This dissertation analyses the social, cultural and religious outlook of the officers and men of the Rifle Brigade, a regiment of the British army, between 1800 and about 1870, and examines the relationship between that corps and British civilian society. Chapter 1 outlines the structure and military record of the regiment, describes its links into the wider army, and examines the military and non-military careers of Riflemen, and their social backgrounds. Chapter 2 presents evidence for reforming and conservative professional attitudes, and argues for the importance to them of an ideal of regenerated gentlemanliness. Chapter 3 describes the operation of patronage and the links it created with civilian society, and it analyses the views of merit that und~rpinned the system. Chapter 4 brings together evidence for the reading of officers and men, and the theatre they saw and performed themselves. It shows how these acted as a channel for a range of information, ideas and attitudes to enter the regiment from civilian society, and so fostered a shared outlook. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the extent and nature of religious belief among Riflemen, taking into account their backgrounds and subsequent careers, and argue both that Christianity coloured attitudes to a range of conduct, and that Riflemen adhered to forms of institutional and cultural religion that should be set beside personal piety. The conclusion highlights the role of the ideal of gentlemanliness in guiding officers and in shaping a culture shared across ranks and across the civilian-military divide. Two appendices are provided. The first describes the method used for the analysis of officers' careers, and the second is a genealogical table showing their interrelation.

This thesis examines post-war black British theatre through a transnational lens. It argues that the hitherto prioritization of a national paradigm in discussions of black British theatre is not sufficiently complex to chart the historical processes that have shaped it and the multiple spatial, cultural, and political contexts in which it has been generated. This thesis finds that a transnational optic exposes a network of connections – physical, ideological and psychic – between blacks in Britain and other global black communities which have shaped and transformed the lives of Britain’s black communities and their cultural production. The thesis is divided into three chapters: the USA (chapter 1), the Caribbean (chapter 2), and Africa (chapter 3). Each chapter represents a specific geo-cultural-political space with which black British theatre has an important relationship. Each chapter follows the same broad structure: the first half of the chapter establishes a particular transnational process and mode of analysis which frames the ensuing historical discussion; the second half is devoted to an analysis of two contemporary black British dramatists. The USA chapter examines black British theatre through the lens of Americanization and Black Power. The first half traces the influence of black America on black British theatre’s formation, organization and expression in the post-war period. The second half examines works by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Mojisola Adebayo. The Caribbean chapter applies the process and theory of creolization to a discussion of the rise and consolidation of Caribbean culture in black British theatre. The chosen case studies for this chapter are Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Finally, the African chapter discusses the recent flux of immigrants from Africa since the 1990s and, using the concept of diaspora as an analytic model, explores the impact this has had on black British theatre. The second half focuses on works by Inua Ellams and debbie tucker green. Dividing the thesis into the spaces of the USA, the Caribbean and Africa allows one to filter and track the origination and circulations of particular sets of ideas, practices and / or people. The divisions reiterate that I am looking at complex heterogeneous material informed by multiple strands of influence. Nevertheless, connections between the chapters emerge, which illustrate historically embedded circuits of influence and exchange that have routinely transgressed national borders. Taken as a whole, the thesis supports the idea that black British theatre not only merits a transnational approach, but is, in fact, a transnational practice in itself.

The purpose of this thesis are to show that Fielding's dramas reflect the social and political abuses prevalent in England during the first four decades of the eighteenth century; to show through careful delineation of specific drams that those dramas led to repeated attempts by the Walpole Ministry to pass a licensing act; and to show that Fielding was seriously concerned about the political and social deterioration which he felt was occurring during the decade of the 1730's.

English and Indian historians have devoted considerable research and analysis to the genesis of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 but have ignored contemporary British reaction to it, a neglect which this study attempts to satisfy.

This thesis attempts to revise the existing historiography of British Columbia by first. establishing the growth and presence of a significant and diversified manufacturing sector between 1860 and 1890 and second. by charting the relative and absolute decline of the secondary manufacturing sector between 1890 and 1915. It adds to the literature which argues that British Columbia has been an industrial society since before the 1880's. Even by 1890 a higher percentage of British Columbians were engaged in manufacturing than elsewhere in Canada and output per capita in British Columbia exceded that of any other province. Comparing total manufactured output. British Columbia moved from the seventh largest producer to third among Canadian provinces in the three decades after 1880. Through the whole study period British Columbia factories tended to be larger than their counterparts elsewhere in Canada. The core of the thesis describes the manufacturing sectors of British Columbia. both primary and secondary. at an aggregate level utilizing census. directory. tax. and credit data. In attempting to account for the pattern of growth and decline it considers the two main approaches to Canadian political economy. the export base (staple) approach and the dependency approach and concludes that a third, "production system." approach inspired by recent work in economic anthropology provides a better framework to discern the causal factors. Utilizing the production system framework this thesis explores some of the reasons for the decline of the secondary manufacturing sector after 1890 by using one of the central industries. the boiler and engine industry. as a case study. The thesis ' identifies three factors that were important in explaining the decline of the boiler and engine industry: discriminatory railway rates. high labour costs and. the transfer of iii ownership of much of the economy from local to non-local capitalists. This thesis reveals that although regional manufacturers were responding to the relative prices of transport and labour. these prices were the product of the interaction of social and institutional factors located both within and without the region. The third factor. the shift of ownership outside the region. is an example of how structural changes affect the whole economy. These three factors also point to a revised understanding of how regional industries are linked to one another and how frontier regions or "peripheries" are linked to the metropole. The increasing amount of ownership of the resource extractive. primary processing and transportation industries by non-locals meant that linkages that formerly connected these sectors to local manufacturers. were transferred outside the region. The thesis concludes that these linkages are socially. rather than technologically defined. The thesis argues that the de-industrialization of British Columbia was one aspect of a larger process which. viewed from central Canada. has been called "centralization". Set in a global context the British Columbia experience was one part of an international process which saw industry concentrate in other regions like southeastern Ontario. the American northeast. and parts of Great Britain as it left regions which then became the "periphery". / Graduate

<p> During the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, writers like William Walwyn produced documents contesting the restriction of their liberties. This thesis is a critical edition of Walwyn&rsquo;s <i>Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie,</i> unedited since its original publication in 1646. In this text Walwyn advocates for man&rsquo;s right to question religious orthodoxy in his search for Truth and urges Parliament not to pass a proposed <i>Bill</i> for the harsh punishment of religious sectarians. </p><p> Prior to a transcription of the text is an introduction to Walwyn and an attempt to situate the reader in the context of his time. Following that is a style and rhetorical analysis, which concludes that despite his rejection of rhetorical practices, Walwyn&rsquo;s own use of them is effective. Perhaps this skill is one of the reasons that Parliament passed a milder, non-punitive version of the <i>Bill</i> Walwyn argued against.</p><p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University

Unhappy Consciousness is a study of recognition scenes in the Victorian novel and their relation to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Victorian recognition scenes often show a hero's self-discovery as a retrospective identification with things. When, for example, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer learns the truth about her marriage: "She saw, in the crude light of that revelation... the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron." The retrospective discovery of identity in Victorian novels is often figured as a catastrophic falling-apart of a stable self that is also an economic object or instrument: a bank check, a debt, a forgery, an inheritance, or an accumulated principal. Recognition scenes cannot be considered in the light of a timeless "master plot" or the classical poetics of Aristotelian anagnorisis, but need to be interpreted in terms of historical forms of social misrecognition (such as Marx's analysis of fetishism). Unhappy Consciousness contends that, if we are going to talk about nineteenth century things, we will have to take into account the novelistic misrecognition of the self, insofar as the heroes misrecognize themselves in forms of commodity fetishism. The thing is so often the subject herself insofar as "barred," dispersed among retrospective or delayed object identifications. I respond to the historical contextualization in Victorian cultural studies of "commodity culture," insisting that the economic structure of the commodity is not only a topic for realist notation, but makes up the inner logic of the novel form. Unhappy Consciousness urges a return to questions of novel theory which were perhaps set aside during New Historicism, arguing for a particularly novelistic mode of "objectification" (the form of the hero's activity) seen in interaction with the historical mode of objectification found in the capitalist value-form. I advance this argument through studies of several canonical Victorian works. Chapter One looks at the tension in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit between the ideological closure attained in the "family romance" plot of buried wills and restored parents, and the dead-end of interpretation and retrospection found in the plot of financial crisis and stock swindles. Chapter Two argues that, in Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset, the tautological nature of interest rate is not confined to the urban financial plot but is displaced and affectively diffused over the provincial mystery plot. Chapter Three is a study of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which I read the detective as an exaggerated portrait of the subjective effects of capitalist alienation, a monad whose only intervention in the world is to link predictive results with opaque processes, to "produce" recognition scenes (the solutions to each case) as a salable commodity. He is a machine for retrospection who has no personal past. In Chapter Four, I read Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady as a critique of the fetishizing of autonomous consciousness, using Marx's definition of fetishism as the misrecognition of a social form as the content of a thing. Isabel's mistake is to misconstrue the structure of the male gaze that constitutes her "freedom" as the inherent property of her individuality--until it is unmasked as a trap. As so often in the Victorian novel, fetishism is a mode of self-knowledge.

Invoked as the novel's generic other, poetry is simultaneously central and marginal in our understanding of the Victorian novel. Poetry is the idealism to the novel's realism, the elevated verse to the novel's prosaic prose, entering into our theories of the novel only so that it can be expelled. Even when we define the novel as the genre of complete inclusion, poetry is singled out as the ultimate expression of monoglossia, which the novel subsumes without altering its own generic identity. In my dissertation, Losing the Margin: Poetry and Poetic Form in the Victorian Novel, I argue that Victorian novelists engage poetry not as a simple foil against which to defend the borders of their genre, but as a shifting collection of representational techniques that highlight the limitations of the novel and attempt to transgress them.

This dissertation identifies wifely counsel as a major theme in The Canterbury Tales. My analysis of The Tale of Melibee, The Clerk's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, and The Wife of Bath's Tale reveals a pattern of women instructing, transforming, and collaborating with their husbands to accomplish important work for both the household and the public sphere. Wife-counselors in the Tales do not merely provide advice; in moments that modern critics too often overlook, these women also supersede their husbands in leadership roles to mediate conflicts and dispense justice. By reading the tales in my study as narratives of wifely counsel, I show how greater critical attention to plots and characters illuminates underexplored arguments about gender, marriage, and women as political agents in the Tales.