My thesis explores language policy and practice in the history of the people of Gibraltar between 1940 and 1985. This period covers the wartime Evacuation and the Spanish border restrictions and closure, and it is also fundamental in the emergence of Gibraltarian identity and democratic rights. My contention is that these developments were facilitated by growing accessibility to the English language. From being largely the preserve of the colonial establishment and the elite, it emerged as pre-eminent in official use, the media and culture, and higher oral registers. This change was hastened by the Evacuation, which increased awareness of the need for English. The Clifford Report of 1944 reformed the whole education system and gave a central role to English. Clifford, Gibraltar’s Colonial Secretary, and indeed educationalists at the Colonial Office, proved themselves far more enlightened than their governing counterparts in Gibraltar. Their reform greatly contributed to political development in the following decades. With the Spanish border closure, the English language and the sense of attachment to Britain gained further consolidation, co-existing with the move away from overt colonialism. In my examination of language behaviour in Gibraltar, including bilingualism and the use of Spanish, interview material supplements written sources.

The francophone bande dessinée came of age in the late twentieth century, earning the title of “Ninth Art” and becoming increasingly accepted as a focus of critical discussion and academic analysis. However, despite this impressive evolution, the representation of women in the bande dessinée remains vastly understudied. This thesis thus aims to provide a first step in the analysis of female characters as a distinct phenomenon within the Ninth Art. It considers the evolution of female depiction throughout the twentieth-century medium and beyond, and provides close studies of specific female characters, the results of which are synthesised to present comparative conclusions relating to women in the bande dessinée as a whole. The historical and formal specificity of the medium is studied in relation to female representation to determine what may (or may not be) particular to the depiction of women in the bande dessinée. As a medium that is overwhelmingly male-dominated in terms of creation as well as representation, the differing relations to BD production between genders, both historically and socially, are represented within this thesis in a division of chapters examining female representation by men and by women artists. The first and second chapters consider respectively the depiction of female primary and secondary figures created by men in the medium, studying specific character examples and reflecting on the varying ways of looking at women drawn into different roles. The third and final chapter analyses the representation of women figures by women artists, focusing on how the specificity of the medium may contribute to female depiction outside of dominant modes of production and representation. Proposed next steps for continuing research on the representation of women in the bande dessinée form the conclusion to this work.

This thesis proposes a comparative study of some imaginative responses to the Great War in English and French writing. The principal works discussed range from Peguy's anticipation of the war in his poem Eve (1913) to David Jones's recreative memory of it in his poem In Parenthesis (1937). The survey is limited to British and French works, and does not include American and colonial contributions, or the war-writings of other combatant countries. The thesis examines the various ways in which twelve authors - six English and six French - developed and expressed their individual response to the Great War. It is not based on an imaginary anthology of the dozen best war-writings. The twelve examples have been chosen to illustrate and cover as wide a range as possible of the ways the historical experience could be met and interpreted in literature. They include writings by civilians, and by commissioned and non-commissioned soldiers; narrative and discursive prose, essays, letters, and verse. The first chapter considers the war-writings of Rupert Brooke, H. G. Wells and T. E. Hulme; and the second chapter discusses the work of Charles Peguy, Henri Barbusse and Jacques Vache. Chapter 3 is concerned with three novels, by Jean Cocteau, Richard Aldington, and Proust. In the second half of the work, a chapter each is given to Wilfred Owen, Guillaume Apollinaire and David Jones. War-writings by definition include history, and even those most innocent of a propaganda intention are likely to betray an interpretation of history, as well as having some documentary value and, at a less visible level, enacting a private drama. The literature of the Great War, considered as a sub-genre, is the product both of shared and of individual, intimate experience. The purpose of this study has been to suggest the variety of possible literary responses to the Great War; to discover what these responses are likely to have in common, and thus to offer a sketch-map of the topography of the 1914-1918 war in English and French writing; and, by locating these works in a context of European literature as well as of world history, to allow each text discussed reciprocally to illuminate and criticise the others.

My thesis seeks to challenge the existing understanding of the relationship between Romanticism and Post-Modernism in order to put into question the traditional historiographical view of the division of literary history into a series of discrete epochs, each one consecutive to the passing away of the other. My methodology devolves upon a close reading and analysis of the work of three writers and philosophers: the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the 'Post-Modern' French feminist writer Helene Cixous and the 'Romantic' philosopher and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through my examination of the oeuvres of these three writers I seek to demonstrate that, in the domain of subjectivity, there is a strong commonality of approach to the question of the construction of the subject in despite of the gulf of time that separates them. In this way I demonstrate that the historiographical approach, which involves the fissuring of the works of writers and philosophers into discrete historical events, is fundamentally susceptible of being put into question.

As an output of the HERA Travelling Texts project, created with the aim of uncovering the realities of women’s literary culture on the fringes of Europe during the long nineteenth century, this study was conceptualised to find out more about the networks of women writers in Spain around 1900, using the digitised corpuses of contemporaneous periodicals as the primary source material. Each chapter of the study centres on a particular periodical, which is used as the starting point for the community of writers and readers, both real and imagined. This thesis looks at the realities of the literary culture for creative women in the late nineteenth century-early twentieth century, exploring the strategies used by women (and men) to support each other in their literary endeavours, how they took inspiration and courage from each other, how they promoted their own names, and how they were received by wider society. The study will also focus on the transnational nature of this literary culture, looking at how women of different nations influenced each other’s work, with a view to understanding more about how cultural change takes place. Finally, this thesis hopes to persuade the reader that the periodical is a rich and under-utilised resource for discovering more about the lives of women writers and their network of relationships.

This thesis considers some of those who were killed in politically-motivated attacks, often referred to as ‘terrorism’, which took place during Italy’s anni di piombo. Six works written by victims’ children will be used as a lens through which to examine the collective memory and the victims’ place therein. In recent years, there has been a shift in the way that this period of Italian history - the anni di piombo – has been remembered. Where previously the perpetrators of the violence of those years dominated public discourse, in the last decade the principal narrative has become more victim-centred. The biographical works written by victims’ children have inevitably contributed to this change in the memory narrative. The techniques employed in their writing in order to change the existing public image of their fathers will be analysed in this thesis, along with certain themes that recur throughout the six works and broader victim-centred discussion of this period. Analysis begins with a thorough outline of the political and historical context of the anni di piombo, including case studies of two of the most famous victims of this period and a consideration of the written works of some of the former terrorists. Following this preliminary contextualisation, each of the six books and their authors will be studied in detail to provide a foundation for the analysis contained in the final three chapters. The themes examined in the second half of the thesis are second-generation writing, forgiveness and commemoration. Using these themes as a framework, a rigorous investigation of the place that the victims hold in collective memory; the role their children’s writing has played in shaping and maintaining their public image and the longer-term impact that these changes can be seen to have had within a broader societal and political perspective is undertaken. On the basis of this study, it is evident that the victims’ place in the collective memory of the anni di piombo has changed dramatically since that period of violence concluded. The victims’ children have been very significant in enacting this change and their writing has placed them in a position from which they can continue to exert influence and promote a victim-centred approach to history.

This history of Dostoevsky’s reception in France draws from critical responses, translation analysis, and the comparative analysis of adaptations as well as intertextual dialogues between fictional, critical and philosophical texts. It begins from the earliest translations and critical accounts of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s seminal moralist reading. It then traces modernist responses and adaptations from the turn of the century to the twenties. Existential readings and re-translations dating from the arrival of émigré critics and religious philosophers in the wake of the Russian Revolution are examined, assessing the contribution of these émigré readings to emerging existential readings and movements in France. Finally, French existentialist fiction is analysed in terms of its intertextual dialogue with Dostoevsky’s work and with speculative and critical writings of French existentialist thinkers on and around the philosophical reflections expressed in Dostoevsky’s fiction. By following specifically the existential and existentialist branches of Dostoevsky’s French reception, an overlooked aspect of the history of French, Russian and European existentialisms comes to the fore, reframed within a pivotal period in the history of European intercultural exchange, and of transmodal literary and philosophical discourse.

This thesis examines the syntax of the sentence and the style of three of Alberto Arbasino’s early works: Le piccole vacanze (1957), Il ragazzo perduto (1959) and Fratelli d’Italia (1963). The period in which these works were written and published was one of great linguistic changes, with Italian starting to become the language spoken by the majority of the population and the consequent formation of a new variety, the italiano dell’uso medio. This social evolution has also consequences for the language of narrative: whereas some authors embrace the lingua media and a clear, communicative style (stile semplice), others reject it and opt for linguistic experimentation. Although Arbasino is typically placed in this second slant of narrative writing, one cannot so easily assign him to a group or stream, since from the beginning of his career he developed a personal poetics influenced by modernist writers, as well as his own ideas on language and style. The aims of this study are first of all to chart the birth and diachronic evolution of Arbasino’s style, and evaluate the influence of his syntactic choices on it. Then investigate how the syntax of each work compares to the lines of development of contemporary Italian and to the language of contemporary narrative. My analysis begins with a comprehensive outline of the features of contemporary Italian and of the styles of writing in post-war narrative, ending with a focus on the character of Arbasino’s poetics and ideas on language and style in the decade 1954-1964. A brief chapter then illustrates the methodology used, based on quantitative analysis of syntactic aspects, and clarifies terminology. Thereafter, the core of the thesis is composed of three case studies that examine thoroughly the syntax of the sentence and other important syntactic devices of the three works separately, comparing data with corpora of Italian and with studies on narrative language. Finally, a concluding chapter highlights the lines of development of syntax and style in the three works. On the basis of this research, it is clear that the syntax of the sentence places Arbasino among experimental writers tending to break with the linguistic standard. Moreover, Arbasino’s syntactic choices in the three works reflect an increasing distance from traditional literary modes of representation and the progressive affirmation of his own literary project, founded in the poetics of realismo critico.

The thesis regards the extraordinary power of Sappho in the 1860s as resulting in a form of “Sapphic Possession” which laid hold on Swinburne, shaped his verse, produced a provocative new poetics, and which accounted for a critical reception of his work that was both hostile and enthralled. Using biographical material and Freudian psychology, I show how Swinburne became attracted to Sappho and came to rely on her as a substitute mistress and particular kind of muse, and I demonstrate the pre-eminence of the Sapphic presence in Poems and Ballads: 1, as a dominant female muse who exacts peculiar sacrifices from the poet of subjection, necrophilia, and even a form of “death” in the loss of his own personality; as a result, he is finally reduced to acting as the muse’s mouthpiece, a state akin to that of Pythia or Sibyl. Verse written under such duress instigates a new poetics where the demands and constructs of the muse produce a sublime composed of aberrance, fracture and the darkness of myth. To explicate this argument I read Poems and Ballads: 1 through carnival, a form of Bacchanal or Sapphic Komos which has the effect of blurring the boundaries between life and lyric, and which demands a joyous and reciprocal response from its readers, in which they must acknowledge their own attraction to the Sapphic sublime.

‘The Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Carlyle’s French Revolution’ examines the work of Thomas Carlyle as a crucial aesthetic intervention in the modern reception of the French Revolution in Europe. It interrogates the prevalent critical constructions of Carlyle’s work and finds them to proceed predominantly from the Whig historical agenda, structured around such key nineteenth-century concepts as utilitarianism and civilisational and moral progress. Within this critical framework, Carlyle’s largely conservative cultural stance and Christian spirituality are hardly allowed any creative potential and, ever since the famous fabrication of James Anthony Froude who depicted Carlyle as ‘a Calvinist without the theology’, they have been perceived as artistically-stunted, irrational, and out of touch with the nineteenth-century political, social and cultural realities. In examining Carlyle’s involvement with German Romanticism on the one hand, and with contemporary British periodical press on the other, this thesis proposes a more comprehensive reading of Carlyle’s politics, aesthetics and spirituality in an attempt to represent his radically open, catholic and indeed cosmopolitan artistic agenda which taps into the Scottish Enlightenment concept of rationality, Calvinist scepticism towards nineteenth-century progressivism and acute perception of evil in this world, and post-Burkean Romantic aesthetics of the sublime. We chart the aesthetic movement from Carlyle’s early dialogue with Schiller and Goethe to ‘The Diamond Necklace’, Carlyle’s first artistic rendition of the French pre-revolutionary scene, delivered as a (Gothic) moral tale and anticipating The French Revolution (a historical work that uniquely employs the Gothic genre within historical narrative, arguably unparalleled in British post-Burkean Romanticism). The critical reception of The French Revolution in Britain is examined, with special attention paid to the highly unfavourable review by Herman Merivale in The Edinburgh Review, in order to challenge the Whig line in Carlylean criticism and to expose the fundamental artistic, political and moral disagreement between Carlyle and Merivale. Carlyle’s Calvinist stance sees both Merivale’s and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s facile exorcism of the categories of good and evil from their historical agendas as irrational given the recent French terror (which, in Carlyle’s reading, released its demons precisely through such a botched ethical deal). Similarly, I highlight Carlyle’s close dialogue with John Stuart Mill both in their correspondence, and in the publications in the London and Westminster Review, while I argue that this intellectual exchange is crucial for the reading of The French Revolution as a text challenging Mill’s utilitarianism, and written within the institutional framework of the contemporary periodical press. Finally, Carlyle is seen to make capital of the concepts of Gothic and sublime, introduced by Edmund Burke and popularised by the Anti-Jacobin Review in Britain, by applying them directly to the French mob in search of a new spiritual tongue for his times (a move that even a nineteenth-century radical liberal thinker such as Mill sees as politically, if not artistically, far too subversive and revolutionary). Creative non-conclusiveness and playful deconstruction of the prevalent post-revolutionary narratives of 1789 characterise Carlyle’s deeply spiritual and artistically-sophisticated text, which, in an orthodox Christian reading, rejoices in the messy, dark and complex residue of human history, through which Christian providence acts in mysterious and unexpected ways that do not allow for any simple, de-mythologised reading.