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In their novels, Ernest Buckler, Alice Munro, Peter Ackroyd, Adele Wiseman and A. S. Byatt have each explored moments when their characters experience expanded states of consciousness. Narratives such as these, as well as those of various mystical literatures, posit the idea that the barriers of the known self can be broken through, often repeatedly. Each of the novels to be studied here portrays a gap- or flaw-ridden self in the act of perpetuating and/or penetrating various forms of narrative and identity constructs. Each also features an encounter with what is other when these narrative and identity boundaries are breached. Reading about "mystical" occurrences of this nature challenges readers with the possibility that perceptions may be registered beyond the paradigms of the subject/object split. In this project, narrative fiction will be read in terms of its capacity to trigger a questioning of, and an expansion from within, systems of knowledge and identity, explicitly in terms of character and plot structure, and implicitly as a model for the reading self. The ability to observe and to respond to productive "gaps" or "flaws" in the stories of the self is a skill not only practiced by contemplatives and mystics, and by the characters in these novels, but by readers of imaginative fiction as well.

This dissertation is concerned with both the way vernacular religious texts were written, and the way they were read, in late medieval England. The context for this discussion is the growth in lay readership and the increasingly ambitious spiritual aspirations of sections of the laity. This dissertation argues that awareness of this wider audience profoundly shaped the way writers presented their texts. Regardless of theological perspective or general intent, medieval writers reveal a common tendency to try and identify "right" readers for their texts, invoking specific interpretive communities, and guiding reader response by establishing parameters for interpretation. The first half of the study draws attention to this engagement with hermeneutics as it is found in Lollard tracts, The Cloud of Unknowing, Nicholas Love's Treatise on the Sacrament, Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love, and the anonymous works, Book to a Mother and The Recluse. Shifting attention on to the reader in its second half, the dissertation uses the evidence of two early fifteenth-century collections of religious texts to demonstrate how lay readers could and did fit their reading material around their own concerns and interests, and that these interests could be extremely diverse. Following Nichols and Wenzel's approach of studying the "whole book," I argue that by choosing to read certain texts together, readers were able to fundamentally alter the interpretation of those texts. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates connections between contemporaneous works which have rarely been dealt with together because of the tendency to divide medieval religious literature into discrete generic categories ("devotional," "mystic," "pastoral") or discrete doctrinal categories ("Lollard," "orthodox"). Its discussion of religious texts and manuscripts exposes the inadequacy of such categories given the depth, complexity, and range of religious opinion in late medieval England.

This thesis examines the history of the British novel from 1790 to 1814, arguing that the struggle for the authority of history that took place over the course of the French Revolution debate is foundational to understanding the novel's development in the period. In the political tracts of the 1790s, the Revolution controversy begins as a representational contest over the status of one historical moment (1688) and then escalates into a broad ideological war over the significance of the past for the present and future. The era's various novelistic forms participate in this ideological war, with Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels, for instance, representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda, respectively. As the Revolution crisis recedes at the turn of the century, new forms of the novel emerge with new agendas, but historical representation---largely the legacy of the 1790s' novel---remains as an increasingly prevalent feature of the genre. The representation of history in the novel, I argue, is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the Revolution debate, is appropriated for other (often related) causes, and ultimately develops into a stable, non-partisan, aestheticised feature of the form. The novel's transformations in the 1790s, 1800s, and early 1810s thus help to establish the conditions for the emergence of the historical novel as it was first realised in Walter Scott's Waverley (1814). Chapter 1 reviews the political tracts of prominent contributors to the Revolution debate such as Edmund Burke, Richard Price, James Mackintosh, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, demonstrating the widespread engagement with history characteristic of the period and the distinctive historical paradigms reformers and loyalists invoke in support of their political positions. Chapters 2 and 3 examine how the historical discourses of the 1790s shape the anti-Jacobin and Jacobin novel, respectively. Using Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and Jane West as its primary examples, chapter 2 argues that the antiJacobin novel draws heavily on Burkean historical discourse to develop a variety of tactics---including the representation of select historical moments and conscious attempts to "historicise" their works---whose goal is to characterise the reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical accretion. Turning to Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth as its principal examples, chapter 3 shows how reformist novels appeal to the period's discourses of history to respond in kind, contesting Burke's logic by consciously travestying his tropes and arguments, by undermining and then re-defining the category of history, and by depicting in detail historical moments that challenge the Burkean paradigm. Investigating the work of Jane Porter, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Walter Scott, chapter 4 demonstrates how early historical forms of the novel and, ultimately, the historical novel as it was realised by Scott emerge, in part, out of the legacy of the political novels of the 1790s. It argues that the novel experiences a generic shift in the early nineteenth century---one marked by continuity, re-deployment, and departure--whereby the political impetus for historical representation is ultimately displaced by aesthetic and, crucially, historicist concerns.

"Women and the City in Novels of the Romantic Period" investigates how women writers used the novel to explore a dynamic relationship between femininity and urban space. To provide an historical context, the thesis begins by summarizing contemporary accounts of how rapid urbanisation affected the lives of middle-class women. These records suggest what is also reflected in fiction of the period: by careful negotiation of social codes, women were able to find considerable latitude in the city for experimenting with different kinds of femininity. Turning next to selected novels of the Scottish writer Mary Brunton and Jane Austen, the thesis examines the evolution of a distinctive version of "domestic woman" shaped by urban influences. In Brunton's work, this new figure serves as a mediator between traditional and modern economies; in Austen's novel, the heroine unsettles images of the gentry estate as stable, enclosed and enduring. Next, the thesis identifies in the prose works and fiction of Mary Robinson, the Countess of Blessington, Elizabeth Inchbald and Elizabeth Hamilton, the presence of a "semi-detached flaneuse," a trope encapsulating feminine urban experiences. Taking pleasure in being part of the London scene, the flaneuse also justifies her presence in the city through the reformative functions she undertakes. Finally, the thesis looks at three London novels by Maria Edgeworth which depict heroines training themselves to take part in the political life of the nation by engaging in public sphere critical discourses. Moving into the foreground the largely overlooked relationship of women and the city, this dissertation shows that women's fiction developed new constructions of femininity, uniting the nurturing values of the ideal domestic woman with the rationality and agency born of modern urban experience. The novel of sentiment thus emerges as more layered and complex than often charged, capable of confronting large themes and registering the transition of Britain from a homogeneous, settled, rural society to a diverse, mobile urban one.

This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman's place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis. My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women's autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.

This thesis examines the works of five Irish-born writers who came to Canada between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Donnchadh Ruadh MacConmara, Isaac Weld Junior, Thomas Moore, Anna Brownell Jameson, and Adam Kidd. Collectively, these writers helped formulate, establish, and solidify impressions of the eventual Dominion. In turn, they played an invaluable role in encouraging immigration to Canada by providing would-be emigrants with valuable insight and information that would aid in their impending decision about where to seek a new home once they crossed the Atlantic: America or Canada. Essential to their respective experiences was the discovery that Canada could offer not only respite from the instability sweeping the British Isles but also that it was superior to the American Republic. To illustrate this point, the Dantean concepts of inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso, first suggested in Weld's work, are equated with America, Canada, and the Old World respectively. This paradigm is used both to conceptualize and assess the New World in relation to the Old, to compare Canada and America invidiously, as well as to encourage immigration to the former and divertit from the latter. In addition to providing a survey of the heretofore unrecognized contribution of five foundational Irish writers to the beginnings of Canadian literature, the thesis also exposes and challenges the early and present-day critical reception of their respective works in reviews and criticism that frequently propagate unfavourable stereotypes of the Irish. Its aim is partly to counter these falsely imposed myths and harmful stereotypes by drawing attention to the unsound practices of many biographers and critics.