The following thesis is an account of Thomas Hood's literary reading, arranged according to the nationality and chronology of the works read. Thus, after an Introduction, chapter 1 deals with classical literature, chapter II with foreign literature, especially the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Don Quixote, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron, also French literature, particularly Rabelais, and American literature. There is a brief section on the Bible. German literature, particularly the work of Goethe and Schiller, is dealt with separately in chapter III. Chapter IV deals with English literature to the age of Shakespeare., particularly the work of Spenser and Marlowe and Chapman's 'Hero and Leander'. Chapter VI deals with English prose of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a concluding section on the drama. Chapter VII deals with English poetry of this period. Chapter VIII deals with contemporary English prose, the novel between Scott and Dickens, periodical literature, particularly the work of the writers of the London Magazine, and miscellaneous writing, particularly travel works. There is again a final section on the drama. Chapter IX deals with contemporary English poetry, particularly the work of the greater and lesser romantics. The Conclusion is an attempt to evaluate Hood's work in the light of his reading. This is followed by a bibliography of uncollected Hood items. In accordance with the regulations concerning the Ph. D. degree I am submitting as subsidiary matter a printed contribution to the advancement of my subject, an article, 'Taylor and Hessey: aspects of their conduct of the London Magazine,' which is bound in at the back of this thesis.

I.A. Richards, Lecturer in English Literature in Cambridge, is a many-sided personality who has expressed his various intellectual interests in voluminous writings. Semanticist, educationalist, philosopher, psychologist, and, last but not least, literary critic, he has written on all these subjects separately, though in his two most important books - "Principles of Literary Criticism" and "Practical Criticism"-he attempts to be all these at the same time. But the purposes and the methods of these various disciplines are different and sometimes conflicting. It is this conflict between Richards the exponent of a certain type of psychological aesthetics and Richards the practical literary critic who is not bound by his own theoretical preconceptions that is the central theme of my thesis. I have devoted the first four chapters to an exposition and criticism of Richards' theory of language and his psychological theory of aesthetic value. Having shown that the theory of "Synaesthesis" as a criterion of aesthetic merit implies aesthetic pluralism and is inapplicable in practice, because vacuous, I have tried in Chapter 5 to find Richards' actual standards of aesthetic value as revealed in his own literary criticism. In Chapter 6 I have discussed the nature and function of the aesthetic judgment and have emphasised, as against Richards, its status as a judgment of value and not of psychological fact. In Chapter 7 I have attempted to show that the psychological approach to the problems of aesthetics is not as such to be ruled out as irrelevant; on the contrary, as practised, e.g. by S.Bullough it is worthy of being further developed, because it both offers a comprehensive view of aesthetics, art-criticism and culture, and provides in the principle of "Psychical Distance" an aesthetic principle capable of practical application. The main assumption underlying my critical attitude to the kind of aesthetic theories of which Richards is a typical exponent is that in Aesthetics theory and practice must be connected: Aesthetic theory must begin with an examination of aesthetic judgments, and practical art-criticism - if it is to be valid - must be based on theoretically established criteria of value. If this is so, then the aesthetician's task can be much wider than a "journeyman's". By affirming the1. W.B.Gallie: "The function of philosophical Aesthetics" in Aesthetics and Language ed by W.Elton. (Oxford,Basil Blackwell, 1954)underlying similarity of most great works of art of past cultures, by pointing out the essentially humanistic values of great art, he might perhaps actively contribute to their re-emergence.

The first two chapters are devoted to investigating the psychological characteristics of Landor's personality. This preliminary study of the man, which is essential for a reconsideration of his works, points to a recurring pattern of rebellion against persecution and self-imposed exile from the region of its influence. The recurrence of this pattern throughout Landor's life, brought alternately into prominence - as the third chapter attempts to show - the two soul-sides of the man: "One to face the world with," and "one to show" the beloved. Landor's fight against the contemporary world is then studied in the three subsequent chapters. His struggle against the political, religious and literary worlds, and his alienation from them are dealt with in detail. It was in terms of his sense of persecution that Landor came to view political and religious institutions, and to speak of contemporary writers, critics and reading public. When we deal, in chapter seven, with Landor's withdrawal, we find out that his essential character embodies traits which imply a romantic attitude to life. This romantic aspect of his personality comes into full view as we study his promethean rebellion, his withdrawal in time and place, his subjectivity, and his attitude to love, death, and nature. This view of Landor's character becomes the more convincing when we study, in chapter eight, the impact of his withdrawal into Italy upon his mind and work. For he will emerge, from this study, as a major participant in the Italianate fashion which was prevalent during the Romantic period, and which characterises the works of the Romantics proper. After dealing with Landor's Content in the previous chapters, we proceed to a consideration of his Form. When Landor adopted the dialogue form, he made it - as chapter nine attempts to show - his own. A knowledge of his peculiarities of temperament, the nature of his thinking, his poetic genius, his subjectivity, and his craving for dramatic expression will help us to understand the reasons for his choice of the dialogue form. A short survey of the dialogues written by his predecessors and contemporaries will show how Landor developed this form, and how the Imaginary Conversations are characteristically Landorian. This study of Landor's dialogues suggests a new classification for the Imaginary Conversations. None of the existing classifications is convincing enough: they overlook the important fact that Landor's dialogues are the product of the recurring pattern of rebellion and withdrawal. The knowledge of this pattern enables us to see in Landor's Conversations two groups that correspond with the two sides of his nature: the discursive and the dramatic. The predominance of this pattern in Landor's life shows also that each of his individual dialogues, though digressive in nature, has unity. It is because they have ignored this pattern that some critics have been led to the conclusion that most of Landor's dialogues lack both a central theme and a unity. Finally, if we approach Landor's criticism with this study in mind, we shall be able to understand what Landor said and - what Mr. Super sees as lacking in previous studies -"why he said it".

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This thesis starts from the premise that medievalism is an important yet under-recognised seam in British modernist culture. Untangling and examining the medieval threads that weave throughout the modern interest in the new, I supply an important link in the chain connecting modernism to postmodernism. Specifically, I consider medievalism through the lens of gender. Suggesting that women’s prolific engagement with medieval culture during the modernist period has been mysteriously neglected, I illuminate modernist women writers’ creative engagement with the Middle Ages by focusing on two writers in particular – Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Lynette Roberts (1909-1995). By means of historicist cultural analysis and close reading, I show that the Middle Ages emerge in their work as an important imaginative structure for thinking about questions of war, gender, and national identity. My central argument is that Woolf’s and Roberts’s representations of medieval culture are strongly implicated in their wider reassessment of national identity and women’s relation to national tradition in the first part of the twentieth century. Re-visioning the Middle Ages from a new angle, Woolf and Roberts recast the foundational myths on which the categories of gender and national identity were based. This project, as I see it, is twofold: recuperating a female-oriented past through a close attention to the ‘details of life’, and inventing a tradition for use in the present day. Returning to the Middle Ages, Roberts and Woolf salvage a ‘usable past’ with which to construct a new form of national culture for the future – one that admits women and ‘outsiders like ourselves’. There is a political, recuperative impulse behind my decision to pair Woolf, a modernist who is ubiquitous and canonical, with Roberts, a writer who, partly due to her gender and Welsh affiliations, remains an obscure and marginalized voice even today. Establishing a dialogue between Roberts’s ethnographic poetry and Woolf’s poetical prose, I use Roberts’s positioning on the cultural margins in order to attain new purchase on Woolf’s complex approaches to empire and national belonging. On the other hand, Woolf’s feminist polemics help to uncover the feminist components of Roberts’s cultural vision, indicating the ways in which her feminism intersects with her nationalist and socialist commitments. I show that, in spite of their cultural differences, Roberts and Woolf both use the medieval past in order to articulate those marginalised experiences, at once ‘travelling’ and ‘native’, that remain unassimilated to the colonial experience. While, for Roberts, the act of historical re-writing opens out the possibility for a new, postcolonial awakening for Wales, for Woolf, it provides the basis for reconceiving the nation on new ‘common ground’ for the postwar future.

Ruskin felt he had been born with a special power of vision, and he was to find in his early reading many different ways of considering this faculty. This thesis attempts to explore the literary background to his early writings, broadly interpreted, as befits a man of such varied interests, to include works of theology, philosophy, popular science and travel. The first half considers favourite authors of his childhood, reflecting his parents' Scottish origins, religious beliefs, contemporary literary taste and educational ideas, pastimes and travel abroad. In the second and third parts consideration is given to the influence of Wordsworth, Carlyle, the Bible, and Ruskin's reading as an undergraduate, on his decision not to become a clergyman, but to devote himself with an equally strong sense of dedication to writing on nature and art. His developing ideas are traced on the central importance of the cultivation of the individual's powers of vision not only in appreciating natural beauty and painting, but as a measure of his entire moral well-being. Attention is also drawn throughout the thesis to Ruskin's parallel development as a writer in verse and prose, and to the reflection of his reading in his juvenilia. A final chapter considers his emerging powers as a prose writer, with particular reference to Modern Painters Volume I, and indicates the special ways in which his style reflects his beliefs concerning the importance of sight.

The aim of the thesis is to examine the sources and the extent of Kipling's knowledge of India, and the way in which he pictures it in his writings. His undoubted talent as a story-teller,in particular his ability to make his stories convincing and believable, has succeeded in imposing his picture on the world. It will be shown, however,that what he wanted to see in India was often in opposition to what in fact he saw,and that at times he preferred to ignore aspects of the truth which did not suit his own or Anglo-Indian interests. The first chapter deals with the Indian scene. Kipling travelled widely as a reporter for his paper in northern India,and has described with confidence what he saw. The second chapter deals with his attitude to the Indians and the Anglo-Indians, and how it changed by the time he left India. The third chapter deals with omissions-the things he had seen and known about but had purposely ignored in his writings. The fourth chapter deals with the influence upon him of various Indian religions and superstitions end the sources of his knowledge of them. This influence can be traced in work which is not confined to India. The last chapter deals with the sources if his Indian stories and the way in which he collected material for them. Kipling emerges as well informed,and highly skilled in his craft as a writer,but with a bias in favour of the white rulers, first exemplified in the days of his own unimportance in the simple soldier,later in the unacknowledged field-work of lesser civil servants, and finally tending to an identification with the Government itself, especially in its less liberal forms.

The thesis sets forth Dorothy Richardson's ideas on socialism and literature, either as explicitly stated or as suggested in her writings, and emphasizes the strong link that in her view must and does exist between art and life. Part One, chapter I, presents Dorothy Richardson's ideas as expressed mainly in her articles and reviews, on socialism and anarchy, on the role of women in the new social order, and on the social implications of the feminine consciousness' Chapter II describes her views on the substance and aesthetics of social reform revealed in her reviews of the works of socialistically oriented writers, finding that aesthetics may suffer in the practicalities of socialist change. Chapter III shows that these ideas on the social order and the role of men and women in it are basically those set forth in Pilgrimage. Part Two, chapter IV, presents Dorothy Richardson's theory of the art of reading as analogous and complementary to the art of writing Chapter V presents her view of the novel as a psychological portrait of the author. Chapter VI applies the theoretical ideas of the two preceding chapters in exploring the explicit and implicit similarities to Emerson that Dorothy Richardson's consciousness reveals through Miriam, the main character of Pilgrimage. Part Three, chapter VII, discusses the initiation of Miriam's quest for a sense of personal reality in the face of unavoidable psychological and social pressures while chapter VXI1 emphasizes as her solution of this dilemma her developing critical and aesthetic sensibility and growing absorption with literature as the revealed consciousness of the author Chapter IX shows how these theoretical views and their practical application in Pilgrimage contribute to the multiple significance of the pilgrimage metaphor. Part Four chapter X explores both the nature of the creative consciousness as it reveals itself in its depiction of reality in the novel and Dorothy Richardson9s dissatisfaction with traditional realism revealed particularly in Pilgrimage Chapter XI investigates her views on time memory history the relationship of the annual cycle to the individual consciousness the paradox of being and becoming the source and repository of reality and the involvement of eternity in temporal time Chapter XII finds that her refutation of the "stream of consciousness metaphor is the result of her rejection of any view that is fundamentally evolutionary" whether social or scientific as ignoring life's essential and immutable reality apprehensible to the human consciousness.

This thesis offers a new perspective on D. H. Lawrence’s early career. Despite the ‘materialist turn’ in modernist studies, critics have not yet considered the extent and depth of Lawrence’s engagement with the literary marketplace. The labelling of him as a ‘genius’ who was destined to succeed has concealed the question of how he became a published writer in the first place. This is the first study to consider how Lawrence gained a foothold in the pre-WWI literary marketplace and began to make a name for himself. It re-evaluates aspects of Lawrence’s early oeuvre across a variety of genres, examining his multifaceted authorial identity as a novelist, essayist, lecturer, poet, journalist, short story writer, dramatist, and reviewer. The young author appeared in various guises as, for example, a romance writer, an ‘erotic’ writer, a Georgian poet, and a working-class realist. The fundamental principles underlying this work are that authors have plural identities, and their texts change under the pressure of immediate events (Jerome McGann); moreover, the literary field is a sociological phenomenon that is formed by networks of associations (Pierre Bourdieu). Using extensive new archival research, this thesis analyses the literary marketplace of the ‘long’ Edwardian period to assess the circumstances for becoming an author at this time. It examines Lawrence’s changing conceptions of what kind of writer he wanted to be, and who he wanted to write for; it reassesses the significance of Lawrence’s literary mentors, Ford Madox Hueffer and Edward Garnett, who helped Lawrence to become a published writer. In doing so, it recovers a number of figures (such as Violet Hunt, Ezra Pound, and Edward Marsh) whose significance for Lawrence’s career has been underestimated. This research evaluates how Lawrence’s work was marketed and received by the reading public in both Britain and America. It also examines several publishing houses (including Heinemann, Duckworth, T. Fisher Unwin, Elkin Mathews, and Mitchell Kennerley) and literary journals and magazines (for example the New Age, the English Review, Madame, Rhythm, and Forum). A new image emerges of Lawrence as a young writer who was pragmatic, diligent, and anxiously determined to achieve and sustain a career as a professional writer. From when he started writing in 1905, he had an idea of creativity as being produced collaboratively, and he asked for assistance from a variety of individuals. By 1914, he had attained a strong reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.

This thesis explores the legacy of Walter Scott through analysis of the adaptations of his works. It argues that remediations of Scott's novels and poetry have shaped the conception of those works in the popular imagination and resulted in an understanding of Scott's writing which overlooks it[s] complexities. In addition, it suggests that as a by-product of the process of adaptation a very small percentage of Scott's works have come to represent the whole. This thesis examines the development of the current gap between the critical rejuvenation of Scott's legacy by the scholarly community and his continued denigration in popular culture, contending that the popular remediation of Scott's works over the course of the last two centuries contributed to the formation of this gap in perception. It also poses [i.e. posits] that adaptation provided fodder for the popular notions that his writing glorifies tartanry, chivalry and pageantry, has imposed a false version of history and culture on the people of Scotland, and is best left in the category of 'boys' adventure tales'. Furthermore, this thesis interrogates claims that Scott has no relevance for contemporary readers and has become what memory theorist Ann Rigney terms the 'Great Unknown'. While adaptations from the nineteenth century have been reasonably well documented, this thesis explores not only early dramatisations of Scott's works but also a plethora of twentieth-century remediations, including film, television, comic book, mass-market science-fiction and children's adaptations, which demonstrate that popular engagement with Scott did not end with the start of the First World War. This thesis concludes that, while Scott's readership may indeed have declined from its peak in the late nineteenth century, he still maintains a place in popular consciousness and is not as greatly forgotten as some have argued.