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The aim of this study is to demonstrate that Wells's early works are the supreme fruits of his ambiguous and complicated reaction against, and interaction with, romance and realism in fiction. Wells's efforts concentrate on combating against and, at the same time, capitalising on the popular narratives that flooded the expanding fin-de-siècle mass market and the powerful influence of the continental and American Realists. In so doing, Wells eventually purports to revive and modify the English novel tradition from Chaucer to Scott and Dickens, and the romantic transformation of everyday life without losing a sense of reality. By reading Wells's fictional and non-fictional works published between the 1890s and the 1900s, this thesis maintains that Wells is a novelist who could exploit romance contingencies in his fiction Wells's early literary criticism demonstrates that his theory of the novel is preoccupied with the potential of the romance rather than with the strict realistic representation of everyday life advocated by Naturalists and Realists. His non-scientific romances reveal Wells's instinctive grasp of the romance potential Wells's major scientific romances confirm his effort in writing within the established romance grammar and deconstruct the forms and themes of fìn-de-siècle popular romances. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnivalism and Foucaulťs theory of power are also applied to Wells's texts. This study contends that Wells's major scientific romances not only differentiate themselves from other popular narratives but also create a new genre: the carnivalesque romance. Wells's early twentieth century Utopian projects continue the carnival theme, and develop the carnivalised narrative space in which the sociologist's logical speculation is mixed with the romancer’s dream. Reading Wells's Edwardian novels, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly as marking a turning point in his literary career, the thesis advocates that when Wells ceased to be a romancer, his creative energy began to wane.

This thesis announces the special relationship that Bram Stoker's masterpiece Dracula has to its creator, taking as its focal point the startling textual reflection of Stoker's own hybridised national identity as Anglo-lrish emigré in his vampire Count. Using this paired relationship between author and antagonist as its base, it thereby proposes an original reading of the novel as a work of imaginative autobiography, as a fictional rendering of the realities of Stoker's own fragmented national existence in fin-de-siècle London, positioning Dracula as a novel that deeply engages with the complexity of its author's national identity and the place of this national self in his writing. By their very nature, discussions of nationality are articulated in the interaction between the individual and the community that constitutes the nation. Stoker's own lived experiences in London provide the immediate context for the exploration of such concerns in Dracula, but these are experiences shaped by his particular status as an Anglo-Irish writer in the metropolis. Dracula is therefore first positioned in this work as the product of a historical tradition of Anglo-Irish writing long invested in the complications of national affiliation, something that Chapters One and Two explore, interrogating in the process how the legacy of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Charles Robert Maturin and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu forms the foundations of Stoker's work. Chapter Three considers in detail how it is Stoker's migrant status that serves as a keystone in this thesis' reading of Dracula by exploring the (Anglo-) Irish migrant experience in Victorian London. Chapter Four deals with the nineteenth-century literary vampire, and asks what such a motif might offer a writer like Stoker seeking to give authentic textual life to his sense of national displacement. Chapter Five reveals the centrality of ideas of writing the (national) self in external perceptions of Stoker and in Stoker's own non-fictional work. Finally, Chapter Six completes a reading of Dracula as imaginative autobiography, as a sustained literary engagement with conflicted national identity that proves illuminating of both Stoker and the class that shaped him and his most famous literary endeavour.

This work presents a theory that Lewis Carroll's life and works were profoundly affected by a conflict between his logical world view and his religious beliefs. Three examinations are presented - the first of convention and logic in Carroll's life, the second of the nature of his religion and the third of his response to contemporary science. The thesis concludes that Victorian science brought Carroll's beliefs into contradiction, causing him to experience religious and existential doubts. It is suggested that an understanding of these doubts can inform an understanding of Carroll's relationships with Alice Liddell and other young girls, and indeed has repercussions for his entire life and works beyond the scope of this thesis. Two brief appendices expand upon issues mentioned in the text: the first considers the artefacts at Ripon Cathedral which are supposed by some to have influenced Carroll; and the second discusses Effie's Dream-Garden, a children's book which bears some resemblance to the Alice story but which was published several years before that story was first told.

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Although some good work on Collins is now beginning to emerge, complex and central elements in his fiction require fuller exploration. More consideration is due to the development of Collins's thinking and fictional techniques in the lesser-known novels, since out of a total of thirty-four published works most have received scant attention from scholars. This is particularly true of the later fiction. It is to work of the later period (1870-1889) that I devote the fullest consideration, whilst giving due attention to the novels of the 1860s which are usually regarded as Collins's major novels. Collins perceived that established discourses on criminality, deviance, femininity and morality functioned as mechanisms with which the dominant masculine and middle-class hegemony attempted to confirm and maintain its power. His later fiction reveals the anxieties of masculine and middle-class narrator-figures. In his novels written in the 1860s Collins explored narrative and subnarrative. He developed the technique of using the accounts of various characters to challenge the perspective of the narrator-figure and created the persona of an omniscient narrator whose response to his creations reveals his own anxieties. The novels of Collins's later period develop such techniques to explore masculine apprehension at the changes occurring in late-Victorian society in which women and the working-classes were gaining greater freedom and middle-class dominance was threatened. Although narrators overtly argue the validity of standard discourses, their views are subverted by a level of sub-textual meaning at which the inadequacy of the narrators and their ideologies is revealed. Sub-textual meaning in the novels reveals tensions and anomalies within ideas of criminality, the Victorian ideal of womanhood, medical discourses and the idea of the gentleman and his counterpart, the knight errant figure. Collins's later fiction presents itself as an impressive attempt to explore the ideological and social tensions of rapidly changing late-Victorian England.

This thesis reassesses the claim that Thomas Hardy was an agnostic, looking closely at the meanings of agnosticism (in terms of nineteenth-century usage of the word) and how Hardy's reinterpretation of agnosticism manifested itself in his work. By exploring his novels and poetry as they intersect with the intellectual development of agnosticism, it is shown that at the centre of Hardy's work, as at the centre of agnosticism, is an insistence upon final epistemological uncertainty and a rejection of dogmatism. For Hardy, this had application beyond theological questions to broader aspects of human existence. Chapter One examines Hardy's engagement with the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley and Leslie Stephen. Chapter Two discusses Hardy's exploration of knowledge, through its obscuration by means of secrets, trickery and concealment, in his 'Novels of Ingenuity' (Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta and A Laodicean). Chapter Three investigates Hardy's critical reinterpretation of two of Leslie Stephen's agnostic essays in A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Return of the Native. Chapter Four considers The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders as Hardy's attempts to contextualise philosophical debates concerning the consequences of non-commitment. Chapters Five and Six discuss Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, respectively, as Hardy's most thorough explorations of the consequences of agnosticism for morality, through the portrayal of the agnostic heroes, Angel Clare and Jude Fawley. Chapter Seven considers Hardy's poetry as a medium through which he was able to express and explore his version of agnosticism. The claim of this thesis is that, Hardy, as an artist, was able to take agnosticism further than the Victorian agnostics. As such, his work can be read as a critical reinterpretation of the rationalist principles of agnostic thought within the domain of art.

This thesis explores the role of anti-Catholicism and Catholicism in the life and work of Charles Dickens. A critical consensus has emerged that Dickens was vehemently anti-Catholic. Yet a 'curious dream' he had of his beloved dead sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, in which her spirit appears to him in the guise of the Madonna, suggests that his overt anti-Catholicism masks a profoundly complex relationship to the 'Church of Rome'. 'Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism' therefore re-evaluates the anti-Catholic sentiments in the author's novels, journalism and letters by contextualizing them in relation to key events of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival such as the 1850 Papal Aggression. I argue that Dickens often employs anti-Catholicism not simply as a religious prejudice, but as a mode of discourse through which he disrupts, displaces or reinforces a range of secular anxieties. 'Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism' also uncovers and explores the often cryptic moments in Dickens's writing when Catholic motifs are invoked that suggest a strange 'attraction of repulsion' to Roman Catholicism. Catholicism seems to offer him a rich source of imaginative and narrative possibilities. Reading Dickens's fiction through the lens of Catholicism can therefore reveal a much more ambivalent relationship to the religion than his apparent beliefs as well as unearthing new ways of thinking about his work.

This thesis examines the epistemological, socio-cultural and aesthetic impact of the hyperspace philosophy of Charles Howard Hinton, as expressed within his two-volume collection of Scientific Romances (1884-1896). Hinton's hyperspace philosophy is founded on the belief that the fourth dimension exists as a transcendental yet material space that is accessible to both the mind and the physical senses. Inspired by Immanuel Kant's discussion of space as an a priori intuition, Hinton's project is one of consciousness expansion: he argues that 'a new era of thought' can be attained through the recognition of the fourth dimension. The thesis demonstrates that, in the Scientific Romances, Hinton seeks to engender the 'reality' of the fourth dimension within the reader's imagination through the collaboration of reader and author. Hinton's hyperspace philosophy is thus concerned with mediation, the ways in which the consciousness thinks and creates with and through the aesthetics of space. In addition to providing the most developed analysis of Hinton's writing to date, this thesis examines the work of Hinton's contemporaries exploring the ways in which the discourse of the fourth dimension can offer new readings of familiar literary texts. A recurring explanatory device throughout hyperspace philosophy is the dimensional analogy, and the thesis illustrates how this trope resonates across the work of contemporary writers including Lewis Carroll, H. G. Wells, HenryJames, Friedrich Nietzsche and William James.

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