My thesis considers the profound effect of the all-pervading late Eighteenth-Century revolutionary climate on the evolving religious and political views of the young Coleridge, and their expression through his published works from 1794-1800. I consider how Coleridge‘s continuing use of religious imagery evolved, following his transition from the established tradition of Dissenting religion, towards a more personal form of Dissent, grounded in Pantheism. Chapter One considers how Coleridge‘s sonnets, lectures and periodical (The Watchman) of 1794-5 articulated his developing radical political and Dissenting religious views. Fundamental to Coleridge‘s views was a notion of the Establishment Anglican Church as a hollow Christian sham, needing a spiritually renewed form of religion to bring it back to God. Chapter Two compares Religious Musings and Fears in Solitude, examining how Coleridge‘s political and religious views matured in the intervening four years. I also focus on iconic and archetypal figures featured in The Wanderings of Cain, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Christabel. A key figure is the Wanderer, who appeared in different guises in Coleridge‘s works of this period. I also examine the protean nature of Geraldine, from Christabel, as a rare female manifestation of the Wanderer, as well as the iconic and archetypal guises of serpent, Lamia, Lilith, and succubus. Chapter Three considers Coleridge‘s exploration of the relationship between power, politics, and religion, in his translation of Schiller‘s Wallenstein trilogy, through a comparison of Wallenstein and the archetypal figures of Satan and Faust. I consider how Coleridge has used the vehicle of translation as a creative space, allowing him to articulate and develop his changing religious and political opinions. The notion of translation as creation has not previously been considered. Chapter Four examines Coleridge‘s influence on second-generation Romantic Period writers, specifically Mary Shelley. I discuss the evidence for Coleridge‘s influence on her novels and short stories, also drawing attention to her religious and political expression in microcosm, compared with Coleridge‘s macrocosmic political views.

'Never Forget Your First' presents the story of Gillian - a young woman who, from a young age, expresses an attraction to violence. Following an encounter with her father - in the course of which he suffers a fatal injury - Gillian begins her journey towards her first murder. Never Forget Your First aims to illustrate how contemporary authors can deviate from narrative norms in regard to representing female violence. Complementary to this, the critical portion of this thesis, Violent Women: Representations of Female Violence in Muriel Spark's 'The Driver's Seat', Virginie Despentes's 'Baise-Moi', Gillian Flynn's 'Gone Girl', and C.S. Barnes's 'Never Forget Your First', discusses how depictions of female violence in fiction remain heavily gendered. Through an analysis of three novels- Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970), Virginie Despentes's Baise-Moi, trans. by Bruce Benderson (1993), and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012)- this essay aims to highlight that even innovative narratives of female violence remain, to some extent, governed by gendered expectations. This analysis also draws on feminist theory, above all on Betty Friedan's and Judith Butler's work. The critical essay highlights problems with the gendered representation of violence in fiction and calls for a revision of literary tropes governing the representation of violence.

This study brings together for the first time four non-canonical memoirs written by women from various backgrounds who emigrated from Germany to the United States in the early post-war years and whose texts were published in English in the United States between 2004 and 2011: Irmgard Powell, 'Don't Let Them See You Cry: Overcoming a Nazi Childhood' (2008); lrmgard A. Hunt, 'On Hitler 's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood' (2005); Maria Ritter, 'Return to Dresden' (2004); Sabina de Werth Neu, 'A Long Silence: Memories of a German Refugee Child 1941-1958' (2011). The memoirs chosen for this study were written by women who were born in Germany between 1932 and 1941 . These memoirs address an American readership and entered the American public sphere via the popularity of the contemporary misery memoir. I demonstrate how the trope of the innocent child, articulations of citizenship and confessions to guilt and shame construct the necessary framework of German culpability for the Nazi past to enable a testimony to the victimhood of the protagonists, their families and, in part, the wider German population. The memoirs of childhood are, therefore, expressions of personal, collective and transnational memory. This study contributes not only to memory and literary studies but also to a historiography of National Socialism that includes diverse individual stories from the bottom up, of women belonging to the Kriegskinder generation who now live in the United States.

This thesis is the first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother in thirty years. Responding to a shortfall in Eliot studies in understanding the true importance of Eliot’s poet-mother, Charlotte, to his life and works, it rethinks Eliot’s ambivalence towards women in the context of mother-son ambivalence, and shows his search for belief and love as converging with a developing maternal poetics. Utilising the work of feminist and psychoanalytic thinkers seeking to reinstate the mother against Oedipal models of masculinity, it looks at Eliot’s changing representations and articulations of the mother/mother-child relationship—from his earliest writings to the later plays. Particular focus is given to mid-career works: ‘Ash-Wednesday’, ‘Marina’, ‘Coriolan’ and The Family Reunion. Drawing on newly available materials, this thesis emphasises Charlotte’s death as the decisive juncture marking both Eliot’s New Life and the apotheosis of the feminine symbolised in ‘Ash-Wednesday’. Central to this proposition is a new concept of maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. This thesis breaks new ground revealing the role of the mother and the dynamics of mother-son ambivalence to be far more complicated, enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot’s personal, religious and poetic development than was previously acknowledged.

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This thesis interrogates various accounts of the relationship between the biological and social. Often the biological is conceptualised as built upon, or originating from, the foundation of the social (or vice versa). I suggest an alternative approach, using various resources and approaches from the sciences and from social theories, to reconceptualise the biological and social as always already entangled. I develop an account of the entanglement of the biological and social that also entangles the ontological and epistemological, matter and meaning. I begin by exploring feminism and sociobiology in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly feminist standpoint and postmodernist epistemologies. Building on this, and developing my approach (particularly in terms of conceptualising material and more-than-human agency), I explore queer and deconstructive approaches to sexuality alongside the Human Genome Project and genetic determinism in the 1990s, and more recent theories of kinship from gender and sexuality studies alongside insights from animal studies and critical posthumanisms. Finally, I interrupt this trajectory, suggesting that the so far uninterrogated opposition of living/non-living that structures biological science is threatened by the liminal status of viruses. More importantly, people living with viruses can become liminal in relation to this and other binary oppositions, with consequences for their health and ability to live well. I propose an approach to living well that is both ecological and queer; connections, symbioses and entanglements are crucial throughout. I argue that attention to the entanglement of the biological and social offers a way of interrogating narratives of biological determinism and for countering the effects of patriarchy and heteronormativity in the theory and practice of science. Furthermore, this approach can offer ways of rethinking the production of scientific knowledge and the effects this has on the possibility of living well as biopolitical citizens in the more-than-human world.

Cultural materialism has become an influential discipline in recent years, particularly so in 'Renaissance' studies, but also more generally in 'English', as well as departments defined as practising 'cultural' or 'communications' studies. The phrase is usually linked with the name of Raymond Williams, but a cursory examination of Williams's own work quickly establishes that it is a phrase he rarely uses, and only schematically attempts to define. The thesis therefore takes the form of an investigation into the way cultural materialism has come to be understood, by examining in detail the trajectory of Raymond Williams's theoretical development, and how his own engagement with various theoretical positions has helped to set 'limits' on the meaning of cultural materialism. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with some of Williams's earliest work, particularly Reading and Criticism, as a way of investigating how reasonable it is to tag him as a 'Left-Leavisite', arguing that Leavis's undoubted influence is resisted (though not entirely rejected) from a very early stage. The first chapter considers in detail Leavis's work at Cambridge, the influence of Eliot, and the significance of the 'Organic Community'. Chapter 2, which is based around a comparative analysis of Williams's and Leavis's readings of Dickens, argues that Williams rejects the 'organic community' in favour of his 'knowable community'. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with specific 'theoretical' issues: the first, based around a reading of Terry Eagleton's critique of Williams's use of the Marxist metaphor of 'base and superstructure', shows some of the problems which arise from Williams's cultural model, as well as suggesting refinements; the second deals with the influence of Volosinov's theories on Williams. Chapter 6 comes out of Williams's readings of the 'Country-House' poems in The Country and the City, showing how his practice of literary criticism relies on an acceptance of 'ideology' apparently denied in his more 'theoretical' writings. This analysis is extended as a result of investigations into the 'De L'Isle' manuscripts relating to the Penshurst estate. Chapter 7 argues that it is possible to see the work of Fredric Jameson as developing Williams's cultural materialism into Jameson's debates on postmodernism. In the Introduction and Conclusion, I have taken the opportunity to look briefly at the activity of cultural materialism as it has developed since Raymond Williams's death in 1988. The Introduction emphasizes what I see to be important methodological differences between 'cultural materialism' and 'new historicism'; the Conclusion deals with the continuing debate over the value of a cultural materialist approach by considering the 'appropriation' of Shakespeare.

The Early Modern Irish recension of the tale relating Cú Chulainn’s death, Oidheadh Con Culainn, has received comparatively little scholarly attention, especially compared with its Early Irish counterpart, Aided Con Culainn. Consequently, little is known about the textual transmission and manuscript tradition of the Early Modern Irish tale. The present thesis seeks to rectify this and give a more accurate view and preliminary analysis of the extant manuscripts, concentrating on the manuscripts that date to before the 19th century. A core element of this thesis is a draft catalogue of these pre-19th-century manuscripts. Taking advantage of the tale’s prosimetric structure, it will be argued and demonstrated that it is possible to classify the manuscripts of Oidheadh Con Culainn into distinct groups. Within the extant manuscripts preserving the tale we can identify a number of versions of it, differing most notably in the poetry that they contain. The classification of the manuscripts into groups can be established on the basis of the poetry that a version of the tale contains; the emerging groups thus established can be used to comment on the transmission of the tale. In order to corroborate the argument for the manuscript groups, we will explore a number of aspects of the text and the manuscripts, such as textual comparisons on both intra- and inter-group levels, possible relations (e.g. geographical) of the scribes, linguistic and metrical variations, the ‘rhetorics’, and different versions of the tale written by the same scribe. The thesis will further investigate the most famous poem from the text, Laoidh na gCeann (‘The Lay of the Heads’), in order to establish to what extent the evidence from the poem can be used to add to our understanding of the transmission of the overall tale.

This thesis compares the reproduction of violence in the fictional writings of two contemporary Martinican authors, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. While existing scholarship provides significant examinations of both authors individually, this study builds on these foundations to carry out the first single extensive comparison of Chamoiseau and Confiant’s novels. Chamoiseau and Confiant’s literary and political movement of créolité has been the basis of much critical attention in recent years but the theme of the representation of violence in their novels remains relatively unexplored. This thesis explores how – and even whether – fiction can be a way of coming to terms with the brutal violence of their past. This study therefore examines – through close textual analysis – the literary strategies employed by the authors in their representation of the origins of the Antilles in order to address the painful, difficult issues arising out of these origins. In its comparative approach to the authors and in its focus on the reproduction of violence, this study makes two original contributions to the study of Antillean literature. In the Introduction, I outline the tensions surrounding the process of writing in the Antilles. Within this specific historical context the figure of the writer – real or imaginary – becomes a complex and difficult one, as it is clear that the violence of the colonial past continues to affect the authors and their writing. In the first chapter, I therefore return to those same brutal origins of the Antilles, examining how they are constructed in the author’s fiction. Chamoiseau and Confiant imply that the violence of the past acts as a mechanism of oppression. Drawing on colonial theory, the next chapter explores closely how this mechanism is represented in the author’s fictional work as a repetition of the original violence and one that continues to structure Antillena society, and from which no escape seems possible.

Writers, mental scientists and spiritualists at the fin-de-siècle were haunted by their impossible desire to contain the inchoate elements of the supernatural within the fixity of print. By examining technologies of writing such as the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, different genres and late nineteenth-century technologies of mental science, this thesis will show that despite writers’ attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural, these tools are incomplete and the supernatural remains only a partially legible script. In addition, the thesis examines how both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind problematised agency. Is the author dictating to the typewriting machine, or is the machine the secret dictator regulating the author’s stylistic choices? Is the spirit at the séance ghostwriting the text? Issues of uncanny authorship are explored in the first chapter, in particular through a close reading of Henry James’s ‘The Private Life’ (1891). The uncanny effects of new technology on the body are also explored in James’s ‘In the Cage’ (1898), and Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ (1901). Chapter Two takes the example of Doyle and how he used the photograph as a technology to attempt to capture the supernatural. Chapter Three looks at mesmerism as a technology of the mind. Chapter Four indicates that traditional notions of Victorian womanhood, as well as writings on mental science, implied that women themselves were ghostly. Chapter Five turns to Vernon Lee, for whom the ghost story blurs literary genres, making indistinct fiction and non-fiction, ghost story and critical essay. Chapter Six returns to a discussion of the ways in which paranormal perception inspires women writers. An examination of Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) implies that New Woman writers find the altered states they access in their writing both ecstatic and agonising. A re-examination of the uncanny effects of technology through a close reading of Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) shows that in New Woman fiction, women have the freedom to engage with writing technologies like the typewriter either actively or passively.