There are two concurrent arguments: firstly, that the Edwardians found in Chesterton the same kind of liberating imaginative experience that earlier readers found in the first Romantics (1790-1830); secondly, that, contrary to recent opinion, he was an artist of some depth. The first chapter describes this case against Chesterton and the real problems to which a critic must address himself. Chapter 2 identifies his position among the different post-Romantic movements in Victorian society. Chapter 3 shows his special debt to William Morris's ideas; but also illustrates that the best of Chesterton's historical writing is fresh and not derivative. The next four chapters deal with Chesterton's original achievement; in which, paradoxically, he is also most recognisably Romantic in his imagination and in his sensibility. Chapter 4 describes how his strange imagination developed from childhood to adulthood and ultimately shaped his whole career. The darker side of this imagination, his awareness of supernatural evil, is the subject of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 shows the newspaper journalist bringing all kinds of strong and tender feelings to bear on public life, and compares him to Haslitt and his contemporaries. Chapter 7 shows how this imagination and sensibility combined to produce perceptive literary criticism. Chapter 8 argues that the novels of Chrles Williams show widespread signs of Cpesterton's influence, and that this illustrates his power to permeate a younger mind. Finally Chapter 9 sums up: Chesterton is like pre-Victorian Romantic writers in his passion, his idealism, and in the imagination which perceives a miraculous universe behind the physical world. He expresses this view with the sensitivity and subtlety of the artist. Finally a rationale of Chesterton's apparent frivolity, based on his own metaphysics, is proposed as necessary to a just evaluation of his work.

This thesis examines representations of China and the Chinese in Britain in the interwar period. It selects key writers and texts that demonstrate the importance of genre, location and subjectivity in the imagination of China. This thesis tries to demonstrate that the genre of travel report and the Chinese subjectivity intervene in our rethinking of the relations between British modernism and China and of the very concept of modernism itself. Borrowing from recent theoretical discussions of transnationalism, this thesis looks at how the transnational flow of people, ideas and texts between Britain and China helps us identify modes of thinking of Sino-British relations beyond modernism-orientalism or imperialism-nationalism patterns. It argues for the interactive nature or mutual influence within the cultural contact zone by highlighting the role of the cultural translator or agency in the claim of cultural equivalence or transnational solidarity. I examine the ways in which Russell, Auden and Isherwood interact with and represent Chinese intellectuals to critique capitalism and imperialism. I also look at their ethical dilemmas in their cross-cultural and cross-class representations of the Chinese coolies and lower-classes that reflect how the establishment of socialist transnational solidarity has to face class and national barriers. I also examine the British Chinese writer Shih-I Hsiung's position as cultural translator in both the British and the Chinese contexts and how his works are a response to this inequality. To sum up, this study of the historical cross-border production, circulation and reception of these writers in question aims to demonstrate the interactivity in the cultural contact zone. It contributes to our rethinking of the Euro-centric notion of modernism and of the Western influence/local reception mode of cross-cultural relations. It argues for the positivity of the contact zone in which transnational solidarity is imagined in multiple ways to combat various forms of unequal power relations.

Although descriptions of civilian experience during the Second World War tend to stress concepts of unity and the nation 'pulling together', much literature ofthe period repeatedly suggests division and distrust, and fears of an 'enemy within' that can be seen directly in the numerous fifth columnist plotlines and more indirectly through stories of personal treachery and duplicity. Here the work of a number of authors writing during World War II is examined, with close comparison of how themes of betrayal and mistrust are woven into their texts. This is placed in context through consideration both of government propaganda warning citizens of the dangers of spies and fifth columnists during the war and social fracturings along gender, class and political lines that were already in existence when war began. The 'enemy within' motif exists in a number of forms and discussion of this is extended to consider, for example, contemporary concerns that the increasing authoritarianism of the British government meant the country was moving towards the fascism it had gone to war to defeat, presentations of the home as an enemy space, and repeated depictions of fragmented identity and trauma that suggest the enemy also exists within the individual psyche.

This study considers some nineteenth century novels which raise a critical problem about the relation of the author to his material. It seeks to establish that the distance which characterises the focus of the narrator in Our Village, Cranford, Cousin Phillis, Adam Bede, Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders, distinguishes these novels as Victorian idylls, that is as Victorian transformations of pastoral. "Pastoral" is not here considered in terms of its subject-matter (shepherds, pipes, song-contests etc) but (following Empson) as a mode of perspective. The study describes the Victorian idyll as a picture of simple life presented simultaneously with the acknowledgement or consciousness of a complex response to it. The narrative strategies which convey this double view are the subject of the central chapters on the novels. Chapter I defines the variety of contemporary idyllic effects by means of Clough's The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich and Tennyson's English Idyls which were written and received as modern versions of pastoral, Arnold's distinction between simplicite and simplesse is examined and the poems he uses as illustration, Wordsworth's "Michael"' and Tennyson's "Dora", are explored to find a vocabulary for the description of idyllic methods. Wordsworth's definition of the idyIlium (1815 Preface) and Schiller's of the idyll as a "sentimental" code (Naive and Sentimental Poetry") further define the mode of the idyll as conceived in the nineteenth century. Comparison is made with genre painting which provides not only a parallel Victorian mode of presenting the simple to the sophisticated but, as itself a narrative node, offers an insight into the interaction of movement and stasis in the idyllic novel. The Victorian idyll presents a picture of the traditional oppositions of pastoral-the simple and the sophisticated, the rustic and the urban etc-held in a precarious balance viewed by the narrator from an un-ironic, unjudging distance. The effect of this idyllic perspective is seen predominantly in the structure of the novels; they do not contain isolable, traditional pastoral elements either exclusively or to the same degree as one another. The Victorian idyll is shown to be particularly apt for the description of social change; the novels present historical process and enduring values in a single frame. The mode, according to Schiller, is the hardest of the "reflective" modes to sustain. Only a few best of the sketches of Our Village achieve the incorporation of the reader's reflection into the response which characterises the idyll, Elizabeth Gaskell's fully achieved idylls are the shortest of her extended works. George Eliot does not repeat the node after Adam Bede. Hardy achieved three different but equally perfect idylls, but his last novels are tragic. The conclusion to this study considers the particular relation of the idyllic novel to social reality, which is not seen as separately interpretable in twentieth century terms.

This thesis is an edition of four poems (Lady Bessiye, Bosworth Feilde, Scotish Feilde, and Flodden Feilde) which were written in celebration of the military successes of the family of Stanley, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, at the battles of Bosworth (1485) and Flodden (1513). The introduction discusses the manuscripts and editions, the conditions for which the poems were composed, the style of the poems, and their contributions to the history of the period. The poems are newly edited, and the commentaries attempt, as well as elucidating the meanings of obscure lines, to identify the people and places which would have been of interest to the Stanley family and friends.

In this dissertation I consider the travels, and the travel and other non-fictional writings, of five women who travelled within Scotland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the anonymous author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland; Sarah Murray (later known as Sarah Aust); Anne Grant of Laggan, Dorothy Wordsworth; and Sarah Hazlitt. During this period, travel and tourism in Scotland changed radically from a time when there were few travellers and little provision for those few, through to Scotland's emergence as a fully organised tourist destination. Simultaneous with these changes came changes in writing. I examine the changes in the ways in which travellers travelled in, perceived and wrote about Scotland during the period 1770-1830. I explore the specific ways in which five women travel writers represented themselves and their travels. I investigate the relationship of gender to the travel writings produced by these five women, relating that to issues of production and reception as well as to questions of discourse. Finally, I explore the relationship between the geographical location of travels and travel writing.

This thesis explores representations of crowd behaviour in prose writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain. I argue that accounts of the crowd from a broad range of contexts, genres and political prejudices are united by a common intuition that the peculiar qualities of collective behaviour are provoked by sympathy. Sympathy is a ubiquitous term in eighteenth-century studies, but recent accounts of its political application tend to make it an index of mutual approbation and social cohesion. I argue instead that sympathy is a mode of transmission, a medium for the unregulated political energies that make democratic politics a profound worry for commentatorso f all political persuasionsd uring this period. The model of sympathy on which this study draws is a physiological rather than a moral or emotional one. Sympathyh ad long been associatedw ith quack medicine,b ut during this period it becomes a legitimate medical term for the process through which disorder in one organ of the body is instantaneously transmitted to another distant organ, or throughout the whole body. Though the cause of this phenomenon is often attributed to the nerves, physiological sympathy retains its occult overtones, and is never granted categorical explanation. My work demonstrates how this model of sympathy is applied to the behaviour of crowds in the philosophical, political, literary and periodical prose of the period, reaching greatest intensity at periods of social and political unrest. I argue that the threat of the crowd catalysed by sympathy produces surprising continuities between writers of contrasting political views. While reactionary commentators find it easy to denounce the mob, reformers are often forced to agree that that sympathetic communication makes the crowd ultimately resistant to control. But writers of all political persuasions also attempt to find a positive application for the language of collective sympathy, with varying degrees of success. In this thesis I argue the need to reconsider the understanding and applications of sympathy during the long eighteenth century, to give full consideration to its dynamic social and political function. In addition, I assert the significance of accounts like these to the ongoing analysis of `crowd psychology'. Eighteenth-century descriptions of the crowd in terms of sympathy resonate strongly with contemporary accounts of collective behaviour, demonstrating the extent to which questions raised by commentators at this period still remain to be answered. In chapter one I discuss various investigations of physiological sympathy in eighteenthcentury medical writings, and show how sympathy becomes connected in popular medical texts with electrical and quasi-electrical phenomena, including animal magnetism. I show how these phenomena were explicitly associated with mob behaviour in accounts of the Wilkesite agitations of 1768-1770. Chapter two addresses the representation of revolutionary crowds in the writings of Edmund Burke, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and John Thelwall during the 1790s. I argue that though Burke is forced to revise his conception of sympathy as an emotional force of social cohesion in the wake of the revolution, he is less troubled than his antagonists, for whom sympathetic transmission disrupts any appeal to rational enlightenment. Only Thelwall, I argueoffers a solution to this iirp sse by embracing the physical basis of sympathetic connection. Chaptert hree examinesr epresentationso f collective behaviouri n the periodical press during the years 1816-1819. I show how a vibrant cheap radical press and a concertedc ampaigno f massp olitical protest transformed understandingsth e influence of sympathyo n collective political behaviour.W hile the `respectablep' ress,r eformist as well as conservative, represents the crowd as unruly rabble, cheap radical publications unsettle this judgement by articulating voices from within the crowd. Despite their commitment to the diffusion of knowledge, these journalists exploit the crossover between the spread of reason and the sympathetic diffusion of physical and emotional energies. In chapter four I address two attempts to reclaim the language of sympathy for cohesive, even loyalist political ends. Dugald Stewart's analysis of `sympathetic imitation' makes sympathy the primary stimulus for collective action but refuses to draw the usual reactionary conclusions. A more profound break with condemnations of collective sympathy comes in the work of Robert Southey, David Wilkie, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey, who all present sympathy as a patriotic force, by associatingit with national systemso f communication such as the mail. However, in the wake of further developments in communication, this positive appropriation of sympathy is necessarily short-lived

The Honourable John Byng (1743-1813; later fifth Viscount Torrington) was a British soldier, civil servant, and diarist who wrote fifteen accounts of his series of pleasure tours between 1781 and 1794. Unpublished in his lifetime, these accounts were re-discovered in the twentieth century and have been in print ever since. Despite their scope (Byng visited two thirds of all English and Welsh counties) and detail (he filled twenty seven manuscript volumes totalling over 2,500 hand-written pages) his writings have been used only sporadically and anecdotally by historians. This dissertation, therefore, seeks to re-position Byng as an historical actor and his writings as a complex historical source that requires detailed re-examination and reevaluation. Doing so reveals that Byng’s journals can inform the historigraphical discussion that surrounds the creation of a ‘British’ national identity and consciousness in the late eighteenth century. Prevailing models stress top down dynamics and external forces that caused the English, Welsh, and Scottish to band together as a Protestant elect in order to survive the onslaught of the large, Catholic, Continental powers of the time. Whilst Byng’s observations do not refute this interpretation, they present a strong argument for the inclusion of ‘sub-national’ (hamlet, village, town, county) identities and loyalties in any attempt to chart British identity formation. To demonstrate this, elements of post-colonial theory, particularly contact theory, are used to show that in Britain Byng moved through a series of encounters akin to those experienced by Europeans in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through his reactions, it is possible to see how these various identities complemented and competed with each other, particularly important social tropes such as politeness. Family composition and relationships with friends are also discussed to illustrate how focusing on individual historical subjects can yield useful insights into broader historical issues. Finally, the experiences of Arthur Young (1741-1820) and William Cobbett (1763-1835), two other well known travellers and commentators, are used to suggest the wider ramifications of the analysis whilst making links to wider study of domestic travel.

This thesis examines representations of Cornwall in literature from 1880 to 1940. It identifies alternative literary ‘Cornwalls’ and seeks to understand their relationship to the predominant ways in which Cornwall has been culturally produced. The Cornwalls identified are all influenced by a nineteenth century seismic shift from mining to tourism. Until its catastrophic collapse mining dominates how Cornwall is represented within and without of the county. Its replacement by tourism gives impetus to different ways of representing Cornwall in literature and other cultural mediums. Touristic friendly Cornwalls – Celtic, exotic, Arthurian – dominate. Economic necessity requires that these Cornwalls persist to radiate an enticing version of Cornwall to potential visitors. Some authors seize upon these dominant images and develop them, but there exists other literary Cornwalls – voices lost, hidden, subsumed –which counter hegemonic representation. Chapter One provides a cultural geography of Cornwall and discusses the dominant constructions of Cornwall in their historical and literary context. Chapter Two examines literature of Cornish mining. Salome Hocking’s novel focuses on the balmaiden, the female mine surface worker, while other mining texts adhere to a narrative of masculine achievement and toil. Chapter Three examines how visiting writers Dinah Craik and Edith Ellis negotiate established constructions of Cornwall. While Craik is unable to imagine a Cornwall uncoupled from Arthurianism, Ellis disengages from dominant representations of place in order to produce a form of literary anthropology. Chapter Four begins by positioning Jack Clemo and Daphne du Maurier as contrasting inheritors of the period of study. Du Maurier’s literature forms part of Tourist Cornwall while Clemo’s novels of the china clay region embrace an antitouristic, bleak, harsh, industrial world. Their literary worlds, however, though disparate, are in dialectic with each other. There can be identified, therefore, connections between the dominant and alternative versions of place under exploration.

Three late Elizabethan progress entertainments are being discussed: Cowdray (August 1591), Elvetham (September 1591), and Harefield (July 1602). The Elvetham entertainment has received some critical attention and is comparatively well known due to the extraordinary preparations undertaken for the royal visit, and the fact that a woodcut of an artificial crescent-shaped lake, especially dug for the occasion, has survived. The other two entertainments have been somewhat neglected, and Harefield survives only in fragmentary form. To my knowledge, its text has never been printed in toto, and the thesis will include a transcript of the original manuscript housed in Warwickshire County Record Office. The traditional view that progress entertainments were pastoral tales whose main purpose was to consolidate and confirm existing class structures is challenged. Entertainments are rather complex fictions that serve not merely to establish and preserve the `beautiful relation' between Queen and her subjects, highborn as well as lowly. These occasions were also very much sites for the exercise of power, by monarch and hosts alike. When examining these festivities in their historical and political contexts and illuminating their hosts' backgrounds, significant new interpretations, or at least possible alternative readings, may be found. Most importantly, the entertainments have to be viewed holistically, as events rather than as the texts that have come down to us. The hosts of the first two entertainments were powerful peers who were politically suspect from the regime's point of view. Both these lords, on the other hand, had little reason to love the regime because they had been harassed. Despite this state of affairs, traditional interpretations still maintain that both entertainments were submissive in tenor; that their hosts regarded the royal visit as an honour, and tried to (re)gain the Queen's favour through the spectacles that they were putting on. I would claim that these pageants are far more complex affairs and have to be read on different levels of signification. Far from being submissive, these fetes can be interpreted as challenging the existing order, if not indeed actively trying to subvert it. Having said that, there are country welcomes that seem to conform to the more traditional view of progress entertainments. The third pageant at Harefield was offered by a top-ranking Elizabethan official whose relationship with the Queen was presumably more amicable. Her visit to him was probably intended as a sign of favour, and his motivation in hosting the entertainment may well have been the consolidation of his own position within her close circle of councillors. He would have aimed at maintaining the existing order rather than challenge it; at establishing a `beautiful relation' between all classes. These conclusions can only be drawn, however, once the event as a whole has been studied as well as the surviving fragments of text.