This thesis focuses on the images of Oman in British travel writing from 1800 to 1970. In texts that vary from travel accounts to sailors’ memoirs, complete travelogues, autobiographies, and letters, it looks at British representations of Oman as a place, people, and culture. It argues that these writings are heterogeneous and discontinuous throughout the periods under consideration. Offering diverse voices from British travellers, this thesis challenges Edward Said’s project in Orientalism (1978) which looks to Western discourse on the Middle East homogenisingly as Eurocentric and hostile. Chapter one explores and discusses the current Orientalist debate suggesting alternatives to the dilemma of Orientalism and providing a framework for the arguments in the ensuing chapters. Chapter two outlines the historical Omani-British relations, and examines the travel accounts and memoirs written by several British merchants and sailors who stopped in Muscat and other Omani coastal cities during their route from Britain to India and vice versa in the nineteenth century. Chapter three is concerned with the works of travellers who penetrated the Interior of Oman. James Wellsted’s Travels in Arabia (1838), Samuel Miles’ The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (1919) and other uncollected travel accounts, and Bertram Thomas’s Alarms and Excursions (1932) are investigated in this chapter. Chapter four considers the travellers who explored Dhofar in the southern Oman and the Ruba Al-Khali or the Empty Quarter. Precisely, it is devoted to Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix (1932) and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959). Chapter five looks at the last generation of British travellers who were in Oman from 1950 to 1970 employed either by oil companies or the Sultan Said bin Taimur. It explores Edward Henderson’s Arabian Destiny (1988), David Gwynne-James’s Letters from Oman (2001), and Ian Skeet’s Muscat and Oman (1974). This thesis concludes with final remarks on British travel writing on Oman and recommendations for future studies related to the subject. The gap of knowledge that this thesis undertakes to fill is that most of the texts under discussion have not been studied in any context.

This thesis examines Blake's posthumous reception, focusing particularly on the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s as decades in which Blake's reputation was both consolidated as a poet and artist, and invigorated as a radical sympathizer. As Blake's texts and life were being formed and re-formed in physically and conceptually elaborate books, such as Alexander Gilchrist's The Life of William Blake and Algernon Charles Swinburne's William Blake: a critical essay, significant and innovative appropriations of Blake's poetry and illustrations were made in Republican and freethinking periodicals and pamphlets. This thesis recovers some of that material. Retrieving the influence of such "low culture" ephemera on the "high" culture of Pre-Raphaelite creativity allows the Victorian Blake to emerge as a multi-faceted, contradictory production: both secular iconoclast and mystical visionary, blasphemous sibyl and poet of social justice. Nineteenth-century readings and reproductions of Blake are a chronicle of freethought and freeform. The multiplicity of Blake in this period, in both reproduction and interpretation, enables a questioning of books and periodicals as mediums of representation. Blake's reproduction in the nineteenth century coincides with, and yet confounds, Foucauldian configurations of nineteenth-century representation. Although Blake is depicted as a lone, isolated individual - often labouring under the insane tag - this does not simply signify an epistemological nadir of vacuous, disconnected individualism, such as Foucault identifies. On the contrary, this thesis seeks to prove that the enthusiasm for Blake in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s is facilitated by a deep connectivity of medium and message, and between different mediums and different messages. The political stance of Secularism meets the cultural concerns of Aestheticism, both reproducing Blake through technology that improvises upon and rejuvenates Blake's own unique craft.

A particular kind of voice recurs in fin-de-siècle British literature. It is a voice without a human body, a voice whose source is either invisible or non-human. This study explores the historical factors underlying the literary representation of such a voice. Chapter 1 examines Arthur Symons' phrase, 'the disembodied voice of a human soul,' and sets up the context for the subsequent discussion by teasing out the four major implications of the fin-de-siècle disembodied voice: the socio-political, the aesthetico-linguistic, the techno-scientific, and the sexual-somatic. Chapter 2 first outlines the modern origin of the disembodied voice in the Gothic-Romantic culture of the late eighteenth century, where the frequent description of the disembodied voice is linked to the rise of the nostalgia for premodernity; the chapter then analyzes the disembodied voice in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness both in terms of Gothic culture and of the fin-de-siècle situation. The Romantic aesthetico-linguistic prioritization of the aural-oral, which we call 'melocentricism,' the fin-de-siècle consumerism and colonialism, and the then influential scientific concept of ether receive scrutiny. Chapter 3 addresses Oscar Wilde's Salome. Apart from the factors that this play shares with Conrad's novella, the disembodied voice in Salome secretly expresses a longing for the homosexual-cum-communal. Chapter 4 explores the fin-de-siècle imperial and homosexual implications, and the 'melocentric' pre-history, of the phonographic voice in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Chapter 5 teases out the hidden political dimension of the technological voice, phonographic and wireless, in Kipling's Kim and '"Wireless".' Chapter 6 compares the fin-de-siècle voice with an instance of the early twentieth-century, the wireless voice in D. H. Lawrence's Ladv Chatterley's Lover, a voice now involved in the global network of broadcasting. It is concluded that the disembodied voice is inseparable from important aspects of fin-de-siècle British culture as well as the question of modernity.

Central to my analysis of Woolf's work are five novels: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves. These are written in pursuit of Woolf's modernist project, but as I shall argue below, her modernism was at the same time a feminist subversion of conventions, and I will analyze the ways in which Woolf actually effects this fusion of her concerns in her texts. I will concentrate on her fiction in this thesis, an area of her work that has been, surprisingly, comparatively underemphasized in the recent, intense revival of interest in Woolf. Directed towards her centenary in 1982, the revival has at its centre a 'family' industry which includes Quentin Bell's biography, the publication of Woolf's innumerable letters and diaries, and previously unpublished material. As a consequence of this extensive, new access to Woolf's personal life, there has flourished a biographical and psychoanalytical criticism, but this latter has tended to focus on her actual mental illness rather than the possibilities of new readings of her texts, a relative neglect which this thesis hopes, to a degree, to remedy. The linkage of psychoanalysis and Woolf is not an arbitrary one, since the Hogarth Press has been Freud's English publisher since 1921. Leonard himself reviewed Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Though she was never treated by Freudian psychoanalysts, Woolf did meet Freud when he took refuge in England just before the war. It is not until towards the end of the 1930s that we can be certain, from the entries in her diary and her reading notebooks, that Woolf was actually reading Freud. ' Yet we can sense the great impact of Freudian psychoanalysis in her references to 'our psychoanalytical age'(CE II 142). She wrote a review called 'Freudian Fiction', in which she showed her dissatisfaction, not with Freud's own discoveries, nor with the principle of their use in fiction, but with the way a particular novelist (J. D. Beresford) had done so: 'It simplifies rather than complicates, detracts rather enriches'(CW, 154). shall seek to heed this caveat in the studies that follow. Contemporary feminism has, since the seventies, given impetus to this prodigious revival of interest in Woolf; its recent major emphasis has been the re-assessment of Woolf as a radical political thinker. Feminist assessments of Woolf's aesthetics (E. Showalter, Sidney Jane Kaplan) have often been on the whole negative, fundamentally continuous with the criticism of her by the politically committed writers of the 1930's or of Scrutiny: Virginia Woolf as hypersensitive, as a sheltered invalid lady unable to cope with a harsh 'reality'. A pioneer book by Herbert Marder in 1968 stressed the crucial importance of feminism in Woolf's art: 'far from being a mere excrescence on her work, feminism ... is essential to her conception of reality.' But the major shift in evaluation was initiated by American feminists around Jane Marcus, who aim to revolutionize the commonly accepted accounts of Woolf by emphasizing the political dimensions of her writing. These recent books and articles have valuably uncovered previously unknown or repressed aspects of Woolf, which offer the possibility of a new and fuller comprehension of her literary endeavours. Yet, because these works are eager to dispel the old image of ethereal aestheticism, they tend to eschew fullscale dealings with Woolf's formal experimentation, that series of works from Jacob's Room to The Waves which have conventionally been regarded as quintessentially Woolfian, which have supported the image of her work as beautiful, pure artefact, subjectivistic and hypersensitive. What is needed now is to radicalize the reading of precisely these novels and of the aesthetic behind them, and I have sought to bring the resources of contemporary critical and psychoanalytic theories upon them, stressing those aspects of theory which seem to me most germane and illuminating for each particular novel. I shall argue that Woolf's series of major experimental works, which are traditionally assigned to a gender-free category of 'modernism', can be interpreted as a quest for what she refers to as a 'woman's sentence' that would allow 'a woman [to] write exactly as she wishes to write', and what I refer to, in my title and throughout this thesis, as 'feminine writing'. Both modernism and literary feminism - projects which, as I shall suggest below, are uniquely conjoined in Woolf - are a questioning of a previously dominant mode of writing, and the crisis-of narrative that they represent is also a crisis of the self. Lacanian psychoanalysis illuminates this crisis of the subject by bringing Freud's work into relation with structuralist theories of language, and allows us to define feminine writing as a concern which addresses itself to the position of mastery maintained in the order of discourse. The 'feminine' can then be seen as the subversion of a mastery guaranteed by the 'Cartesian' subject or self which also sustains the narrative conventions that Woolf's experimental novels so effectively interrogate. Far from being a flight from social commitment into an arcane modernism, her experimental texts can, I shall argue, best be seen as a feminist subversion of the deepest formal principles - of the definitions of narrative, writing, the self - of a patriarchal social order.

This thesis examines representations of intellectual work in the writings of Edmund Burke, William Cobbett, William Hazlitt, and Thomas Carlyle, focusing on their tendency to draw on an analogy between mental and manual labour when representing their own work to themselves and to their readers. It is my argument that while the assimilation of intellectual to physical labour can be seen as a symptom of political bad faith - suggesting, as it does, that thinking and writing are as painful or as difficult as digging and ploughing - the primary purposes of the analogy in the works of these four cultural commentators are, first, to forge rhetorical alliances with ordinary labourers, and, second, to attack other intellectuals engaged in what are alleged to be less arduous and less valuable forms of intellectual endeavour. By blaming the irresponsible activity of disaffected literary men for the political upheaval of the French Revolution, Burke set the terms for debate about the role of educated and literate men in society, a debate in which, for the first time, intellectuals competed for the allegiance of the labouring population. The analogy with manual labour was a key rhetorical site in the struggle to define an ideology for intellectuals, since it claims to ground the speaker or writer in the labouring community at large. For each author, I undertake close readings of several key texts to demonstrate the prevalence of the comparison with manual labour in the representation of intellectual activity. The political-ideological valence of the analogy is never straightforward, I contend, and it often occurs alongside an impulse to emphasise, as well as to elide, what are assumed to be the fundamental differences between mental and manual activity. We witness in the writings of Burke, Cobbett, Hazlitt, and Carlyle a recognisable mode of self-representation, for the desire to assimilate intellectual to material work has persisted.

My research examines Christina Rossetti’s use of biblical typology in her articulation of individual and communal identity. The central concern of my thesis is with tracing the ways in which she bridges the gap between the two biblical covenants and her contemporary situation by a ceaseless interpretative movement between the discourses of the Old and New Testaments. After examining the basis for her typological modes of reading, I demonstrate the various ways in which they underpin her interpretations of Tractarian, Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite writings as well as providing her with a framework with which to structure her own poetic sequences. In my examination of the ways in which Rossetti engages with patristic and medieval theology and articulates identity through the cyclical dynamics of typology, I consider her writings alongside those of Isaac Williams, John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey and highlight the key part they play in reinforcing the Oxford Movement’s liturgical momentum. Focusing specifically on her poetic utilization of the ancient practice of chanting psalms and antiphons, her engagement with the musicality of the church service, and her depiction of the visual aspects of ritualism, I read her poetry in terms of the mystical journey towards God upon which, she suggests, each Christian embarks. Applying to Rossetti’s poetry the method of typological analysis that she herself uses, I consider how the poems in her 1893 volume, Verses, can be understood to comment upon her earlier works and how her earlier poetry can be seen as an antecedent to her later works. Through this, I trace the development of her theology as it engages more directly with the hermeneutical principles encouraged by the Tractarians and offers a basis upon which the patristic concept of trinitarian personhood can be understood.

Prose murder pamphlets first appeared during the final three decades of the sixteenth century and were a successful part of the early modern market for cheap print throughout the seventeenth century. There is a corpus of over 350 extant prose murder pamphlets printed between 1573 and 1700. The literary analysis of murder pamphlets undertaken in this research reveals them as an identifiable genre with recognisable narrative and rhetorical strategies. The Calvinist theology of providence and predestination gave the prose murder pamphlets their distinctive chain-link structure which began with original sin, progressed through sinfulness to murder, condemnation, death and salvation through God’s divine grace. The chain-link narrative proved particularly sympathetic to the absorption and promulgation of other Protestant narratives, including those of divine providence, anti-papist propaganda, and control of youth, sodomy, dying, and English historiography. This structure also proposed that murder should be interpreted allegorically, as the narrative pattern was an allegory of an individual’s journey through life from the prediction of original sin to the assurance of salvation. An analysis of the embedded Protestant narratives of the murder pamphlets shows that murder was presented to early modern readers so that it could be scrutinised for its rhetorical, religious and political significance. The representation of murder, therefore, intersected with the religio-political crises and ecclesiastical politics of the seventeenth century. For over a century it carried forward a particular representation of English Protestantism, constructing the reader as an English Protestant ‘subject’: someone who was a member of the English nation, subject to a monarch and government that should embody godly rule, but who was also an individual Protestant with a godly duty to read and interpret God’s purpose. This research demonstrates that although materially fragile, murder pamphlets were culturally robust and a detailed study of them contributes to a more detailed understanding of early modern literary culture.

An understanding of the concept of decadence in the late nineteenth century is not dependent on a purely linguistic approach to the various forms of literary language in which it might be manifested. Rather, the label of decadence invokes (and deliberately flouts) perceptions of normality in a number of cultural spaces, not all of them strictly textual. Importantly, the personality of the artist figure is also a part of the definition of decadence. Decadence, that is, is not limited to a particular mode of textual performance; it is also a matter of how the artist's personality is interpreted through a critical assumption current throughout the nineteenth century, that the text acts as an index of the moral status of the writer. Decadence, then, is about reception, as well as conception. Given that meaning accrues to the figure of the artist in the definition of decadence, and given that the late nineteenth century was a period of conflicting discourses of sexual politics, the definition of decadence is bound up with the matrix of associations around such concepts as sex, gender and sexuality. The three writers at the centre of this study all demonstrate decadent potential in their refusals to respect the conventions of gender — both in terms of the subjects and forms they each chose for literary representation, and for the choices they made about the living of their lives. In his poetry Wilde took up a series of dramatic poses, inconsistent with each other, inconsistent even within single poems. In doing so, he called into question prevailing standards and ideals of masculinity — sincerity and purposiveness — and he was attacked for doing so even before he was tried for gross indecency in 1895. Symons's subject matter — the preponderance in his poetry of the liminal figures of the dancer and the actress, and the liminal spaces of the music-hall and deserted city streets at night — explicitly courted a decadent label, and, indeed, Symons helped to defme the term. Contemporary audiences read his poetic persona back onto his personality. And his decadence, like Wilde's, also came from his flouting of the rules of masculinity, in his case, his exposure of the gender and class ideology of the gentleman, by speaking aloud of its implications. That decadence has an importance for sexual politics is signalled by the fact that there are very few women writers who seem to 'suit' the label. Vernon Lee provides a test case here of the argument that decadence is to be defmed primarily as a falling away from an idealised standard of masculinity. Lee wrote impeccably decadent fiction, but is not generally thought of as a decadent writer, perhaps precisely because she was a woman writer for whom a term that resides in conventions of the masculine is inappropriate. Decadence is a notoriously difficult term to define, and this thesis attempts to show a range of definitions of the word in terms of its favoured themes, forms and and their relation to ideas of artistic personality; it shows that the label is inextricably bound up in the sexuality debtes of the 1890s.

The thesis is a Critical Edition of Derek Walcott’s Omeros, consisting of a Critical Introduction and Annotations. The Critical Introduction analyses: - Narrative - Settings - Metaphor and Paronomasia - Symbolism - Historiography - Intertexts - Dualism - Autobiography - Dialects - Prosody. The Annotations comment on more than 1000 references that may be obscure and on specifics of narrative, language and prosody. This study presents new conclusions about some aspects of Omeros: - It challenges the prevailing view that the work is written substantially in a variation of terza rima and shows that regular quatrains predominate. - It demonstrates ways in which the metrics follow the sense of the narrative and takes a more balanced position on the use of Caribbean as opposed to classical metrics than that put forward previously. - It identifies a paragraphic structure to the verse. - It proposes a new prosodic structure for the significant Chapter XXX/iii. - It extends Walcott’s recognised use of numerology into word counting the names of characters. - It develops the idea of Walcott’s dualism and his use of pairing and contradiction as a dialectical method. - It defines his wide use of paronomasia and shows that many of the puns have a metaphorical aspect beyond mere word-play. - It analyses some of Walcott’s symbolism. - It identifies intertextual links to his earlier works and to some thirty other writers, and suggests homage to Hemingway and possibly Heaney. - It provides the first complete analysis of Walcott’s rhyme types in Omeros. In its analysis of Omeros and in the Annotations it has included commentary from across the critical literature, to provide some sense of other views on Walcott’s writing, and has included as many as possible of Walcott’s own comments on Omeros and on the writer’s task, as a background to understanding the poem.

Winifred Holtby was a novelist, journalist and feminist, writing in the 1920s and 1930s. This thesis focuses on her feminist resistance to the fashion for sexual division in interwar Britain. She reads it as a social and political backlash against women’s equal rights that seeks to drive women out of the workplace and back into the home. In Holtby’s view, the popularisation of Freud and the growing appeal of fascism contribute to this backlash by stressing women’s primary role as wives and mothers. For Holtby, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, sums up this fashion for sexual division when he declares in 1932, ‘we want men who are men and women who are women’. Previous scholarship has focused on Holtby’s work in dialogue with her friend and fellow feminist, Vera Brittain. This thesis adopts a more panoramic perspective to consider Holtby’s work in the context of other feminist contemporaries and in the context of feminist intellectual history. Each chapter examines how Holtby draws inspiration from a figure in feminist history in order to challenge the influences of psychology and fascism on attitudes to women between the wars. Holtby declared that Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the ‘bible of the woman’s movement’ and the first chapter examines Wollstonecraft’s influence on Holtby’s feminist thought. The second chapter considers Holtby’s defence of the spinster against interwar prejudice that castigated the spinster as sexually frustrated and psychological abnormal. By subverting Charlotte Brontë’s romance narratives for an interwar ‘feminine middlebrow’ readership, Holtby valorises women’s work in the community. The third chapter addresses the fascist veneration of motherhood, analysing how Holtby recognises and assimilates the feminist potential of Alfred Adler’s theory of Individual Psychology to her anti-fascist critique.