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.

Thesis (D.C.A.)--University of Wollongong, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 173-188.

This thesis examines the representation of Ireland in images and texts produced in Britain and France between 1839 and 1855. I argue that in this period, Ireland functioned as a crucial site for the negotiation and transformation of the relationship between the two nations. Chapter One examines a popular middle-class British publication of 1845, Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.. .and Emmett's Insurrection. Through an analysis of George Cruikshank's illustrations to this work, I explore the ways that a predominant image of the Irish was linked to British anxieties concerning a potential political alliance between the French and the Irish based on what was represented as a "natural" religio-racial connection between the two nations. Developing this transnational focus, I argue that French concern with Ireland exacerbated such constructions. Chapter Two examines liberal and leftleaning French publications that took up representations of the Irish between 1839 to 1846 in order to critique Britain's role as a modern industrial nation. In Chapter Three I analyze how "Irishness" in the French press between 1845 and 1847, and in satires by artists like Cham and Paul Gavarni, served both as a warning against French adoption of the English economic model of laissez-faire capitalism, and as a commentary on domestic working class poverty. Chapter Four explores how the Irish were taken up both visually and textually in the French press to be momentarily transformed into active agents of radical change in the year of France's revolution of 1848. My final chapter concludes with an analysis of French artist Gustave Courbet's figure of an Irishwoman as a complex marker of both pauperism and potential revolution in a contentious painting displayed strategically outside Paris' 1855 Exposition universelle. In the course of this analysis "Ireland" is shown to raise a range of issues concerning relations between France and Britain. While images of Irishness evoked the mobility and exchange that characterized an early moment of free trade, those same images could simultaneously arouse anxieties in both Britain and France around industrialization, the "advancement" of civil liberties, the growing pauperization of populations, and the threat to both nations of calls for republican reform. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate