This thesis argues that the scale of independently motivated geographical mobility within Italy during the 3rd-1st centuries BC was much greater than is usually thought, and that the impact of this type of movement on political developments was correspondingly more significant. The study of this private phenomenon, affecting the demographic face of Italy independently of Roman state control, also provides a new perspective on the wider process of transformation in this period, restoring as it does the element of individual choice. The thesis begins by distinguishing the type of independent mobility in which it is interested from other types of population movement in the same period, before providing a brief review of work on mobility in Roman Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean world. Chapter 2 examines the various types of evidence for the phenomenon: literary, epigraphical, and archaeological. Two central chapters exemplify the phenomenon - and its connection to economic change - using the full range of literary, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence to reveal patterns of mobility in two chosen areas: southern Latium, with the focus on the two important sites of Minturnae and Fregellae, and the region of the Po Valley. The final section examines the relationship between the picture of a high level of mobility, as revealed in the case studies, and the political context of Roman rule in Italy in the middle Republic. First, it is argued that the so-called ius migrandi never existed as a privilege of the Latins, but was instead a restriction placed on colonies to maintain their demographic stability. Second, it is suggested that the difficulty of preventing individual migration had seriously disruptive consequences, especially for communities suffering from emigration in the 2d century, which in turn contributed significantly to the strain on Rome's middle Republican framework of control in Italy.

This thesis explores the multi‐layered inter-relationships between the works of George Eliot and those of the Pre‐Raphaelites. Taking up the very different mediums of painting, sculpture, and photography as they emerge in Pre‐Raphaelitism, it assesses their relation to Eliot's novels as reinforcing a web of Victorian visual art and literature. The discussion begins by examining proximities between the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Eliot's Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda. I explore, in particular, their shared interest in dichotomies of female representation in the nineteenth century, and ways in which the opposing traits of the sacred and sexual are interwoven. The second chapter reads Eliot in the context of writings by Walter Pater. Reassessing the prevalent perspective that Eliot was opposed to the ideas of Pater, I argue that, like him, Eliot passionately sought to elucidate the relationship between life and art through studies of the early Renaissance. In Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance and Eliot's Romola the authors are linked by their use of web imagery and their interest in the effects of music within the realms of literature and art. In the third chapter, exploring elements of the New Sculpture movement in the late nineteenth century together with the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, I analyse ways in which sculptural representations are rendered in Eliot's, Middlemarch, and the paintings of Edward Burne‐Jones. The final chapter focuses on the nascent medium of nineteenth century, photography. By considering photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron in relation to The Mill on the Floss, I explore the way in which both Cameron's and Eliot's works embody a particular conception of childhood and the memory of childhood. My study concludes by re-visiting the phenomenon of the interweave of image and the text during the nineteenth century.

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This thesis analyses the relationship of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, artists that were central to the visual culture of the Bloomsbury group. The title of this project positions ‘partnership' as a connecting force between the two artists, a term I interpret as a series of layers, boundaries, and thresholds that are in a constant state of flux, over-lapping, layering and leaking. By mapping the artists' presence I am able to construct a new model of partnership. Chapter one considers the artists' signing and marking of their work, examining the variations of the signature, tracing its evolution, its presence and its absence, its location on the work and the calligraphy of the mark. By examining the various ways that Bell and Grant had of signing and of not signing their work and the use and function of the mechanically reproduced signature, I demonstrate the uneasy relationship that can occur between objects, names and signatures. Chapter two focuses on the pond at Charleston, the home that the artists shared for almost half a century, which is central to many of the narratives and mythologies of the household and is the subject of many paintings and decorations. I chart how the artists map this space by repeatedly recording it and how the pond acts as a layered topography for the exploration and presentation of gender, queerness and familial relationships. Chapter three continues the process of examining boundaries and layers by exploring the artists' often problematic relationship to clothes and to the delicate threshold between fabric and skin that often loosens and gapes. I cast the artists as agents of disguise and masquerade in which uncertain and unstable boundaries are created. I map the transference of fabric and demonstrate how this textile threshold ruptures, how the body leaks, leaving marks and traces.

Coal mining communities across Britain have often been argued to have possessed powerful collective memories of past struggles, though such memories have, as yet, been little studied. This thesis is a study of the collective memory of the interwar years within the mining communities of south Wales, and explores the ways in which the great strikes and lockouts, underground accidents, the interwar depression, and clashes with police and strike-breakers were remembered by the men and women of the coalfield. Using nearly 200 oral history interviews that were recorded in the 1970s, alongside newspapers, political and trade union records, novels and other sources, this study examines collective remembering as a reciprocal interaction between the public representations of the past, and the memories and attitudes of individuals. It argues, firstly, that individual memory did not just reflect or rework discourses about past events, but was itself an important agent in shaping and creating collective understandings of that history. Those individual memories remained integral to those collective memories, rather than being subsumed within or subjugated by them. It also suggests that the relationship between individual and collective memory should not be seen as necessarily oppositional, nor as between two distinct and separate types of memory, but rather as a spectrum. Secondly, it argues that the experiences of the inter-war years were understood and remembered within a number of distinct temporalities. Strikes and protests were often recalled within a linear framework, accidents underground were understood as a cyclical experience, whilst the depression was seen as a discontinuous rupture. It thus argues that conceptions of historical time were not singular, but plural and overlapping, and were themselves shaped and transformed by historical events. It thus traces understandings of time and how these changed at a popular level, rather than an intellectual or cultural one, through examining the memories, thoughts and attitudes of the men and women of the south Wales coalfield.

This thesis explores the influence of John Milton on the edges of Victorian culture, addressing temporal, geographical, bodily, and sexual thresholds in Victorian poetry, painting, and prose. Where previous studies of Milton's Victorian influence have focused on the poetic legacy of Paradise Lost, this project identifies traces of Miltonic concepts across aesthetic borders, analysing an interdisciplinary cultural sample in order to state anew Milton's significance in the period between British Romanticism and early twentieth-century critical debates about the value of Paradise Lost. The project is divided into four chapters. The first explores apocalyptic images and texts from the 1820s-Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and the paintings of John Martin-in relation to Miltonic aetiology and eschatology. These texts offer a complex re-thinking of the relation between personal loss and universal catastrophe, which draws on and positions itself against prophecy and apocalypse in Paradise Lost. In the second chapter I address conceptual connections that cross boundaries of medium and nationality, identifying the presence of a Miltonic notion of powerful passivity in the writing and marginalia of Herman Melville and the paintings and anecdotal appendages of J. M. W. Turner. In the third chapter I consider Milton's importance for A. C. Swinburne's poetic presentation of peripheral sexualities, identifying in Milton's poetry a pervasive metaphysics of bodily 'melting' or 'cleaving' which is essential to Swinburne's poetic project. The final chapter analyses the presence of the Miltonic in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, whose repeated readings of Milton contributed to both establishing his poetic vocabulary, and prompting a career-long engagement with Miltonic ideas. The thesis refocuses attention on peripheral elements of the work of these writers and artists to re-articulate Milton's importance for the Victorians, whilst bringing together models of influence which show the Victorian Milton to be at once liminal and galvanising.

This thesis deals with the institutional histories of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in an attempt to establish their role within the English state and within English culture in the Early Modem period. It seeks to explain the complex relationship between social definitions of masculinity and the translation of those conceptions via the universities to a student population whose influence and power upon their leaving of those precincts would be felt throughout the nation. It further argues that education at Oxford or Cambridge was not relegated to the college halls alone, but was the result of both official and unofficial instruction conducted both within and without the university setting. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis examines pieces of visual art that are untraced, stolen or otherwise understood as lost. It conceptualises how this alters artworks. Are they still ‘objects' in ‘visual' culture? Might they become literature? Lost works continue to be circulated and interpreted through practices of remembrance, narrative and often through visual reproductions. These become extraordinarily overdetermined once a work vanishes. I investigate this process in four critical case studies and a novella. The first study looks at Vanessa Bell's painting The Nursery (1930-32), a major work which has been critically neglected because unavailable. I ask what this can tell us about memory and nostalgia, and explore the ghostliness of visual representations. The second study examines Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa in the period after it was stolen (1911-13). I closely read some startling journalistic responses to this and to earlier, Victorian thefts. Through these writings there emerges a new kind of ekphrasis and a new conception of the museum. My third study builds on these readings of visual and literary restitutions to consider how lost art could inspire a corresponding critical methodology. With reference to writings on aesthetics by Burke and Derrida, I look at William Blake's Virgil woodcuts, reading them through their missing parts, including chopped-off edges. The fourth study explores how lost works can be restituted creatively as well as critically. I analyse missing episodes of Doctor Who, which have inspired reconstructions from fans – an active audience of lost art. Finally, my novella tells the story of a curator of an illicit museum; it uses the epistolary form, which has a history of creating drama through lost letters. My conclusion suggests how, using evidence to feel for what cannot be seen, a focus on lost art can spark unique ways of thinking about vision, writing and criticism.