Playing at Being: Style, Ethics, and W.B. Yeats, offers a reading of the canonical Irish poet by looking at how the tradition of European aesthetic and romantic philosophy informs both Yeats’s poetics, and the critical premises of those who have written on him. Although I employ the traditional literary method of close reading, I am also concerned to philosophically question the ground of literary value. My tutelary authorities for this endeavour are Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond critically evaluating Yeats, I aim to define the value of literary style through Yeats, and, in doing so, make connections between literature, knowledge and ethics. At the heart of my study is the argument that there is a fundamental relationship between literary accomplishment and the practice of political sovereignty expressed at the individual and national level. By showing how literature, especially poetry, engages and qualifies statements of cultural authority, my thesis ranges from the philosophical to the sociological.

This thesis explores representations of urban space in work published between 1962 and 2007 by British writers Doris Lessing, Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. I read these texts alongside a body of influential urban literature, with an emphasis on the spatial theory developed by postmodern scholar Fredric Jameson in the late 1980s. I argue that, despite claiming to provide a universally valid description of the contemporary urban experience, the spatial categories proposed by Jameson are inadequate for a reading of women's urban writing. My research turns to an alternative framework, which brings together insights from feminist and non-feminist cultural geography and psychoanalysis. My examination of urban texts by Lessing, Roberts and Maitland highlights a persistent interest in gender categories and their role in shaping the individual experience of the metropolis. In particular, I focus on women's struggle to articulate their identity against Enlightenment definitions of public and private spheres in post-1960 London. A second but equally important concern regards the potential of the city to enhance individuals' engagement with spirituality and to reinforce a sense of community that is rooted in a religious worldview. In view of the fact that questions of gender and spiritual identity are commonly overlooked by both Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern urban theory, my central argument is that women writers' accounts of urban experience undermine the Enlightenment gendering of space, while at the same time challenging the revision of the Enlightenment performed by postmodern scholars. In exploring the ways in which women writers' representation of the metropolis is informed by an engagement with gender and spirituality, my research bridges the gap between explorations of urban space and gender, on the one hand, and gender, community and spirituality, on the other, contributing to an enhanced reading of late-twentieth-century, and early-twenty-first-century, urban imaginaries.

This thesis investigates “English Hecubas” as they appear in the recurring stories my culture tells itself about legendary Troy. Analysing a necessarily select number of Hecubas, spanning from the twelfth to the twenty-first century, I uncover a history of intricate cultural negotiations as theatre, literature and pedagogy attempt to domesticate the grief-stricken Trojan queen and recruit the classical past into the service of an ever-changing English present. My interest lies in the performative potential of texts. I therefore consider the reception of English Hecubas as they are culturally activated, looking to textbooks and classrooms, play-texts and theatres, print material and their readerships, insisting that schoolmasters, pupils, actors, authors, spectators and readers remain visible as the creators of meaning. Adopting ‘Presentism’ (as developed by Terence Hawkes) as my theoretical approach, the thesis is structured achronologically. This configuration gestures toward a more synchronic reading of Hecuba, replicating twenty-first century encounters with ancient mythological characters, by starting with our present “situatedness” yet juggling accumulations of history gathered with each prior acculturation. Classical Hecubas (of Homer’s Iliad, Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Seneca’s Troas), entered England in the Renaissance via the imported texts and tenets of continental humanism. Pre-existing Hecubas of England’s oral tradition, medieval romance epics and indigenous Troynovant myths were forced into dialogue with their long-lost textual origins. This clash of Hecubas occurred within a crisis of mourning, resulting from the Reformation’s radical alteration of English funeral rites, which left maternal grief a culturally contentious site of anxiety. Thus, within its eight-hundred year span, the thesis repeatedly returns to the Renaissance to investigate the origins of the modern English Hecubas with which I begin. Hecuba’s grief can lead her to gouge out men’s eyeballs and murder their sons; tactics of accommodation and assimilation have been necessary to render this potentially violent ‘alien’ valuable within England’s cultural lexicon. By exposing the systemic marginalisation, mitigation, suppression and sublimation of Hecuba’s maternal grief and fury, this study hopes to recuperate the value of Hecuba’s essential mourning work.

Critics have long recognised the conflicting tendencies towards progress and conservatism in George Eliot, which are reflected in the behaviour of her characters. This study focuses on the oscillating pattern of desire in this behaviour. As the characters alternately fight with and succumb to their desires, these desires seem to be disproportionately intensified, often leading to tragic consequences. The thesis seeks to analyse this process in the light of G. W. F. Hegel's and Jacques Lacan's elaborations on the nature of desire, which provide the theoretical basis for the discussion of the fiction. While Lacan sees desire as seeking its own sustenance and intensification, ultimately converting itself into a desire for an unfulfilled desire, Hegel sees desire as a movement of self-consciousness towards a return to itself that is accomplished by desiring the desire of another self-consciousness, that is, recognition. The thesis will explore several variations on the logic of desire which divert it from its path towards recognition, and these can also be seen as various types of addiction: namely, the art of hunger, Protestantism, money-hoarding, Orphic desire, the vicious circle of writing, the gambling appetite and the dialectic of homecoming. By examining through close reading how these motifs are given vivid illustration in George Eliot's fiction, this thesis will demonstrate that the theme of intensified desire is a prominent feature that runs throughout her works and is of central importance in understanding the complex emotional lives and interactions of her characters. The myth of Orpheus's descent to the underworld, which depicts an intensification of a desire for a structurally unattainable love object that is the dead Eurydice, can be seen as a paradigm that is applicable to Eliot's early works. The ascetic figure of Maggie in The Mill on the Floss is then compared to the hunger artist in Franz Kafka's short story, through analysing the abundant food references in the novel. Her adolescent asceticism can be figuratively understood as a kind of anorexia and later develops into a kind of bulimia in her relationship with Stephen. Silas in Silas Marner, too, can be seen as a hunger artist in his addiction to work, until he is freed from his fixation through raising Eppie. In Middlemarch, there is a continuity between the earlier figure of Maggie and Dorothea, and also between Silas and Casaubon. Dorothea, who marries Casaubon out of her art of hunger, utilises her marital relationship to work out and overcome that same art of hunger, guided by Ladislaw as the advocate of spontaneous enjoyment. In the other unhappy marriage, Lydgate's relationship with Rosamond is examined in relation to his appetite for gambling, and that appetite is then seen to play a central part in Daniel Deronda where it is related to Gwendolen's mode of desire, which feeds off and intensifies the desires of others until it is stifled by Grandcourt. Deronda, on the other hand, finds a tentative solution to the impasses of desire in his commitment to the Jewish cause, which can be understood in relation to the text's references to the myth of Ulysses. The centrality of the problem of desire in Eliot's fiction is finally underlined by its reappearance in the work of one of her important successors in the exploration of the psyche, Henry James, whose The Portrait of a Lady can be seen to inherit its critique of desire from Daniel Deronda.

This thesis aims at showing how pedagogical concerns are manifest in the writing of Iris Murdoch and A. S. Byatt. Through the portrayal of teacher and learner characters they explore the working of authority in relationships marked by power, seduction, admiration and love. As Murdoch‟s and Byatt's learners share a tendency to choose a person or a work of literature as a guiding master, who is invested with excessive power, the proximity of teachers' and authors' concerns becomes apparent. Both authors analyse writer and reader characters alongside the pedagogical figures, and their own writing reacts to the concepts of authority as discussed within the novels. Murdoch rejects authority in principle with the consequence of becoming authoritarian in fact but also enchanting through the mystery she imposes on her readers. Byatt accepts authority and moves between an authoritative affirmation of her position and an opening up to the reader, which also leads to a sense of mystery. The conceptual tools used in this thesis are the figure of the fairy-tale enchanter as a teacher and writer model, as well as the figure of Socrates, and above all Jacques Rancière's concepts of the "explicating" and the "ignorant" master. While Rancière's two types need to have enchanting qualities in order to affect change, authority is determined by the needs of the learner, who may be satisfied with explanations and a transmission of knowledge, or who may have the self-confidence to do without firm guidance. Moreover, the timing of the experience is crucial, since what goes unnoticed at one moment may become obvious and clear later on. What exactly authority is, remains obscure to the end, since it is the result of a complex interplay between learners, teachers, lessons on the one hand and readers, authors, texts on the other hand.

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This thesis considers the crisis in the portrayal of national spaces and national identities, insecure in the multiplicity of their cultural roots and thus diasporic and hybrid, from 1922, a year marked for its importance in the disintegration of imperial Britain and in the positioning of Greece on the threshold of its European literary Modernist inheritance, until 1952, the year of Louis MacNeice’s observations of Greece in his poetry collection Ten Burnt Offerings. The boundaries of cultures, states, religious beliefs and genders are considered in the figures of T.S. Eliot’s Mr. Eugenides, C.P. Cavafy’s Myris, Kostes Palamas’s Phemius, W. B. Yeats’s Crazy Jane and Demetrios Capetanakis’s Greek Orlando and the Greek space is explored as John Lehmann’s Mediterranean home and Louis MacNeice’s Easter gathering. The opening chapter considers the bardic performance of Yeats and Palamas’s poetic alter-egos and their respective progress towards a fusion with the feminine and a battle with the modern. Smyrna, an area of contention for British imperial and Greek irredentist claims raising questions about the stability of national states and national identities, is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 in the way it informed the construction of identities in Eliot’s The Waste Land and Cavafy’s poetry, respectively. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the literary encounter between Capetanakis and Lehmann, a pair that advanced the dissemination of modern Greek poetry in Britain. The final chapter of the thesis examines MacNeice’s poetry and radio features inspired by Greece in an effort to explore how the imagining of Greece has developed both visually and metaphorically in the post-war years.

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and a reflective, critical essay. The creative work is a novel, entitled Kilea after the central character, who is a young girl brought to a Scottish island by a man she calls Father. The girl is haunted by visions of spirits, called ‘schie’, and by their music, by her feelings of being an outsider, and by a metaphysical confusion and anxiety that grows as she develops. Kilea was originally modelled on Heliodorus’ the Aethiopika, a work of late Hellenistic fiction. However, while writing the chapters which make up the second part of this thesis, I came to realise that the plot of the older novel was not sympathetic with the aims and style I wished to bring to my work, and that my narrative could not follow a journey as the other had; it required to be located in one place only. A singular setting required an increase in detail, an awareness of landscape and how it can be salted with levels of meaning that enliven the language and support characterisation. The introduction and first chapter of the critical essay lay out the struggle to come to grips with the Aethiopika, and the usefulness of Virginia Woolf’s theories of cultural translation in ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, an essay in her The Common Reader, as well as how and why Woolf enacted the transmutation of setting in To the Lighthouse from a nostalgia-tainted Cornwall to a neutral, but unfamiliar place, Skye. Chapter Two addresses James Joyce’s Ulysses in a similar vein, though the style of this chapter is impersonal, lacking the ‘I’ of the rest of the critical essay. This decision was made to reflect the analytical, less personally reflective approach towards Joyce’s cultural reshift of the Odyssey from the Mediterranean to a time-specific, linguistically energised Dublin. The last chapter examines Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea through the lens of feminism, with an awareness of Rhys’s antagonistic views of ‘Women’s Lib’. It notes how fate and foreknowledge of fate imbue the characters of the novel with a heaviness and fatality regardless of their gender. This is compared with Kilea, in which I wished to leave open a sense of possibility, in terms of the turns of plot, the physical qualities of the landscape and the presence, or imagined presence of the dead.

No description available.

The aim of this work is to investigate the importance of Italy, as a real and imaginary country, in British Romanticism, particularly in women's writings. Since the heyday of the Grand Tour, Italy has been approached as an alien and distant country, but also as a liberating and stimulating reality. Italy as an 'other country' constitutes an important element in the delineation of British Romanticism. The opposition between North and South, which was developed and consolidated by Romantic authors, constitutes the theoretical frame for this work. As part of southern Europe, Italy stands in opposition to Northern societies. North and South, however, are not simply in opposition; they merge and interconnect in the literary production of the time. Italy and Great Britain exemplify the dialogical connection between apparently irreconcilable opposites. In women's writings, Italy is exploited as an alternative imaginary setting onto which they can project their anxieties, their artistic ambitions and their dreams of literary success. The role of Italy in women's writings is important to demonstrate their participation in contemporary social, national and political issues. The work focuses first on travel reports and the real encounter with Italy. Then it analyses the imaginary figurations of Italy in Gothic literature and in poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of Italy as a morally liberating and artistically stimulating country is consolidated in the works of Stael and Byron. The representation of Italy as an ideal country for women artists makes their support of the Italian fight for independence particularly important. Since Italy represents a feminised and politically enslaved country, women associate its effort to gain freedom with their own struggle for political and social emancipation.