This thesis provides a new direction to studies of “gay masculinity”, examining the impact a consumerist approach has had on the two bestselling “gay” lifestyle(s) magazines between 1991 and 2011: 'Attitude' and 'GT' (previously known as 'Gay Times'). In both magazines over the period covered, the desire for a “successful” identity as understood through neo-liberal discourse is demonstrated through textual analysis of the aspirational discourse and images (re)presented in both publications, specifically assessing the importance placed on signifiers of consumerism and celebrity role models. In selecting the most-read lifestyle(s) magazines in Britain over the period under study, I was able to understand how mainstream forms of “gay masculine” identity had increasingly been underpinned by discourse pertaining to consumerism as opposed to campaigns against perceived homophobia and inequality. In arguing that a neo-liberal binary of “success” and “failure” has become increasingly prevalent since 1991, with signifiers (re)constructing the former as aspirational, this thesis also notes that 'Attitude' and 'Gay Times' have remained uniquely directed at an explicitly “gay” audience, with emphasis being placed on homonormative forms of “success” being an easily attainable norm.

This thesis argues that in the plural cultural context of the twenty-first century the value of Shakespeare resides in his identity as a free and flexible resource. This adaptable Shakespeare is valuable to theatres because they are dialectical spaces. Free-resource Shakespeare is able to contain a range of different cultural values and theatres provide a space for producers and consumers of culture to negotiate between them. It has been established that tensions of cultural value, for example innovation/tradition or commercial/non-commercial govern the production, dissemination and critique of culture. Building on this idea, this work shows that when tensions are dealt with as negotiations rather than confrontations, new cultural value is generated. It identifies Shakespeare as a site for the debate of value tensions and contends that he can be simultaneously commercial and non-commercial, traditional and innovative. Cultural value is thus created because Shakespeare is reinvigorated and redefined through a process which negotiates between tensions. In publicly-funded theatre this process manifests itself in an ambiguous relationship to the market, myriad adaptations and a move towards event-theatre. The cultural value of Shakespeare in publicly-funded theatre mirrors the continual redefinition of the Shakespearean object and, rather than being a concrete ‘thing’, is better defined as a constant process.

A large part of the extant criticism of Evelyn Waugh's fiction is orientated towards either a biographical or a literary-historical interest: there are comparatively few detailed surveys of the novels themselves. This study attempts such a survey, and in particular examines the tension which inheres in the relationship of Waugh's poised, urbane narrators to the social and moral chaos they depict. I have been interested in the source and management of that poise, the testing, as it were to destruction, of a series of narrative positions. There is a very modern equation to be observed in Waugh's fiction, between the potentially anarchic mode of fiction and what Waugh felt to be the actual anarchy of contemporary civilisation. His novels can with interest be read in terms of a comic exploitation of this equation, and subsequently, as the writer aged, of his attempts to evade its logic, to discover a 'voice of authority'. Apparently secure narrative stances are repeatedly undermined, and a succession of 'realities' compromised - Tony Last's, William Boot's, John Plant's, Guy Crouchback's. It is this awareness and exploitation of the reflexive quality of fiction, and its use in disclosing the nature of his age which lends Waugh's writing its real and enduring interest. I seek to draw out this awareness through detailed examination of the different novels' precise narrative stance, the source of their 'voice', and have been largely content to let stand other commentators' descriptions of Waugh's broader thesis. My method involves close attention to Waugh's language, from the conviction that nuances of tone and the development of marginal allusions and metaphors are the keys to many of his characteristic effects.

This thesis examines Gaelic poetry and the military between 1756 and 1856. While previous studies have collated and analysed the poetry of two of the other major impacts on Gaelic society at this time, clearance and emigration, there has so far been no concerted attempt to examine and place in context the corpus of Gaelic military material of the period – despite this verse being widespread in the poetic record. This poetry has been largely neglected by scholars of Scottish history, and, though selected pieces have been examined by scholars of Celtic Studies, it has not received the fullness of attention that such a major concern in the poetic record deserves. This thesis therefore directly addresses this gap in previous scholarship. The study first considers the historical and literary context for this corpus of poetry, in order to establish the background to Gaelic military verse in the post-Culloden period. A chronological approach is taken to consider this poetry over the course of five chapters. The first period explored is that between the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolutionary War (1756-93). Two chapters cover the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), focussing respectively on verse by soldiers and non-combatants. The next chapter has as its focus the period between the British Victory at Waterloo and the end of the Crimean War (1815-56). The last chapter takes a different chronological approach to those which preceded it, examining women’s poetry and the military across the one-hundred year time period. Each of these chapters explore the background to, contemporary context for, and content of this corpus of Gaelic military verse from 1756 to 1856. A full database of the corpus of 178 poems is also included. There is a focus throughout the thesis on the manner in which poets drew from and utilised their poetic tradition to contextualise the British military and its influence. Another major strand of the research is its examination of loyalty as expressed or revealed in the poetic record. The thesis contends that this corpus of poetry deserves a central place in the military historiography of the Highlands and Gaelic literary criticism.

This thesis examines the depiction of the country estate in English women’s poetry, 1650-1750. The poems discussed belong to the country house genre, work with or adapt its conventions and tropes, or belong to what may be categorised as sub-genres of the country house poem. The country house estate was the power base of the early modern world, authorizing social status, validating political power and providing an economic dominance for the ruling elite. This thesis argues that the depiction of the country estate was especially pertinent for a range of female poets. Despite the suggestive scholarship on landscape and place and the emerging field of early modern women’s literary studies and an extensive body of critical work on the country house poem, there have been to date no substantial accounts of the role of the country estate in women’s verse of this period. In response, this thesis has three main aims. Firstly, to map out the contours of women’s country house poetry – taking full account of the chronological scope, thematic and formal diversity of the texts, and the social and geographic range of the poets using the genre. Secondly, to interrogate the formal and thematic characteristics of women’s country house poetry, looking at the appropriation and adaptation of the genre. Thirdly, to situate the selected poetry both within and against the extensive and formally published male-authored canon and the more general literary and historical contexts of the early modern period. Across these related strands of discussion, the study has two important implications for our understanding of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poetry: it adds to our knowledge of women’s poetic practices of the period and extends and complicates our understanding of the country house genre. Each chapter highlights a particular engagement with the genre responding to a complex of historical contexts, literary trends and personal circumstance. Chapter one will explore the contexts which prompt the emergence of the country house poem and the shape and detail of the genre, 1600–1650. It also examines where the specific gendered contexts of women’s writing practices are relevant to the selection of texts. Chapter two focuses on the thematic and formal interplay in Katherine Austen’s manuscript miscellany ‘Book M’ and role the country house genre plays in exploring and negotiating women’s relationship to property. Chapter three shares many of the same historical and literary contexts but from a different religio-political standpoint and focuses on Lucy Hutchinson’s manuscript collection ‘Elegies’. Chapter four examines the appropriation and re-positioning of the country house genre in the poetry of Anne Finch and Jane Barker, arguing that as the post- Restoration period began, the motivation to explore the country house as a symbol of legitimate political power, a location and symbol of retirement and retreat and the site of financial and cultural investment did not wane, but was reworked by Finch and Barker to explore their political sympathies for the Stuart monarchy. Chapter five explores the use of the country house genre by poets associated with Whig political sympathies: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anne Ingram. Largely unaffected by socio-economic or political marginalisation, both Montagu and Ingram enter into a public, and politically inflected, debate on the importance of taste. Chapter six explores two writers, Mary Leapor and Mary Chandler, who belong to an emerging body of writers of mercantile or labouring class. The discussion will focus on Leapor’s ‘Crumble-Hall’ and Chandler’s A Description of Bath and the contexts of consumerism and tourism to which both poems respond.

The primary aim of this thesis is to bring Allan Ramsay (1684-1748) and James Thomson (1700-1748) into close critical contact for the first time and, in so doing, deconstruct the paradigm of opposition which has previously attached to these two contemporaries. The thesis posits that the separation of Ramsay and Thomson has been effected, retrospectively, by the twentieth-century Scottish critical tradition. The narrow, cultural essentialism exhibited by this body of scholarship has been effectively challenged in recent decades by the work of Gerard Carruthers, and revisionary ‘Four Nations’ approaches to late eighteenth-century British literature have done much to reinstate the importance of what were previously viewed as marginal or peripheral literary locations. Ramsay and Thomson, however, have never been fully united in literary and cultural terms. This thesis demonstrates that Ramsay and Thomson shared, not only a chronological context, but also a creative context informed by a reciprocal engagement with the work of the other and posits that the relationship between these two lowland Scottish writers can be conceived of in terms of a sustained mutual gaze. James Thomson remains entrenched within an English literary canon, despite the efforts of Mary Jane Scott to reclaim him for his native country. Conversely, Allan Ramsay remains firmly rooted in his native Scottish soil as the father of the vernacular revival and the epitome of literary and cultural resistance to a supposed English cultural hegemony in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England. It is true that Ramsay’s and Thomson’s creative trajectories exemplify the literary choices and cultural paths available to a Scottish writer in the years immediately following the Union of Parliaments, but to set them in creative opposition as a result of these choices is a critical commonplace which this thesis challenges. Thomson spent the greater part of his literary career in and around London, whilst Ramsay remained in Edinburgh until his death; clearly the corpora of these two writers were conditioned by the locations of their production. Hence, the thematic structure of this thesis relies on the notion of location, both physical and literary. The first two chapters of this thesis, ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘London’, illustrate the urban contexts of both writers; in so doing they suggest that a mutual gaze was sustained, not only between Ramsay and Thomson, but that a similarly reciprocal relationship and network of influence existed between the literary and cultural centres of Edinburgh and London. The third chapter of this thesis, ‘Nation’, traces the fluid and nuanced literary responses to the concept of nation in a period when national and literary boundaries were in a state of flux. The fourth and final chapter of this thesis, ‘Land’, explores the shifting aesthetic landscape of the period and, with an emphasis on mode and genre, demonstrates Ramsay’s and Thomson’s original contribution to an emerging British poetic, elucidated by an extended analysis of their poetry of place.

This dissertation demonstrates that Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1906), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Mary Wilkins Freemans The Portion of Labor (1903) exemplify the radical politics and aesthetics that late nineteenth-century literary regionalism shares with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Despite considerable feminist critical accomplishments, scholarship on regionalism has yet to relate its rural folkways, feminine aesthetics, and anti-urban stance to similar ideals in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman all depict the challenges of the regional woman artist in order to oppose the uniformity and conventionality of urban modernity. They were not alone in engaging these concerns: they shared these interests with period feminists, sexual radicals, and advocates of the Arts and Crafts Movement like John Ruskin and William Morris, all of whom deeply questioned industrial capitalism and modernization. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman envisioned women’s Arts and Crafts communities that appealed to readers through narratives that detailed the potential uniqueness of homemade decorative arts and other aspects of women’s material culture. For Arts and Crafts advocates and regionalists, handcrafted goods made using local folk methods and natural materials fulfilled what they saw as the aesthetic requirements for artistic self-definition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and The Land of Little Rain embrace the destabilizing effect queer and feminist characters have on a presumably heterosexual domestic environment, and they formally resist the narrative structures of industrial modernity, emphasizing the Arts and Crafts ideal union between woman artist, natural environment, and communal bonds. The Awakening and The Portion of Labor expose the suffocating impact of industrial capitalism and sexism on women artists who strive for connection with their local environments and communities and cannot achieve their creative goals. I prove that all four texts do more than simply interpret regionalism through the Arts and Crafts Movement as a means to launch their critiques of industrial modernity, they transform the meaning of regionalist Arts and Crafts aesthetics and politics in late nineteenth-century American literature.

The creation of a highly detailed on-line catalogue of Walter Scott’s Library at Abbotsford has made it possible for the first time, not only to see exactly what items Scott collected, but also in many cases to determine when and how he acquired them. If, as Alberto Manguel has claimed, all libraries are autobiographical, what does this enhanced information about Abbotsford Library tells us about Scott? Five distinct topics have been selected for examination: Americana, Ireland, Science, Politics and Bibliography. They have been chosen because, although they are for the most part not subjects frequently connected with Scott, they are nonetheless areas on which he collected a substantial amount of books or manuscripts, and for which substantive information about his involvement or interest can be deduced from external sources such as his Journal or correspondence. In addition to the investigation of these specific subject areas, the collection as a whole is explored for evidence for Scott’s personal relationships, both with other writers and with members of his family, focussing especially on his collections of Burns and Byron, the commonplace book he kept as a young man, and his own marginalia. Evidence concerning Scott’s final book purchases is surveyed against the conflicting accounts of his mental and physical health in 1831/2 as given by J. G. Lockhart, William Gell, and other contemporary observers, and an account of the afterlife of the Library traces its history from Scott’s death to the present day to examine how closely the present arrangement of the books resembles that intended by Scott, and whether changes which took place after his death could mislead us into drawing incorrect conclusions. Finally a description of the twenty-first century cataloguing process with some statistical analysis of the contents of the Library examines the importance of the holdings to ask if this is a significant collection, even without the provenance of one of the most popular and prolific writers of the Romantic Era, and whether Scott’s influence on nineteenth-century book culture is one of his most important contributions to modern scholarship.

Subject of the dissertation thesis research is the term Romanticism, in entirety of its existence in thinking about the history of specific Central European literary works. At first the author of the thesis discusses constitution of the term, its revision and basic scope of the revised term use. Introduction of the constitutionalized term as an intersection of judgments, allows us to understand the reasons for its inconsistency and ambiguity in the meaning which were the most significant incentives for the revision of the term. The constitution as well as the concept revision is monitored in terms of interpretation of its meaning, the differentiation of the meaning and its collocability with other terms of the same genus proximum. Use of the revised concept is examined in terms of accentuating the homogeneity and heterogeneity of its meaning. After the establishing the general historical overview of the Romanticism term use, the author of the thesis focuses on its use in the relation with the Czech national literature as a specific, relatively fixed set of material. Author focuses on the application of the term in critical-historical thinking about the modern Czech literature, in the positivist and mindscientific works, and also devotes attention to the interference of Marxist thinking to the structuralistic concept of Czech literature history in relation to the Romanticism and to the current possibilities of the term use. Based on the introduced glimpses into the history of the use of the term Romanticism the author comes to several recommendations for current and future conceptualization of Romanticism, whose validity may also be related to other historical literature terms.

This thesis is comprised of three parts: a critical dissertation, a creative work of fiction and a bridge piece that connects the two. The critical work is an examination of the Devil as a satirist in Faustian bargains. Through the usage of the Devil as a literary figure, his character has become a more secular being: a trickster rather than evil incarnate—a facilitator of sin rather than its originator. In the tragicomedy of pacts with the Devil, he acts as a mirror, reflecting mankind’s foibles and vanity, while elevating the reader in the process. The thesis considers the language, tone, purpose and conceits of several versions of the story. While the focus is primarily on American Literature, the influence of English, Scottish, French and German folklore and fiction are recognized as an essential component of the theme’s evolution. In the bridge piece, the pact with the Devil is literalized in a modern context; a corporate business of reaping souls is theorized in which techniques of persuasion are streamlined into an effective formula. Whether immersive or expository in approach, the portrayal of the supernatural depends on the literary principles of science fiction and fantasy in order to manipulate the reader and allow irrational concepts to obey rational laws. Such theories are cited to support how the Devil functions as a believable character. The novel, Could Be Much Worse, relates the story of an egocentric boss and his dependable employee, a scout who disguises himself as a taxi driver and seeks candidates who may succumb to temptation. Passengers’ monologues of desperation and pathos are interspersed throughout the protagonist’s day-to-day narrative. At times, the work is experimental, utilizing irregular storytelling techniques, alternative forms and conceits. Light-hearted, but nonetheless poignant, the story serves as a cautionary tale, illustrating the tedium of a bureaucratic job in a transmundane existence.