Although the quest for authenticity has been particularly foregrounded in self-narratives from the nineteen-sixties onwards, its long tradition goes back to St Augustine. This thesis endeavours to trace a genealogy of texts that foreground the problematics of locating and narrating a self: from the confessional to the legacies of the literature of the double, through to the modern and postmodern novel. Ever since Augustine’s Confessions, the preoccupation with the transformation and shaping of subjective experience into narrative forms has wrestled with the problem of whether the activity is one of locating the essence of a presumed unitary ontological self or of a continuous process of rewriting and constructing that self through narrative itself. The inherent contradiction in the activity of writing a self has long been understood by writers who, over the last seven centuries, have addressed the problem of doubling the self in and as text. Paradoxically, the inevitable dividedness that arises out of this process appears to reify the self even as it seeks to retain the illusion of presence. In this thesis, I intend to demonstrate, how preoccupations regarded as ‘postmodern’ or as ‘post-postmodern’ emerge out of a long tradition of problematizing the writing of the self. Given the ephemeral nature of subjectivity as part of the on-going process of invention and projection, the impossibility of grasping any essential reality that can be located behind constructed textual masks serves to compound the problem. The emergent textual self, or selves, disappoint as mere approximations of verisimilitude; they essentially fail to provide a valid rendition of the idea of the self in the mind: an homunculus within the supposed “Ghost in the Machine”.

This thesis begins from the observation that seventeenth-century life-writing appears to have little recourse to the age's revolutionary medical developments when describing personal illness. It therefore seeks to explore the available textual frameworks for writing autobiographical accounts of illness, and the rhetorical strategies that writers of such texts used for adapting their illnesses to those frameworks. My research is contextualised within discussions of early modern selfhood. Like a number of recent scholars, I reject the Burkhardtian assumption of a vibrant Renaissance self, born, fully formed, sometime during the Tudor age. I present examples of illnesses described both as self-obliterating and self-invigorating, but the moments of self-invigoration, I argue, are not evidence of a thoroughgoing subjectivity, but glimpses of a nascent, fragmentary and problematic selfhood, often kept forcibly in check by strict observance of religious routines and adherence to restrictive textual conventions for recording life events. Those textual conventions, I claim, are best uncovered by attending – where possible – to the material texts of the various autobiographical sources I consult. From predominantly manuscript sources, I present examples of writers, for instance, using prescriptive methods such as that of financial accounting, or collecting and adapting non-original material to account for their illnesses, neither of which techniques suggests an introspective and sustained expression of selfhood in sickness. I present chapters examining descriptions of personal illness in diaries, autobiography, letters and poetry, attending in each case to the ways in which illness and identity are written and rewritten. My evidence suggests that a sense of collectivity appears to dominate the life-writing of illness, one in which the subject is frequently defined by his or her participation in familial, social or religious networks, and in which material from other texts is collected and redeployed to account for events in an individual life. The textual frameworks examined in this thesis, I hold, are readily adaptable to accommodate and treat moments of personal crisis such as illness.

Drawing on a large number of newly-published materials, my study, first of all, explores the connection between war, as both a literary theme and historical circumstance, and Eliot’s writings, and casts light on the transformation of both the degree to which war shapes Eliot’s writings and the ways in which Eliot responds to war in his writings. As a timely contribution to Eliot scholarship, my thesis aims at complicating the existing understanding of Eliot’s writings, suggesting political corollaries to the personal, psychological, aesthetic, or philosophical issues that previous critics have explored in depth. In general, the organisation of chapters in this thesis will follow a historical sequence, and each chapter will correspond with one particular stage in the development of Eliot’s writings. In total, there are four chapters in this thesis. Drawing upon Eliot’s wartime biography and correspondence during the First World War, the first chapter explores Eliot’s wartime writings in relation to their historical context, and suggest that, while the War affected young Eliot’s life, war, as a literary theme, also made its presence felt in his writings, sometimes in rather obscure ways. The second chapter scrutinises Eliot’s post-WWI writings between 1919 and 1925, and suggests the ways in which his post-war writings signal both a reflection of the First World War and an observation of the disintegrated Europe in the aftermath of the War. The third chapter investigates the ways in which Eliot sought intelligent debates on political theories as responses to the feverish political climate of the time in a series of cultural conversations that Eliot participated or formed in the Criterion, and argues that the Criterion’s involvement in the discussion of post-war European cultural politics shows not only the War’s impact on the ensuing intellectual debates in interwar Britain, but also that “[a] war of cultures” (CP3 346) was created on the pages of the Criterion. The fourth chapter focuses on Eliot’s writings after 1939, particularly the wartime Four Quartets and the post-war Notes towards the Definition of Culture. First of all, it explores Four Quartets in relation to wartime England during the Second World War, investigating the ways in which Eliot’s three wartime quartets are “patriotic” poems. On the other hand, this chapter explores Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture, and suggests that Eliot advocates the means of “cultural reconstruction” in a war-torn society after the Second World War. By doing so, I aim to show the way in which war, especially the Second World War, contributes to the formation of Eliot’s cultural theory in the late 1940s.

This study engages in both an examination of Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity and how they might be applied to culture as well as a reading of cultural performance in James Joyce’s works. The dual-nature of this study provides an opportunity to utilize literary works in the reading of theoretical texts and is not simply a reading of Joyce’s works through a lens of Butlerian performativity. In doing so, this thesis will explore a wide range of performances, from Joyce’s own performative identity as an “exile”, to the performative relationships initiated by naming rituals, the performative use of catechistic question and answer, as well as the fluidity of performative identities in Joyce’s array of cultural characters. At the heart of this study is the sense that Joyce’s characters are uniquely self-conscious in the way that they take up culture and can therefore be utilized in a re-examination of drag performance in Butler. The developmental aim of this thesis is not only to study cultural performativity in James Joyce’s works and the unique position of the Irish as self-consciously performative, but also to provide a new means for reading cultural performativity through a theory of cultural drag. The theatricalization of culture through “drag” performance allows for a distinctly self-conscious method of performing culture which does not rely on reactionary performances of “Us/ Them” in traditional colonial binaries. Keeping in mind the various cultural pressures, including colonialist and nationalist interpretations of the cultural being, cultural drag maintains a degree of agency within identity construction, presenting spectrums of cultural performances and the degrees of “belonging” that might be attributed to them. Cultural drag explores and celebrates divergence – the reading of an identity as performative – by examining the performative relationships between actor and audience: the cultural being and the observer’s perception of that being.

This thesis examines how Wordsworth interacted with non-literary communities within Cumbria, his impact on these communities, and their impact on his work. Analysing texts from across Wordsworth’s lifetime, including published poetry and prose, manuscripts, and personal writing, my study charts how his engagement with Cumbrian communities changed and his portrayals of local life developed. It argues that there are three phases to his writing about local communities: ‘remembering’ (1790s), ‘experiencing’ (1800-8), and ‘determining’ (1808 onwards). In the first phase, his writing about communities is defined by a sense of nostalgia and detachment; in the second phase he is immersed in the locale, writing with a vivid sense of exploration and discovery; in the third phase he writes from a more authoritative position, seeking to prescribe the ideal model for Cumbrian communities. The study reveals that although he was drawn to an attractive ideal of community cohesion, he also responded to local tensions and divisions, and ambivalence can also be read within his portrayals of the locale. The unresolved disjunctions between ideal and reality, cohesion and division, provide a significant motivation for his creativity.

I have attempted to find out what was of significance in the sphere of religion in Charlotte Bronte's life and thought. For information on this I have concentrated on a study of her better known novels, her letters and the contacts she had through family and friends. Naturally of importance was her up-bringing in an Evangelical Anglican household. But at the same time, she had a father, who though orthodox in his theology was unorthodox in his views on child-rearing. The mental freedom this gave her was important. Her education, though far from conventional, was such as stimulated and invigorated her imagination. Her natural inclination and independence of thought, , enabled her to use this freedom. Her letters are revealing of a person capable of passionate feelings and strong emotions. But these she was only able to give open expression to in her novels. This was undoubtedly what contributed to their lasting appeal. In delving into these personal responses it has been possible to throw an interesting light on religious thinking in sections of nineteenth-century church life, particularly on the contentions and divergencies within the EvangeIical and Catholic wings of the Anglican church This has in turn shown how, leading an isolated life in an isolated part of the world does not exclude Charlotte Brontë from absorbing and reflecting currents of religious thought that were strong at that time. To give background to all this, it seemed helpful to introduce the whole subject by a brief outline of what those main strands of thought were, both Protestant and Catholic. This, in turn, led to a consideration of the changes that had taken place during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries not only in Anglicanism, but in Catholicism and Methodism. In summing up, it was interesting to trace Charlotte Brontë’s changmg attitudes; how she responded to new ideas and controversies as her literary reputation grew and her horizons expanded. What remains after all this sifting of ideas is the conviction that over and above all the outside influences there is always the indefinable factor, the spark of genius.

Dove Cottage, Grasmere is a unique cultural centre. As home to William Wordsworth and his family from 1799 to 1808, and Thomas De Quincey and his family from 1809 to 1835, it encompasses a rich literary history. In 1890 it became only the third writer's house in England to be preserved as a museum. As such, it also incorporates a rich history of literary tourism and museology, acting as a record of cultural and practical shifts in touristic and museological practices. Today, as a global tourist attraction, contemporary arts organisation, archive, scholarly resource, and heart of a community, it offers a distinctive combination of functions and meanings which memorialise and reiterate its past, at the same time as working to create its future. This thesis examines the processes through which the cottage the Wordsworth's rented in 1799 has been re-imagined into the cultural centre of the twenty-first century. It is concerned with how meaning is created around place through different media, comprising the writing and disseminating of various literatures (from poetry to tourist guides), the activities of dwelling in place and visiting place, and the re-presentation of place as museum or archive. In so-doing, it traces how the cottage has been re-imagined and re-presented at different points in its history, elucidating the Wordsworths' initiation of a mythos of home at Grasmere through their writings, which was repeated and augmented by De Quincey in his writings. These popular accounts of life at Dove Cottage created powerful impressions of the site as particularly inspirational, which .~~~------------- -- ---------.---=-~-~-~~~~-------- ii have been reiterated and propagated through its re-presentation as museum and cultural centre. This thesis argues that it is the activities enabled by the site's multiple functionality which continue to recreate Dove Cottage as cultural centre: as 'inspirational home'.

As a transnational contribution to the study of life-writing and to the understanding of women's war experiences, ‘Trauma and Representation in Women's Diaries of the Second World War' examines women's war diaries from the point of view of trauma studies. It provides new readings of established texts, such as Frances Partridge's A Pacifist's War and Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life, alongside previously unexamined archival diaries and several recently published diaries that have received little critical attention to date. Through close reading, it analyses how traumatic registers, ranging from mild to severe, manifest in both the genesis and subject matter of women's diaries. The Introduction discusses the post-war cultural imperatives that have worked to repress women's accounts of the Second World War, particularly those which describe devastation in the domestic sphere. It situates diary writing contextually within the field of autobiographical writing, exploring the characteristics of this contested genre and questioning the possibilities it opens up for the conveyance of traumatic experience. Finally, it provides a brief historiography of trauma studies, focusing on the complicated relationship between trauma and modern warfare and the difficulties traumatic experience poses for testimony. In the ensuing chapters, my analyses demonstrate the various ways war trauma manifests in women's diaries. Chapter One examines the physiological and psychological costs of repeated exposure to violent situations such as bomb raids and rape through a combination of psychoanalytic and neurobiological discourses on trauma. Chapter Two discusses diaries that were kept at a relative distance from violent conflict, exploring women's affective responses to the changes in their lives that occurred during wartime through theories of depression and melancholia. Finally, Chapter Three constitutes a final analysis of the relationship between trauma and representation, analysing women's descriptions of both the physical and societal abjection that proliferated towards the end of the war.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of Tolkien's writing, seeking to place his work within the framework of the historical period within which it was created. The thesis concentrates on four areas of Tolkien's expertise and experience and explores how their historical development informed the creation of Tolkien's legendarium. The Introductory Chapter presents an overview of Tolkien criticism and defines the scope and range of the thesis. Chapter 2 concentrates on the question of the centrality of the Elves in the Middle- earth mythos and explores how the evolution of their image corresponds to the development of the science of folklore. Chapter 3 examines the influence of contemporary anthropology on Tolkien's ideas and how the decline of racial anthropology left its mark in the conception of the different creatures that inhabit Middle-earth. Chapter 4 is a new, detailed analysis of Tolkien's 'invented languages' as an integral part of his fiction. The chapter looks at the principles of Tolkien's language invention, contextualises the creation of his imaginary languages within a long philosophical and literary tradition (that of the search for the perfect language) and explores the role of philology and the - then emerging - science of modern linguistics in the construction of the languages of Middle-earth. This chapter is complemented by an Addendum on the Writing Systems of Middle-earth. Chapter 5 takes the previously almost entirely neglected topic of Tolkien's awareness of contemporary archaeology and its role in his work. The chapter focuses on the depiction of material culture in Middle- earth, mainly through examining the human 'cultures' of Tolkien's invented world, but also treating such issues as the anachronistic material culture of the hobbits, and the creation of Middle-earth landscapes. The Epilogue recapitulates the main conclusions of the thesis and further examines the interplay of biography and literature in Tolkien's case, by using the concept of 'biographical legend'.

No description available.