This thesis consists of four papers, of which paper 1 and 4 are co-written with Mikael Bask. Paper [1] implements chartists trading in a sticky-price monetary model for determining the exchange rate. It is demonstrated that chartists cause the exchange rate to "overshoot the overshooting equilibrium" of a sticky-price monetary model. Chartists base their trading on a short-long moving average. The importance of technical trading depends inversely on the time horizon in currency trade. The exchange rate's perfect foresight path near long-run equilibrium is derived and it is demonstrated that the shorter the time horizon, the greater the exchange rate overshooting. The aim of Paper [2] is to see how the dynamics of the basic target zone model changes when chartists and fundamentalists are introduced. Chartists use technical trading and the relative importance of technical and fundamental analyses depend on the time horizon in currency trade. The model also includes realignment expectations, which increase with the weight of chartists. The introduction of chartists may significantly reduce and reverse, the so-called "honeymoon effect" of a fully credible target zone. Further, chartists may cause the correlation between the exchange rate and the instantaneous interest rate differential to become either positive or negative. Using a chartist-fundamentalist set-up, Paper [3] derives the effects on the current exchange rate of central bank intervention. Fundamentalists have rational expectations and chartists use so called support and resistance levels in their trading. This technique results in chartists having both bandwagon expectations and regressive expectations. Chartists may enhance or suppress the effect of intervention depending on their expectations. The results indicate that a chartist channel exists. The aim of Paper [4] is threefold; (i) to investigate if there is a unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE) in a new Keynesian macroeconomic model augmented with technical trading, (ii), to investigate if the unique REE is adaptively learnable and, (iii), to investigate if this unique and adaptively learnable REE is desirable in an inflation rate targeting regime. The monetary authority is using a Taylor rule when setting the interest rate. A main conclusion is that a robust Taylor rule implies that the monetary authority should increase (decrease) the interest rate when the CPI inflation rate increases (decreases) and when the currency gets stronger (weaker).

This thesis argues that William Blake’s poetry creates meaning through internal poetic echoes, and that these Blakean echoes re-sound in Ernest Jones and Gerald Massey’s Poetry. There is no demonstrable link between Blake and Chartism; this raises the question of how to account for poetic echoes that occur in the absence of a direct link. The thesis uses two complementary methodological strategies. The significance of the Blakean echoes in Jones and Massey’s work will be demonstrated through extensive close textual analysis. This is accompanied by the historically focused argument that the Blakean echoes in Chartist poetry can be explained by a shared underlying cultural matrix of radical politics and radical Christianity. Chapter 1 opens by presenting the evidence against a demonstrable link between Blake and the Chartists. It outlines how the lack of a direct link impacts upon our understanding of the Blakean echoes in Chartist poetry. Existing theories of influence insufficiently describe these textual effects; this chapter draws upon aspects of Intertextuality and New Historicist theory to propose that Blake, Jones and Massey’s poetry is best considered in terms of echo, re-sounding and correspondence. Chapter 2 addresses the question of how Blakean echoes can occur in the absence of a direct link. Using recent Blake scholarship as a methodological model, this chapter outlines the ‘cultural matrix’ theory, suggesting that Blake and the Chartists engaged with many of the same radical historical ‘threads’. Chapter 3 explores key examples of Shelleyan influence in Jones and Massey’s poetry. This chapter highlights the direct intertextual link between Shelley and the Chartists and demonstrates how Chartist poetry might be discussed in terms of influence and allusion. Chapter 4 outlines the most notable Blakean echoes in the poetry of Jones. Jones’ poetry resonates with images of Priestcraft and Kingcraft, as well as chains and binding; similar images play a central role in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The chapter contains significant engagement with Blake studies; it presents Blake’s imagery as echoingly interconnected both within and across poems and collections. Chapter 5 extends this close textual exploration to the work of Massey. Massey’s poetry contains many of the key Blakean images identified in the work of Jones. However, ‘The Three Voices’ contains an uncanny resonance of Blake; echo occurs as mis-hearing and trace. ‘Echo’ is not being used as a simple substitute for ‘allusion’, ‘influence’ or ‘intertext’, but here denotes an entirely different textual effect that must be judged in new terms. The conclusion summarises the thesis and asks whether the radical nature of Blake, Jones and Massey’s shared culture may have affected not only their vocabulary of imagery, but also the way in which these images were deployed.

This thesis tells the story of an historical tradition of radical literacy and literature that is defined as the British radical literary tradition. It takes the meaning of literature at its broadest understanding and identifies the literary and educational relations of what E.P. Thompson terms 'the making of the English working class' through its struggle for literacy and freedom. The study traces the developing dialectic of literary radicalism and the emergent hegemony of capitalism through the dissemination of radical ideas in literature and a groundswell of public literacy. The proposed radical tradition is defined by the oppositional stance of its participants, from the radical intellectual's critical texts to the striving for literacy and access to literature by working class people. This oppositional discourse emerged in the fourteenth century concomitant with nascent capitalism and has its literary origins in utopian vision. This nascent utopian imagination conceived a democratic socialism that underpinned the character of much of the following oppositional discourse. The thesis establishes the nexus of the oppositional discourse as a radical literary tradition and the earliest instances of adult education in autodidacticism and informal adult education. The ascent of middle class power through the industrial revolution is shadowed by the corresponding descent of the working class into poverty. Concomitant with this social polarisation is the phenomena of working class literary agency as the means to political and economic agency. While Protestant dissenting groups such as the Diggers and Levellers were revolutionary activists, it was Methodism that formed a bulwark against revolution. Yet it was their emphasis on self-improvement that contributed to an increasingly literate populace. Radical texts produced and disseminated by individuals and organisations and read by autodidactics and informal reading groups are seminal in the formation of a working class identity. Spearheaded by the Chartist movement, education became a central ethic of working class politics and the civil struggle for economic and political justice throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. The avant garde movements of the early twentieth century are analysed as a strand of this tradition. The narrative of the thesis then moves to the penal colony of Australia and explores the radical literary tradition's development there. Early colonial culture is seen as having a strong impetus towards a developing a native literary expression of the new land. Where conservative colonial literature struggled to differentiate itself from formal British literary models, the radical heritage and its utopian vision of a working man's paradise gave definitive expression to the Australian experience. This expression was strongly influenced by Chartist ideals. The British radical literary tradition is thus seen to have had a dominant influence in the development of a native radical literary tradition that strove to identify the national character. Socialist thought developed in Australia in concert with that in the parent culture, and anarchist and libertarian trends found a ready home amongst independent minded colonials. Yet, in preventing the formation of a native aristocracy the small radical population made a compromise with liberalism that saw a decidedly conservative streak develop in the early labour movement. There were little in the way of sophisticated radical literary offerings at first, but from the mid-nineteenth century a vanguard of radicals produced a thriving native press and other fugitive text forms. At the turn of the century the native radical literary tradition was vibrantly diverse, with a definitive style that claimed literary ownership of the Australian character. However, exhausted by the battles over WWI conscription and isolated by censorship, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was able to subsume the vanguard position from the socialists. The Party laid claim to the Australian radical literary tradition, at once both strengthening it with the discipline of a Marxist ideology and diminishing its independence and diversity. Party literary theory centred upon the issue of class, developing a doctrine of socialist realism that communist writers were expected to practice. How well a writer adhered to socialist realist principles became a measure of their class position and loyalty. Drawing more from primary sources, the thesis develops an analysis of the intellectual development of the Australian post-WWII writer Eric Lambert through his experience of class instability during Depression and war. The study examines Lambert's decision to join the Party and his literary response to his experiences of war, the Party, the turmoil of 1956 and life after the Party. Lambert's body of work is then analysed as the unintentional memoir of a writer working as an adult educator in the radical literary tradition. Lambert's struggles, for artistic independence within the narrow precepts of Party dogma and with class tensions, were common amongst intellectuals committed to the communist cause. Like many of his peers, Lambert resigned from the Party at the end of 1956 and suffered a period of ideological vacuum. However, he continued to write as a Marxian educator, seeking to reveal that which makes us human in the humanity of ordinary people. It is concluded that, while the Party did much to foster disciplined cohesion, the mutual distrust it generated amongst its intellectuals suppressed the independent thought that had kept the radical literary tradition alive. Although the Party developed an ideological strength within the radical literary tradition, its dominance over thirty years and subsequent fall from grace acted to fragment and discredit that centuries-old tradition which it subsumed. An argument is made for a reinvestment of the centrality of the radical literary tradition in the education of adults for the maintenance of social justice and the democratic project.