This thesis examines acts of narrative appropriation, the telling of purportedly‘authentic’ life stories by those for whom the stories are not theirs to tell. This misuse or subversion of genre - the discipline of historical writing and the category of autobiography - becomes a means for cultural, social and political dissimulation, and the analysis focuses both on the act: the event, trespass, or ‘theft’ of another’s life story, and on the cultural meaning that this event reveals. These narrative acts are approached theoretically through discussions of what it means to be an author, a reader, and through the consideration of literary and social genre, category and form. In exploring identities at particular risk of appropriation, this thesis shows how fraudulent appropriated narratives affect our reading of the world, and in turn influence our perception of already marginalized social groups. My primary examples include prostitution ‘narratives’, Native North American ‘memoir,’ and fraudulent Holocaust survivor ‘testimony,’ with each text providing decoded evidence of ‘genre-bending’ exhibiting a social and political intent. These works seek to be read as authentic personal narratives, as autobiography, and that is how they have been presented to the reader. However, they are imposters – fictional tales desiring the elevated status of historical authenticity and willing to bend the rules and contracts of genre to achieve their end. Here the appearance of authenticity is achieved through the use of cultural and social ‘myth,’ or perceptions of cultural identity, and as such its fraudulent construction is first and foremost a social act, with a social and economic motivation. As this thesis concludes, these texts are most successful when their own political and social ideologies echo and confirm that of the readership; when their subjects, the fraudulent ‘I’ at the center of the text is also a performative elaboration of cultural belief.

This thesis explores ways in which the outsider questions rather than confirms dominant cultural values whilst avoiding the crudity of overt politicisation. I argue that the outsider's preference for an observer's stance is not so much an act which denies responsibility to the world of his day, but rather a means of reassessing its priorities. In Section One, I discuss Conrad's role as an outsider in the age of Empires. I demonstrate the ways in which Conrad employs narrators, frequently using strategies of irony which can be and have been read in very different ways. I argue that Conrad uses irony as a tool for condemnation rather than condonement of imperialist practice, if not its ideology. In Section Two, I discuss Lowry as an emigre from England (so contrasting him with Conrad, the immigrant from Europe), and examine his dissenting voice which opposes bourgeois prejudice against the working class, a totalising ideology like Fascism, and a Western rationalism which sees too rigid a distinction between sanity and madness. I demonstrate how Lowry as an outsider reacts to the age of twentieth century World Wars. In Section Three, I discuss Naipaul's role as an outsider in the age of decolonisation, when bogus liberals and false redeemers fail to rebuild the newly independent post-colonial states. As in Conrad's case, I show how a failure to read Naipaul's ironic tone of voice has given rise to radically divergent views as to what he is about. I also link Conrad and Naipaul through their cultural negotiation between the 'centre' and its peripheries. By looking at these three writers in chronological order and offering a comparative perspective on their work, I highlight the outsider's disturbing, yet illuminating role within a historical context. I also draw attention to creative tensions between artistic concerns and a serious political purpose. I assess the outsider as observer and man of conscience rather than as a` mere onlooker. I conclude that the outsider also fulfils a social obligation by promoting critical awareness on the reader's side by means of his defamiliarising perspective.

This thesis aims to show that Wagner's theories of Gesamtkunstwerk were a pre-occupation in Woolf's work throughout her career. The introduction explores Gesamtkunstwerk theory, tracing its development in theories concerning the combination of art forms, I go on to show how Woolf uses the Voyage Out to explore what the modern novel can learn from musical arts, while Jacob's Room adds painting to music as a significant field of interest for Woolf Mrs Dalloway adds to the complexity of combination, for I will demonstrate that in this novel a Nietzschean interpretation of Wagner's ideas found in The Birth of Tragedy is detectable, allowing Woolf to compare the motivation of more extreme avant-garde groups. The chapter on To the Lighthouse will consider Woolf's evaluation of her parents' cultural background and the influence of Roger Fry on her developing aesthetic theory of combination. I shall argue that understanding of these areas allows Woolf to begin to experiment with her own form of Gesamtkunstwerk. It is in The Waves that the connection with Wagner is most obvious. Here, I believe Woolf shifts the focus of attention from Wagnerian theories of Gesamtkunstwerk to the Modernists' development of such ideas, demonstrating her knowledge of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Looking closely at the 1915 Raid Scene in The Years, I intend to show that Woolf's thinking on the concept of combination is equally radical in this novel which is often considered to be more conventional. I will go on to suggest that Between the Acts, widely acknowledged to indicate a crisis in Woolf's confidence in Modernism, marks a turning point in her thinking about the possibilities of combining the arts to achieve Gesamtkunstwerk. I will argue that in this piece Woolf provides us with all the elements used to create unity in the previous works and yet they are never wholly united. Woolf, however, is not suggesting that Gesamtkunstwerk is an impossibility, she is rather indicating that the audience lacks the ability to provide the stage for such a piece to exist.

This thesis examines certain configurations of imperialism and their displacements in the novels of Joseph Conrad beginning from the premise that imperialism is rationalised through a dualistic model of self/"other" and functions as a hierarchy of domination/subordination. In chapters one and two it argues that both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim configure this model of imperialism as a split between Europe/not-Europe. The third and fourth chapters consider displacements of this model: onto a split within Europe and an act of "internal" imperialism in Under Western Eyes and onto unequal gender relations in the public and private spheres in Chance. Each chapter provides a reading of the selected novel in relation to one or more contemporary (or near contemporary) primary source and analyses these texts using various strands of cultural theory. Chapter one, on Heart of Darkness, investigates the historical background to British imperialism by focusing on the textual production of history in a variety of written forms which comprise the diary, travel writing, government report, fiction. It considers how versions of (imperial) history/knowledge are constructed through the writing up of experience. In chapter two, on Lord Jim, the hero figure is analysed as a product of the imperial ideology and the protagonist's failure is explored through the application of evolutionary theory. Chapters three and four, on Under Western Eyes and Chance, investigate displacements of the imperial model: the failure of an "enlightened" Western Europe to challenge Russian imperialism in Poland forms the basis for reading Under Western Eyes with Rousseau's writings and a nineteenth-century history of the French Revolution. Chance presents a further displacement of this model in its relocation of imperialist imperatives in the sexual/gender inequalities practised in the "mother" country.

Women were prominent in the Lollard movement in the fifteenth century, but it is only in the mid-seventeenth century that women begin to produce theological texts which contribute to the controversy over popular religious expression and women's part in religious culture. After 1640 women began to publish on a number of theological issues and in a wide range of genres: prose polemic, prophecy, autobiography and spiritual meditation. Subject to widespread criticism, they quickly had to fashion a rhetoric of justification with which to defend their intervention in print and pacify male critics. This thesis shows that they achieved this in two ways: by producing a literature which complied with the expectations of masculine theological culture and by manipulating these assumptions so as to create space for a female symbolic language of piety. They developed a literary self-consciousness which depends on the idea of subjectivity as a gendered experience and they often resisted their detractors by valorising denigrated forms of female subjectivity and pursuing theological conclusions irrespective of normative ideas of gender. Women did not engage in theological debate in isolation, however. They often intervened as committed members of religious sects and thus deserve to be read as representatives of corporate and communal theologies. In contrast to earlier studies which have sought to recover neglected women writers as early feminists, without reading their work historically, this thesis seeks to uncover the social and the theological rather than the authorial origin of much early modem women's writing and to measure its engagement with early modem debates on women and religious culture. It seeks to challenge the increasingly dominant view of early modem women writers which invests them with too modem an authorial presence, by reconstituting the seventeenth-century debates which gave rise to their work and by bringing modem French feminist perspectives to bear on a period largely untouched by theoretical approaches to literature. To this end it proceeds by way of several close readings of women who wrote as women and as Baptists, Independents, Levellers, Presbyterians and Quakers.

This thesis attempts to discover the links between concepts of identity and origins, and Canadian women's writing. The work of three English-speaking Canadian women writers, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, will be examined in order to discover the ways in which their writings problematize feminine subjecthood, and in doing so shed light on a specifically Canadian 'discourse' of identity. I posit thereby, that perceiving the absences and silences structuring their modes of representation is a (symbolic) means of perceiving Canada as a dualistic, fractured, and contradictory unity. This implies a dialogue between text and context: a reading of one through the other. The three writers in question draw on diverse, and often opposing, centres of cultural and personal consciousness. I shall attempt to demonstrate however, that the problematical concept of origins and its relation to location and to feminine self-hood defines all three. To do so I have chosen those texts, whether novel or short story, which to my mind best articulate the social, cultural and symbolic discourses informing the definition 'English-speaking Canadian Women's writing'. Other works not included would undoubtedly have proved of interest, but the type of 'close reading' which such themes required entailed an automatic limitation on the range of fiction under scrutiny

This dissertation argues that the political, philosophical, and aesthetic theories developed in The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage, provided a crucial foundation for modernist poetry. By situating the modernist aesthetics of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot in tenris of the complex scene of 19 10s and early 1920s London radicalism, this study develops historically local theoretical terms to read modernist poetry and also suggests the continued relevance of modernist political questions when viewed frorri this perspective. The first chapter analyzes Orage's early political and theosophical writings, demonstrating how these sources informed the journal's interconnected concerns with print culture, radical politics and literature. The second chapter analyzes Ezra Pound's entr6e into the NeIv Age scene in late 1911, situating the criticism and poetry of I Gather the Limbs of Osiris as an important ideological contribution to The New Age's Guild Socialism movement. The third chapter argues that Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound's Vorticist movement was organized as a radical mode of production along New Age lines and that Vorticism's aesthetic products are politically positioned against capitalist production. The fourth and fifth chapters trace The New Age's engagement with orthodox economic theory and Pound and Eliot's interest in radical economics, particularly as they connected to epistemology, money and representation, value, corporate organization, consumption and scarcity. In the final chapter, this analysis of Social Credit is used to arguet.h at the developmento f The Cawos and The WasteL aiid are fundamentally connected to the New Age's radical economic epistemology. As a whole, this dissertationa rguest hat the idiosyncratic political theory of T11eN ew Age shaped the production and consumption of crucial modernist poetic strategies.

This thesis is an investigation into the concern for History displayed in the Works of Thomas Carlyle. This is seen to be related to his criticism of contemporary society. Carlyle studied History for an insight into the problems of the nineteenth century, and History enriched his roles as artist, prophet and social critic. However, his view remained concentrated on his own age. This concern is seen to be founded on his conception of the nineteenth century as an age of transition, during which society was undergoing profound apocalyptic upheaval. The overarching theme of the new age and the apocalypse embraces both Carlyle's historical works and his social criticism. Carlyle's emergent vision of the modern age as one of change, disruption and disintegration is viewed in the light of his antipathy toward the secularizing, materialist trends of the age, as well as his portrayal of the successive periods of belief and apocalyptic change in History. The important scholarship already in existence on Carlyle's early intellectual and religious background is endorsed in this study. Setting out from the view that greater attention needs to be paid to Carlyle's intellectual and religious development after 1834, the study discusses the salient ingredients in Carlyle's important historical works, and the important bearing these had upon his social criticism. The research is based on Carlyle's Works; as well as on manuscripts and letters of Carlyle, published and unpublished.

This thesis argues that the representations of Venice found in the works of John Ruskin and Ezra Pound can only fully be understood in the light of historico-political contexts such as the Austrian occupation of Venice, the rise of revolutionary Nationalism and Fascist uses of Venetian history. In contrast to critical approaches that concentrate on the construction of Venice as aestheticised fantasy, this project draws on a range of archival materials to place these two modern literary visions of Venice within their respective historical ‘moments’. The first chapter examines a range of cultural representations of Venice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using examples from Ernest Hemingway, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann, it argues against the prevailing myth of the ‘Dream’ of Venice and proposes that literary and other representations of the city should be understood in relation to specific historical events and political anxieties. The second chapter focuses on Ruskin and demonstrates how his text The Stones of Venice can be seen as a counter to the nineteenth-century myth of the ‘dark legend’ of Venice as propagated by historians like Pierre Daru. The third chapter then demonstrates how Ruskin’s Venetian works can be situated within a spectrum of European Nationalist concerns, particularly examining how the 1848 Venice revolution and its aftermath creates an atmosphere of political tension in The Stones of Venice. The following two chapters on Ezra Pound place Pound’s Venetian engagement against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Italian Nationalism. Beginning by discussing the cultural uses of Venetian history under the Fascist regime, these chapters show how Pound’s engagement with the idea of a ‘renewed’ Venice proposed by Nationalist writers such as D’Annunzio, along with Pound’s own Fascist commitment, provide contexts for his visions of Venice in the Cantos. Thus the representations of the city in both writers are seen to be crucially connected to the political concerns of Nationalism and the Nationalistic use of Venetian history.

This thesis is an analysis of the cultural relationship between Britain and the Caribbean from the eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century. It is organised around the concept, considered both as an historical practice and a metaphor. Using a variety of literary sources such as diaries, historical documents, as well as poetry, drama and canonical literary texts by Lady Maria Nugent, Matthew Lewis, James Thomson, Daniel Defoe and William Beckford, the thesis develops the argument that British identity was consolidated through the rejection of an authentic metropolitan Carnival culture in favour of a constructed national profile, predicated on Protestantism and imperialism. This is contrasted with the way in which the Caribbean was framed within the parameters of Carnival and was described within a burgeoning discourse of monstrosity and fear. The thesis discusses the origins of this image of the Caribbean as a site of Carnival and moral transgression, examining how groups such as the sugar planter, pirates and slaves established the islands as corrupt, uncontrolled and antithetical to Britishness. It also highlights the centrality of the Caribbean, not only for imperial commerce, but significantly, establishes the way the Caribbean becomes a cultural repository of Carnival for Britain during the period under study. The discussion demonstrates how the Caribbean becomes a powerful symbol conflating Carnival excess and hedonism with fears regarding the fragility of Britishness as a constructed identity. It develops this by exploring the Caribbean subtext in Romantic and Gothic fictions, investigating how the symbol evolves in the period under focus from an implicit threat in canonical texts such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to a more explicit symbol of fear, as exemplified by Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte's text Jane Eyre.