The Victorian dinner party mirrors the era's middle- and upper-class societies. Against a backdrop of rapid change, the firmly structured ritual brought new opportunities for social advancement, especially for the nouveaux riches. A myriad of advice manuals responded to the newcomers' need to match financial prosperity with social achievement. However, a group of critics that lamented the ritual's de-humanization, excess, and pomposity opposed these writers, public and private, who celebrated the splendor and refinement of the dinner party. The reformers' antidote was simplicity, sincerity, and enjoyment. Critics and advocates continued this debate throughout the period 1830-1885. Writers of fiction joined in the debate as they created pivotal dinner party performances. By 1885, those who argued for simplicity had been routed by champions of more relaxed but still elaborately ritualized "formal feeds."

The personal history of individuals during the World War II and post-war period is looked at through the film texts "Deutschland, bleiche Mutter", "Europa, Europa", "Peppermint Frieden" and "The Ties That Bind". These film texts are considered for the way in which the filmmakers, in autobiographical accounts of their own lives or of the main characters, have explored and recreated history through individual memory. Memories of childhood in Nazi Germany are constructed from personal remembrance and experience to form a memory of the individual that is unaccounted for in the standard institutional history.

Hilde Spiel (1911-1990) had gained a respectable literary reputation when she emigrated to England in 1936. At that time she was working on her fourth novel. It reflected her own experiences, as did most of her prose. She later turned to journalism to earn a living. Following the war she frequently returned to Austria. But even after her "final return" in 1963, she maintained strong personal and professional ties to Britain. She could never resolve the resulting dilemma of divided loyalties which she expressed in her autobiography by asking, "Which World is my World?" In exile Spiel decided to switch languages, usually producing both a German and an English version of her works. Detailed comparisons show the difficulty of making the transition to a foreign tongue and the considerable obstacles involved in eventually reversing the process. These changes also entailed significant textual revisions. In her own distinctive way Spiel confronted many of the problems germane to a woman of her generation. Her life and work were shaped by conflicting influences--literature and journalism, family and profession, her husbands Peter de Mendelssohn and Hans Flesch-Brunningen, past and present, her attachment to England and her passionate devotion to Vienna. Ultimately, she could not reconcile her image of the city's "Golden Autumn" that had produced such a wealth of cultural achievement with her impressions of present day Austria where she found provincialism and malice prevailing. Spiel's critical intelligence and sense of ambiguity define her style as a writer whose elegant and expressive language is evident even in her smallest pieces. The quality of her novels, to be sure, is not always consistent and her opinions are often controversial, even contestable, but Hilde Spiel's voice continues to deserve our attention.

The crime of infanticide plagued England throughout the nineteenth century, but by the 1860s it seemed to experts and laymen alike that incidences of the crime had reached crisis proportions. The publicity that newspapers gave to the problem sparked public concern; such publicity brought the crime increasingly to the attention not only of middle-class readers but also of medical, penal, judicial, and government officials. To determine whether a crisis of infanticide actually occurred in Victorian England, it is necessary to examine several areas of Victorian history--gender roles and the legal, economic, and social inequities women faced. While a profile of murdering mothers can be drawn from secondary material, this examination of infanticide draws upon primary data from the criminal records of thirty women and two men charged, tried, and convicted of the crime between 1856 and 1878. Both primary and secondary research provides new insights into contemporary fears of the problem, illuminates those characteristics that many murdering mothers and fathers shared, illustrates public reaction to their crimes, trials, and sentences, and outlines the judicial process these women and men faced when they stood before the bar of Victorian justice.

Breach of promise of marriage suits originated in the ecclesiastical courts; the Hardwicke Marriage Act, however, invalidated betrothals and forced jilted lovers to use the common law courts for redress. This study is based on 875 breach of promise cases in England and Wales between 1750 and 1970, most of which occurred between 1850 and 1900. Lower-middle and upper-working class couples had a definite set of courtship rituals, based on their desire for respectability and their simultaneous lack of economic security. Though most couples wanted to find the companionate ideal, they also needed to have good homemakers (for men) and solid providers (for women). They indulged in middle-class sentimentality in their letters and poetry, yet their courting was less formal and unsupervised. This mixture of needs was also reflected in their motives for separating, a combination of ideological, structural and personal difficulties. There was a sustained argument over breach of promise in the later Victorian period, which showed the tensions between individualism and companionate marriage in its culture. The legal community was divided over the desirability of the suit; most judges supported it and most lawyers did not. It also divided the populace, since the lower classes were favorable, but the upper classes abhorred it. Women, too, were unable to agree, breach of promise protected them, but it also placed them in a special category that was inherently unequal. Ironically, the plaintiffs, by appealing to the patriarchal courts, proved to be strong feminists, since they refused to be passive in the face of victimization. This showed great determination, since most of the commentators on the action were hostile; breach of promise cases in fiction, in fact, were overwhelmingly negative, legitimizing the upper-class disdain for the suit and ignoring its usefulness for poorer women.

G. K. Chesterton (1874--1936), an English journalist and man-of-letters, gained an broad audience for his cultural criticism in the first decades of the twentieth century. This dissertation presents an explanation for Chesterton's widespread popularity based on a reading of contemporary reviews of Chesterton's work. It argues that one of the chief reasons for Chesterton's popularity was that he provided an understanding of English national identity at a time when this was problematic for the British public. His early literary criticism on Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, written in the context of the Anglo-Boer War and widespread anti-war agitation, questioned the Kiplingesque glorification of the British Empire and the racial identifications of Englishness. In attempting to create a spiritual or cultural rather than racial genealogy for Englishness, Chesterton got involved in debates over England's religious heritage, the Church of England's establishment, and the role of religion in state education, the nature of English liberalism, and the possibilities for a native English brand of socialism. These debates led him eventually to reformulate the Whig history of England---particularly in his epic poem of King Alfred, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), his propaganda during World War I, and his Short History of England (1918)---to tell a tale in which the persistence of Christian orthodoxy was the key to England's peculiar liberal cultural inheritance. After his death in 1936, Chesterton's conception of England as a nation with a past rooted in European Christendom contributed to rhetorical understandings of England's identity and role during World War II.

I draw upon theories of postcoloniality, narratology, and the new historicism to read turn-of-the-century British literary and cultural texts. I situate these texts in their particular moments of historical production in order to comment upon the elaborate fabrication of an "allegorical" narrative of nationhood, imperial identity and empire-building in fin-de-siecle Britain. As the British colonial theater at the turn-of-the-century is a vast one, my study for the most part concerns the allegorical legacies of fin de-siecle British metropolitan and imperial strategies of power and control in India. I argue that while the making of empire was more often than not bloody and violent, involving as it did military conquest and economic exploitation, the Janus-faced narrative of empire-building also required the enactment of idealistic "humanistic" schemes of cultural domination, such as ideas about the upliftment of "barbaric," "savage" people through conversion to Christianity and introduction to civil society. The rhetoric of social missioning served to putatively recode the violent, economistic narrative of colonialism as a redemptive allegory of empire. I explore both the intrinsically complicated nature of the allegorical and the myriad forms of imperial allegory: the national, the military, the sexual, and the domestic/familial. I bring to my understanding of the national allegory of Empire a postcolonial distrust of predetermined, symbolic narratives. Any attempt to understand imperial allegories has to take into account allegory's "other" nature---the persistent irony, endless deferral, permanent parabasis, that marks its utterances when it "speaks otherwise." By viewing the performance of turn-of-the-century British imperialism through an "allegorical" lens, and mining especially allegory's disruptive potential to "speak otherwise," I am able to pose anew questions about the status of the "other" in colonialist and nationalist discourses, the relation between narrative, history and historiography, and finally, and most crucially, the implications of political and geographical territorialization for an ethical, postcolonial aesthetics of (re)reading and (re)writing. This study will prove to be not so much a definitive view of allegory, but rather a highly selective, creative, and varied engagement with both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic, oppositional, and resistant allegories of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, sexuality, and domesticity in the fin-de-siecle.

At some time around the first half of the fifteenth century the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai commissioned the architect Leon Battista Alberti to design a shrine which could serve both as Rucellai's tomb and as a reflection of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In so doing Alberti created a work that could function not only as a family and religious shrine but could also refer to the history of the city of Florence. The Florentines at this time saw their city as the center of commerce, the arts, humanistic studies, and religion. All these activities converged in the idea of Florence as a "New Jerusalem."

Tennyson's 1859 Idylls of the King responds to and comments on a complex of mid-Victorian fears centered on female sexuality, adultery, and the rising assertiveness and power of women. Tennyson revises his medieval sources in order to make adultery the unifying element in all four early idylls. By making his characters severally revise the appearance of Guinevere's adultery, Tennyson illustrates England's growing difficulty in determining truth. Because Tennyson's poem is now usually read as idylls excerpted from the whole or as the completed work of twelve idylls, it is difficult to see the centrality of the Woman Question in the 1859 idylls each named for a woman: "Enid," "Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinevere." Critics often read the women as schematic versions of "true" or "false": Enid the true wife, Vivien the false harlot, Elaine the true and innocent virgin, Guinevere the falsely adulterous wife. Tennyson, however, undercuts each of these stereotypes, while at the same time illustrating the hazards of individualism. All four women defy traditional authority in ways not found in Tennyson's sources. Geraint believes that Enid, like Guinevere, is potentially adulterous. Enid is not, but she moves from being properly assertive to becoming dangerously controlling. Vivien is not the unprincipled harlot that Merlin names her, but she seizes powerful knowledge that had previously belonged only to males. Elaine, kept from marriage by Lancelot's adulterous love for Guinevere, is not the sweet medieval maiden who dies for lack of love. Instead, her sexual willfulness becomes monomania; she chooses death and controls her family. Guinevere's adultery is indeed contagious, but Tennyson shows clearly that, nonetheless, Guinevere has a far clearer-eyed view of reality, of life's "lights and shadows" than does her "blameless" husband. The kingdom falls not because of Guinevere's adultery, as Arthur believes, but because of many misguidedly selfish decisions, including those of Arthur himself. By the end of the 1859 Idylls, it is evident that Tennyson is investigating the transition in nineteenth-century England from traditional authority to individual choice, with all its "wealth and all the woe." Women's increasing assertiveness is central to that worrisome process.

<p> This thesis uses the diaries of Catherine Robertson McCartney (1838-1922) to define the distinctive characteristics of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland and America between 1856 and 1881. It gives a window into the history of the denomination during the mid-nineteenth century, using cultural, ethnographic, institutional, and gender analyses. The thesis explores the logocentric heritage of the tradition and shows how the denomination as a whole, and Catherine particularly, continued to define their identity in the Victorian and Evangelical milieu of the period.</p><p> Reformed Presbyterian institutional identity had begun to shift away from political dissent due partly to a continued interaction with the broader Evangelical tradition of the time. As a result, the historic logocentric forms of worship, developed largely during the Scottish Reformation, became key to Reformed Presbyterian identity. This logocentricsm and shared commitment with other Evangelicals to revivals, Scripture, evangelism, atonement, and conversion provided Catherine access into the broader religious culture of her time. Yet, the separateness that the dissenters had historically practiced, displayed in the testimonies, meant Catherine and other Reformed Presbyterians were indeed within the category of Evangelicalism, but could never be wholly a part of, nor formally identify as Evangelicals.</p>