The essential features of the theology of S.T. Coleridge are discussed on the basis of both his published and unpublished work. The development of his thought after the publication of the Aids to Reflection is taken into account. A comprehensive investigation of Coleridge's distinction between the Reason and the Understanding, upon which his theology was based, shows that this distinction, as well as his division of Reason into practical and theoretic Reason, was not Kantian, but' -was the Platonic distinction between that which pertains to the sense and that which pertains to the super sensible, between an intuitive and discursive manner of attaining knowledge. An attempt is made to explain why Coleridge had such a high regard for Kant that he borrowed much of his terminology, but yet deserted the whole spirit of his thought, and never considered himself a follower of the critical philosophy. Throughout his life Coleridge remained an "evangelical "mystic". The religious thought of Coleridge is discussed in the light of his growth from Unitarianism and pantheism to orthodox Christianity; he returned to the Church of England because of strictly religious considerations. Luther was Coleridge's greatest hero and authority, and Coleridge considered that he had taken up his mantle as reformer and theologian. He would complete Luther's thought. To the conceptual language of Luther's motif of justification by faith, Coleridge added the dynamic language of "being-in-Christ", thus forming a synthesis between imputed and imparted righteousness. Coleridge was certain that Luther never meant the idea of justification to he merely notional or forensic, and never for a minute doubted that he walked in the spirit of his master. Because of his insistence that all revelation was immediate, Coleridge had a difficult time finding the right niche in his theology for history. His relationship with Edward Irving, which led to a sort of crisis in his ideas on history and Biblical interpretation, is discussed together with these topics.

This thesis is a minute biographical investigation into William Blake's life and work while living at Felpham, Sussex between 1800 and 1803. During this period Blake's patron was the poet, biographer, and man of letters, William Hayiey. Previous scholarship on Blake's relationship with Hayiey has tended to focus on biographical eadings of Blake's penultimate illuminated book, Milton. These readings have consistently presented Hayiey as a negative influence on Blake. Instead, I use an interdisciplinary approach to demonstrate that Hayley's influence on Blake was productive and diverse, inspiring the composition of his two longest and most important works in illuminated printing.

This thesis traces the development of The Dream of Gerontius from its genesis in the writings of John Henry Newman, through his early sketches and fair copies to the edition published in 1866. It then considers the possible reasons for Edward Elgar’s decision to set the poem to music and traces its development into an oratorio, exploring the extent to which the oratorio reflects the ideas contained in the original poem. Chapter One examines how the poem emerges out of the broad and immediate context of Newman’s life, considering (inter alia) both the position of the Roman Catholics in nineteenth-century England, and Newman’s experience of writing the Apologia, the work immediately preceding the poem. Chapter One also investigates the compositional process and the circumstances surrounding the publication of the poem. Chapter Two traces the development of the ideas of the poem through its early texts; taking three sections of the poem as examples, it provides a detailed comparison of five different versions of the poem. Chapter Three explores the poem’s philosophical and theological ideas, examining the extent to which Newman endeavours to make Roman Catholic theology acceptable to a Protestant readership. The reasons for Edward Elgar’s choice of the poem and his redaction of it into the libretto are considered in Chapter Four. Chapter Five looks at Elgar’s compositional processes and, through an examination of his early sketches, traces the development of his early ideas, especially in relation to the Soul’s appearance before God and how his ideas were altered as a result of the intervention of August Jaeger. The extent to which Newman’s original themes are still reflected in the oratorio is the subject of Chapter Six which also includes a description and account of the music of the oratorio.

This thesis examines William Blake's engagement with the problem of pro- ducing "prophetic" art within the confines of the fallen world, in which it is necessarily constructed using inherited fallen materials and addressed to a fallen audience. It focuses primarily on the discourse and textuality of Jeru- salem, which it reads as a negotiation of the problem of the need to con- struct prophetic vision in the context of the impossibility of any such pronouncement within history. Jerusalem is examined as a differentiated en- cyclopaedia of Minute Particulars drawn from across Blake's contexts (intel- lectual, historical, cultural, etc) in a text that is a static tissue or weave of found fragments (citations) of fallen experience. This is analysed in relation to the encyclopaedic discourse of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, which mediates between idealism and fatalism by addressing the fallen world as it is manifested in the material phenomena of history. Benjarnin's approach is centred around his concept of the dialectical image, which presents material phenomena dialectically so as to trigger a recognition by the audience of the fallen state that they manifest, and the existential potential that fallen occu- pation conceals. This thesis examines the operation of this materialist dia- lectic in Blake's art, as a means of redeeming the contents of the work from fallen (discursive) significance by reactivating the creative imagination of the audience. It focuses on the strategies of decentralisation and fragmenta- tion by which the fallen particulars of Jerusalem are consistently desituated from their fallen settings and placed into a shifting and de structured textual field. This makes possible the active intervention of the audience who, in the act of reading, can resolve particulars into dialectical constellations in which their shared fallen status can become apparent, and thereby be overcome.

In the last decade, Anglo-American feminist criticism wished to establish the notion that Keats is a misogynist who denies 5 his female figures subjective identities in hope of obtaining a masculine poetic self. The main problem with this approach is that critics rely heavily on Keats's diatribe against the Bluestocking women. By generalising Keats's dislike of the Bluestockings to an encompassing attitude towards all women readers and writers, critics fail to recognise the political and social undertones embedded -in Keats's attack. By exploring the socio-political associations attributed to the Bluestockings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, my thesis argues that Keats's diatribe emerges not so much from the Bluestockings' literary role, but from the social and sexual conservatism embedded in the term bluestocking itself.

This study uses and develops text world theory to explore the use of desire and dream states in four poems by the nineteenth century poet John Keats. Text world theory as it currently stands has yet to be sufficiently developed to account for the representation and conceptualisation of desire and dream states. This study aims to provide a framework for accounting for these phenomena by proposing a continuum of mentation, classifying distinct desire and dream worlds by differences in speaker volition, distance to reality and the degrees of modal force. The study also proposes that the nightmare world, an extreme type of dream world characterised by negative colouring and inherent world-switching potential, offers a more developed way of accounting for the conceptualisation of nightmare experiences in text world theory. This model is then applied in detailed cognitive poetic analyses of four of Keats's poems. In each case, a reading of the poem is provided that explores the setting up of and interplay between different kinds of desire and dream states. Within these analyses, the study firstly demonstrates how Keats positions his reader into adopting particular vantage points from which conflicting types of love and desire are explored. Secondly, it provides evidence to show that nightmare worlds in Keats's poems emulate a nightmare experience both stylistically and in their intended impact. Thirdly, it accounts for the ways in which the nightmare world is functionally significant when considered in the context of the poems in their entirety. This study therefore aims to both augment current work in text world theory to allow for a systematic exploration of desire, dreams and nightmares and to provide focused and innovative readings of a major English poet. Since there has been little work on either dreams or Keats's poetry in the field of cognitive poetics, this study is a timely response to a gap in existing stylistic and literary critical research.

Since the 1990s, trauma theory has occupied an important position in the field of literary criticism. This thesis looks at the writings of Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man and Cathy Caruth, three critics whose work has impacted on the field of trauma theory, as a means of exploring specifically how an early interest in Wordsworth s writings led them to an explicit or implicit interest in trauma and its effects. The final chapter proposes that Wordsworth's poetry has a unique capacity to convey the aspects of trauma that theoretical language cannot express.

This thesis is concerned with the construction of gendered and sexualised identity in the writings of Lord Byron. The self is narrated as a performance of certain culturally coded ideals, but these ideals are constantly complicated by desires which disrupt uniform notions of gender. My thesis argues that it is through the complex negotiations between desires and cultural codes, between performances and subjectivities, that characterisation functions in Byron's works.

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