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."

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.

Among types of books, novels allow readers the most conversational possibilities: readers may "overhear" conversations among characters, among narrators and characters, among other voices, narrators and characters; readers may even find themselves participating in the conversation which novels demand. Because much of a novelist's style depends upon her/his conversational choices, literary critics discussing the function of conversation in novels frequently describe the ways in which dialogue serves to characterize characters. While such criticism reveals a remarkable range of novelistic conversation, it raises questions which too often it fails to answer. For example, our response to Mrs. Elton differs from our listening to Emma, to Mr. Knightley and to their narrator, and, realizing the extent to which Mrs. Elton's talk contains her, we begin to wonder why Mrs. Elton is in Emma's story. Wondering about Mrs. Elton involves recognizing a curious disequilibrium underlying conversation in Emma and in the novel. Placing Austen in conversation with James, Forester, Lawrence, Conrad and Faulkner--all novelists to whom conversation is of central importance, both stylistically and thematically--allows my study to discuss the reach of this disequilibrium, a reach which defines the novel itself. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of polyphony provides my "disequilibrium" with a theoretical context. The novels which this dissertation reads fail to achieve sustained polyphony; that is, the effects of and the opportunities for the various voices inhabiting these novels are not equal. While one might respond that the concept "sustained polyphony" fails and not the novels, identifying the disparities which handicap the relationship between a novel's speaking selves and speaking others places one at the heart of the novel. Polyphony serves as a kind of asymptote; it is a conversation whose necessity and unattainability define the novel. A particular novel's failure, then, suggests that the novel works to make its reader aware of distance, disequilibrium... and of the pain caused by distance, disequilibrium..., pain which surfaces even in the most serene comic novels. The particular failure defining the novel allows the novel to extend its conversation, to succeed precisely at its point of failure.

This dissertation presents a method for reading William Butler Yeats's A Vision. Establishing parallels between the language of A Vision and that of Jung's Psychological Types both renders A Vision comprehensible at the sentence level and identifies the classical theory of temperaments as a crucial unacknowledged influence on both Yeats and Jung. A reading of Book I of A Vision demonstrates how its cycle of lunar phases functions as a sophisticated psychological typology and reveals the underlying structure of Yeats's system.

The transformation of God as it develops in late-Victorian British literature comprehends a simultaneous double movement: first, it seeks to demonstrate and to discredit the transcendence of God assumed by pre-romantics, a transcendence that Hillis Miller has argued reaches its culmination in the Victorian period; simultaneously, it embraces an immanence which, though dependent on the dynamics of the romantic movement, moves significantly beyond romantic limitations. This immanence, a force deep within nature and within individual and collective humanity, manifests itself in post-Darwinian dynamics such as Darwin's "struggle for life" and Nietzsche's "will to power." Because these post-Darwinian energies share with the romantics a structure analogous to the idealist Absolute, and because their biological base enables them, unlike the romantics, reliably to unite the physical, emotional, and volitional with the epistemological, they successfully rejoin in a quasi-monistic whole what Descartes had sundered. George Eliot models her rebellion against the father on her prior rejection of the Christian God she initially reveres but eventually finds inadequate, and this rebellion ramifies from her personal writings to inform the text of Middlemarch. Thomas Hardy, who seeks in both religion and the secular society a post-Darwinian alternative to the transcendence of supernaturalism on the one hand and the abyss of atheism on the other, details his objections to what Angel Clare calls an "untenable redemptive theolatry" throughout Tess of the d'Urber-villes. For Henry James, religion correlates psychologically to the intertial drag of his father's influence; yet the Jamesian urge to "live all you can" impels his novelistic career and contributes to the success of Maggie Verver, who in The Golden Bowl uses post-Darwinian dynamics to overcome textual transcendences and reunite, through both passion and perception, the components splintered by Cartesian rationalism.

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.

Theoreticians of the problem of the other have overlooked a crucial distinction between two competing modes of alterity: The Other, a classic strategy of metaphorical, externalized singularity, and The Double, a modern strategy of metonymical, internalized multiplicity. The discovery of these two modes of alterity untangles many of the difficulties encountered in attempting to reconcile the theories of writers frequently seen as inimical to one another, including Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Edward Said, and Tzvetan Todorov. These two strategic modes enable women and men, artists and writers, to create "constellations of desire"--traditional and non-traditional "imaginary" psychological outlines constructed from the fixed points or reference in our lives--to deal with loss and alterity. While this paradigm can be profitably applied to many eras of loss, one particularly enlightening local instantiation of the problem occurs in the Victorian era, specifically in the life and works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti. The Rossettis rall under the sign of Gemini in the Victorian constellations of desire: brother and sister poets, standing in the same place, they yet face in opposite directions and follow reversed trajectories with reference to their fixed stars or family, faith, and the female. The strategies of The Double and The Other occur repeatedly throughout their lives, in their interactions with their father and their siblings, where questions of voice and textual incest become prominent; in their problematical relationships to ascEtic, aesthetic, and erotic forms of faith; and in their relationship to the female--mother, fallen woman, and beloved epipsyche--both as lived experience and as envisioned/revisioned object of the gaze. Particular eruptions materialize in poems and paintings such as Dante Gabriel's "Jenny," "Blessed Damozel," "Proserpine," "Ecce Ancilla Domini!," "Sister Helen," "Ave," "Hand and Soul," "A Last Confession"; and Christina's "Goblin Market," "A Royal Princess," Sing-Song, "Maggie A Lady," "Maude Clare," and "Monna Innominata," as well as her drawings. The picture that emerges allows Christina the strength as well as the anguish of her faith, making her a more complex and interesting writer than previously acknowledged, while it recuperates Dante Gabriel's reputation from accusations of chauvinism and obscurantism.

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.

This dissertation explores representations of nineteenth-century middle-class emigration from Britain to Australia, with particular attention to the gendered dynamics of displacement Building on the work of scholars who have theorized the performative aspects of national identity, I focus on practices of self maintenance that enable emigrants, with varying degrees of success, to retain their ties to Britain and the middle classes despite displacement. One such practice involves the performance of what I call "portable domesticity," or the transplantation of British national identity through the replication of British domestic values and practices aboard emigrant ships and in Australia. I argue that even as portable domesticity reinforces the values of British culture, it also subverts them since the domestic practices enabling emigrants to transplant their national identity also initiate the process of settlement that ultimately leads to Australian independence. I explore this paradox in novels by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Catherine Helen Spence, and in cultural artifacts such as emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, and a narrative painting. My first chapter considers the centrality of domestic practices aboard emigrant ships, where family life is modeled in order to prepare individual emigrants for the roles they will subsequently adopt in the colony. The second chapter focuses on the extent to which performances of domesticity, leisure, and strategic amnesia enable female emigrants to maintain their affiliations with the British middle class both during the voyage out and in Australia. The third chapter analyzes representations of returned male emigrants and explores how they become embroiled in criminal plots at home that signify their divided allegiances in familial as well as national terms. The concluding chapter discusses the transplantation of genre as another manifestation of portable domesticity, demonstrating how the iconography of the domestic novel is transformed and adapted to a colonial setting. Together, these chapters highlight the paradoxical effects of portable domesticity in Australia and argue for the status of the British settler colonies as important sites for the exploration of various forms of postcolonial ambivalence.