This thesis examines the psychological and Gothic motifs which infuse Thomas De Quincey's literature. His obsession with childhood trauma and associated guilt, and his tragic affair with opium and the nightmares it brought, will be discussed in order to illustrate how De Quincey has become recognised for his ability to combine sunlight and subterranean, finding somewhere in between these the mysteries of human consciousness and guilt. Many questions will arise during the course of this thesis; was De Quincey as aware of his addiction as he claims? Was he as addicted to opium as he claims? Did he write Confessions with an honest and contrite heart? Was his writing a mode of repentance? Or did he write knowing all too well how popular this glimpse into addiction would be and how much the reading public would revel in becoming the voyeurs of his opium habit? Was he more like a lunatic or a genius? Why was death in childhood so significant to him? This examination specifically of De Quincey's Gothicism and his ability to analyse the subconscious will illuminate some new opportunities for research into his work. This thesis, inspired by Morrison, will provide a detailed and contemporary look at the English Opium-Eater and how relevant his work is in an age where autobiographical writing has deteriorated into mere voyeurism for the sake of transient fame; where the public readership thrives on a diet of the private revelations of public figures. It is intended that this study will appreciate the skill and art of confessional writing, and answer some questions regarding the intent, purpose and importance of revealing our personal histories through self-analysis. In clarifying what is meant by the term 'confessional writing', one must question its purpose and the motivation for its creation. Confession implies truth, professing as honestly as possible the account at hand. However, it is not surprising that this process is, more often than not, obscured by the human error of omission or varying impressions as to the actual details of an experience. Levin agrees that confessional writing falls somewhere between truthful intention and appealing authorship, 'The relationship between lived events and literary narrative becomes especially complex when an author presents a text as a kind of lived experience, as an autobiography or even more specifically as a confession, a word defined by the notion of truthful accounting. His La Confession d 'un enfant du siecle, for instance, raised certain issues for Alfred Musset. In the letter of 1836 to composer Franz Liszt, he wrote of how the book was "not nearly true enough to be a memoir by any stretch of the imagination and not false enough to be a novel." And as a writer Musset was concerned with keeping the literary form under control,.I Whether Musset's assertion regarding his confessional work can be applied to De Quincey's confessional work is questionable. The degree to which confessional writing is, in fact, truly a confession vacillates between extremes; it can be as intentionally truthful as The Confessions of St. Augustine, or it can lean toward an aesthetic and self-vindicating account like De Quincey's Confessions. However, superseding all these investigations and their involved intricacies lies the belief that Thomas De Quincey's life and works will continue to be a source of intrigue and fascination, and that the precedents which he set down in his writing can lead to new and appealing avenues in modem observations of guilt and Gothicism in Romantic literature.

The aim of this thesis is to relocate the work of some late nineteenth-century British writers, including Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and William Morris, within the history of the avantgarde. This is carried out in two ways. First, I examine and criticize on both theoretical and methodological grounds, current theories of the avant-garde, focusing particularly on the work of Renato Poggioli and Peter Burger. In their place I outline a new theory, based on some premisses derived from the philosophy of intellectual history, which attempts to establish the intellectual conditions which make avant-garde activities possible. In this new theory I argue that the politics of avant-garde movements are culturally and historically specific. I then use this theory to establish the conditions for avant-garde activity in late nineteenth-century Britain. This undertaking involves an examination of general intellectual developments which took place in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; more precisely, it entails describing the intellectual changes which took place in political economy, historiography and sociology, for I suggest that these changes, by problematizing concepts of society and of history, both made British avant-garde activity possible, and determined the forms it took. The second part of this thesis examines the work of the above mentioned writers - Pater, Morris and Wilde - in the context of these wider intellectual and cultural changes. I suggest that the subversive political implications - and hence the avant-gardism - of their work may only be properly assessed in such a context.

This thesis focuses attention on the two years that George Orwell spent, between August 1941 and November 1943, at the Indian Section of the B.B.C., producing propaganda talks for listeners in India and elsewhere. It views Orwell's occupation in the context of the growing popularity of radio as the most successful weapon of propaganda war in the late thirties and early forties. The study looks briefly at the changing role of the intelligentsia during wartime, and examines the influence of the B. B. C. and other wartime institutions on Orwell's mind and creativity. Although much of Orwell's own contribution at the B.B.C. had become available after the publication of his war broadcasts and commentaries in 1985, this thesis incorporates fresh material and new documents from the B.B.C. Archives and the Orwell Archive, along with some other essays, journalism and letters, which have not been included in any posthumous collections of Orwell's works. The second area of investigation is Orwell's relationship with India and the East. Although his concern for India and Burma was always quite intense, his attitude towards their political problems underwent constant changes, thereby creating some inconsistency in his outlook. This thesis brings to light Orwell's acquaintance with several members of the Indian intelligentsia residing in London during the war, and gives particular attention to his friendship with the veteran Indian writer, Mulk Raj Anand, which hitherto has remained largely unconsidered. Chapter I surveys the propaganda policies of the British and German broadcasting agencies and introduces readers to those factors which led to, and affected, the creation and growth of the Indian Service. An insight into Orwell's mind just before the outbreak of the war explains his reasons for accepting this particular post. Chapter II establishes the biographical details of Orwell's life between 1941 and 1943, and analyses the effect of the bureaucracy of the B.B.C. and M.O.I. on his mind and behaviour. Chapter III contains a taxonomy of his wartime scripts and elaborates upon his social life during the war, including his apparent intimacy with the poet Stevie Smith. The B. B. C. presented Orwell with many ideas and images which contributed to the imaginative setting, characterisation and content of Nineteen Eighty-Four. A discussion of these is contained in Chapter IV. Chapter V -'Child of the Raj'- examines Orwell's ever-changing relationship with India in terms of four stages and charts the development of his political, social, economic and cultural responses to the country and its peoples. His friendship with Mulk Raj Anand, and a comparison of their early lives and novels, is the subject of the concluding chapter, which also highlights their shared responses to politics and society in the thirties. The six appendices that follow substantiate the argument provided in the thesis. Particularly worthy of mention is 'Who listened-in to George Orwell? ' which surveys patterns of listening-in to broadcasts from the B. B. C. and other radio stations in India during the war.

This thesis examines the work of James Hanley (1901-1985), a working-class ordinary seaman who became a professional writer for most of his adult life. His reputation was made originally during the 1930s when he was often identified with the emergent group of industrial-based' proletarian' realists. However, Hanley's writing radically departs from conventional notions of realism and will be shown to have closer associations with both mainstream and sub-cultural forms of modernism. Theoretically, the thesis is grounded in Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness, which argues that the 'totality' of social relations is made intelligible only through a working-class realization of the dialectic. His social insight is then adapted and, along with other compatible Marxist readings, developed for a literary theory which argues that, read dialectically, working-class interventions reveal the conflictual and contradictory aspects of literary formations and movements. Hanley's life and career is characterized by what is consistently represented as a 'class struggle' at both the social and textual levels: a pervasive phenomenon whereby marginal initiatives both resist and affirm the ideology of the dominant culture. Hanley is also interesting in terms of his spatial and temporal range which, unlike that of other working class writers, is confined neither to that moment of the 1930s, nor to the workplace, but addresses the broad spectrum of 20th-century British history and culture, including the crisis moments of two world wars, and the salient questions of modernity: political engagement and retreat, individuality and community, country and city. Methodologically, such a complexity is more fully explained by an intertextual approach which locates Hanley within both a European tradition and various currents of contemporary writing. It is argued that class is the key determining factor in understanding both these processes, and the analagous problematics of Hanley's social trajectory, each of which are shown to have profound textual consequences. Empirically, the social and cultural sources of his work are traced from the place of his origins, Liverpool, through the domain of the sea, to the modem world of metropolitan publishing and finally to rural Wales, his adopted country. The thesis concludes that interpreting modernism through the category of class has implications for developing general theories of literary culture: namely that cultural phenomena cannot be characterized by any singular factor or process, but are more adequately interpreted dialectically, that is to say as the result of a struggle between competing meanings of tradition, reality, history and art.

The crucial importance of non-Shakespearian Renaissance dramatists to T.S. Eliot is evident in both his poetry and his prose. Eliot himself drew attention to this: he credited his own ‘poetic formation’ to the ‘minor Elizabethan dramatists’, and when reviewing his ‘critical output for the last thirty-odd years’ in 1951, he confessed himself ‘surprised to find how constantly I have returned to the drama, whether by examining the work of the contemporaries of Shakespeare, or by reflecting on the possibilities of the future.’ As C.S. Lewis disapprovingly wrote, Eliot’s ‘sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster) is apparent’. This thesis will trace Eliot’s engagement with these dramatists; it is a topic that has been comparatively neglected despite the central role it played in the evolution of his poetic and critical sensibility. The first section, which is largely biographical, explores Eliot’s background and education for clues to the development of his great interest in Renaissance drama, as well as detailing the ways in which he pursued this interest when he moved to England. The second comprises a detailed study of Eliot’s many essays on Renaissance dramatists. The last section examines his poetry, from the juvenilia to The Waste Land of 1922, when the outward signs of his ‘saturation’ were particularly prominent. In my conclusion I discuss how his engagement with Renaissance drama evolved in his post-1922 poetry and culminated in the composition of his own verse plays. The aim of this thesis is to explore the nature of the ‘profound kinship’ Eliot shared with Renaissance dramatists; their work appealed to him because it combines erudition with emotion, refinement with savagery, levity with the macabre and squalid. This appeal was so strong that it powerfully shaped both his poetic ideals and his vision of modernity.

John Buchan (1875-1940) has a literary reputation as a minor novelist, based mainly on his success as a popular fiction writer, the inventor of the spy thriller in his best-known novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Although there has been considerably increased scholarly interest in his work in recent years, the perception that he is mainly a genre writer persists and has limited the success of attempts to move his literary reputation towards the academic mainstream. Other areas of his writing have received some recognition, but his uncollected journalism has remained a neglected aspect of his work, largely overlooked even by Buchan specialists. This thesis brings an academic focus to Buchan's uncollected journalism for the first time. It breaks new ground by examining the style, structure, and content of his articles and reviews, and argues that Buchan should be considered as an essayist of elegance and authority, an astute literary critic attuned to contemporary trends, and a wide-ranging cultural commentator on his times. The thesis shows that Buchan's uncollected journalism, in its volume and range, provides a major field for the additional research which is clearly required if Buchan's literary reputation is to be further enhanced. It aims to make a significant contribution by opening up this area of his work to future study in two entirely new ways. First, it contains an extensive catalogue of his uncollected journalism, over a thousand items in total, with each article categorised and summarised as an aid to future researchers, features which have never before been available. The catalogue also contains a hundred articles and reviews which have not been included in any previous bibliography. Secondly, it provides a selection of annotated articles which could form the basis of the first critical edition of Buchan's essays to be issued in order to promote further recognition of this aspect of his writing.

This thesis examines the use of light and dark imagery throughout T. S. Eliot’s literary career; in his poetry (Inventions of the March Hare, Prufrock and Other Observations, The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday, Four Quartets) and in his dramatic works (The Rock, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion). The aim of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, it aims to show how, by an attentive analysis of light and dark imagery in Eliot’s works, it is possible to discern a continuous pattern of light and dark correlation and opposition throughout his oeuvre, which can be interpreted in historical, biographical, and existential terms. Secondly, this thesis seeks to explain poetry qua poetry, with the light and dark imagery proving a remarkable path of investigation, in which to understand Eliot’s poetry and its important relationship with his own literary “debts”. If, on the one hand, many critics have considered the importance of light and dark imagery in Eliot’s most significant poetical work after his religious conversion, Four Quartets, as an important turn to mysticism and religion, this has too often been perceived as a sudden change in his beliefs and in his poetics, rather than as a gradual development. The presence of light and dark images in Eliot’s early poetry, as well as in his earlier masterpiece The Waste Land, shows how Eliot had consciously imagined a path of light throughout his oeuvre, demonstrating his own preoccupations with regard to soul, rationality, and religion from his very early years as a poet. This thesis thus wants to fill a gap in the field of Eliot studies, where the importance of light and dark imagery in Eliot’s early poetry, as well as in his drama, and the connection of light and dark in Four Quartets with his other literary works, has been underestimated by previous scholars.

This thesis identifies and interrogates commonalities and divergences in the works of T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway in relation to their focus on how to make sense of the world of experience in the early twentieth century, and the complex mediations in which feeling and consciousness are involved. Chapter One considers Eliot’s and Hemingway’s common concern in their early works with the experience and representation of a fragmented self, and the extent to which this feature led them to involve their characters in a flow of sensations that liberates consciousness from the chains of rational constructs. Chapter Two examines Eliot’s and Hemingway’s later ambivalent consideration of this glorification of the sensual beyond any intellectual categorization of reality. The chapter shows how their shared mistrust of this primitive state of mind guided them to pay attention to collective modes of experience intrinsic to ritual patterns. The focus of Chapter Three is on Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). This chapter analyzes the rituals to which they paid attention and how these shaped their distinctive consideration of a common unifying sense of feeling to revitalize society. Chapter Four investigates Eliot’s interest in religious feeling and Hemingway’s concern with moral feeling as modes of reinforcing the interrelation between the individual and society. The aim in the final chapter is to consider Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) within the framework of the American Jeremiad to analyze the outcomes of the final quest of these two authors to attain a unity of experience that moves beyond the frontier of the contradictions of the material world. Critics have commented on the relationship between Eliot and Hemingway in different terms. My overall argument, however, is that the similarities and differences between these two authors result from Eliot and Hemingway occupying two poles of a dissociated experience of reality, and that they attempted in comparable yet contrasting ways to transcend the disorder of experience.

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‘How to Make White People Happy’ is a creative and critical thesis that explores the nature of the journeying condition and the realities of cross-cultural immersion. The creative component is a collection of forty-three autobiographical stories that fuse elements of memoir, travelogue, satire and essay. In it, readers find docujournals about Indonesian slum life, hostile New Mexico cowboys, and star-struck pool boys who dream of fistfighting Chuck Norris. Alone in the city of Paris, a bereaved widow discovers some hard truths about travel and escapism, while on the bleak prairie barrens of Montana a grizzled recluse encounters a different kind of child’s play in an isolated barn. Readers also meet a dying Newfoundlander who dreams of an unusual cut of steak, two young lovers experimenting with the explicit in someone else’s house, and an abandoned Balinese orphan who rises to success in an elitist Anglo society. The exegesis which accompanies the collection focuses on western middle-class travel and discusses the influences and perceptions that drive it, primarily the influence of tourist media and its glorifications of travel life. Drawing from a range of scholars and writers such as Alain de Botton, James Clifford, Mark Twain, Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, the commentary emphasizes that any alteration of our human condition occurs foremost through dynamic psychological shifts, rather than geographical ones. Other topics discussed include: belonging and displacement, the relationship between expectation and disillusionment, and aspects of travel narration, specifically humour, satire and point of view.