The thesis then goes on to discuss a range of representations of the Orient in the pre-Romantic era, including the translations and adaptations rendered by eighteenth-century Oriental scholars such as Jones and D‘Israeli. Finally the thesis focuses on the influence of Persian literature on the works of Shelley and Byron. An attempt is made in these chapters to explore the extent to which the Romantic subject‘s desire for union with the ideal Other is made possible through idealisation of and dissolution in the Other, first in the literary historical context of the Sufi tradition, and secondly in the framework of the theoretical models in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In order to analyse the concepts of self and Other in their Romantic and Sufi contexts the thesis invokes Lacan‘s discussion of supplementary jouissance and sublimation. These Lacanian formulae prove helpful in analysing the path the Romantic subject pursues toward perfection and his desire for a return to the primal state of unity which is possible through dissolution in the ideal(ised) Other.

My interest in archaeology, amateur and impractical as it is - yet dare I say passionate? - dates back to an almost accidental first visit to Greece in 1982, a revelatory experience that I recounted in a magazine article. I returned from Athens determined not only to visit Greece as often as possible, but also to learn as much as I could about archaeology and visit as many sites in Britain as opportunity would allow. Being an English teacher of over twenty-five years' experience, I suppose I should claim that an interest in Thomas Hardy's work dates back to studying The Mayor of Casterbridge at `A' Level, but, in common with my current students of that book, I admit that the opposite is the case; in fact it was only on being offered the opportunity to teach the book in 1994 that I returned to give Hardy a second chance. That same year I began Peter Abbs's two-year MA course at Sussex, `Language, the Arts, and Education', which allowed me in the second year to write, with boundless enthusiasm and inevitable superficiality, a dissertation on the influence of archaeology on the arts. To pursue this theme further, there could be no better literary subject than Thomas Hardy. Both of these disparate topics - Hardy and archaeology - enjoy a wide and enduring following of long standing. Among the sciences (though, as many archaeologists would argue, their chosen discipline is one of the humanities), perhaps only archaeology has the inherent ability to arouse popular, imaginative interest to match the technical specialisation necessary for its professional pursuit. In 1995, for example, no fewer than 500 books were published – in English - on ancient Egypt alone. Thomas Hardy seems to attract a comparable level of interest, again, among general readership as well as in the realms of academe: all his works remain in print, and all eight of Hardy's most celebrated novels, plus the early A Pair of Blue Eyes, and the complete poems, are available in one or more of the budget-priced series of paperbacks; one academic web-site, moreover, lists over seventy biographical and critical books about the author. But why try to put these two topics together? In a television programme some years ago, I heard Lucinda Lambton give one of the best definitions of education that I have come across: the ability to make connections. For my own satisfaction, and for others' interest too, that is what I intend to do with Hardy and archaeology. When I re-read The Mayor of Casterbridge, with twelve years accumulated knowledge of archaeological sites, artefacts, and ideas behind me, the small collection of allusions in the book to actual Roman and prehistoric features in and around Dorchester automatically gained in significance and gave an extra, unanticipated, dimension to a visit to the town while I was part-way through my re-reading of the novel. Perhaps this was a purely subjective coincidence of interests; yet, here was a famous author who grew up in one of the world's most significant archaeological regions, whose eclectic interests included archaeology, whose life-span of almost eighty-eight years embraced the transformation of archaeology from the realm of the dilettante collector to that of a complex scientific discipline, and whose works made limited but frequent references to the subject. My interest was aroused. How much was Hardy concerned with archaeology per se amongst is plethora of interests? How much did he actually know about it? Did his Classical education, architectural training, and visit to Italy impinge on his perception of the mysterious traces of British prehistory with which he had grown up? How does reference to archaeology fit in with his overall narrative, aesthetic, and philosophical scheme? Such is the type of question which arose in my mind once the conjunction of subjects had been made. This study was never conceived as one of literary criticism only and the proportion of such material in particular chapters is dependent on the nature of the works dealt with. Two disparate topics, an author and a subject in which he was interested, will be unified by my examination. The two run along parallel lines, but the unifying factor in the dichotomy is always the man Thomas Hardy. My reading of Hardy is thus only one part of the discussion: often, I will digress, and Hardy will appear to be set aside, for part of the aim of the thesis is to discover, gather, and synthesise all the archaeological materials that are employed in his works. He is nonetheless implicitly present, since these are the very materials he selected to fashion into this significant and hitherto neglected aspect of his art. In this I am following, in a specialised way, in the footsteps of Herman Lea and his successors who identified and catalogued the settings in Hardy's works. Much of this knowledge is not otherwise readily available to Hardy's readers; conversely, archaeological texts usually make only the most fleeting reference - if any - to the appearance of archaeological sites and artefacts in fiction. The evident imbalance in the Bibliography between books on Hardy and related topics and those about archaeology is more apparent than real: most of those on the latter have provided only brief references. [Abstract taken from the thesis Preface]

This thesis aims to portray the different ways in which nineteenth-century women poets perceived God and religion, exemplified by the works of Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, and Constance Naden. From the 1960s onward, there have been considerable efforts to redefine Victorian women‘s spirituality, and to eliminate the ‘angel of the house‘ image that was attached to them by their male contemporaries. As a result, the works of many Victorian women poets have been revived and re-evaluated. Brontë and Rossetti have been the focus of many individual studies which have explored their religious orientations, mainly by identifying in their works the religious doctrines of the movements with which they were associated. In contrast, Constance Naden‘s status as an atheist scientist and a philosopher has made modern scholars overlook the representation of religion in her poetry. By focussing on the less familiar poems of Brontë (the Gondal poems) and Rossetti (the secular early poems), the thesis will offer a new interpretation of their relationship with God. This will not be based on a consideration of their religious beliefs but on the lack of them in their early works. The chapter on Naden, however, will demonstrate how her scientific training did not stop her from sympathizing with theists, and admiring prophets and mystics. The ultimate aim of the thesis will be to illustrate the individuality of these poets and the uniqueness of their thought. This will be achieved through a close analysis of the poems, with a minimal use of feminist and other literary theories. It will also demonstrate the problematic interpretations that may arise from associating these poets with one religious movement or one school of thought.

This thesis employs a variety of theoretical approaches to examine the representation of children in the novels and journalism of Charles Dickens. Whereas previous studies of Dickensian children have concentrated on his fictional characters, I have expanded the parameters of the discussion to include his journalism, and his examination of children as readers. The discussion focuses on two novels, four significant articles in his weekly periodical Household Words, and A Child’s History of England, which was serialised in Household Words. In recent years there have been considerable efforts made to investigate Dickens's journalism, but there has been little consideration either of his writings on children's welfare nor on his nursery writings intended for young readers which were published in his periodicals. Despite the fact that he wrote specific works for children to read, there has been no examination of his representation of child readers in his novels. In analyzing three of Dickens's child readers I have drawn upon contemporary theories of reading. I have utilized a variety of modern psychological theories in my discussion of the novelist's understanding of child development. In the course of my discussion of individual texts I utilize theories of narratology, trauma theory, contemporary accounts of commodity fetishism and theories of masculinity as it impinges upon child development. In my analysis of Dickens's journal articles and their relation to specific fictional characters and episodes, I emphasize that this is not simply a case of ‘factual’ journalism set against ‘fictional’ characters and plots, but rather that Dickens's creativity is manifested in both genres, and that to understand his comprehension of child psychology and child development, both are essential.