This dissertation argues that by adapting the style and techniques of sentimental novels, poetry, and drama to persuasive writing a significant number of late-eighteenth century political writers were able to develop a distinct and recognisable rhetoric of sensibility. It develops this argument by examining eighteenth-century views on the use and purpose of rhetoric, and by looking at writing in one of the most wide-ranging debates of the lateeighteenth century, the debate over abolition of the slave trade. Chapter One looks at traditional ('neo-classical') rhetoric and contrasts this with some of the many varieties of the eighteenth-century 'new rhetoric'. Chapter Two looks at particular rhetorical strategies employed during the sentimental period and identifies the main tropes of the rhetoric of sensibility. Chapter Three examines the relationship between slavery and literary sentimentalism, looking at the way in which imaginative writers used sentimental rhetoric to advance the idea of anti-slavery. It also considers the extent to which abolitionist poems, plays, and novels themselves contributed to the development of a sentimental rhetoric. Chapter Four examines the use of sentimental rhetoric in nonfictional slavery-related tracts and pamphlets. It explores the ways in which the sentimental rhetorical strategies outlined in Chapter Two were adopted by both pro and anti-slavery writers of the 1780s. Chapter Five discusses how William Wilberforce, the main parliamentary advocate for abolition, used sentimental rhetoric in his early parliamentary speeches. The conclusion examines anti-slavery writing after the collapse of the first abolition campaign in 1792. In particular, it examines the use of sentimental rhetoric in responses to the revolutions in France and Haiti and suggests that after this date sentimental rhetoric, though never entirely disappearing, was progressively supplanted by other forms of rhetoric.

In 1930s Ireland, modernist writing developed at a conjuncture of national and international influences. The second generation of Irish modernism responded to national culture in the context of international debates about literary form. The purpose of this thesis is to present a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Irish and European literary discourse in the work of Thomas MacGreevy, Sean O'Faolain and Samuel Beckett: three writers who formulated Irish writing within a self-consciously international frame. Drawing on recent critical approaches to modern Irish writing and on contemporary theories of modernism, this thesis argues that Irish writing in the 1930s reflected many of the debates and tensions in international modernism. In the first decades of independence, attitudes to literary form, to cultural nationalism, and to the role of the writer in the public sphere were being reshaped. These attitudes formed the basis of alternative formulations of Irish modernism. The three writers considered here approached the relationship between Ireland and Europe from different perspectives, and figured the possibilities of international influence on national literary culture in diverse ways. Consideration of the national and international networks of influence underlying the aesthetic projects of MacGreevy, O'Faolain and Beckett illuminates their 1930s writing, and has broader implications for the understanding of Irish literary culture. The first chapter argues that MacGreevy's critical writing formulated a national version of conservative modernism. MacGreevy combined Catholic and republican attitudes with a high modernist approach to the role of art in mass democracy. The second chapter focuses on O'Faolain's realist aesthetic in relation to contemporary debates about modernism and realism. O'Faolain's attitude to national culture developed from a conflict between artistic integrity and social responsibility which reflected tensions in both national and international literary discourse. The third chapter contextualises Beckett's 1930s fiction in the avant gardist elements of Irish literary culture, and argues that his aesthetic developed as a specifically national manifestation of late modernism.

The question 'Where does she begin and I end, asked in Virginia Woolf's The Years, voices a modernist concern with the limits of self-identity and related questions of egoism and altruism. In this thesis I argue that this concern is informed by a pre-history of thinking about selfhood, psychic boundaries and the spiritual mainly ignored by readings of modernism which map the psyche via psychoanalysis, or Freud's 'discovery of the unconscious'. Our thinking about the self has become colonised by the literary doctrines of better known canonical figures of the modernist period, generating a way of thinking about the limits of the psyche which is both literally and metaphorically circumscribed. A reading of more eccentric discourses explicitly engaged in negotiating the boundaries of individuality can provide a history of the psychic underpinnings to the modernist conception of the self. The representation of marginal states of consciousness, or epiphanic moments, is crucial to the literature of modernism: interpretation of these altered states, or edges, can be refigured through readings of Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison: five women writing between 1880-1930 for whom pre-Freudian forms of dissolution and challenge to self-unity are palpably present in the form of telepathy, subliminal selves, oceanic consciousness and internal multiplicity. In addition to writing non-fictional texts which variously explore the psychological, philosophical, ethical, spiritual and occult implications of the modernist position, each of these women, excepting the classical scholar Jane Harrison, also wrote fiction. The aesthetic questions of modernism dovetail into the theoretical arguments of the writers in this thesis, inviting a different reading of its psychological sub-text and to suggest that where 'stream-of-consciousness' is stylistically indispensable, the 'oceanic', as counterpart, thematically haunts the modernist aesthetic

This project examines the conception and imaging of the city in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The thesis aims to chart the ways in which a spatialised reading of the metropolis most fully realised in ceremonial representations of the city informs representational strategies of the time. Chapter 1 looks at the transformations taking place during this period in the practice of land surveying, exploring the implications of the new techniques of geometrical survey for conceptions of civic space. Examining the parallels between the viewing of the estate and the reformation of the Rogationtide ceremonies of perambulating the bounds, the urban context for spatial description is analysed through a reading of John Stow's Survey of London. In Chapter 2 the resistance of the city to a strictly geometrical conception of space is traced through an analysis of early printed maps of the city and the texts of civic ceremonies. The shared interest of these cultural practices in the representation of civic space is interrogated to reveal an understanding of the city as comprising !oth built environment and social body which informs the deployment of the city as a subject of cartographic representation. The next chapter analyses the costume book in the context of a Europewide project of geographical description. The production of a clothed body capable of articulating spatial and hierarchical difference is examined in relation to the available ceremonial models for the negotiation of these intersecting axes of description and the tensions generated by this representational strategy The final chapter undertakes a reinvestigation of the Earl of Essex's rebellion, reading a wide range of materials to argue for the centrality of anxieties over the control of the civic sign to the understanding of this event.

This thesis discusses the poetry published by contemporary American poet Susan Howe over a period of almost two decades. The dissertation is chiefly concerned with articulating the relationship between poetic form, history, and authority in this body of' work. Howe's poetry dredges the past for the linguistic effects of patriarchy, colonialism and war. My reading of the work is an exploration of the ways in which a disjunctive poetics can address such historical trauma. The poems, rather than attempting to reinstate voices lifted from what Howe has called "the dark side of history", are a means of reflecting the resistance that the past offers to contemporary investigation. It is the effacement, and not the recovery, of history's victims, that is discernible in the contours of these highly opaque texts. Notions of authority are most often addressed in the poetry through the figure of paternal absence, which has a threefold function in the work, serving to represent social authority, an aporetic conception of divinity and an autobiographical narrative. Alongside the antiauthoritarian currents in the writing - critiques, for example, of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny or of scapegoating versions of femininity - my thesis stresses Howe's engagement with negative theology and with a strain of American Protestant enthusiasm that has its roots in 17th century New England. The dissertation explores the dissonance caused by the co-existence in the poetry of elements of political dissent and religious mysticism. Finally, I consider Howe's engagement with literary history and authors such as Shakespeare, Swift, Thoreau and Melville. The manner in which Howe deploys the words of others in her work, I argue, allows for a mixture of textual polyphony and a more conventional notion of authorial 'voice'.

This thesis examines the emergence of black urban subjectivity in South Africa during the 1950s, focussing on the ways in which popular American genres were utilised in the construction of black urban identities that served as a means of resistance to apartheid. At the centre of this process was Drum magazine: founded in South Africa in 1951 , it became the largest selling magazine on the African continent in 1956. Drum's success was due to the way in which it enabled the relocation of black identity from the "traditional" towards the "modern'. The 1940s gave rise to widespread migration of black South Africans from rural to urban areas and this newly urbanised community was seeking models of black urban identity. Yet the Nationalist government was attempting to curtail the emergence of a black urban proletariat, which posed a threat to white political supremacy. Through apartheid legislation black identity was constructed as essentially tribal and rural. As a means of resisting this, urbanised black South Africans turned to, and appropriated, readily available forms of American culture. Drum published Americanised images and stories: gangsters, black detectives, black comic heroes, and pulp romances. This popular material appeared alongside some of the finest investigative journalism ever published. While Drum magazine is widely acknowledged as having provided a platform for the emergence of black South African writing in English, its popular content has been dismissed by critics as apolitical escapism, imitation and capitulation to American culture. This thesis challenges the dismissal of the popular that has dominated analyses of Drum since the 1960s, arguing that such a position denies the agency of local writers and audiences. My analysis reveals that American forms were adopted in critically discerning ways and chosen for their ability to convey local meaning and create positions from which to resist apartheid

This thesis examines constructions of what we might call popular readerships in early print. Focusing mainly on the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it explores the ways in which a constituency of readers variously imagined as, for example, 'mean', 'common', or 'simple' are represented, instructed and discussed. As such, it is less an attempt to recover the reading habits of a particular social grouping, as rather an effort to trace contemporary attitudes towards that group‘s engagement with textual productions, and, more particularly, the anxieties that the perception of that engagement provoked. In doing so, I discuss the treatment of books and reading in an early printed conduct book, trace the attitudes of two particularly influential humanist writers, Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives to reading, concentrating on their engagement with Bible-reading and women‘s reading respectively, before examining the importance of real and imagined 'common' readers in the religious disputes surrounding the production of vernacular Scripture. Here, I focus on the polemical disputations between English reformists-in-exile, and their conservative opponents, through the analysis of texts by Thomas More, William Tyndale, and, particularly, William Roye and Jerome Barlowe.

This thesis resituates the war-writing of Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells in relation to official British propaganda produced during the First World War. Examining these authors' institutional connections with propaganda that was authorised by the British government locates some of their texts within a network of materials that were deployed to justify Britain's involvenlent in the war. The British government, via the War Propaganda Bureau, approached major literary figures to assist in its plan to compete vigorously with Germany to win American support. Positioning Ford's condemnation of Prussian culture within this institutional context reveals that his officially commissioned books functioned as a part of the larger yet-covert government project to influence American intellectual opinion. Although wary that Kipling's chauvinism might offend some readers, the British government reprinted and distributed his denunciations of the 'Hun'. Kipling was given access to censored letters from Indian soldiers in order to assist him in depicting the Imperial forces as united. The result, The Eyes of Asia (1918), was a set of fictional texts by Indian soldiers celebrating French and English civilisation in contrast to German barbarism. In addition to official propaganda, these authors produced pro-war stories, poems, and articles independent of direct government commission. Conan Doyle's formal call for men to volunteer to defend their country, and his public denunciations of German atrocities, were followed by his recruitment of Sherlock Holmes to repel a possible German invasion ("His Last Bow" (1917)). Adding to his support for the war in his journalism and war-time fiction, Wells was appointed the Head of Enemy Propaganda for the newly formed Ministry of Information. He resigned almost immediately following disagreements over government strategy. This project situates historically and examines critically these authors' differing roles in relation to British propaganda efforts during the First World War.

My concern in this thesis is to show that a reconstruction of the publishing history of the work of William Burroughs offers a new, critical perspective on his experiments with psychoactive substances and their connection to his developing practice. I begin with an exploration of the publication of The Yage Letters (1963) and Naked Lunch (1959), and reveal how the complexities of their publishing histories shaped their critical reception. I examine the legal defence of Naked Lunch as it developed from the Big Table Post Office hearing through to the 1965 Boston trial and demonstrate the degree to which censorship came to define the published text. The legal defence of Naked Lunch, as it was incorporated into the Grove publication, emphasised the issue of opiate addiction. The way in which Burroughs’ 1953 letters to Allen Ginsberg were reworked as The Yage Letters did much to conceal the significance of yagé for Burroughs’ later work. Together, these publishing histories have obscured the relationship between his use of psychoactive substances and his evolving aesthetic. At the same time many of Burroughs’ most experimental - and important - works appeared only in small, ephemeral magazines. His adoption of avant-garde strategies such as collaboration and collage and his dedication to multimedia experimentation with the non-chemical alteration of consciousness made conventional book publication problematic or unsuitable. These experiments in aesthetic production, I argue, are central to our understanding of Burroughs. His main published writings must be re-evaluated as one element in this collage of multimedia activities. 4 I argue that Burroughs’ experiences with yagé, mescaline and dimethyltryptamine exerted an influence on his shift to experimentalism in the early 1960s, which sought to replicate the experience of these altered states of consciousness. That this is so is evident from a study of two collections of correspondence - Burroughs’ letters to Ginsberg held at Columbia University Library and his letters to Brion Gysin in the William S. Burroughs Papers held at the New York Public Library. My reading of these letters forms an important component of my argument, working to reveal what the conventional ‘published’ Burroughs serves to conceal.

This thesis examines the fantastic tales of the marginalized writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget 1856-1935), focusing on such confections as Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890), Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Stories (1904), and For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (1927). It traces the influence of European Romantics such as Hoffmann and Heine on her writings and juxtaposes Lee's work with that of fin-de-siecle contemporaries such as Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Her stories often depend on the supernatural properties of art objects for their uncanny effect, and this study traces the contradiction between Lee's concern with form in her aesthetic treatises, and the 'formless' and metamorphic qualities of the 'ghostly' objects that come to fife in her works. The resultant conflict is explored in the context of D. W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory which suggests that a child's subjectivity is formed in a 'potential space', a space existing in a developmental 'limbo' in which the child plays with items or toys while negotiating its separation from the mother, and recognizing its individuality. According to Winnicott, in adulthood, this childhood process is re-experienced in the illusory realm of art and cultural objects. With this premise in mind, this thesis argues that, in Lee's tales, the supernatural functions as a 'potential space" in which Lee 'plays' with the art object or 'toy' in order to explore alternative subjectivities that allow the expression of her lesbian subjectivity. Using an interdisciplinary approach which combines literature with psychology, aesthetics, mythology, religion, and social history, this thesis demonstrates the contemporary validity of Lee's tales, and its importance for the study of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth-century fin de siecle.