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The focus of this study is an investigation of cross-channel exchanges represented in travelogues, historical works, journalism, letters and journals written by English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh on France and by French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart on England. The work is based on the view that narratives about another culture betray preconceptions and beliefs and are never innocent descriptions. Nineteenth-century English descriptions of France, for instance, are not only marked by the stereotype of the gregarious French bon vivant but also by the often tense political relationship and economical concurrence between the two countries. French descriptions of England reflect the consciousness of England's superiority in the domains of economy, industry and colonialism as well as the stereotype of the boring, monosyllabic, haughty, egoistic and often xenophobic Englishman. Given that writings on the other culture are marked by practices and belief systems as well as notions of superiority and inferiority like texts emerging from a colonial context, ideas which have been developed in this field by scholars such as Sara Mills and Reina Lewis have been used as a basis for this investigation. I argue that the women whose texts I analyse strategically employ 'discourses of difference' (to use Sara Mills' term), or alignment and 'othering' in regard to nation, class, and political opinion, in order to gain positions which allow them to challenge contemporary ideologies of femininity. They take advantage of their positions in very different ways, according to their personal, class and economic situations, their agenda, and their gendered position within society which changes significantly during the century. The English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh construct themselves as part of the tradition of French salonnières from the seventeenth century to the present, while the French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart align themselves with English travel writers, particularly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Through a careful construction of these foremothers, which often differed from other representations of them, they criticise gender politics in their own country and endeavour to normalise their own activities as intellectuals and writers, in the case of Tristan as a socialist and feminist activist. This strategy is complemented by 'othering' with regard to nation, class and political convictions which confers on the women an authoritative authorial voice and / or allows them to support their argument. They endorse ideologies of gender, nation and class at the same time as they reject some aspects of them. This study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century discussions of the so-called 'woman question' through a broader approach which encompasses not only the parameters of gender, class and political orientation but also cross-cultural experience.

This dissertation examines sensation in twentieth-century narratives of London and argues that vulnerability is a constitutive experience of the post-imperial city. Sensations of vulnerability in London arise because of the built environment of the city: its status as an imperial center and a global capital create important intersections of local, national, and global concerns which render the city itself vulnerable. I chart the trajectory of vulnerability as an affective history of London that is documented in cultural texts ranging from fiction and film to political debates and legal materials. Since the sensational experiences of the present partly arise from the materials of the past embedded in the landscape, affective histories create new ways of understanding history as a spatial experience. The narrated sensations of the city make vulnerability legible as a persistent feature of twentieth-century London life. I begin with a modernist, imperial London, in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and in Parliamentary debates from the same year (1925). Ambivalence about London's dual status as a local site and as a national and international capital is a response to London's vulnerable position at the end of the Great War. Next, I turn to World War Two London and Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. I discuss intimacy as an important national feature in narratives of London during the crisis of this war. National narratives about intimacy constructed by Winston Churchill and heard on BBC radio respond directly to London's defensive vulnerability. My third chapter concerns Margaret Thatcher's 1980s London and the crucial role autonomy plays in constructing London as an invulnerable, international financial and civic capital. Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library documents Londoners' attempts to make sense of their autonomy in a postimperial capital. My final chapter examines sensations of social and political belonging in contemporary London through reading Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things alongside legal documents about immigration. I contend that reading cultural texts affectively creates counter-histories of the city that accommodate a deeper range of experiences than do traditional histories and offers to literary studies a new way of understanding the relationship between official and unofficial histories. / text

This project asserts that much of the cultural anxiety found in Gothic-infused late-Victorian fiction derives from literary revelations of the nested spaces, shifting identities, and spontaneous connections inherent to the late-Victorian metropolis. The three literary texts studied here – The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung, and The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan – all depict London as fundamentally suitable for those who seek to evade the disciplinary gaze and to pursue menacing schemes of criminality and invasion. Doyle’s text illustrates the interconnectedness of the spaces within London as well as the passable threshold between London and the English countryside; both the villain Stapleton and the hero Sherlock Holmes use these connections to attack and defend, respectively, the city and its inhabitants. Hornung’s stories depict the machinations employed by the gentleman-thief Raffles as he alters his identity and his codes of behaviour in order to free himself to pursue criminal ends and thus as he challenges cultural barriers. Buchan’s text, building on the others, explores the dissolution of cultural boundaries and identities incumbent upon the spontaneous connections made between those who attack English culture and those, like Richard Hannay, who defend it. There emerges in these texts a vision of London (and by extension Great Britain) as a swirling vortex of motion, an unknowable labyrinth perpetually threatened by menacing agents from without and within. I have employed Victor Turner’s theories of liminality and communitas to describe how criminal agents, and their equally menacing “good-guy” pursuers, separate themselves from structured society in order to move freely and to gain access to the contested thresholds they seek to infiltrate. I also invoke theories of the Gothic, surveillance, and travel, as well as Jeffrey Cohen’s monster theory, to characterize the anxiety embedded in such invasions. / The transformation of contested space : Baker Street, Grimpen Mire and the battle for thresholds in The hound of the Baskervilles -- Hornung's code-switching monster : threatening ambiguity and liminoid mobility in Raffles, the amateur cracksman -- Towards a more inclusive Britishness : Richard Hannay's transformative connections and evolving identity in The thrity-nine steps. / Department of English