During the eleven years of Margaret Thatcher's administrations in Britain, playwright Caryl Churchill had perhaps the most productive period in her career to date and achieved an unprecedented degree of success. This phenomenon is unusual since Churchill is a self-described socialist-feminist and these were times of increasing conservatism in the theatre, as in society as a whole. This dissertation seeks to explain this apparent contradiction. It begins with a survey of changes in British society during the Thatcher years, including the effects which Thatcher's policies and attitudes had on women, feminists, the left, and artists (especially theatre workers). Next, it examines Churchill's collaborative writing strategies against the context formed by an ideology of radical individualism. Three specific plays from the Thatcher Years are then considered in terms of the society's influences on them and their potential impact on contemporary culture. Top Girls (1982) is discussed as an attempt to reclaim the term "feminism" from a new breed of conservative business women and return it to the materialist-feminists who were once the core of the British women's movement. Fen (1983) is examined in terms of regional policy, class and gender issues, and the reconfiguration of "family" in Britain in the 1980s. Serious Money (1987) was Churchill's greatest commercial success, and the reasons for its popularity form the basis for the discussion of this play. In each case, considerable attention is given to issues of critical and public reception.

My study was prompted by a hostile reaction to S. Foster Damon' s claim that Blake read the Bhagavad-Gita. I am intimately familiar with that work, intellectually, spiritually, in translation, and in the original Sanskrit. This reaction led me to question the validity of recent Blake criticism. My research concentrated on a verse letter to John Flaxman in which Blake names his most inspirational sources: Milton, Shakespeare, Isaiah, Ezra, Boehme, and Paracelsus. I draw heavily on historians, such as E. P. Thompson, Nigel Smith, and A. L. Morton, and recent critics, such as Robin Aubrey, John Mee, Mark Trevor Smith, and of course David Erdman, to refute what I consider wrong-headed assumptions in Blake criticism. The net effect of my preliminary study validates to a large extent Northrop Frye's, and to a lesser extent, Harold Bloom's, reading of Blake. Still, whether the above critics or others seem to be right or wrong, none takes into account the concept that Blake is not an intellectual, but a preacher. He is proselytizing. Understanding his theological stance is so fundamental to understanding Blake that I remain mystified that scholars have insisted on an aesthetic motive for his work. Aesthetics may be the means, but the end is theology. My study shows how Blake's theology is visionary, sophisticated and cogent and, perhaps more significantly, widely shared, especially among the working classes.

This dissertation describes and examines the fictional representations of friendship between middle-class boys at all-male public boarding schools during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries in England. In the texts under consideration, romantic friendships embody educational, social, and spiritual ideals; readings of sermons, letters, memoirs, and book illustrations contextualize these ideals and suggest that they mirror a broader ideological framework in the culture. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and F. W. Farrar's Eric (1858), which consolidate the tropes of the schoolboy narrative, self-consciously reflect the philosophical and educational standards of Thomas Arnold, Headmaster at Rugby School from 1828 to 1842. For Arnold, highly emotional friendships, based on Christian values, helped to develop piety and to reflect, in earthly terms, the spiritual brotherhood that all "men" share with God. Friendships in Charles Dickens's fiction also conform to many of these narrative and ideological constructs. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) represents the comforts of compassionate friendship, while David Copperfield (1849-50) illustrates the torturous complexity of the schoolboy romance. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), Dickens alludes parenthetically to Mortimer and Eugene's school days in order to evoke the history and depth of their adult friendship. Edwardian fiction presents a revised discourse on schoolboy friendship, with expressions of affection breaking through a strenuous emotional reserve. In E. M. Forster's A Room With a View (1908), the schoolboy Freddy Honeychurch invites George Emerson to share an uninhibited bond (the "Sacred Lake" bathing scene) that both contrasts with the atomized heterosexual relations in the novel and presages their eventual brotherhood (when George marries Freddy's sister Lucy). The animals in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) inhabit a homosocial society modelled on Grahame's fantasy of the public school. E. F. Benson's David Blaize (1916) dignifies friendship between boys in spite of the political, intellectual, and aesthetic breakdown of male identity and relations that resulted from the oppressive traumas over masculinity indicative of the fin-de-siecle.

The conceptions of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance were complex and contradictory, and the four surviving plays about Caesar from the period--the anonymous Caesar's Revenge (c. 1595), Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599), George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey (c. 1604), and Sir William Alexander's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1607)--negotiate these conceptions in distinct ways. The views of Caesar current in the Renaissance were diverse in both their sources and content. The medieval tradition glorified Caesar, but classical sources were mixed in their assessments. Caesar was lauded for his virtues and the authoritarian stability he brought to Rome, but was also condemned for his vices and his subversion of the Republic. In the Renaissance, therefore, Caesar was an ambiguous figure who was regarded as both an ambitious usurper and as a legitimate monarch. Renaissance drama imposed didactic lessons on historical subject matter, and, thus, Caesar's Revenge illustrates how ambition and revenge cause civil discord. Caesar and Pompey espouses Stoic independence, and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar both condemns ambition and counsels Stoic transcendence of the vagaries of Fortune. The three plays, however, cannot simplify Caesar and the events of his life to fully complement their didactic aims because of two primary factors. First, the plays were composed within disciplinary paradigms that promote ambiguity. These paradigms--historiographical in Caesar's Revenge, philosophical in Caesar and Pompey, and rhetorical in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar--resist reductive, didactic appropriations of Caesar by acknowledging opposing viewpoints and perspectives. Secondly, the multiple and conflicting conceptions of Caesar in the Renaissance defied simplification. The number of accounts of Caesar and their contradictory nature produced an intertextual web of references and interpretations that undermined unequivocal portrayals of Caesar. Shakespeare avoided these difficulties by focusing Julius Caesar on ambiguity itself. His play demonstrates the manner in which assessments and judgments of character are the product of the perceiver's perspective and how identity is thus shaped to appeal to the perceived judgments of those perceivers. These insights are applicable to the operations, specific to the Renaissance, of the other three plays, and to the means of interpretation today.

With the posthumous publication of Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf afforded her readers an intimate view of her childhood in late Victorian England. The signal event in that childhood was the death of Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen. By Woolfs own admission, her lost parent "obsessed" her until the completion of To the Lighthouse. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, which stresses the primacy of mother-child relations, and the more recent "identity theory" of Hans Lichtenstein, which postulates that one's "way of being" is dictated by early maternal experience, this study contends that Woolf's obsession never ends. Indeed, maternal loss, coupled with what Klein calls "the urge towards reparation," are central motivating factors in Woolf's continuing creative process. This reading considers the author's nine novels, in order to highlight Woolf's lifelong, recurrent "vision" of Julia Stephen. Woolf's vision is encoded in several symbolic variations of her "identity theme," including the use of the mother figure as writer, as moral progenitor, and as prognosticator of a twofold philosophy of resignation and melancholy. Virginia Woolf writes to recreate the lost figure of Julia Stephen, and to recapture the love denied by her mother's death.

After tracing the theo-philosophical roots of the eighteenth-century sentimental sensibility as Laurence Sterne used them in Tristram Shandy, this work examines the antecedents of twentieth-century sentimentalism as they appear in William Butler Yeats's memoir Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, in the first two chapters of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in the "Overture" and "Combray" sections of Marcel Proust's novel Swann's Way. This study concentrates on how the focal characters' innate artistic sensibility emerges during their childhoods. Following sentimental patterns, the idealistic central figures are vulnerable to threatening realities that disillusion them. Melancholy accompanies their distress, and they react by wishing to withdraw physically and psychologically from an alienating world to which they feel superior because of their aesthetic sensibilities. These modern works conform to three specific sentimental characteristics that appear in Yeats, Stephen and Marcel. First, they respond spontaneously to sensory stimuli, which lead to associated ideas, often manifest as memories or synaesthesia that the characters elaborate both imaginatively and intellectually. The second sentimental trait is that the action of deeply-detailed scenes is often suspended to reveal characters. And the last sentimental element, which reinforces the Kunstlerroman and Bidungsroman aspects of these works, is that the protagonists turn to language to define both their realities and artistic identities, showing the evolution of sentimental sensibility in these potential writers.

The idea of progress found in the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley germinated in the intersection of Enlightenment philosophy and the millennial tradition. In this dissertation, I show that the spirit of scientific inquiry and the tradition of millennial prophecy come together in Romantic poetry to form a secular conception of human destiny and spiritual restoration. Mingling the spirit of anticipation and hope associated with the millennial tradition and the spirit of empirical observation found in Enlightenment philosophy, the Romantic poets reinterpret divine providence as moral and intellectual progress. In their reinterpretation of human progress, the Romantics transfer initiative from an intervening deity to the human mind itself. In Romanticism, the notion of a guiding presence in human history is replaced by a secular idea of providence based upon faith in human nature's essential goodness and potential. Examining the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, I show that the new Romantic myth of redemption was reinforced by empirical theories that promised to renovate society and the species through the rational observation of human behavior. In a reinterpretation of spiritual restoration and the millennial plot, the Romantic poets identify themselves as chosen prophets and internalize the saving and sanctifying power traditionally attributed to a divine redeemer. Combining Enlightenment philosophy's interest in cognitive processes with the millennial tradition's spirit of renewal and redemption, the Romantic poets introduce imagination as a visionary faculty capable of bringing a new world into creation. This dissertation focuses on the new myths of redemption forged by four Romantic poets. Close readings of Blake's Jerusalem, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Wordsworth's The Prelude, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound demonstrate how the Romantics adapt the millennial prospect and plot to a human and earth-centered theory of progress.

The claim of individuals to a private cohesive self might be interestingly thought of as an effect of consciousness. Even if illusory, the self is an object to which one establishes relations, and can be usefully examined by object-relations theory, especially when "troubled" by feminist and gender theory. This self resists institutional identities and received knowledges--perceived as "rot" because they conceal at their core secrets and lies--through the snooping processes of epistemophilia. Epistemophilia responds to the lure of suppressed knowledge, what cannot be out-spoken or often even conceptualized. Literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries displays cultural ideas about self-fashioning and the ideal self. Epistemophilic characters in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body resist or utilize their perceived "calls" to marry, to enter profession, and to fall in love, developing their own less predetermined epistemologies based on a newly reclaimed desire for self. Epistemophilia teases out the issues of the role of early interests, talents, and premonitions of genius, the perfomativity of reunions, and the lesbian sublime.

Drawing upon historical studies of the family and feminist studies of discourse and culture, this dissertation explores representations of the family in Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. It situates each novel's representation of the family within a central ideological undertaking in Victorian culture—the attempt to confirm individual autonomy without sacrificing collective responsibility. It claims that a new family paradigm, the affective family ideal, gains cultural currency because it appears to reconcile these competing values by, on the one hand, giving a new primacy to individual feeling and choice and, on the other hand, insisting that individual choice be contained by familial bonds. This dissertation thus delineates the network of associations—among them individuality and collectivity, natural law and social progress—that composes the affective family ideal and explores its implications. It suggests that normative conceptions of gender and selfhood mandated by this ideal actually obstructed individual choice even as its new articulation of class difference undermined collective well-being. Fundamentally, it claims that the affective family ideal, despite its construction as individualism's antidote, rationalized practices central to the ideology of individualism and promoted middle class hegemony. The first chapter summarizes historical developments that produced the affective family ideal and explores the ways in which gender, class, and subjectivity were shaped within the context of that ideal's construction. Each succeeding chapter analyzes the discursive construction of the family in one Victorian novel. In each novel, three entities structure the family narrative: the aristocratic patrilineal family, individualism, and the affective family. Besides tracing these recurrent figures, this dissertation demonstrates the complex nature of nineteenth century domestic ideology by identifying points of consensus and dissent among these representations of the family. It claims that, despite notable differences, both Bleak House and Wives and Daughters identify the affective family ideal as a distinctively moral alternative to the traditional patrilineal family and individualism. It argues that Daniel Deronda, despite its similar critique of both patrilineal family and individualism, rejects the family ideal that the earlier two novels posit as the key to individual and collective progress.

This dissertation argues that widespread belief in a British national character is the result of the wide circulation of images purporting to depict its traits, and further, that audiences for those images have been no less important than image makers in determining what kind of character has been imagined. To support these contentions depictions of the British or English are examined, chosen mainly for their own wide circulation or that of their authors' work in general, but also for their derivation from earlier images in order to demonstrate the continuity of the nation's self-imagining. Apart from one sixteenth century text by Sir Walter Raleigh, the images examined are taken from British works of the last two centuries: in the nineteenth century from texts by Thomas Macaulay, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson, and paintings by Ford Madox Brown and John Everett Millais; in this century from texts by Sapper, Maud Diver, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Margaret Drabble and Salman Rushdie, political speeches by Margaret Thatcher, T. E. Utley and Britain's current chancellor Gordon Brown, and the 1980s re-enactment of Raleigh's activities known as Operation Raleigh. Reference is also made throughout to other contemporaneous images in a variety of media. Discussion draws on post-colonial theory and on theories of nations and nationalism and of narrative and historiography, with a predominantly Marxist approach. Although authors' motives for designedly portraying the national character have quite personal, even, at times, irrational aspects, they are primarily ideological. Motivation is, however, largely irrelevant to the images' reception, which mainly depends on their appeal, availability and general circulation. In conclusion, the construction and proclamation of a supposed national character is seen to be a continuing process which provides the nation's members with an acceptable collective self-image adapted to concerns of the time. Largely stereotypical, inevitably idealized and fraught with ideology, such collective representations incorporate much that is true but differ considerably from prevailing national norms of attitude and behavior. One or another such representation has nevertheless been embraced by a very large number of Britons as embodying their national character.