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Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones novels are popular with countless readers all over the world. They are "ripe for feminist interpretation and investigation" because they are "contemporary women's novels" that discuss the everyday lives of women, particularly unmarried women in the West (Whelehan 2004, 38). Imelda Whelehan argues that if the Bridget Jones novels do not "offer a 'true' reflection of contemporary single life for women, they perhaps present its tensions more boldly than ever" (2004, 30). This thesis is a feminist study of the Bridget Jones novels and the film adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary, focussing on how discourses of feminism and otherness appear in Fielding's texts and in the film, and how the major women characters use them to interpret their own lives. Chapter One investigates the ways in which Bridget, Sharon, and Pam Jones understand feminism and employ feminist language in Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996). Chapter Two explores how characters who are Other---those who are racially and ethnically different from Bridget, her friends, and her family---create barriers between the white, heterosexual couples in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999). Finally, Chapter Three turns to the 2001 film adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary in order to demonstrate how prevalent themes in the first novel, including feminism, go missing in the adaptation.

St. Thomas More's Utopia has been the subject of considerable debate over the past 75 years. It claims to be concerned with the 'best state of a commonwealth', but how is it concerned? It is a strange little book that records a fictional dialogue between More, his friend Peter Giles, and a very impulsive and opinionated traveler named Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday has recently returned from a voyage, and the Utopia is mostly taken up with a detailed account of the bizarre customs, laws, and rituals of a people he encountered in a place called Utopia. Hythloday praises them as the best and wisest people. More remains skeptical, but does acknowledge that certain of the Utopian practices have merit. The reader is therefore left wondering whether More created this fictional commonwealth to provide a model for reform, or whether he created it as a satire. This thesis has sought to contribute to the wealth of research on this topic, by interpreting the enthusiasm of Hythloday and the skepticism of More as evidence that More did not intend the Utopia to be taken literally, but neither did he intend for it to be read solely as satire. He meant for the Utopia to be a springboard for discussion and debate. He meant to create a platform to address issues plaguing European commonwealths. I have come to this conclusion by interpreting the Utopia within its historical and literary context. In this thesis I examine the circumstances of the Utopia's publication and distribution; the intellectual and cultural influences of Renaissance England, and More's immediate circumstances in the year 1515 when he wrote the Utopia. I then move from a general study of the Utopia to a more concentrated study of its content where I provide a character analysis of More, Giles and Hythloday. I also examine the inconsistencies inherent within the pages of the Utopia, as well as the inconsistencies that existed between More's life and the ideals he seemingly espoused within the Utopia. Lastly, I examine the Utopia in comparison to many of More's other works on the subjects of religion and property such as the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, and More's letters, poems and prayers.

Andrew Marvell (1621-78), though best known today as a lyric poet, was also the author of a handful of aggressive pamphlets on religious toleration and proto-Whig political values. In comparison to earlier polemic produced by divines such as John Owen, Richard Baxter, or Samuel Parker, Marvell's books appear as a radical aesthetic departure into a witty style of dramatic pamphlet. This thesis argues that Marvell's aesthetic innovation owes to his infusion of theatre and theatricality into ecclesiastical controversy. The hybrid polemic caused a point of contact between smaller separate publics foreshadows the opening of the wider Public Sphere that Jurgen Habermas situates in the wake of the 16889 Glorious Revolution. As a new style of public writing, Marvell's hybrid polemic initiated a crossover between the ecclesiastical and theatrical publics that expanded debate to a new idiom and a wider audience.

This project describes the work of three contemporary British novelists as they explore the possibility of self-identifying as black and British in contemporary Britain, despite the prevalence of racist attitudes that hold that these two identities are mutually exclusive. The three novels examined -- The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Brick Lane by Monica Ali -- present black protagonists who self-identify as British. While other characters in the novels either conform to assimilationist or diasporic models of identity, where the subject seeks to expunge all "black" characteristics in favour of conforming to stereotypical "white" cultural norms, or retreat from "white" characteristics into an essentialized version of the values of their "home" countries, Karim, Irie, and Nazneen establish spaces for themselves within British society that allow them to try on different identities. By acknowledging the variability of identity, all three protagonists are able to self-identify as being both black and British.

'A Singular Person': Portraits of Subjectivity in the Poetry and Prose of Matilda Betham represents the first book-length study of Matilda Betham's literary output. A poet, biographer, and portrait artist, Betham is best remembered for her friendships with S. T. Coleridge, the Lambs, and Robert Southey. Referring to manuscript and printed material, this thesis uses feminist and New Historical critical methods to examine Betham's contribution to British Romanticism. It offers a biography of Betham and a historically contextualised analysis of her own construction of women's role in civic affairs. Betham's political affiliations, as well as the generic range of her poetic and scholarly representations of history, suggest her engagement with contemporary discussions surrounding subjectivity and self-representation. Her Biographical Dictionary participates in a construction of female identity that redefines the feminine while acknowledging the influence of preceding historians. The location and recovery of her autobiographical writings inform this examination of Betham's biographical research. The thesis argues that Betham's political views surrounding broad social representation also emerge in her exploration of the relationship between the lyrical voice and enfranchised selfhood. Betham combines her scholarly and poetic depictions of the individual enacting social change in The Lay of Marie , a historically informed metrical romance that compares to compositions by poets, both male and female, who similarly consider the demands of subjective interpretation of publicly available modes of historical discourse.

This dissertation examines a group of female writers in the eighteenth century, the Countess of Winchilsea, Sarah Fyge, Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Anna Barbauld, who reconfigured elements of an authoritative generic mode, the georgic. In undertaking this reconfiguration these women developed their own distinctive tradition of verse which I describe as a portrayal of a beata femina . The poetry of the beata femina acknowledges the separate sphere to which eighteenth-century mores restricted women and privileges the life of that sphere. Thus the narrative of the beatus vir is not figured as an appeal to rural retirement so much as a gendered escape from a male dominated world into a female life of the mind. The traditional affirmation of the georgic labour of the estate is transformed into a testimony of domestic labour. The country-house poem is rewritten to celebrate the women who give it life, while the topographical survey is reordered as a means for women to survey their own narratives. However, the most significant way in which these women establish a sense of a beata femina within georgically inflected verse is through their employment of time. Women's poetry in this mode self-consciously rejects both the seasonal cycles and sense of historic progression associated with the georgic. Instead, women describe short periods of time within their quotidian lives in which they experience pleasure, connect to nature or other women, and, often, achieve transcendent experiences which seem to stand outside time.

Based on extensive archival research, this thesis offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by recuperating articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the previous century, becoming the national poet of intellectuals and gentlemen, but during the Victorian era he was embraced by groups outside the corridors of power. If Shakespeare was sometimes employed as an instrument of enculturation, imposed on these groups, he was also used by them to resist this cultural hegemony. As a comprehensive record of how Shakespeare was represented to a wide variety of readers, the periodicals are invaluable. Research has already demonstrated the varied representations of Shakespeare available to the Victorians through performance, criticism, and creative works employing Shakespeare as a point of departure, as well as his prevalence in formal education and examinations. A missing element of this Victorian picture, the periodicals, has been virtually ignored by Shakespeare studies. Articles published in periodicals intended for well-defined readerships including the working classes (chapter one), children (two), women (three), and theatregoers (four and five) are records of alternative Shakespeares reshaped for particular demographic groups. As the pressure to sell copies was renewed with each issue, the periodicals were acutely responsive to the interests of their readers, and Shakespeare's prevalence in such diverse publications is powerful evidence of both the scope and the variety of his popular appeal. In the Girl's Own Paper, for instance, Portia became a vehicle for discussing women's rights, while some working-class periodicals borrowed from Coriolanus and Richard III to sharpen their readers' views on class relations, and the proponents of a national theatre transformed Shakespeare into the saviour of English drama. Measured in terms of utility, a favourite word among Victorian thinkers, Shakespeare became a valuable, contested commodity for Victorian readers and spectators. In turn, the Victorians prevented Shakespeare from fading into the forgotten past by continuing to discover new ways of making him relevant.

Chapters I through III of this thesis seek to advance the study of apocalyptic form, themes, and imagery in fiction, and more specifically British literature from the twentieth century, by demonstrating that critics of the period have tended to apply an exclusively secular concept of literary apocalypse informed by a deep skepticism about the scriptural tradition whence it comes. Chapter I establishes both the significant value of and oversight in critical discourse on this topic, including an analysis of major works on the subject (Kermode and Frye). Chapter II examines the character of Revelation as both sacred scripture and literary object, and posits a model of secularization that accounts for the cumulative assumptions made by what I have termed "critical modernism" about literary apocalypse, showing that this model delimits critical uses of apocalypse to ethical apocalypse, principally in the guise of eschatological anxiety, and discourages the study of texts that involve scriptural apocalypse in other ways. Chapter III identifies and defines prophecy and revelation as companion dimensions to eschatology, and suggests ways of analyzing apocalyptic elements that will help focus and thus enhance the critical use of apocalyptic language. The thesis argues that prophecy and revelation are overlooked as apocalyptic elements chiefly because they occur in a "second stream" of texts that considers the spiritual dimensions of scriptural apocalypse as vital to the uses of apocalypse in the literature of the British twentieth century as the eschatological dimension is known to be. The second part of the thesis (chapters IV--VI) addresses the absence in critical treatments of apocalypse of the texts in this second stream, and the concomitant absence of scholarship on them, by analyzing the uses of eschatology-as-hope in Wyndham Lewis' Blast and Tarr, the representation of prophetic vocation in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay and Time Must Have a Stop, and the ontos of revelation in William Golding's Pincher Martin, The Spire, and Darkness Visible.

This dissertation is about the need to re-examine South Asian British literature and film from the perspective of "horizontal" thought. Writers and filmmakers of the British Asian diaspora offer a new model of thinking about identity, one that is "Deleuzean" in nature. Artists such as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Suniti Namjoshi, and Gurinder Chadha reveal a concern with showing both celebrations of and resistance to pluralism and possibility in a transnational world. Furthermore, their work also illustrates the need and desire to create a new cultural poetics in Britain, one that is more inclusive of diaspora literature and film. When applied to Asian British texts, Deleuzean philosophy reveals the complex intersections of migrancy, ethnicity, postcoloniality, and (homo)sexuality in the diasporic identities of contemporary South Asian writers, filmmakers, and their characters. In contrast to models of hybrid identity espoused by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha (vertical thinkers), Gilles Deleuze's model of horizontal thought escapes hierarchism, binarism, and idealism when analyzing transnational, liminal identities as represented in and by the creative work of British Asians. This shift in thought to horizontality is necessary because the literature and film themselves exemplify the following three concerns: (1) the need and quest for plural identities, (2) an examination of the pros and cons of being a migrant/transnational/diasporic figure in England, calling for a consideration of both transnationalism's advantages and its discontents, and (3) and the need to create a unique cultural poetics that operates as a "minor" literature that forms a significant part of the larger grouping of English literature and cinema.