Invasion literature is a branch of fiction that enjoyed significant popularity in Britain prior to the First World War. Focusing on invasion narratives of the Edwardian period, this thesis foregrounds the literature’s representation of domestic political issues. These include debates over national identity, the campaign for compulsory military service, and the sociopolitical upheavals of the late-Edwardian period. Through emphasising the importance of these internal themes, the thesis argues that such narratives were vehicles for multifaceted critiques of British society rather than one-dimensional predictions of invasion. Exploring the ideological origins of these narratives, the thesis questions the dominant understanding that invasion literature was a Tory product. The genre is instead interpreted as a product of the British ‘Radical Right’. Presenting invasion literature as a repository of varied contemporary anxieties, the thesis reconsiders the analytical value of the ‘Edwardian Crisis’, arguing that narratives of invasion illustrate a pronounced sense of approaching crisis. This thesis therefore offers an original contribution to modern British political and cultural history, and invasion literature studies.

Regnant queenship is one of the defining features of the early modern era. During this period England witnessed the reigns of four regnant queens, three of whom were married: Mary I, Mary II and Anne. The reigns of Mary I and Mary II in particular were marked by considerable religious and political tensions, which made their queenships even more remarkable. Using a wide range of contemporary sources, the thesis considers the early modern period as a coherent whole. Despite distinct differences between the mid Tudor and later Stuart political climates, continuing fears of and antipathy to female rule meant that precedents set by Tudor regnant queens in the sixteenth century remained highly relevant to the reigns of the Stuart queens in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and parallels can be easily drawn. In an era when marriage was deemed necessary for women, and particularly queens, who were required to secure the future succession of their dynasty, marriage was and remained an important, yet problematic, element of queenship. Focusing on married regnant queens and analysing the ensuing tensions between conjugal and political power over the period gives us a fuller understanding of these reigns, and, more generally, of early modern monarchy. This diachronic approach allows us to consider whether the concept of female rule evolved across the period, and, from there to assess whether and how that evolution changed the office of regnant queen and altered contemporary perceptions of regnant queenship. The anxieties provoked by female rule are explored through an initial focus on the contested accessions of Mary I and Mary II. The thesis reveals the centrality of blood legitimacy to their claims to be queen, showing how, in a polarised religious climate, this combined with prevailing conceptions of gender in terms that enabled both women to gain, and then maintain, monarchical authority. In both periods, regnant queenship inaugurated unprecedented monarchical arrangements that presented significant challenges to the political nation. Drawing Anne into the analysis for purposes of comparison, confirms that the mechanisms and rituals that defined and confirmed monarchical power were by necessity re-interpreted in each queen’s reign, as contemporaries sought to negotiate the ambiguities surrounding female rule. Crucially, married regnant queenship introduced the phenomenon of the male consort, an inversion of traditional gendered roles at the level of the crown. Analysis of all three queens reveals that this raised significant questions about gender and authority that neither legislative nor symbolic measures were able to successfully resolve. Representations of queenship demonstrate that queenly identities were readily manipulated by opponents of individual queens and their regimes using broadly similar themes across the period. And queens and their supporters appropriated existing portrayals of consort queens as suitable models to represent regnant queenship. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that although by Anne’s accession in 1702, there was less apprehension regarding female rule, regnant queenship continued to be problematical. Some evolution had occurred, but this was greatly outweighed by continuities.

This thesis tracks ideas about choirs of angels and righteous souls from their early manifestations in the Bible and late antique texts through to their ramifications in Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman England (up to 1116). It does so by tracing changes in topoi, commonplaces that form part of the fabric of visions, hagiographical narratives and ascetic guidance literature. Unlike previous studies that have examined topoi, the thesis both thoroughly scrutinises developments in commonplaces and situates them within their wider religious and cultural contexts. It therefore shows how topoi intersect with, and construct, ideas about salvation and eschatological reward. The argument also contributes to the field of angel studies and to discussions on heavenly song by examining nuances in the depiction of angelic worship and its perception in the early Middle Ages. Of all the chapters in the thesis, the first is the broadest in focus: it poses the question of what it meant for spiritual beings to form a heavenly choir, and establishes the major themes and questions that will be pursued throughout the remainder of the study. Chapters two and three follow the developments in two of the topoi that are found most frequently in texts of the ascetic tradition – the conveyance of the soul to heaven by psychopomps, and the new song of the virgins. Chapter four, a case study of hagiographies produced at Canterbury in the late tenth and late eleventh centuries, examines the relationship between angelic and monastic choirs. The thesis as a whole illuminates the complexity and diversity of ideas about groups of celestial singers, shedding light on how writers adapted existing material in response to changing spiritual climates.

It is commonly accepted that Late Antiquity Cyprus emerged from relative isolation to greater engagement with Constantinople. This thesis reverses the paradigm and offers a contextual account of the island's basilicas in support of the proposition. Located between New Rome and New Jerusalem, fourth-century Cyprus occupied a nodal position in the Eastern Mediterranean. Under Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis (r.367-403) it was at the forefront of Nicene-Constantinopolitan faith-forging. In the late fourth and fifth centuries it was also the site of an ambitious building programme which instantiated its affiliations and produced buildings which, in scale and treatment, represented an engagement with Christendom's major monuments. This, arguably, was the period of greatest affiliation between Cyprus and Constantinople, not as centre and satellite, but in a shared recognition that Jerusalem was their new Christian capital. By the late-fifth century post-Cyrilline Jerusalem had lost some of its hold on the Cypriot imagination and other issues - autocephaly, liturgical changes and the rise to prominence of its bishops - coalesced in a greater engagement with the wider Eastern Mediterranean. At about the same time healing the Orthodox-Monophysite schism became an imperial obsession. Monophysites were sponsored by the Sassanids intent on dividing the Empire before invading it. Reacting to threats from north as well as the east, Justinian reorganised the Empire relegating Cyprus to the eastern outpost of five provinces and transferring its administration from Constantinople to the Black Sea. The schism unresolved, in the seventh century Heraclius developed doctrinal 'innovations' designed to heal the breach with the Monophysites, insisting that Cyprus serve as his laboratory. For Orthodox believers doctrinal innovation was anathema to the extent that, on the eve of the Arab invasion, Cyprus found Old rather than New Rome a more congenial ally, a reorientation that the archaeology too, might support.

This dissertation illustrates the process of how the Zo of the Northern Arakan Yomas were reinvented into the Chin of Burma and the Lushai and Kuki of India during the British colonial period and in its aftermath after Independence in 1947/1948. Company officials, relying on informants, provided the first written accounts that justified delineation of the Zo mountains and the creation of the Chin, the Lushai and the Kuki. Colonial civilization projects fostered the Zo to accept colonial dominance by providing opportunities to participate in the colonial state. Christian missionaries brought modernity in the form of literacy. After the Zo learned to read and also write, they began participating in their own reinvention and identity-making. There were numerous factors that necessitated this construction and identity-making. The topography of the Northern Arakan Yomas makes them difficult to govern. The relative height and distance across the Northern Arakan Yomas prompted administrators to slice them up into manageable units. It is argued that this delineation, initially drawn for the ease of administration, was justified by the British using arguments about ethnicity, culture, and history. They, however, had fostered the re-invention of the past and with it the ethnicity and history of the Zo. American Baptist and Welsh Presbyterian missions took charge of the western and eastern of the Northern Arakan, respectively. Each group of missionaries determined which Zo language to transliterate creating elite dialects, and thus elite, among the Zo. The reading elite in Asia, America and in Europe began to demand stories, anecdotes and articles about the Zo. Hence, writers and editors relying on very little information, made sweeping generalizations about the new British subjects in the hills. It is further argued that the Zo eventually began participating in colonial endeavours through working with the British in the governing of the hills, by fighting for the Allied Forces in both World Wars and by serving the Government as police officers in the plains. They eventually began to reinvent their own histories in order to gain political agency on the world stage as well as to create elite groups among the Zo.

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This study explores the link between perceptions of British identity in the early twentieth century and representations of foreign cultures, focusing on the South Slavonic peasant communities of the Balkan territories which formed the first Yugoslavia in December 1918. Utilising a range of source materials, including archival documents, memoirs, press articles and scientific literature, it presents an original perspective on Anglo-Balkan engagement – in the specific historical context of Yugoslavia’s creation as opposed to the region in general – from a social, rather than political, dimension. Furthermore, it challenges previous historical interpretations of this period as representing merely the conclusion of a ‘long-nineteenth’ or the beginning of a ‘short-twentieth’ century process of ‘othering’. In doing so, it contributes to the study of Western engagement with southeastern Europe before the Second World War. Despite Britain entering the twentieth century as the dominant world power, public discourse became imbued with distinct cultural pessimism, stemming from a range of social anxieties surrounding the future of British identity, which increasingly undermined nineteenth-century ideals of modernity and progress. By the 1910s, these latent anxieties had even permeated into elite, supposedly unrelated, debates on the contemporary Balkans, recalibrating the image of the South Slavonic peasantry as an allegory for Britain’s perceived ‘decline’. Reactions to regional violence signalled this shift, forging a metanarrative of peasant victimhood in the face of modernity’s worst excesses yet also feeding into the emerging notion that Britain had a moral duty to resist such forces. The deployment of thousands of British military and civilian personnel in the Balkans, compounded by a vigorous domestic propaganda campaign, saw this process reach its apotheosis in the First World War: Yugoslavia’s creation was legitimised as the solution to peasant victimisation and became integral to Britain’s imagined revival as civilisation’s moral arbiter.

This thesis focuses on the careers of Milovan Djilas and Vladimir Dedijer - the only men in the communist world who, at the height of their power, repudiated the system they helped install. Taking a largely chronological approach, the thesis presents the roles of both men in establishing and then undermining communist rule in Yugoslavia. Fundamental change in any society does not occur without the introduction of new ideas. More than any other work in the field, this thesis emphasises the link between the changing ideologies of both men and political developments within Yugoslavia. The study also represents the first effort at comprehensively analysing the roles of both men in power and dissent. Much of the existing literature has taken a hagiographical approach, focusing on their fall from power in 1954. By taking a more holistic and critical stance, the thesis cuts through some of the vague heroic aura that currently surrounds the figures of Djilas and Dedijer, instead seeing them as products of a particular web of personal, societal and cultural circumstances. While the thesis is a historical case-study of both men, it makes contributions to other fields such as: dissidence in communist regimes, the role of ideas in driving societal change, politics in multi-ethnic societies, and the (mis)interpretation of history for ideological purposes. Using published memoirs and primary sources, the thesis reconstructs the lives of Djilas and Dedijer. Its main originality is in presenting new sources and offering new interpretations of the roles played by both men in the analysed period. It also corrects some misconceptions in the debate about how the Yugoslav communists dealt with their country’s problematic past after 1945, and the extent to which ‘liberal’ pro-Yugoslav intellectuals undermined the communist state, paving the way for nationalists to emerge in the 1990s.

This thesis examines the growth of psychotherapy as a discipline in the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1985, looking at the types of treatment that existed in this period, the tasks that psychotherapy was to perform according to physicians who promoted it, and their efforts to establish it as a distinct medical speciality and popularise it within the Soviet healthcare system. It looks at how different challenges encountered by the promoters of psychotherapy influenced its practice and the discourse around it, and how it was shaped by a broader political, social and cultural context of the USSR. It demonstrates that psychotherapy after Stalin was not stagnant but developed into a diverse field fuelled by enthusiasm of its practitioners who, while sticking to methods that by mid-twentieth century lost popularity in the West, gave them new theoretical underpinnings, constantly worked to modify and improve them, and supplemented them by new ideas and approaches. The result was a unique form of psychotherapy characterised by a physiological language, a specific view of the human mind and body and an unusually broad understanding of its tasks. This thesis analyses the legitimising strategies employed by psychotherapists to present their discipline as both scientifically substantiated and useful to the Soviet society, showing that it was envisaged not only as a strictly therapeutic method but also as a potentially universal auxiliary treatment and as a means of prophylaxis. It examines various aspects of Soviet psychotherapy such as its goals, links to physiology, emphasis on human self-perfection, embrace of placebo as a legitimate form of therapy and the blurring of the boundary between therapy, prophylaxis and conversation implicit in its theory, seeking to understand what psychotherapy was for its Soviet practitioners and how it came to be conceptualised in this particular way.

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