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This thesis takes as its subject the village of Elsecar in Yorkshire. In the period circa 1750-1870 this small rural hamlet was developed by the local landowners, the Earls Fitzwilliam, into a thriving industrial village, with an economy based on the twin industries of coal-mining and iron-smelting. As a well-documented example of a rural/industrial complex, Elsecar offers the historian the opportunity to view in microcosm the processes of social and economic change as a consequence of industrialisation, issues of national significance in the context of late eighteenth and nineteenth century social history. Using the records of the Earls Fitzwilliam as its main research material, this thesis examines the social and economic aspects of industrialisation as they affected the village and, in particular, the ways in which they influenced the development of a specific village community during this period. In so doing, the thesis engages with ideas of social cohesion, identity, class, gender and their relationships to structures of power, authority and the environment. These issues illuminate the central themes of the thesis, which are the relationship between structures of authority, the agency of the villagers and the physical environment in creating the idea of community. In examining these issues, this thesis argues that community is a form of site-specific social identity, and that the development of the industrial community of Elsecar in the period 1750-1870 is the story of the emergence of a powerful sense of place and identity, rooted in the particular collective histories and experiences of the villagers.

This thesis examines the work of the most important literary critics and theorists who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period between 1928 and 1939. Its main concern is to provide a systematic and critical account of the communist understanding of the politics of literature. Its wider objective is to assess the ways in which the "Party theorists" were influenced by the CPGB's relationship with the world communist movement. The basic argument is that the work of the Party theorists had its roots in (1) the political strategies imposed on the CPGB throughout this period by the Communist International, and (2) the body of cultural doctrine enunciated by Soviet intellectuals at the famous Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934. I argue that the Party theorists responded creatively to these external influences, usually (though not always) by drawing on ideas from the British tradition of cultural criticism to develop Soviet doctrine in distinctive ways. Moreover, in spite of its debt to Soviet theory, much of the British work on literature and culture was noticeably unorthodox - sometimes consciously so, sometimes not. I argue that these ideas are consistent with the main principles of the so-called "revisionist" school of CPGB historiography which has emerged over the last 15 years. Chapter One surveys the period between 1928 and 1933 when the CPGB adhered to the Communist International's "Class Against Class" strategy. It focuses on (1) the work of the Anglo-Australian critic P. R. Stephensen, (2) the ideas about cultural crisis developed by John Strachey and Montagu Slater, and (3) the communist response to the prevailing fashion for cultural conservatism. Chapter Two provides an overview of the ideas explored at the Soviet Writers' Congress in 1934. Chapters Three, Four and Five examine the work of Alick West, Ralph Fox and Christopher Caudwell, the three men who are usually regarded as the founders of Marxist literary theory in Britain. Chapter Six explores the consequences for British cultural Marxism of the Communist International's "Popular Front" strategy against fascism. Its particular focus is the attempt of British communists to combat the influence of fascism by tracing the history of the "English radical tradition".

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