The aim of this thesis is to explore, by examining her life and works, how Sarah Fielding (1710-68) established her identity as an author. The definition of her role involves her notions of the functions of writing and reading. Sarah Fielding attempts to invite readers to form a sense of ties by tacit understanding of her messages. As she believes that a work of literature is produced through collaboration between the writer and the reader, it is an important task in her view to show her attentiveness toward reading practice. In her consideration of reading, she has two distinct, even opposite views of her audience: on the one hand a familiar and limited circle of readers with shared moral and cultural values and on the other potential readers among the unknown mass of people. The dual targets direct her to devise various strategies. She tries to appeal to those who can endorse and appreciate her moral values as well as her learning. Her writings and letters testify that she is sensitive to the demands of the literary market, trying to lead the taste of readers by inventing new forms. The thesis opens with an overview of Sarah Fielding's career, followed by a consideration of her critical attention to the roles of reading. I go on to examine the narrative structures and strategies she deploys, with a particular emphasis on her use of the epistolary method. The following chapter deals with her attention to the reading of the moral message tangibly embodied in her educational writing. It is followed by an analysis of the activity which earned her a reputation as a learned woman. Various as the forms of her works are, they invariably reflect her attempt to balance herself between the two demands of inventiveness and familiarity.

This thesis analyses some of the changing features by which Indian Muslims were identified in British colonialist discourse between the outbreak of revolt in 1857 and the partition of Bengal in 1905. Most of the texts examined emanate out of the relatively circumscribed Anglo-Indian official community, and range from personal correspondence, to 'Mutiny' memoirs, travel guides, and socio-political essays. The argument takes as its starting point David Washbrook's description of the selfconstitution of the Raj as a centralised, secular and neutral state arbitrating the claims of competing ascriptive racial and ethnic communities. Drawing on recent Lacanian analyses of the formation and maintenance of ideologies, as well as on the sociological schema of Zygmant Bauman, the thesis argues that in the post-1857 period the preservation of this official identity became dangerously reliant on a discourse of power centred on representations of Indian Muslims. Chapter One reads the stereotype of the Indian Muslim in 1905 for its most salient features - debased foreign origins, religious incontinence, isolation within Indian society, and secret ambitions towards temporal power. It then traces them back to their first marked appearance in colonial discourse in 1857. Chapter Two begins with a reassessment of the historiography with regard to Muslim 'conspiracy' during the revolt, as well as a reconsideration of official praxis towards Indian Muslims in the half-century before its outbreak. Proceeding to a detailed analysis of' Mutiny' texts, it concludes that the unprecedented, widespread British misperception of 'conspiracy' stemmed in part from an irrational colonialist attempt to re-possess their own fractured secular ideology through tropes of Christian persecution. Chapter Three compares the highly ambivalent post-'Mutiny' representations of Indo-Muslim 'fanaticism' that resulted with a secularised late eighteenth-century discourse on Mughal figures of authority. It argues that the strikingly similar discourses of alienation and lack of self-command structuring both forms of representation derived from crises in the colonialist inability to command their own self-presentation as rulers within the Indian environment. In the later discourse, in particular, these instabilities issued in a disastrous process of representational stigmatisation and segregation.

Traversing geographical boundaries and cultural locations, and using a comparative, crosscultural framework, this thesis examines and critiques a selected range of women's writings from postcolonial Africa and Asia. It foregrounds the works of Assia Djebar, Mariama Ba, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nayantara Sahgal and Attia Hosain and outlines the processes through which women writers decentre imperialist, patriarchal underpinnings of the grand recit, defy conventions of autobiographical practice, make sense of a feminized past and revision a different collective personal history that has emancipatory potential for women and other oppressed groups. Referring to Eurocentric "male-stream" histories that have systematically thrust women to the margins, the study illustrates through a variety of literary texts and genres the complex ways in which past histories have obliterated women's presence and voiceconsciousness. While appraising diverse textual strategies of narratives, it discusses the "fictional" nature of historical work and the underlying ideologies framing supposedly "truthful" archival records; the ambivalent role of the historian; the gaps and fissures in historical memory; and the significance of history as a palimpsest. By excavating subsumed histories and "spectres" of the past, the study assesses the way specific texts reconstruct totalizing masculinist chronicles and counterpoise them with alternative feminine inscriptions that are multi-layered and polyphonic, and sometimes also fragmented, "silent" and inconclusive. Additionally, the thesis demonstrates how the process of overwriting the palimpsest has situated women in pivotal positions to articulate issues relevant to a dialogue between gender and nation/atism. The strategic role women have undertaken in decolonization processes worldwide, the ambivalent attitude of male nationalists to women's concerns after independence, and the multiple dilemmas confronting women in a globalized neoimperial world scenario are central to this discussion. Here, the thesis also probes the implications of veiling for Muslim women of contemporary times, sex-segregation based on an antiquated ideology of purdah, women's (limited) access to public space, and the question of agency and women's voice-consciousness. The study highlights current global conditions (such as modern migrations and economic transnationalism) and multiple categories of race, class, gender and ethnicity that intersect in complex ways to represent the Otherized identities of women.

For a hundred years, between Marlowe's. translation of Ovid's Amores in the 1580s and Rochester's death in 1680, a current of erotic feeling flows through English amatory verse which has as its source the Ovidian Art of Love. This Art sees sexuality as an autonomous activity and it elaborates amatory techniques and scenarios, described individually as 'topics', to enhance the mutual pleasure of both parties. Such a view of sexual relations challenges the prevailing amatory codes of courtly love and Christian monogamy and not infrequently clashes with them. This study traces the impact of the Art of Love upon all the principal non-dramatic writers of the period with the exception of Shakespeare, The Elizabethan appetite for the sensuous and suggestive is shown to develop into the more calculated sensualism of the Caroline court poets which in turn evolves into a deliberate cultivation of predatory appetite at the Restoration. With Rochester's death in 1680 begins a period of erotic decline,, A concluding chapter charts the eighteenth-century transformation of the Ovidian tradition into sentimentalism, raillery and pornography.

James Miller was born the son of a Dorset rector in 1704. He was himself ordained, but acquired no benefice until just before his early death, probably because of a scathing portrayal of the Bishop of London in one of his verse satires. At Oxford he wrote a vivacious comedy of humours, set in the University. Its production in 1730 began his dramatic career, at a time when the number of London theatres had just doubled, and new dramatic forms were being invented. In 1731 his poem Harlequin-Horace, a witty inversion of the Ars Poetica, attacked pantomime and opera, but also painted a lively portrait of the entire theatrical world, in the tradition of the Dunciad. After collaborating in a translation of Moliere's works Miller wrote two plays based on this author. Of all his dramatic works these were the most successful with his contemporaries, and were followed by a modernisation of Much Ado, and a ballad-opera adapted from an afterpiece by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, and rendered highly topical. Miller made similar use of a recent French comedy showing a Red Indian's reactions to civilisation, a satiric "fable" by Walsh and Voltaire's Mahomet. A large quantity of original material was incorporated into most of these, and this is generally satirical in nature. The Indian is made to voice almost egalitarian sentiments. An afterpiece, "The Camp Visitants", satirised military inaction in the war, and was apparently banned. The manuscripts of the six plays produced after the Licensing Act bear the examiner's deletions, and illustrate the nature of the censorship at this time. Miller's greatest strength is probably his flexible, vigorously colloquial dialogue. His political satire is mostly contained in the poetry, which attacks Walpole's administration with increasing vehemence through the seventeen-thirties, until its fall. In 1740 two poems that used Pope in symbolic contrast to Walpole caused a sensation. In both poetry and plays Miller is also a social satirist, who lays unusually strong emphasis on false taste and the deterioration of culture.

This historically contextualised work investigates Virginia Woolf's often contested theory of the androgynous writing mind. The work draws on early twentieth century discourses prevalent within sexology and psychoanalysis as a means of investigating Woolf's work. This is offset against readings of recent theorizations of sex and gender which accentuate the limitations of the conceptual schema used by early twentieth century theorists. Since her writing life was framed by two world wars (between publication of The Voyage Out in 1915 and the posthumous publication of her last novel, Between the Acts in 1941) much of this work analyses modernist literature, particularly women's writing, in relation to ideologies that sought both to privilege and to denigrate war-time constructions of masculinity and male sexuality. I argue that androgyny was introduced as a metaphor for writing in A Room of One's Own as a way of controlling militant feminism and male sexuality. At the same time that it sought conservatively to suppress sexual politics in writing, it was itself an autoerotic figure, based upon mythological and psycho-sexual discourses that either transcended the political dynamics of the time, or relied upon rhetorical constructions then associated with the unconscious. As Woolf constantly negotiates between embracing and wishing to escape from the various implications of sexual difference, this work traces the relationship that Woolf establishes between patriarchal society, women's sexuality and pre-war and post-war constructions of gender. These constructions are always, for Woolf, intrinsically bound up in her writing praxis, which I trace through her unpublished, extant manuscripts. I argue that because Woolf never abandoned the trope that she had invented for symbolising writing and the subjectivity of the writer, her writing, as it engaged with the encroaching political dynamics of the 1930s became increasingly more arcane. Although she believed that art could somehow transcend the political debates during the 1930s, her reluctance to abandon the once auto-erotic figure that she had developed in the 1920s figured what she began to call "mental chastity. " Woolf's retort to politics was, finally, to eclipse history and go back to the beginning, to the primeval and pre-history. This dissertation engages with the mythical, psychoanalytic, cultural and sexual dynamics of Woolf's work and her context.

This thesis is an attempt to assess the creative potential of alchemy as a master trope in Coleridge's conception of authorship and imagination. It begins with a challenge to the idea that an autonomous author is at the centre of a literary work. This idea is crucial to the reception of literature and to the way in which concepts of "originality" and "authorship" are typically understood. Against this marking out of an author as a singular, autonomous, and uniquely privileged "self', I posit that, for Coleridge, authorship occurs in a transformative or alchemical interspace between the desire for self-expression and the necessarily other-determined nature of creativity. Offering an alternative trajectory for the author, Coleridge elaborates an imaginative strategy in which the dislocation of the selffrom itself is the truest path to self-expression, and the author must become other in order to become morefully himself. Demonstrating a unique link between plagiarism and creativity, this thesis suggests that alchemy, better than any other system, accounts for Coleridge's propensity for plagiarism and for an aesthetic of artifice. In an attempt to trace Coleridge's familiarity with Hermetic and alchemical discourses throughout his life, it has been necessary to review works as varied as those of Plato, Marsilio Ficino, Ralph Cudworth, Jacob Boehme, Herman Boerhaave, and F. W. J. Schelling. I then suggest how Coleridge appropriates alchemical terminology to his own aesthetic and imaginative ends. Unable to resolve the desire for aesthetic autonomy with the impossibility of asserting the self in one's own voice, the thesis posits that Coleridge "plays" in the hermeneutic interspace between selfhood and otherness, creativity and counterfeit, authority and artifice, in order to arrive at an entirely unique strategy of alchemical self-exposition. Arriving at authorial selfhood through the odyssey of alterity, Coleridge's "play"giarisms, in this view, do not violate the principles of originality, but redefine them. The thesis ends with a consideration of the necessarily negotiated fiction of all acts of imagination and authorship.

This doctoral thesis focusses upon the translation of patristic works into English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering the pragmatic usage of texts in humanist culture, this research project explores the mobilisation of vernacular versions of the Church Fathers in response to historical crises. Regarding Renaissance humanism as a gendered intellectual methodology,I have investigated the way in which these texts particularly aim to address the needs of men, offering them exemplars to 'cope' with their social circumstances. The first chapter involves the analysis of Thomas Drant's rendition of Gregory of Nazianzus' Epigrams (1568) as part of the struggles of the early Elizabethan era. I suggest that this verse translation may possibly have played a supportive role for Protestant clerics facing a loss of humanist confidence due to educational deficiencies and the conflict of learning with the Catholic Louvainist scholars. The second chapter examines John Healey's version of Augustine's City of God (1610) in the context of the colonisation of Virginia. I propose that the Augustinian text - and the included commentary by Vives - may have represented a 'handbook' for the predominantly male community of planters confronted by (among other problems) the severe difficulty of establishing a household and fathering the next generation. The third chapter looks at Tobie Matthew's translation of Augustine's Confessions (1620) as an aid for Catholic Englishmen in an age of religious persecution. I contend that this text advertises and advances a passive / feminine form of manhood - which had been initially propagated by late sixteenth-century recusant ideology - in order to offer succour to its socially debilitated male readers. By undertaking an examination of these previously neglected texts, this thesis has attempted to expand the understanding of Renaissance humanist translation, as well as to offer a unique insight into the history of gender.

The thesis explores the poetry (and some prose) of Plath, Sexton, Atwood and Rich in terms of the changing constructions of self-image predicated upon the female role between approx. 1950-1980.1 am particularly concerned with the question of how the discourses of femininity and feminism contribute to the scope of the images of the self which are presented. The period was chosen because it involved significant upheaval and change in terms of women's role and gender identity. The four poets' work spans this period of change and appears to some extent generally characteristic of its social, political and cultural contexts in America, Britain and Canada. (Other poets' work, for example Rukeyser, Lorde, Levertov, is included too. ) The poets were not chosen to illustrate a pre-feminist vs. feminist opposition since a major concern is to explore what I see to be the symbiotic relation between femininity and feminism (as also between orthodoxy and heresy). However the thesis is organised chronologically because periodisation is important for a consideration of the poetry's social setting. In wanting to connect the poetry with cultural and political circumstances as much as possible I have taken Edward Said's assertion of a text's position of 'being in the world', its potential as a cultural product to help reshape reality, and its value as a 'powerful weapon of both materialism and consciousness'. This is the starting point for the study which is circular and cumulative in shape, fundamentally thematic, though each chapter is a chronological exploration of the work of one specific poet, beginning with Plath and completing with Rich. A conclusion attempts to pull the strands of each together and consider the implications raised. The thesis has four general concerns which run through its particular focus on each poet. The first involves the relations between cultural practice and ideology; the second involves the ideology of gender (through exploration of femininity and feminism); the third involves authorial ideology (through the construction of self-image in relation to femininity and feminism) while the fourth involves these concerns in terms of the overall arena of women's struggle for meaning and selfdetermination in cultural practice. More specific elements of the study include collating and comparing self-images and attempting to make connections or chart changes where images such as witch, queen, handmaid, shamaness, goddess, earth mother, whore, madwoman, etc., re-occur. Usage of myth (particularly Persephone). the Gothic, 'and articulation of lesbian desire are also explored. The emergence of a female 'hero' self-image, in opposition to 'victim', seems to be a corollary of the impact , of feminism in Rich's poetry particularly, but this tendency can be traced back through Plath. I explore the celebration of nature and the power of essentialism in the construction of heroic female images, particularly in the figure of the mother flowing with milk at the centre of 'ecriture feminine'. The concluding chapter suggests that femininity did not constitute such a repressive constraint on self-image and writing practice for women as perhaps might be supposed; and that feminism, while opening up many empowering changes for women, has raised further disturbing and unresolved questions about identity, and even helped, in some of its aspects, to create a new 'orthodoxy' in which various aspects of experience cannot easily be articulated. My example is Rich's later work where it seems to admit itself limited by its own initially liberating strategies and looks further on towards new 'heresies.'

The thesis documents the censorship histories of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Richmal Crompton's William books under Franco, and analyses these censorship histories in terms of the changing character of the regime. Previously unconsulted primary sources are used, such as censors' reports and translation proofs held in the Archivo General de la Administración del Estado at Alcalá de Henares. The censors' reports demonstrate that children's literature and translated literature were treated as special cases by the regime, and that censorship was particularly harsh in both areas. These findings demonstrate the crucial importance of attitudes to childhood and foreignness in the Francoist ideological scheme. The censorship histories of Tom Sawyer and the William books reveal some surprising facts. The William books began to be persecuted by the censors in late 1942, precisely the moment when the regime was seeking a rapprochement with the Allied powers as the course of the War turned in the latter's favour. This prohibition cannot be understood without exploring the factors which differentiate children's literature from adult literature in the context of Francoism. The books' peculiarly English character also had a vital bearing on how they were censored. The history of Tom Sawyer in Spain demonstrates the effect of literary status on censorship practice. Early in the regime, the censors generally considered Tom Sawyer to be a work for adults. From the mid-1950s, however, children's literature was inscribed as a special category in censorship legislation, and the censors began to view editions of the work as specifically intended for children. Tom Sawyer thus encountered censorship problems in the later years of the regime, supposedly more liberal than the earlier period. Again, these problems would be inexplicable without examining the evolution of the publishing industry and Francoist attitudes to literature and the child. The thesis also provides a detailed analysis of the type of suppressions imposed on the books studied, under the following headings: religion; love, sexuality and gender; authority and politics, nation and race; crime, terror and violence.