This thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious or racial difference in the Victorian period. The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered, looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of femininity and English national identity. It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and modern national unity. Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women. Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity. Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation, drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery. Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England movement of the 1840s.

This study of hysteria is indebted to Freud, and it is equally indebted to certain authors who came before him: Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Florence Nightingale. As particular works of these authors show, the hysteric was a touchstone in cultural and scientific research due to her exemplification, in striking ways, of unconscious internal forces. The interconnectedness of social and psychological issues in the work of Balzac in the 1830s and George Eliot in the 1870s is highlighted, with attention to the degree that all the authors treated inflect Freud's exploration of hysteria in the century's final decades. By moving between European cultural traditions and languages, both in French and in translation, I focus on the overlap between literature and psychology whenever the representation of interpersonal and sexual matters is foregrounded. I intend my use of psychoanalysis to complement a textual analysis in order to emphasize notions like character, choice, fate, and destiny. Within the textual analysis I make conceptual, social, and psychological links to animate that most topical and implicitly hysterical nineteenth-century question: the Woman Question. I assume that the extent to which hysteria can be understood is the extent to which it can be communicated and read, transcribed from without, in the narrative form which is its bent. Further that the hysteric cannot give expression to desires without the involvement of an intermediary and the provocations of plot. The hysterical question 'Who am I to become? ' (man or woman, father or mother, lover or sister) is formulated differently by each of the authors on whose works I draw, being modulated by aesthetic as well as intellectual shifts within the nineteenth century. In the earliest novel I treat, Balzac's Eugénie Grandet (1833), a brief blossoming and slow withering of Eugénie's desire for Charles indicates what happens when an implicitly forbidden relation, in this case fraternal love, suffers the blight of its betrayal. Once Charles, initiator and guide of Eugénie's desires, absents himself, Eugénie's love is transformed into a defence against erotic incursions such that youthful love results in resigned melancholy. Charlotte Brontë's protagonist and hysterically unreliable narrator in Villette (1853) complains of that curse, an over-heated imagination'; a creative malady which results in hallucination, resistance, denial, and evasion, all features of a scenario where accession to desire prompts an elaborate narrative that finally quells the desire which began it. Tolstoy's early pastoral works attest to the way hysteria, index to a suppressed relation to a primordial loved one, can spill over into consciousness and thence into literature. In his wily Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852-55) and nostalgic Family Happiness (1859) Tolstoy shows how deceptive imaginative powers can be when in thrall to hysterical impulses that fuel it, such that a promising image in fantasy is rendered not just fleeting but illusory. Gwendolen Harleth, a perpetual object of interpretation to Deronda, narrator, and subsequent critics alike, figures the still centre of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876). The dynamic lure of Eliot's heroine soon dissipates alongside characters who bind themselves to symbolic values - to music, charity, and Judaism, and who thereby avoid the pull of hysterical attachments. Florence Nightingale's Cassandra (1860) prompts many more questions than it resolves, yet its significance is multiple, written by a woman who became a nineteenth-century hysteric par excellence her impassioned cry against those conditions - psychic, physiological, moral, and social - which circumscribed feminine potential remains a powerful testament to the possibilities and limits of literary discourse. For all these authors, and for Freud after them, the hysteric was together muse and sacrifice, unsung heroine and dejected sufferer, whose plaint, however encoded, was also a sign of deliverance. 'Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental changes in the person to whom they are addressed' (SE 7, p. 292). Although these remarks by Freud date from 1890, its premise is shared by each author I evoke, bearing on a dynamism at the core of human relations. To empathize with the hysterical dilemma was not however to identify with it. rather it was to articulate it as a scenario in order to posit one's distance from it. It was this psychological feat, of identifying in order not to identify with the hysteric, which authors and scientists of the nineteenth century collaboratively brought off, thus cutting across divisions of culture and discipline. Above all, it was the ephemeral and fluid aspects of hysteria which provided ongoing stimulus to its representation, a stimulus which, in revised form, continues its pressure up to the present day.

Victorian medical men, writers, relatives of the dying and consumptive sufferers themselves seized on the narrative potential of representations of the disease in a variety of ways. I argue that both medical and lay writers subscribed to a common set of beliefs about the disease and that medical knowledge, moreover, shared a common narrative way of knowing and understanding it. I analyse aspects of general clinical expository texts, including accompanying illustrations, showing how a narrative knowledge of death and the tubercular body was elaborated. Furthermore, I show how documents used in the compilation of medical statistics on the cause of death were fundamentally narrative through their reliance on case narratives. It is demonstrated that Dickens uses a seldom noticed consumptive death and decline to offset his heroine's development in Bleak House, in ways similar to those developed in Jane Eyre. Similarly, it is shown that Mrs Gaskell's use of a consumptive alcoholic 'fallen woman' unsettles her account of her heroine in Mary Barton. George Eliot's 'Janet's Repentance' is analysed, showing how the psychological struggle between an orientation towards life or death is played out across both alcoholism and consumption. I also examine how consumption presents a narrative opportunity whereby plots involving setbacks in love are resolved through women's consumptive deaths in popular fiction by Rhoda Broughton,Ladv Georgiana Fullerton and others. Through an examination of the Journal of Emily Shore and accounts of other actual deaths, I illustrate how experiences and accounts of consumptive deaths were structured and rendered intelligible through reliance on beliefs encountered in both fiction and medicine. In conclusion, the thesis alerts readers to the presence of signifiers of consumption in Victorian texts, showing how various narrative strategies are integral to any understanding of representations of its dying victims

This thesis examines how Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison and Rebecca West appropriated the political ideas of the interwar period into their fiction and sought to transform abstract ideals into values with which to judge and improve social life. For all four writers, this pursuit takes the form of showing the complex relations between theory and practice as experienced by particular individuals. My premise here is the idea that political ideals are based upon the moral principles used by persons to guide their conduct in the pursuit of individual and collective happiness. Chapter One discusses the socialist concepts of loyalty, equality and fraternity as the values upon which the good society should be constructed and the self-appointed role of writers as public intellectuals whose task was to counteract political apathy and encourage the practice of active citizenship. Chapter Two examines Holtby's Eutychus or the Future of the Pulpit, Jameson's No Time Like the Present and Rebecca West's "The Strange Necessity" to demonstrate how literature was intended as a tool in the defence against the atomisation effected by the impact of modern life on culture, and a bulwark against the concomitant subjectivism which resulted from the extensive retreat into private life. Chapters Three and Four examine the practice of politics itself, with particular emphasis on the social bonds proposed to replace the instrumentality of interpersonal relationships in capitalist societies. The texts examined are Mitchison's We Have Been Warned, Holtby's South Riding, Jameson's In the Second Year and Mirror in Darkness, as well as West's Harriet Hume. Chapter Five focuses on Jameson's That Was Yesterday and West's The Thinking Reed and discusses the difficulties faced by women unable to negotiate the boundaries between the domestic and the public sphere of sociability as a result of the irreconciliability of self-determination and social demands.

This dissertation explores the social and literary worlds of horticulturists who lived, worked, and wrote in early-eighteenth-century London. The period witnessed not only a growing market for printed books and pamphlets about gardening, but also the emergence of the nurseryman as a distinct commercial and cultural identity. In many cases, trading nurserymen also published horticultural writing, their texts exploiting the publicity of representation both in order to persuade readers of the quality and reliability of their goods and services, and to evidence a wide range of intellectual interests and social aspirations. At the same time, increasing numbers of more gentlemanly authors had recourse to nursery and physic (or botanical) gardens and their curators as authoritative sources for their own manuals of horticulture and treatises of natural philosophy. Part one addresses the publications produced by nursery-gardeners and seedsmen during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Through close-readings of texts by George London and Henry Wise, Thomas Fairchild, and John Cowell, chapters one and two examine how such men sought to represent themselves as polite and precise practitioners of gardening successful in their businesses, sociable in their dispositions, and curious in their approaches to the natural world. Chapter three embellishes these themes by describing the genealogy and formation of the Society of Gardeners, a voluntary association of horticultural tradesmen. Part two (chapters four and five) locates these broad arguments more specifically, by presenting a biographical account of Richard Bradley, the most important and prolific horticultural writer of the 1710s and 1720s. Combining published and manuscript resources these chapters interrogate pivotal moments in Bradley's career, demonstrating how its undulating trajectory was shaped by the opportunities and limitations afforded within the spaces of physic gardens (both real and projected), and ultimately turned on his capacity for manipulating contemporary practices and conventions of curiosity and sociability.

Joyce's treatment of family life and relationships reveals both a continuing concern with many of the same themes and a distinctive development from Dubliners to Ulysses. Throughout the works he is concerned with such matters as the nature of blood links, the tension between the needs of the individual and the needs of the family, and the quality of human affection, filial, parental, and sexual. While the early works, Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, present the family as a social institution of some importance, Ulysses shows it to be associated with universal principles of prime importance. Moreover, while the first three works present a largely unfavourable and somewhat restricted view of family life, Exiles and Ulysses develop extensively both the fundamental value of family relationships and the complexities of emotion and motive inherent in them. The early concern with the limitations of family life corresponds to similar concerns in contemporary writers whom Joyce admired, Joyce's declared intentions in writing his own works, and his somewhat unhappy experiences with his own family. The shift to a more favourable and more complex view of family life in the later works corresponds to his evident maturation and to his increased recognition of the value of his own family life. Thus Joyce's treatment of family life and relationships is central to his development as man and artist. While many critics have noted that the family is indeed important in Joyce's works, none has examined the subject systematically or treated many of the matters considered in this thesis.

Eating is a fundamental activity. What people eat, how and with whom, what they feel about food, what they do or do not want to eat and why - even who they eat - are of crucial significance in any reading of human behaviour. In this thesis, I consider the diverse and complex uses of food and eating in fiction since 1950, especially that written by women. I argue both that food and eating carry much of the meaning of a novel or story and that the acts of cooking, feeding and eating depicted are inseparable from issues of power and control: individually, interpersonally, culturally, politically. My discussion centres on the writing of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Michele Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, sociology, anthropology, Foucault, Bakhtin and others, the thesis aims to construct an interdisciplinary perspective which both resists reductive interpretations and emphasises the centrality, complexity and diversity of food and eating in literature in our culture. I begin with an examination of the ambiguities of maternal feeding and nurturing, moving on to explore the links between appetite, eating and sexuality. I explore cannibalism and vampirism as manifestations of oppression, but also as indicating insatiable emptiness and transgressive appetite. The body itself is crucial, and my argument considers the paradox of not eating as control/enslavement, also tracing self-starvation as a positive route towards wholeness and connection. The last part of my argument focuses on social eating, examining conventions, rituals and food itself in connection with power relations, and finally considers how we might truly speak of food and eating in the context of society as a whole.

This dissertation is an attempt to describe the characteristics of Thomas Heywood's dramatic style. The study is divided into three parts. The first deals with the playwright's theatrical career and discusses how his practical experience as actor and sharer might have affected his technique as a dramatic writer. The second part defines the scope of the investigation and contains the bulk of the analysis of Heywood's plays. My approach to the mechanics of playwriting is both practical and theoretical. I have attempted to come to an understanding of the technicalities of Heywood's craftsmanship by studying the changes he made in Sir Thomas Moore and in the sources he used for his plays. At the same time, I have tried to comprehend the aesthetic framework within which he worked by referring to the critical ideas of the period and especially to opinions expressed by Heywood himself in An Apology for Actors and elsewhere. The third part of the thesis is an application of the findings of Part Two to the problems of authorship in Fortune by Land and Sea. The thesis shows Heywood's emphasis on essentially theatrical qualities such as visual effects and effects which can be obtained by controlling the relationship of the actor to the audience. It also illustrates his rejection of "Aristotelian" principles of dramatic construction in favour of "rules" derived from the native morality and romance traditions'., and shaped by contemporary theatrical conditions. It concludes that Heywood is essentially a didactic artist but one interested in technical experimentation and audience response.

Catharine Macaulay and Hannah More are conventionally represented as ideological opposites. Through an analysis which centres on their writings, this thesis critically examines that representation, and more broadly explores contemporary perceptions of the roles of women of the middling sort in the late eighteenth century. It argues that revolution, particularly the French Revolution, created a climate wherein the duties of women became the subject of increasing debate. The discussion challenges and builds upon recent work on women's writing and history, by examining how and why the role of women changed at this time. This work is concerned with contemporary representations of women, and concentrates on analysis of primary texts and archival material over a wide range of genres, including educational treatises, plays, popular tracts, political pamphlets, historical writing and newspapers - the latter proving a major resource. Following a critical introduction, the thesis falls into four chapters. Chapter one discusses the reputation, critical reception and public fame of Macaulay and More, thereby providing insights into contemporary sexual and social politics. Women were considered arbiters of morals and manners - believed to play a vital role in ensuring social stability - and the second chapter examines how the threat of revolution led to increasing anxiety and debate about the nature of female education. The third and fourth chapters discuss religion and politics respectively, and argue that beliefs about the interdependency of Church and State, together with the feminization of religion, legitimized women's involvement in politics and enlarged their sphere of influence. 3 The conclusion argues that the political and religious climate provided opportunities for women to reassess and redefine their roles; while often remaining within parameters defined by commonly held perceptions of femininity, they politicized the domestic, extended female agency, and elevated the status of women.

In this study I will be analysing the way in which the contraries that Beckett calls habit and spontaneity are used in the fictions he wrote in English. In his discursive writings Beckett comments on human experience generally and on the experience of artists particularly in terms of these contraries. I will show that they can be seen as applicable to the people who populate Beckett's early fictions, and thus as illuminating the meaning of those fictions.