This thesis will examine the representation of food in the works of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad to demonstrate how food is used to chart the progress of modernity from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the continuing emergence of capitalism and consumerism to the first decade of the twentieth century when the stability of the British Empire was being questioned. Food becomes the measure of how modern society responded to new innovations in transport, technology and the way in which British society viewed both itself and the colonies from which much of its food was being imported. As a cultural language, traditions and rituals of food solidified notions of what it meant to be civilized but when this cultural language was fused with the food of the Other, the definitions of ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ became increasingly difficult to define. This thesis begins with Section One which introduces the scope and approach of my research. The section is broken into three chapters: the first serves as an introduction considering Conrad’s use of a family anecdote to examine how he borrows from real life experiences while blending fact and fiction to suit his purposes as an author. Chapter two is an analysis of realism, focussing on nineteenth-century debates about its use in the novel and investigating how Hardy and Conrad viewed the process of novel writing. This chapter will also briefly examine food in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations as an example of a traditional realist novel and consider how its handling of food differs from that of Hardy and Conrad’s Modern approach. To conclude, I have provided an overview of the critical reception of these two authors. Finally, to signal my broadly historicist approach, chapter three outlines the changing place of food within British society through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I have chosen to focus my study on the works of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad because, in their novels, these authors span this crucial historical period and between them reflect the changing face of the national food-producing landscape, in Hardy’s case, and the international world which increasingly became the source of imported food, in Conrad’s case. These authors necessarily respond to the key methodologies that provide the frame of reference for this thesis, namely those of history, anthropology, sociology and politics. By narrowing the focus to just two authors, it is possible to consider in greater depth the production, consumption, psychological impact and metaphorical range of food in literature. Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad not only sit well chronologically – Hardy published his last novel Jude the Obscure in 1895, the same year that Conrad published his first, Almayer’s Folly – but also thematically: where Hardy concentrates on the effects of modernity at a national level, Conrad’s perspective is international. Where Hardy laments the decline in the production of food in England and its impact on gender, the countryside and tradition, Conrad considers the impact of colonial expansion at a time when the morality of the Imperial mission was under scrutiny. Food plays an inherent role in this engagement with the Other, posing questions about morality, the rise of globalization, issues of identity, political ideology and the growing power of capitalism. Both Hardy and Conrad respond to the two great social truths about British life during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the great shift of population from the countryside to the cities and anxieties about the decline of the British Empire. Hardy’s novels provide a survey of the changing face of nineteenth-century Britain through the politics of food production; while, drawing upon twenty years in the merchant navy, Conrad brings the colonial world, the world of Greater Britain, into the English novel, and with it the food of the outer world. Selecting these two particular authors enables an investigation into the pervasiveness of food in Modern fiction.

This thesis explores the relevance of the Bildungsroman genre to a selection of Northern Irish writing from the 1960s through to the late 1990s. Synthesizing a range of critical approaches it shows how six novels by Leitch, Duffaud, Patterson, Deane, Madden and Molloy challenge the traditional Bildungsroman. It brings the thwarted Bildungsroman into correspondence with the key elements of ‘minority discourse’ as defined by Mohamed and Lloyd (1990), focusing on subjectivity and identity position. Using Jameson’s concept of the ‘political unconscious’ the thesis demonstrates how fragmented and hybridised subjectivities challenge the two main Northern Irish identarian discourses, Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism. It argues that all six counter-Bildungsromane feature some of the characteristics of ‘minority discourse’ with one even providing an example of ‘minor writing’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1975).

In discussions of English fiction, Hardy and Conrad are only occasionally considered together, and generally as being different exemplars of a late Victorian pessimism who give human dimension to the cosmic ironies of a world bereft of Providence. This study argues for a more vital connection than a coincidence of intellectual outlook, one that finds their fiction is generated by similar conceptions of how human beings experience and gain knowledge of the world in which they live. An epistemology of sense impressions underlies the invention of ‘fictional worlds’, the construction of characters, and the literary style of the otherwise very different novels considered here. As such, it is illuminating to explore both of these novelists in the light of the empirical scientific investigations of the nineteenth century which accorded such prominence to the function and evidence of the senses. While both authors have been the subject of several excellent studies of their relation to Darwin, such studies have tended to concentrate on biology in the case of Hardy, and have seen Conrad more in the province of metaphysics than empirical science. The originality of my study lies in its attention to physics and physiology as informing realms for fiction, not as a matter of direct influence upon the writers, but rather as conceptually and historically complementary modes of apprehending the world within which human experience takes place. Consequently, some of the work of contemporary scientists, as well as modern theorists in the fields of sensation, vision and sound, are seen to be as helpful in elucidating the sensory effects achieved in Hardy’s and Conrad’s novels as the many contemporary and modern literary critics whose work also informs this study. After an Introduction which locates Hardy and Conrad in relation to each other in terms of critical estimation, and which establishes the importance of the senses to their fiction and to their theoretical outlook as novelists, the study closely examines the modes of writing found in three sets of paired novels, exploring their individual treatment of a shared epistemology. In taking Desperate Remedies and The Rescue as often disregarded yet, in my view, foundational texts for each author, the focus is upon the phenomenology of sensation itself, with a distinction made between the outer-directed sensory field established in these novels as opposed to the inner mental world characteristic of Walter Pater which was so influential for Modernism. Both Hardy and Conrad are renowned for their visual evocations, and I take Far From the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim in order to explore each novelist’s extraordinary attention to light, and what it reveals to the eye. I argue that, unlike the later Modernists, the scenic construction of Hardy and Conrad creates occasions that exceed the perceptions of individual consciousness, which it renders as participating in a larger process of the ‘event’. Attending to the sound-world of these novels yields a different inflection of this account: The Return of the Native and ‘Heart of Darkness’ show characters surrounded by an active universe which penetrates to that which is hidden within, and the subject for portrayal is the attempt to give a human accent to phenomena that retain a mystery in their location and transmission. Throughout, both novelists are seen to have a united interest in the medium that surrounds human action and perception, but each novel examined is allowed its individuality and is not coerced into being a mere representative for a theoretical position. This is a study centred upon the early fiction, but the Conclusion proposes that Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Nostromo explore in very different ways an end-point for the novel of sensation, in which the identity of the individual self is open to absorption by the sensory qualities of the circumambient universe that it apprehends.