Most theoretical discussions of the novel published in the eighties were crude and unimpressive, but the criticism of individual novels was more interesting. Discussing novelists such as Payn and Oliphant critics showed that they were not prepared to accept any novel just because it was constructed along traditional lines. Meredith was the most respected novelist. He defended accepted moral values but in a way that struck his contemporaries as ambitious and original. Other novelists were less acceptable because they challenged the moral convictions of the critics. Zola's novels provoked intense controversy, but the excitement was short-lived. However, his realism did inspire a whole new movement of reaction---the revival of romance. This fiction was escapist and therefore unpopular with critics, who preferred realistic fiction, but realistic fiction that endorsed traditional moral values. They particularly admired philan-thropic themes and admired Gissing for his use of them. But Gissing dealt with the failure of philanthropy. This led onto wider doubts about the social system and a new emphasis on the individual. Suchan emphasis was unacceptable to critics who preferred a picture of\social integration. James made a greater emphasis on the individual than any other novelist in the period and his work baffled critics. Hardy started with concepts of community and shared values but showed their disintegration. Critics refused to accept his vision and misinterpreted his works as pictures of a structured social order. Wishing novelists would present a vision of social cohesion critics referred back to George Eliot, although her vision was not as straightforwardly positive as most critics seemed to believe. Critics would have liked novelists in the 'eighties to emulate her though socialpicture. They wanted to see a picture of society functioning well, not a pessimistic picture of social chaos.

This thesis is a critical examination of Daniel Deronda, together with an attempt to relate it to George Eliot's fiction, to its fictional time, and to some selected fiction of its time. The Introduction defines the scope of this study, and Chapter I traces briefly, through correspondence, the writing of Daniel Deronda, passing on to consider certain selected criticisms of it since its publication in 1876. Chapter II is an investigation of the widespread nature of its unity, and demonstrates that it possesses a principle of manifold association. Chapters III and IV trace comparisons in usage, plot, situation, character and ethical direction, between George Eliot's fiction and Daniel Doronda, indicating development or mutation in the author's creative art where appropriate. Chapter V displays the retrospective technique which has so large a part in Daniel Deronda, and considers in detail the two basic methods of presenting character in that novel. Chapter VI examines the direct and indirect inodes of commentary in Daniel Deronda, indicating at the same time the extent of the author's moral preoccupation. Chapter VII further underlines this preoccupation by placing Daniel Deronda against its period (1864-6) and examining its Judaism and the nature of George Eliot's humanism for man and community. Chapter VIII takes the qualities of some selected fiction of the 1870's,which appears to have some bases for comparison with Daniel Deronda , and seeks to establish the latter's superiority to these novels. In the Conclusion a revaluation of Daniel Deronda is attempted, and the qualities which make it a great novel are indicated.

While other researchers have sought to put poetry of the First World War into perspective in the general context of twentieth century verse, it is proposed that this study will focus principally on the contemporary response - of readers, reviewers and critics - to this remarkable poetic efflorescence between the years 1914 and 1918. A general survey of the situation in English poetry on the threshold of the War is initially presented, taking into account the reading public's expectation of poetry and the current critical dicta pertaining to the composition of verse˙ The three subsequent chapters examine in some detail the different types of War Poetry - Georgian-influenced, Imagist-inclined, non-combatant - in con-junction with analysis of the particular readership to which each appealed and the response of reviewers to the different modes, while the final chapter traces the evolution of certain themes characteristic of First World War Poetry, such as the changing concept of sacrifice and the development of the important camaraderie-motif. The brief Epilogue which completes the study assesses the overall response of readers, reviewers and literary critics of the time to First World War Poetry, and briefly evaluates the extent to which such verse contributed to the formulation of a 'new poetic' in the decades after 1918.

This critical study of Juliana Ewing traces her development and examines the considerable range of her prose and verse. As a talented and imaginative, though uneven, writer, experimenting with diverse forms and techniques, she helped to shape and extend children's fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century. The introduction indicates the unpublished and published materials for such an undertaking, gives a brief account of the critical reception of her work arid provides a selective biography describing the social and intellectual climate in which her work grew, and her formative relationship with her mother, the writer Margaret Gatty. Her juvenilia and her apprentice work in the sixties show her restless experimentation with the inherited models of children's fiction and with some of the dated, threadbare types of adult fiction. Only gradually and through her knowledge of the greatest contemporary novelists did she evolve more personal forms, adapted to young readers, but with no sacrifice of honesty or subtlety. In the short story, her earliest successes were dream fantasies that transformed the older didactic magic into more expansive psychological accounts. Subsequently, she consciously recreated the spare style, fundamental situations and wayward magic of folk tradition in her imitative tales, and she reworked versions of the legend and parable, making an intelligent contribution to the age's rediscovery of fairy tale. Her particular achievement in domestic fiction was her development in the seventies and eighties of a nouvelle structure and of controlling images as principles of organisation. The resulting form, taut and rich, avoided the problems of her five novels of education which lay in reconciling her intense and accurate recreations of children's experience with the novel's demand for some terminus of maturity. Tales, nouvelles and novels present a combination of formal artistry with sympathetic penetration of children's lives that is distinctive in juvenile literature of this date.

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This thesis carries out a corpus stylistic study of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. It investigates the role of textual patterns as building blocks of the fictional world and triggers of literary themes. It also investigates the effects of translation on the relation between textual patterns and the fictional world, and discusses the potential consequences of translational alterations on the text’s themes. Heart of Darkness is a complex and multifaceted text that deals with a multitude of themes and has been interpreted in many different ways. By offering an overview of the text’s literary reception, I foreground two major themes that emerge from the contemporary critical debate as particularly central to the discussion about Conrad and his text: “Africa and its representation” and “race and racism”. Through a keyword analysis, I establish a connection between these themes and the lexical level of the text. Adopting Mahlberg & McIntyre’s (2011) model, I group keywords into categories that reflect specific aspects of the fictional world and the thematic concerns of the text. I then select groups of keywords that relate specifically to “Africa and its representation” and “race and racism” for more in-depth examination. Specifically, I analyse how the African jungle and the African natives are linguistically represented in the text. I demonstrate that repeated lexico-semantic patterns shape these fictional representations and play a fundamental part in the interpretation of the two themes related to them. I then focus on the Italian versions and compare them in order to show the effects of translation on the lexico-semantic patterns. I show that alterations made at the linguistic level affect the interpretational level of the translations, with potential consequences for the reception of the major themes in the target context. Finally, I use computational methods to compare the original and the translations at the level of whole texts, as opposed to feature-specific comparisons. I claim that together these two perspectives provide a more nuanced understanding of the relation between source and target texts. Through this analysis, the present thesis explores how the fictional world and literary themes are constructed and conveyed in literature and in its translation. It also contributes to the critical discussion on Heart of Darkness and proposes a methodology to analyse and compare literary translations. Finally, as an interdisciplinary project, this thesis builds on the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies, and strengthens this relation further.

This thesis represents the first extensive examination of the ‘faithful fictions’ of the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown (1921-1996). Until now, critical appreciations of the Catholic imagination informing Brown’s opus have been vague and Brown has been seen as a throwback; his Catholicism only part of a reactionary impulse that denies modernity a place in his oeuvre. Through a thematic critical analysis of four major strands of Brown’s corpus that display his Catholic imagination, it is contended that Brown has been misunderstood by the Scottish literary-critical tradition, and that his creative work on religious subjects is diverse, experimental and devotional. The thesis provides a biography of Brown’s faith. It looks at his conversion accounts, and it discusses the interaction between these and other accounts of (spiritual) autobiography. The thesis looks in a detailed way at three mediators of grace in Brown’s faithful fictions: the Virgin Mary, St Magnus, and Christ, whose nativity Brown frequently depicts. By discussing their different roles, depictions and the various literary forms that tell their stories, this study will discover the ways in which Brown encapsulates his Catholic faith in his creative work. The thesis questions whether Catholicism harms his literary output, as some critics have suggested, and shows the ways in which Brown’s writing interacts with other Catholic literature – old and new, at home and abroad. Manuscripts, including several unpublished poems, plays and stories, will be referenced throughout, as will rare and unseen correspondence. The thesis takes in the entire scope of Brown’s body of work and is not limited to a single mode or genre in his corpus. Ultimately, this study contends that Brown is an excellent case-study of the neglected Catholic writer in twentieth-century Scotland, and that there is much work to be done in appraising the Catholic imaginations of many post-Reformation Scottish Catholic writers.

This Creative Writing thesis comprises two parts. Part one consists of two essays on questions that arose, and which I wished to explore, in relation to my poetry writing, and it concludes with a selection of my poems entitled Pillow Lava. The first essay considers reflections on the use of conventional form in critical writings and poetry of Thom Gunn and Michael Donaghy; the second explores the relationship between perception and the use of metaphor in poems by Craig Raine and Elizabeth Bishop. Part two consists of two essays relating to my translation of poetry by the German writer Sarah Kirsch, and concludes with my translations of poems by her entitled Ice Roses: Selected Poems by Sarah Kirsch. In the first essay, I introduce the life and work of the poet; in the second, I discuss my literary translations of some of her early poems through comparison with non-literary translations by others interested in Kirsch’s writing for political rather than aesthetic reasons.

In Ordinary Time consists of two parts, a critical introduction and novel. Focused by my sister Heather Benning’s site-specific sculptural installations, the introductory essays perform a fine topography of place, specifically of the wilderness and watersheds of my natal home in central Saskatchewan, a landscape exhausted by the current reign of corporate agriculture. While each essay can be considered discretely, they are better read as a whole as themes, stories, and various thinkers are returned to in the manner of leitmotifs. With each return, understanding deepens and alters – this movement suggestive of the ongoing nature of my meditation on place, how it shapes who we are. To further trace my continued engagement with these themes, the introduction is interleaved with poems from my collection of new and selected, The Season’s Vagrant Light (Carcanet Press 2015). Similarly, In Ordinary Time constitutes an archive of the subtleties that generate a sense of place. Set mainly between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, the novel centres on eight-year-old Luke Abend and his mother, Magda, descendents of German-speaking, Catholic Russians, who immigrated to rural Saskatchewan to escape religious persecution. Their intertwined narratives, which give voice to the harsh exigencies of life on a subsistence farm, reveal that not only ancestral history and inherited faith determine identity, but also that intimacy with place shapes who we are. Refashioned from the remnants of the family farm, both In Ordinary Time and the introductory essays will stand in stark contrast with Saskatchewan’s corporatized prairie. These works will invite the reader in, even as she is expelled by the current un-livability of the milieux. By coupling the sensation of intimate dwelling with the contemporary reality of rural abandonment, these projects will make manifest the complex costs attendant to the dramatic shift in Saskatchewan’s farming terrain.

This thesis examines a selection of Lady Gregory’s original dramatic works. Between the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and the playwright’s death in 1932, Gregory’s plays accounted for the highest number of stage productions in comparison to her co-directors William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. As such, this thesis analyses examples ranging from her most well-known and successful pieces, including The Rising of the Moon and The Gaol Gate, to lesser known plays such as The Wrens, The White Cockade, Shanwalla and Dave. With a focus on the historical, bibliographical, and political contexts, the plays are analysed not only with regard to the printed texts, but also in the context of theatrical performances. In order to re-evaluate Gregory’s contribution to the Abbey, this thesis is divided into three chapters dealing with dominant themes throughout her career as a playwright: Empire, class, and religion.