The abundance of literary devices Butler employs in his prose works has often been interpreted as evidence of satirical intent. This thesis challenges this position by illustrating how sophisticated assumptions about language and rhetoric often lie behind the form in which Butler cast his thought. Centrally important is Butler's realisation, aged 23, that his intellectual development had been arrested by an education in which vested interests had disguised themselves as rational argument. This crisis, it is argued, left Butler with an awareness that language is always open to manipulation; that multiple competing interpretations can coexist; and that behind every interpretation there is always an intention. Taking a chronological approach, the thesis considers the evolutionary writings and The Fair Haven to show how the formal qualities of these texts both embody and develop these preoccupations. Central are the following aims: - To expose the inadequacy of existing classifications of Butler as 'satirist'. - To provide a thorough account of the origin and development of Butler's later stated belief in the metaphorical basis of language. - To argue that any analysis of Life and Habit which does not consider how it developed from the early, more imaginative machine sketches is necessarily limited. - To suggest that the value of Life and Habit might better be understood with reference to William James' pragmatic philosophy rather than a natural theology framework. - To address a long-standing critical problem with a new reading of 'The Christ Ideal' chapter of The Fair Haven. - To provide a sustained critical analysis of Butler's close-reading strategy in the later evolutionary essays and show this to be a consistent expression of his pseudo-Lamarckian beliefs in the primacy of authorial intention.

Working at the intersection between the scholarly fields of affect, gender and print media, my thesis argues that George Eliot's conception of art as a means of extending sympathy was integral to her authorship during 1851-64. Eliot's authorial formation as a promoter of sympathetic feeling was, to a large degree, a product of and a critical response to a burgeoning print culture. Her concern with sympathy during the early years of her journalistic and literary careers permeated both her writing and her relationship with critics, editors, publishers and readers. It is the diverse meanings that such discourse acquired for her in the nineteenthcentury literary market-place that this thesis examines. Eliot's attempt to build sympathetic ties amongst her readers without being intimate with them is another example of her ambiguous relationship to the woman question. Rather than focusing on the well-known emotive rhetoric in her fiction, my aim is to see how she aspired to control the feelings she incited in her readership, partly through her male pseudonym and partly through her realism. By looking into her publishing policies and reading habits, in addition to the familiar concerns with genre and style, I intend to treat her development into the pseudonymously-signed realist author `George Eliot' as a distinct gendered formation within the history of sentiment. Through close readings of her reviews, poetry and early fiction, my thesis explores the gap between her self-fashioned authorial figure and popular constructions of her authorship. In addition to looking into her relationship with her male predecessors and contemporaries (Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin), it traces her interest in sympathetic women of the past (Mary Wollstonecraft), popular fiction writers (Mary Elizabeth Braddon) or campaigners for women's rights (Bessie Rayner Parkes).

This thesis examines the popular and cultural legacy of Charles Dickens in the period 1900-1940. During this period Dickens was largely ignored or derided within the academy but his works remained consistently marketable to a popular audience. The thesis explores Dickens’s mass cultural appeal, assessing what the term ‘Dickensian’ represented in the early decades of the twentieth century and evaluating Dickens’s role as a national figure. This thesis engages with recent scholarship in the fields of Dickens criticism, heritage studies and material culture to explore a popular appreciation of Dickens which is characterised by its language of feeling and affect. The first chapter situates Charles Dickens’s literary standing and cultural legacy in the light of both critical and popular responses to his work. The chapter charts the development of the Dickens Fellowship and examines the role of this literary society in constructing and promoting a selective public image of Dickens. Chapter Two examines the motivations behind different forms of collecting, and suggests that collecting can be understood as a form of popular engagement with Dickens’s writing. The chapter contends that Dickensian collecting differs significantly from broader collecting practices and can be viewed as a more generous model of collecting. The idea of collecting as a popular response to Dickens is extended in Chapter Three which takes as its focus one particular form of book collecting: the practice of grangerization. Grangerization is characterised as an alternative reading practice through which the experience of reading a text could be extended. Two further alternative reading practices are explored in Chapters Four and Five. Chapter Four demonstrates how in founding the ‘Dickens House Museum’, the Dickens Fellowship aimed to create a permanent memorial site for Dickens. The chapter highlights the language of feeling utilised in the promotional material for the museum and argues that the items selected for display were designed to produce an emotional and imaginative response in the museum’s visitors. Chapter Five considers how readers expressed their engagement with Dickens’s works through literary pilgrimages to sites from his novels. The chapter suggests that these pilgrimages represent an active reading of Dickens’s novels, which offer readers a participatory experience of immersion in the world of the narrative. It argues that this kind of immersive experience is generated by the strong affective responses of many readers to Dickens’s writings.

The aim of this thesis is to explore Thomas Hardy's use of carnival and the carnivalesque in his novels both as a comedic and parodic tool with which he ambiguously both lightens and intensifies the tragedy and pessimism in his work and further as a penetrating literary device under the cloak of which he challenges and subverts the blinkered narrow-mindedness of his publishers and his middle-class readership. The intention is not to produce a solely Bakhtinian reading of these tropes in Hardy's work but to acknowledge the range of other voices, the social anthropologists and social historians among them, who offer a more penetrating interpretation of carnival and the carnivalesque and thus prove perhaps a more fruitful source in relation to Hardy's work. My object is to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of Hardy's utilization of these demi-genres, using them on the most superficial level as a means of authenticating his rural setting by the use of the customs and festivals which still punctuated the agricultural year as Hardy was writing. On a deeper level I shall examine how Hardy acknowledges and utilises the pagan/Christian palimpsest inherent in these rituals and overwrites them as a part of his own literary agenda thus creating a uniquely Hardian palimpsest. Finally, I will investigate Hardy's use of the carnivalesque trope as a means of producing an incisive and often parodic critique of the social and religious hegemonies of both the middle-classes and society at large. The carnivalesque is an 'extraterritorial' humorous world which also serves to question received tenets and prejudices; a destabilising world of the 'topsy-turvy', life viewed 'bottom-up', filled with a cacophony of voices, confusing disguises and masks, grotesque figures, transgressive gender blurring, and 'fearful joy'. In this thesis I shall consider how Hardy uses this inverted, transgressive phenomenon as a humorous yet destabilising literary device and further as a means of encouraging his readers to question received social norms and boundaries, both communal and personal, rural and urban. I will trace how Hardy's characterisation of carnival as a life-affirming and joyous ritual gradually took on an increasingly darker aspect filled with the cackling of subversive laughter reflecting not only the author's growing pessimism and disillusionment with the novel form but the nineteenth century movement towards the starkness of modernism.

This thesis provides a synthesizing account of Kipling as an 'amphibian' writer concerned both with the creation of prose works of great aesthetic sophistication and complexity, and of propagandistic writing whose principal objective was the ftirtherance of a particular imperial doctrine. Through a succession of close readings I demonstrate how these two kinds of Kipling text are both distinguished and connected by their formal operation, with the more aesthetically complex work often deploying similar narrative strategies to the propagandistic texts, but in ways that are far more complex and ambiguous.

Although Vanity Fair is just one episode in The Pilgrim's Progress, taking up barely a dozen pages in the first edition of 1678, it has had a potent and versatile afterlife. My thesis examines how the Vanity Fair trope is transformed between its appearance in The Pilgrim's Progress and the publication of Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair (1847-1848). Canvassing a range of printed material, from pamphlets and periodicals to canonical texts, my research contributes to literary scholarship in two ways. First, I show how the idea of Vanity Fair, which in Bunyan is a place of trial and terror, was tamed, secularised and feminised, becoming associated with consumption, pleasure and the notion of social life as a performance. Second, by exploring how Bunyan and Thackeray engaged with cultural memories, my thesis sheds light on the relationship between the individual and the collective imagination. Chapter 1 interrogates the critical tradition of interpreting Vanity Fair literally, as an actual fair and a critique of capitalism. Chapter 2 argues that Bunyan challenged and subverted an existing trope - that of the disruptive puritan, familiar from Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. Chapter 3 looks at Vanity Fair in early imitations of The Pilgrim's Progress (including Bunyan's own Second Part). Chapter 4 ranges across the eighteenth century to show how Vanity Fair is appropriated as an idiom for conceptualising public space and leisure. Chapter 5 examines how the trope becomes, in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, an ambivalent memory of a puritan inheritance. My conclusion reflects on how, through the medium of cultural memory, Bunyan's puritan protest became one of the governing metaphors of modern consumerism.

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My thesis focuses on the figure of the pantomime clown in the work of Charles Dickens. While a number of scholars have described Dickens's professional and imaginative relationship to the theatre and popular entertainment, few of these studies have attended to Dickens's ideas on pantomime'. Moreover, the importance of the pantomime clown to the formation of Dickens's comic characters is also an under-studied field. The first half of my thesis focuses on two early works that determined Dickens's attitude to the form and ideas of pantomime. The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1838), the biography of a Regency actor who popularised the role of the pantomime clown, is a largely forgotten text, creatively inferior to much of Dickens's work, but I shall argue that it can be read as a working through of the ideas he had raised in his earlier essay 'The Pantomime of Life' (published in March 1837) around the theme of life as a theatrical performance. Moreover, through a close comparison of the Memoirs with the two novels of the same period, The Pick wick Papers and Oliver Twist, it is possible to identify a clear line of thematic and stylistic continuity. In the second half of my thesis I demonstrate how these ideas persist and develop in Dickens's subsequent fiction. I examine a number of Dickens's comic figures in relation to three tropes from Grimaldi's repertoire - excessive consumption of food and drink, transformative clothing and slapstick violence. These tropes are part of Deborah Vlock's 'imaginary text' of Victorian readers and theatre-goers, which carries its meaning beyond the playhouse to the novel.

This thesis considers how nineteenthwcentury novelists employed sexual euphemism to avoid the constraints placed on them by editors and publishers, circulating libraries, and by the ' informal censorship which English readers imposed on their respectable fiction' (Ruth Bernard YeazeIl1982:340). It suggests a move occurred from simple linguistic euphemism in the early years of the century to contextual euphemism later in the century. and that this played a key role in innovation in the British novel, aiding rather than hindering ' British realism' by introducing uncertainty into sexual narrative which reflected, and reflects, social realities within our ' unknowable communities'. The introductory chapter gives an overview of the trope, and suggests that sexual reticence was regarded in the nineteenth century as representative of an advanced state of civilization rather than prudery. The second chapter examines Charlotte Turner Smith's The Wanderings of Warwick (1794) and Sophia Lee's 71,e Life of A Lover (1804), with additional reference to Smith's first novel Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788). It considers these novels' transparent approach to sexual themes, using stable linguistic euphemism as a decorous but unambiguous method of narration. Chapter 3 considers George Eliot's treatment of the child as sexual referent, including pregnancy, miscarriage, and childlessness. Chapter 4 presents an examination of how the ubiquity of the social kiss in the narrative ofWilkie Collins enabled him to include kisses recording extreme physical sensation, with particular attention to his last completed novel The Legacy of Cain. Chapter 5 considers Henry James' examination of the influence of socio~ moral sexual euphemism on the cognition and behaviour of his protagonists in Dai.5Y Miller and The Ambassadors in proleptic illustrations of the Sapir~ Whorf hypothesis.

The main concern of this thesis is to examine the career of George Meredith (1828-1909), the late-Victorian novelist and poet, as leader writer for a provincial weekly newspaper, the Ipswich Journal. Meredith regularly wrote leading articles for the newspaper in the 1860s. -- In Chapter 1, I look at Meredith’s involvement with other periodicals in order to establish the context of the novelist’s career as journalist. Apart from the Ipswich Journal, he wrote for periodicals such as the Morning Post, the Pall Mall Gazette and the Fortnightly Review. I also survey other Victorian novelists’ journalistic careers to compare with Meredith’s. -- In Chapter 2, I closely examine Meredith’s engagement as leader writer for the Ipswich Journal. Although his contributions to this newspaper were anonymous, I attempt to draw a picture of his routine work, which he continued for eight years. -- In Chapter 3, I consider John Morley’s journalistic career. Morley was a close friend of Meredith and the novelist once planned to write a novel called The Journalist in which Morley would figure as a main character. I then discuss Meredith’s journalism and politics. -- In Chapter 4, I examine Meredith’s novel, One of Our Conquerors, in the context of anti-imperialism. The novelist’s experimentalism and prophetic analysis of the malaise of contemporary England established his status as the Sage of Box Hill. -- Meredith’s reputation as a novelist was at its height around the turn of the century, but a few years after his death, it was gone. My contention in this thesis is that his journalistic experience in the 1860s laid the foundation of his political thinking which later gained him his status as a public intellectual. His reputation as a liberal-radical intellectual, however, was doomed to decline with the fall of late Victorian Liberalism.