This thesis attempts to trace the development of two kinds of humorous sensibility in the fiction of the period 1800-1850, and to analyse the tensions between them. Humour as inherited from the eighteenth century contained diverse and sometimes contradictory elements which were strongly developed in the Romantic period, so nineteenth century humour could recommend an ideal individual morality, express social optimism, and hold out the hope of social reconciliation; yet at the same time it could subversively celebrate individual autonomy at the expense of social and moral concerns, and transform reality through ironic perspectives or grotesque forms. Edgeworth used the humorous character for didactic social purposes in her Irish novels; Scott, however, made his humorous characters the main imaginative embodiments of the social themes of his Scottish novels, maintaining a balance between didactic function and individual idiosyncrasy, a balance sustained by Galt in his novels about local history. But sceptical tendencies appeared: Austen warned that the humorous character was a threat to social order; Peacock's humorous characters were finally overwhelmed by a rancorous satirical spirit; and in Don Ju an, Byron used a version of Romantic Irony to undermine moral assertion. Romantic theories of humour were untouched by any taint of scepticism; such theories stressed the moral function of the humorous sensibility, seeing it as a genial and reconciling force based on love for mankind (the subversive power of the grotesque mode was viewed with suspicion); and Sartor Resartus embodied the highest moral and metaphysical possibilities of the humorous imagination. Beyond this, however, Thackeray's development of ironical perspectives further undermiined humour's positive and optimistic tendencies; and in Dickens's early novels there is a profound tension between the moral and social tendencies of the humour, and the increasingly anarchic, grotesque directions it takes. Eliot rejected the egotistical, ironic . and grotesque possibilities of humour, instead seeing moral improvement and social reconciliation as a matter of coming to terms with unattractive reality.

This thesis is a study of the Gothic fiction of Sabine Baring-Gould (1834- 1924), with particular attention given to Baring-Gould’s roles as squire and parson. I have chosen to analyze two of Baring-Gould’s Gothic works, the novel Mehalah (1880) and the novella Margery of Quether (1884), both which allow a particularly profitable examination of the influence of Baring-Gould’s roles on his fiction. In studying these texts I apply my theory of Gothic fiction as a particularly modern genre built upon a "Gothic threshold," a meeting point of extreme opposites which ambivalently contrasts and merges the categories of the modern and the medieval. In the first chapter I describe how Baring-Gould’s unique Hegelian-influenced Tractarian philosophy influenced his creation of the dialectical setting of Mehalah. I argue that because of this influence Mehalah should be recognized as a significant contribution to the literature of the Oxford Movement. In the second chapter I argue that Mehalah’s historical setting in the time of the French Revolution and the influence of Wuthering Heights reinforce Mehalah’s use of the “Gothic threshold” structure and contribute to its theme of ambivalent progress. In the third chapter I discuss the influence of Baring-Gould’s sermon-writing on Mehalah and consider connections between Baring-Gould’s role as parson and the novel’s botched marriage theme. In the final chapter I discuss Margery of Quether as an innovation in the Gothic and vampire tradition as perhaps the only Gothic work that directly dramatizes the Land Law debate and presents that debate as a "Gothic" contest. I argue that Margery channels Baring-Gould’s tensions as a landowner. In the conclusion I argue that Mehalah and Margery display Baring-Gould’s technique of constructing miniature Gothic battles that relate to larger confrontations, and that the ultimate terror presented in these works is the conclusion of the battle between ancient and modern forces.

'Dissembling', derived from courtiers' practice of sprezzatura. has the rhetorical ability to present one ostensible meaning/intention while simultaneously harbouring another meaning/intention. In this thesis, I suggest that three Elizabethan, writers - Lyly, Greene, and Shakespeare have selected this deceptive act as a means to amplify their writing. Lyly exerts the art of dissembling with the intention of enriching his writing verbally. The art enables him to write fiction of love, while he presents his works as either didactic treatises or encomiastic writings. As far as Greene's art of dissembling is concerned, it is a class-conscious one. In his courtly love romances, Greene explores both strengths and weaknesses of women as a way of reflecting his interest in both of the two different social positions of courtiers and shepherds. In his social pamphlets where he depicts middle-class traders in the framework of the prodigal son story, Greene attempts to marry the uneducated with the learned. Greene's tries at theatrical devices with the intention of lifting the boundary between reality and illusion in his plays help Shakespeare to gain an insight into the attainment of dramatic moments in his plays. Shakespeare, by dint of his art of dissembling, takes to multiplying the dissembling of the courtly and the lowly, the elite and the non-elite, reality and illusion which Greene has achieved throughout his career. In Shakespeare's good hands, Greene's art of dissembling is enriched by a movement towards 'bafflement' in both poetic and dramatic terms. An exploration of the way in which the art of dissembling is handed down from Lyly through Greene to Shakespeare encourages us to reconsider a connection between courtly culture and popular culture, the significance of Greene on the Elizabethan literary scene, a most neglected of the major Elizabethan writers, and the relationship of Shakespeare to Greene.

This thesis analyses the representations of North America in English travel narratives between the years 1607-1660. Texts in both print and manuscript format are examined to discover how authors described the geography, climate, landscape, flora and fauna of America, as well as the settlements established there by the English. The thesis is mostly concerned with literature concerning Virginia and New England, although the settlements of Newfoundland, Maine and Maryland are also briefly mentioned. The first chapter describes the methodology of the thesis and locates its place alongside the existing literature. A chapter explaining the pre-history of English involvement in North America in the reign of Elizabeth I follows. Chapter Three describes the connection between printing and adventuring on which the thesis is predicted, explaining how the authors’ intentions and experiences affected their portrayal of the New World. The ways in which authors understood the geography and climate of America are explored in Chapter Four, including the influence of European thinking and the writers’ experiences in America itself. The landscape, including rivers, mountains and forests are examined next in chapter five, with a special focus on the Englishmen’s subduing of the landscape and their reactions to its potential. Chapters Six and Seven deal with the flora and fauna of the New World, tracing how the settlers’ initial high hopes of using the diversity of wildlife they encountered gave way to the realisation that familiar crops and animals imported from Europe would prove more useful than those found locally, with a few notable exceptions, such as tobacco. Chapters Eight and Nine analyse the changing representations of the English settlements themselves, by comparing the English experiences in Virginia and those of New England. Again, initial hopes give way to an acceptance of a less idealistic vision for the plantations. Chapter Ten brings the focus of the thesis back to England, asking how printed information about the New World was transmitted around the country by various practitioners of the printing trade, and who was able to digest this information. The representation of America, not only in travel narratives, but also in other forms of literature such as ballads, poetry and plays, are reviewed more broadly in chapter eleven, and an attempt is made to define the responses of individual and collective readers to the news from the New World that they gathered. In its conclusion, the thesis explores the influence of this literature on the new scientific thinking and on England’s relationship with her colonies.

This thesis focuses on the images of Oman in British travel writing from 1800 to 1970. In texts that vary from travel accounts to sailors’ memoirs, complete travelogues, autobiographies, and letters, it looks at British representations of Oman as a place, people, and culture. It argues that these writings are heterogeneous and discontinuous throughout the periods under consideration. Offering diverse voices from British travellers, this thesis challenges Edward Said’s project in Orientalism (1978) which looks to Western discourse on the Middle East homogenisingly as Eurocentric and hostile. Chapter one explores and discusses the current Orientalist debate suggesting alternatives to the dilemma of Orientalism and providing a framework for the arguments in the ensuing chapters. Chapter two outlines the historical Omani-British relations, and examines the travel accounts and memoirs written by several British merchants and sailors who stopped in Muscat and other Omani coastal cities during their route from Britain to India and vice versa in the nineteenth century. Chapter three is concerned with the works of travellers who penetrated the Interior of Oman. James Wellsted’s Travels in Arabia (1838), Samuel Miles’ The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (1919) and other uncollected travel accounts, and Bertram Thomas’s Alarms and Excursions (1932) are investigated in this chapter. Chapter four considers the travellers who explored Dhofar in the southern Oman and the Ruba Al-Khali or the Empty Quarter. Precisely, it is devoted to Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix (1932) and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959). Chapter five looks at the last generation of British travellers who were in Oman from 1950 to 1970 employed either by oil companies or the Sultan Said bin Taimur. It explores Edward Henderson’s Arabian Destiny (1988), David Gwynne-James’s Letters from Oman (2001), and Ian Skeet’s Muscat and Oman (1974). This thesis concludes with final remarks on British travel writing on Oman and recommendations for future studies related to the subject. The gap of knowledge that this thesis undertakes to fill is that most of the texts under discussion have not been studied in any context.

This thesis examines Blake's posthumous reception, focusing particularly on the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s as decades in which Blake's reputation was both consolidated as a poet and artist, and invigorated as a radical sympathizer. As Blake's texts and life were being formed and re-formed in physically and conceptually elaborate books, such as Alexander Gilchrist's The Life of William Blake and Algernon Charles Swinburne's William Blake: a critical essay, significant and innovative appropriations of Blake's poetry and illustrations were made in Republican and freethinking periodicals and pamphlets. This thesis recovers some of that material. Retrieving the influence of such "low culture" ephemera on the "high" culture of Pre-Raphaelite creativity allows the Victorian Blake to emerge as a multi-faceted, contradictory production: both secular iconoclast and mystical visionary, blasphemous sibyl and poet of social justice. Nineteenth-century readings and reproductions of Blake are a chronicle of freethought and freeform. The multiplicity of Blake in this period, in both reproduction and interpretation, enables a questioning of books and periodicals as mediums of representation. Blake's reproduction in the nineteenth century coincides with, and yet confounds, Foucauldian configurations of nineteenth-century representation. Although Blake is depicted as a lone, isolated individual - often labouring under the insane tag - this does not simply signify an epistemological nadir of vacuous, disconnected individualism, such as Foucault identifies. On the contrary, this thesis seeks to prove that the enthusiasm for Blake in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s is facilitated by a deep connectivity of medium and message, and between different mediums and different messages. The political stance of Secularism meets the cultural concerns of Aestheticism, both reproducing Blake through technology that improvises upon and rejuvenates Blake's own unique craft.

A particular kind of voice recurs in fin-de-siècle British literature. It is a voice without a human body, a voice whose source is either invisible or non-human. This study explores the historical factors underlying the literary representation of such a voice. Chapter 1 examines Arthur Symons' phrase, 'the disembodied voice of a human soul,' and sets up the context for the subsequent discussion by teasing out the four major implications of the fin-de-siècle disembodied voice: the socio-political, the aesthetico-linguistic, the techno-scientific, and the sexual-somatic. Chapter 2 first outlines the modern origin of the disembodied voice in the Gothic-Romantic culture of the late eighteenth century, where the frequent description of the disembodied voice is linked to the rise of the nostalgia for premodernity; the chapter then analyzes the disembodied voice in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness both in terms of Gothic culture and of the fin-de-siècle situation. The Romantic aesthetico-linguistic prioritization of the aural-oral, which we call 'melocentricism,' the fin-de-siècle consumerism and colonialism, and the then influential scientific concept of ether receive scrutiny. Chapter 3 addresses Oscar Wilde's Salome. Apart from the factors that this play shares with Conrad's novella, the disembodied voice in Salome secretly expresses a longing for the homosexual-cum-communal. Chapter 4 explores the fin-de-siècle imperial and homosexual implications, and the 'melocentric' pre-history, of the phonographic voice in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Chapter 5 teases out the hidden political dimension of the technological voice, phonographic and wireless, in Kipling's Kim and '"Wireless".' Chapter 6 compares the fin-de-siècle voice with an instance of the early twentieth-century, the wireless voice in D. H. Lawrence's Ladv Chatterley's Lover, a voice now involved in the global network of broadcasting. It is concluded that the disembodied voice is inseparable from important aspects of fin-de-siècle British culture as well as the question of modernity.

Central to my analysis of Woolf's work are five novels: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves. These are written in pursuit of Woolf's modernist project, but as I shall argue below, her modernism was at the same time a feminist subversion of conventions, and I will analyze the ways in which Woolf actually effects this fusion of her concerns in her texts. I will concentrate on her fiction in this thesis, an area of her work that has been, surprisingly, comparatively underemphasized in the recent, intense revival of interest in Woolf. Directed towards her centenary in 1982, the revival has at its centre a 'family' industry which includes Quentin Bell's biography, the publication of Woolf's innumerable letters and diaries, and previously unpublished material. As a consequence of this extensive, new access to Woolf's personal life, there has flourished a biographical and psychoanalytical criticism, but this latter has tended to focus on her actual mental illness rather than the possibilities of new readings of her texts, a relative neglect which this thesis hopes, to a degree, to remedy. The linkage of psychoanalysis and Woolf is not an arbitrary one, since the Hogarth Press has been Freud's English publisher since 1921. Leonard himself reviewed Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Though she was never treated by Freudian psychoanalysts, Woolf did meet Freud when he took refuge in England just before the war. It is not until towards the end of the 1930s that we can be certain, from the entries in her diary and her reading notebooks, that Woolf was actually reading Freud. ' Yet we can sense the great impact of Freudian psychoanalysis in her references to 'our psychoanalytical age'(CE II 142). She wrote a review called 'Freudian Fiction', in which she showed her dissatisfaction, not with Freud's own discoveries, nor with the principle of their use in fiction, but with the way a particular novelist (J. D. Beresford) had done so: 'It simplifies rather than complicates, detracts rather enriches'(CW, 154). shall seek to heed this caveat in the studies that follow. Contemporary feminism has, since the seventies, given impetus to this prodigious revival of interest in Woolf; its recent major emphasis has been the re-assessment of Woolf as a radical political thinker. Feminist assessments of Woolf's aesthetics (E. Showalter, Sidney Jane Kaplan) have often been on the whole negative, fundamentally continuous with the criticism of her by the politically committed writers of the 1930's or of Scrutiny: Virginia Woolf as hypersensitive, as a sheltered invalid lady unable to cope with a harsh 'reality'. A pioneer book by Herbert Marder in 1968 stressed the crucial importance of feminism in Woolf's art: 'far from being a mere excrescence on her work, feminism ... is essential to her conception of reality.' But the major shift in evaluation was initiated by American feminists around Jane Marcus, who aim to revolutionize the commonly accepted accounts of Woolf by emphasizing the political dimensions of her writing. These recent books and articles have valuably uncovered previously unknown or repressed aspects of Woolf, which offer the possibility of a new and fuller comprehension of her literary endeavours. Yet, because these works are eager to dispel the old image of ethereal aestheticism, they tend to eschew fullscale dealings with Woolf's formal experimentation, that series of works from Jacob's Room to The Waves which have conventionally been regarded as quintessentially Woolfian, which have supported the image of her work as beautiful, pure artefact, subjectivistic and hypersensitive. What is needed now is to radicalize the reading of precisely these novels and of the aesthetic behind them, and I have sought to bring the resources of contemporary critical and psychoanalytic theories upon them, stressing those aspects of theory which seem to me most germane and illuminating for each particular novel. I shall argue that Woolf's series of major experimental works, which are traditionally assigned to a gender-free category of 'modernism', can be interpreted as a quest for what she refers to as a 'woman's sentence' that would allow 'a woman [to] write exactly as she wishes to write', and what I refer to, in my title and throughout this thesis, as 'feminine writing'. Both modernism and literary feminism - projects which, as I shall suggest below, are uniquely conjoined in Woolf - are a questioning of a previously dominant mode of writing, and the crisis-of narrative that they represent is also a crisis of the self. Lacanian psychoanalysis illuminates this crisis of the subject by bringing Freud's work into relation with structuralist theories of language, and allows us to define feminine writing as a concern which addresses itself to the position of mastery maintained in the order of discourse. The 'feminine' can then be seen as the subversion of a mastery guaranteed by the 'Cartesian' subject or self which also sustains the narrative conventions that Woolf's experimental novels so effectively interrogate. Far from being a flight from social commitment into an arcane modernism, her experimental texts can, I shall argue, best be seen as a feminist subversion of the deepest formal principles - of the definitions of narrative, writing, the self - of a patriarchal social order.

This thesis examines representations of intellectual work in the writings of Edmund Burke, William Cobbett, William Hazlitt, and Thomas Carlyle, focusing on their tendency to draw on an analogy between mental and manual labour when representing their own work to themselves and to their readers. It is my argument that while the assimilation of intellectual to physical labour can be seen as a symptom of political bad faith - suggesting, as it does, that thinking and writing are as painful or as difficult as digging and ploughing - the primary purposes of the analogy in the works of these four cultural commentators are, first, to forge rhetorical alliances with ordinary labourers, and, second, to attack other intellectuals engaged in what are alleged to be less arduous and less valuable forms of intellectual endeavour. By blaming the irresponsible activity of disaffected literary men for the political upheaval of the French Revolution, Burke set the terms for debate about the role of educated and literate men in society, a debate in which, for the first time, intellectuals competed for the allegiance of the labouring population. The analogy with manual labour was a key rhetorical site in the struggle to define an ideology for intellectuals, since it claims to ground the speaker or writer in the labouring community at large. For each author, I undertake close readings of several key texts to demonstrate the prevalence of the comparison with manual labour in the representation of intellectual activity. The political-ideological valence of the analogy is never straightforward, I contend, and it often occurs alongside an impulse to emphasise, as well as to elide, what are assumed to be the fundamental differences between mental and manual activity. We witness in the writings of Burke, Cobbett, Hazlitt, and Carlyle a recognisable mode of self-representation, for the desire to assimilate intellectual to material work has persisted.

My research examines Christina Rossetti’s use of biblical typology in her articulation of individual and communal identity. The central concern of my thesis is with tracing the ways in which she bridges the gap between the two biblical covenants and her contemporary situation by a ceaseless interpretative movement between the discourses of the Old and New Testaments. After examining the basis for her typological modes of reading, I demonstrate the various ways in which they underpin her interpretations of Tractarian, Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite writings as well as providing her with a framework with which to structure her own poetic sequences. In my examination of the ways in which Rossetti engages with patristic and medieval theology and articulates identity through the cyclical dynamics of typology, I consider her writings alongside those of Isaac Williams, John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey and highlight the key part they play in reinforcing the Oxford Movement’s liturgical momentum. Focusing specifically on her poetic utilization of the ancient practice of chanting psalms and antiphons, her engagement with the musicality of the church service, and her depiction of the visual aspects of ritualism, I read her poetry in terms of the mystical journey towards God upon which, she suggests, each Christian embarks. Applying to Rossetti’s poetry the method of typological analysis that she herself uses, I consider how the poems in her 1893 volume, Verses, can be understood to comment upon her earlier works and how her earlier poetry can be seen as an antecedent to her later works. Through this, I trace the development of her theology as it engages more directly with the hermeneutical principles encouraged by the Tractarians and offers a basis upon which the patristic concept of trinitarian personhood can be understood.