The relationship between theatrical performance and religion in Western culture has always been complex and often troubled; and yet at points of encounter each provides fertile ground for exploring questions about how our religious and spiritual identity is constructed through society. This is particularly true of England today. The arrival of the 21st century seems to have heralded a renewed interest in questions surrounding religious practice and spiritual seeking. When debates about the nature and implications of religious belief are so high on the cultural agenda, performance inevitably becomes a public site of these debates. This is reflected in the academy, and while sociologists of religion have become increasingly aware of the 'performative' aspects of religious practices, contemporary performance practitioners and theorists have become more concerned with questions of religion, spirituality and the sacred. This thesis acknowledges both aspects of this nexus. It contextualises these manifestations in popular culture through recent scholarship from the sociology of religion, and uses frameworks and discourse from performance scholarship to consider the implications of psychophysical practice on performative identity construction. To do this it critiques performance culture’s use of religion and spirituality to describe both positive and negative aspects of performance and its genealogies, which at its most extreme, asserts the 'failure' of mainstream religion and moves to assume the mantle of religion itself. This thesis, through textual and performance analysis, literature reviews, archival research and fieldwork argues that performance optics offer significant mechanisms for examining the efficacy of embodied practices that construct the infinite variety of religious, spiritual and cultural beliefs. It includes a series of case studies which explore how notions of ‘Englishness’ as civic-identity are interwoven with concepts of religiosity and responsibility. They are informed by my fieldwork as a participant and observer in acts of Christian and Spiritualist worship, in addition to my pilgrimage to Lourdes and Glastonbury with Goddess worshippers and Catholics. This thesis asks how is contemporary English religious and spiritual identity constructed and reconstructed by performance?

This thesis examines the particular situation of displaced children both in nineteenth-century culture and as represented in the mid-nineteenth century English novel. It covers the understanding of adoption in fiction and in practice before the Act of Adoption, 1926, particularly in the period 1837-1870. In the course of its development, it identifies the particular situation of displaced children and their ideological significance in selective fiction of 1837-1870 concerned with their representation. Displaced children may be orphans, strays, destitute, legitimate or illegitimate. What makes them identifiable as a distinct category is their placement and rearing outside their biological family; a process often erroneously referred to in the novels as adoption. Such children appear not to have, hitherto, been identified as a distinct group in literature. Wide-ranging models of such fictional displacees have been selected, mostly foregrounded children with a handful of memorable minor ones. The core-text novels are, with one exception, from canonical novelists whose main output was between 1837-70. Dickens has been privileged and the others are Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Thackeray and the non-canonical Hesba Stretton. The approach has been new historicist insofar as materials have been assembled which might enable reconstruction of the lost sensibilities of these displaced children and their nineteenth-century readers. To this end examples of paintings, journaIs, newspaper articles, Parliamentary debate, letters, ditties and cartoons have been used to illustrate and consolidate the content of the thesis. 1 The period 1837-70 has been chosen because it opens with Victoria's accession and the start of the Dickens output. The final date, 1870, marks the death of Dickens and the passing of Forster's Elementary Education Act whose provisions, albeit slowly implemented, turned the street urchins into the new school children. The intervening years take in major works from the canonical novelists drawn on here, and a wave of writers pressing for betterment of the lot of destitute children. The role of sustainers who, in both fact and fiction, run throughout as counter-point to the displaced children is discussed. In fiction the ail-important bonding between displacee and sustainer which transforms them into a duality is emphasised because it sets the seal on what is, initially, a trial and error relationship. Similarly, the growth of reciprocity as the displacee matures is given particular attention. State and charitable sustainers such as workhouses and Coram's Foundling Hospital are examined, as are the commercial and frequently corrupt baby-farms. A key question in the thesis is whether or not it was possible to take in a destitute child as spontaneously and easily as the novelists describe, without recourse to any legal or official procedure. To this end, fictional displacees and sustainers are scrutinised to see how far what the novelists depict correlates positively with actuality as recorded by social historians. Allied to this the displaced child and its enormous potential as a novelistic perennial favourite is considered. Displacement is of crucial importance in both fact and fiction affecting, as it does, the child's sense of identity, its precarious status and the liberating opportunities it affords. A further issue is the huge difference in the understanding and practise of adoption between the nineteenth-century reader and a modem one. With the realisation that in the nineteenth century adoption was, at best, a flimsy arrangement with no legal safeguards and, at worst, open to huge abuse and irregularities, the sensibilities of the earlier reader must have been greatly affected and their concern heightened when set alongside those of a later reader. There appears to have been no recognition of this difference in such a relationship in literary criticism to date.

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)

Since around 2011, Bongo Flava musicians use significantly more English in their lyrics than in the previous years, particularly in love songs. This article documents and describes this new trend and discusses the reasons for the change in language use. It reveals that the new development is indicative of a transformation of Bongo Flava towards pop, caused by changes in the domestic market on the one hand and by a growing outward-looking market orientation on the other. These changes are demanding new ways of constructing identities through the use of language. / Tangu mnamo mwaka 2011, wasanii wa Bongo Flava walio wengi hutumia kiasi kikubwa cha Kiinge¬reza katika nyimbo zao ukilinganisha na miaka ya nyuma. Hali hiyo inajionyesha zaidi katika nyimbo za mapenzi. Makala hii inaeleza mwelekeo huo mpya na kujadili sababu zake. Inatoa hoja ya kwamba mwelekeo huo umesababishwa hasa na mabadiliko katika soko la muziki ndani na nje ya Tanzania, hasa katika bara la Afrika. Mabadiliko hayo ndiyo yanayosababisha kutumia zaidi lugha ya Kiingereza.

The central aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed ethnographic account of the human ecology of the Broads - a protected wetland region in the East of England - focussing upon how working lives shape and are shaped by this reedy landscape. In conversations about the management of the Broads, the concept of "common sense" is a frequent trope; encompassing a wide range of associated meanings. But what are these meanings of "common sense" in English culture, and how do they influence the peoples of England, and landscapes in which they work? This thesis addresses these questions ethnographically; using academic and lay deployments of common sense as a route into the political economy of rural Norfolk. Based on 12 months of fieldwork in the Broads National Park, this thesis draws together interviews and participant observation with land managers of various kinds - including conservationists, farmers, gamekeepers, volunteers, gardeners, and administrators. Chapter 1 dissects the differences between academic and popular understandings of "common sense" as a phrase, and produces an ethnographically-derived, working definition. Chapter 2 examines the attitudes of farmers, establishing "the common" as a root metaphor for social and practical rectitude, actualised through labouring in a shared landscape. Chapter 3 explores how the common is sensed, reflecting upon the diverse sensoria afforded by different degrees of enclosure on a single nature reserve. Chapter 4 explores how the concept of common sense intersects with a prevailing culture of possessive individualism, creating a fragmented society in the Park, wracked by controversies over management. Chapter 5 examines bureaucracy in Broadland - frequently cast as the very antithesis of common sense. In the conclusion, we return to the title, and ask - what do the reeds have to say about land, labour, and human nature?