Between 1788 and 1805 a subgenre of the novel, which has come to be called the Jacobin novel, provided a series of representations of imprisonment and trial. By reading these politically charged representations against the shared ideology of social and political reform articulated by the writers William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald and Mary Wollstonecraft, we can see how the project of reform is effected and put to the test in their fictional works. I evaluate these novels against the background of penal and legal reform in the latter half of the eighteenth century in England, and offer a reading of the use of imprisonment and trial in fiction in the 1790s as one that functions both as an attack upon the penal and judicial systems and as a subtly-functioning metaphor for the purpose of literature itself. In chapter one I set out the theoretical framework for the thesis in relation to the work of John Bender and other critics on eighteenth-century literature and culture, before moving onto an account of the eighteenth-century prison and influential theories of penal reform. Chapter two focuses upon changes in the legal sphere, the concept of fiction and the use of reading as a means to reform. Chapter three examines the work of William Godwin in relation to his writings on the 1794 London treason trials, and considers the representation of prison reform in his fiction. Chapter four analyses Elizabeth Inchbald’s attempts to destabilise imprisoning patriarchal authority in the domestic sphere as well as the court of law. Chapter five discusses Mary Wollstonecraft’s generic experimentation, and examines her attack upon the forces that make prisoners of women. Chapter six investigates the treason trial writings of Thomas Holcroft and his novels’ representation of penal and social reform through his engagement with conversation and debate.

The thesis was planned as an attempt to investigate the general increase in the number of literary prizes in the 1980s and particularly those sponsored by business. However it is also an investigation into the specific workings of the Booker Prize as the best known literary award of its kind in Britain, and into the effects that prizes such as the Booker may have had on fiction. Part 1 deals initially with the history and founding of the Booker Prize. Then in Chapter Two it covers some of the broader issues involving literary awards in general, such as the tendency among them to encourage a conflation of business and aesthetic ideals. Part 2 deals with the issue of patronage for the arts and with the predominance of particular social groups among the authors, judges and members of the Management Committee of the Booker Prize. I also examine how certain types of supposedly aesthetic evaluations arise and how they subsequently come to predominate. In the final part of the thesis I look at the issue of standardisation as it relates to the novels which won the Booker Prize during the 1980s.

This thesis investigates three major areas in the background of Edward Lear's literary nonsense: the parodic relationship with text and genre of early children's literature, the trends behind Lear's innovative illustration style, and the "nonsense" child construct manifest within the genre, which I claim is, in many ways, an expression of the Romantic conception of the child. The first chapter explores the parodic basis of nonsense. Most literary nonsense is referential; it often begins by inhabiting a genre or individual work, but what it does to the original is debatable. Some critics see nonsense as parody, while others claim that nonsense precludes parody in its intentional purposelessness. In this chapter I explore the critical debate surrounding parody in nonsense, and parody in general. I then examine the works of Lear, and some Carroll, looking first at their genuine, clear parodies. Next, I look at the many borderline cases of parody which use nonsense as a device but are not overshadowed by it. Finally, I discuss the more "pure" literary nonsense which, I argue, goes beyond parody to establish a new genre. The next chapter looks at the background of Lear's nonsense illustration. His style of illustration was a widely original combination of devices which are best seen in the context of the children's book illustrations of his day. With Bewick's innovations in woodcuts, the quality of children's illustrations had drastically improved. Diverging from this trend, Lear's illustrations hearken back to the rough chapbooks which he probably read as a child. His child-like style, coupled with an expert draughtsman's eye, began a rival tradition of children's book illustration. His illustrations are in way caricatures of chapbooks. His text and illustrations, like those of Blake and Hood, are integral, and their self-reflexiveness with the verses places them in an altogether different class of illustration.

This thesis explores the relationship between government and poetry in the verse, essays, and translations of Charles Hubert Sisson (1914-2003). Theories of sovereignty and government drawn from the work of Giorgio Agamben are used to interrogate these issues in Sisson’s critical and creative writing. Sisson’s work is contextualised within the politics of post-WWII Britain, taking in such issues as the altered relationship between the arts and the state, the decline of the British Empire and the subsequent influx of Commonwealth immigration, the changing status of the monarchy, and the importance of the environment. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first comprises a preliminary theoretical excursus, focussing on poems by Sisson and C. Day Lewis. The second analyses Sisson’s portrayal of the country and the city, and his own position in relation to them. The third places Sisson’s work in the context of the changing nature of laureateship in the era 1945-1976, comparing his work with that of Philip Larkin and C. Day Lewis. The fourth investigates the politics of translating Virgil after the Second World War, and especially after Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of April 1968. The final chapter returns to Sisson’s wartime and immediately post-war writings, especially on the subject of India, before moving on to the poems collected in Exactions (1980).

This thesis examines how a poetics may emerge from both the possibilities and the limits peculiar to the metaphor of the mirror and the concept of reflection. Working from a particular history of Western ideas that moves from Plato through to postmodernism, the examination focuses on W.H. Auden, whose treatment and utilization of reflection within The Sea and the Mirror, a long and variegated poem and commentary upon Shakespeare's late play The Tempest, act as a template for an expanded notion of poetics. It is argued that this poetics affirms the creative process by a breaking down of the borders between reflection and what is being reflected, thereby necessitating a reinscribing of those borders self-reflexively and ironically, and in tum necessitating a reevaluation of the respective tasks and boundaries of philosopher, artist and theologian. As suggested by Auden and The Sea and the Mirror, this poetics draws upon texts from a variety of historical periods and a variety of theoretical disciplines. The texts investigated in this thesis include: the "text" of a certain history of ideas defmed as the philosophy of reflection; Shakespeare's The Tempest; Robert Browning's Caliban Upon Setebos; Auden's later poem Friday's Child as well as many of his critical writings; and the theoretical notions and theologies of such contemporary thinkers as Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida as they themselves interact with the texts of the Bible, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and many other thinkers who have been critical of the West's metaphysical and onto-theological traditions. The bringing together of such texts is meant to show that, upon a continual reinvention of previous texts, the distinctions between an original and a copy, a poem and a commentary, or imaginative and theoretical discourse, begin to blur, and that the resulting negations and recreations, as variously represented by the figure of the "0", mark out a new inclusive arena for philosophy, art and theology. It is argued that this circular arena or stage does not, however, preclude the possibility of a "Wholly Other", but that, in line with the traditlolJ;,~~~5lIive theology, any theology seeking an non-idolatrous notion of GOd'"fWil1:.IJtq;lnd upon a doctrine of creation l~ ~ .... -'. . as suggested by Auden, where reverential silence is reached through the ironiesand inversions of conscious artifice as a "rite". In this sense, it is thus suggested that any philosophy or art probing the paradoxes and fissures of its own mirrorlike creations necessarily opens up new theological possibilities

This study attempts to modify the received opinion that Scottish poetry of the nineteenth-century failed to build on the achievements of the century (and centuries) before. Rather it suggests that a number of significant poets emerged in the period who represent an ongoing clearly Scottish tradition, characterised by protean identities and eccentricity, which leads on to MacDiarmid and the 'Scottish Renaissance' of the twentieth century. The work of the poets in question is thus seen as marked by recurring linguistic, stylistic and thematic eccentricities which are often radical and subversive. The poets themselves, it is suggested, share a condition of estrangement from the official culture of their time either within Scotland (Hogg, Geddes, MacDiarmid) or in their English exile (Smith, Davidson and Thomson). They can be hardly associated with established tradition, but rather they belong to what I define as tradition of 'otherness' - other from mainstream literary and cultural society, and characterised by eccentric forms and themes. The Introduction examines the notions of 'eccentricity' and 'otherness' in relation to the selected poets. Chapter 1, after outlining existing critical theories on nineteenth-century Scottish literature, reinforces the thesis that the dominant voices in Scottish poetry are radical and eccentric by looking retrospectively at some of the eighteenth-century 'eccentrics'. Chapter 2 focuses on the work of Hogg and Byron, the former as the original nineteenth-century eccentric, evincing strong links with later poets, and the latter because of the striking affinities between his work and personality and those of contemporary and later Scottish poets. Chapter 3 focuses on Alexander Smith and attempts to rescue his most interesting poetry from the simplistic categorising of his work as 'Spasmodic'. Chapter 4 on James Thomson ('B.V.') explores the innovative and pre-modernist aura of his opera omnia. Chapter 5 concentrates on John Davidson, particularly on his diverse styles and unorthodox ideas, which also look forward to MacDiarmid.

This thesis considers Eliot's critical writing from the late 1910s till the mid-1930s, in the light of his PhD thesis - Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley - and a range of unpublished material: T S. Eliot's Philosophical Essays and Notes (1913- 4) in the Hayward Bequest (King's College, Cambridge University); T. S. Eliot's Family Papers in the T. S. Eliot Collection at the Houghton Library (Harvard University); and items from the Harvard University Archives at the Pusey Library. 'Me thesis offers a comprehensive view of Eliot's critical development throughout this important period. It starts by considering The Sacred Wood's ambivalence towards the metaphysical philosophy of F. H. Bradley and Eliot's apparent adoption of a scientific method, under the influence of Bertrand Russell. It will be argued that Eliot uses rhetorical strategies which simultaneously subvert the method he is propounding, and which set the tone for an assessment of his criticism throughout the 1920s. His indecision, in this period, about the label 'Metaphysical' for some poets of the seventeenth century, reveals the persistence of the philosophical thought he apparently rejects in 1916, when he chooses not to pursue a career in philosophy in Harvard. This rhetorical tactic achieves its fulfilment in Dante (1929), where Eliot finds a model in the medieval allegorical method and 'philosophical' poetry. Allegory is also examined in connection with the evaluation of Eliot's critical writings themselves to determine, for instance, the figurative dimension of his early scientific vocabulary and uncover metaphysical residues he had explicitly disowned but would later embrace. Finally, it is suggested that, the hermeneutics of allegory are historical and it is used here to test the relationship between Eliot's early and later critical writings, that is the early physics and the later metaphysics.

The Introduction to this thesis includes a brief discussion of various understandings of what torture is, and a statement of the definition of torture adopted for the purposes of this study. Torture, as it is examined in this study, is not so much an act of violence as it is a violent process; that is, torture is a means, not an end in itself, and torture always presupposes intent and causality. Chapter One provides the historical and legal contexts for later literary and theoretical discussions of torture. This chapter is divided into two parts, the first dealing with instances of torture which appear in Anglo-Saxon historical records, and the second dealing with legal codes which are concerned with torture. In the course of this chapter it becomes apparent that torture as a public act serves as a document of sorts, sometimes recording and sometimes interpreting political realities. Any study of torture must be grounded in an understanding of pain, and Chapter Two is concerned with the nature of pain, and with its relationship to torture. The paradox of pain is that it is universal and at the same time isolating and inexpressible. In Chapter Two, a close examination of the language and structure of The Dream of the Rood serves to illustrate that the Anglo-Saxons understood this paradox. The graphic and sometimes almost loving detail with which the poet describes the passion of Christ functions as a language "of weapons and wounds", and helps to convey, in some measure, the almost incommunicable nature of intense physical pain. Chapter Three explores the way in which torture acts may function as language acts, and the necessarily public nature of such performative language. This chapter begins with a discussion of linguistic theories concerning pragmatics and performative language acts. Then, drawing upon textual examples from such Old English sources as Elene, Juliana and Daniel, this chapter examines how torture may be construed as a form of language, and how the performative nature of an act of torture articulates that act's context of power and politics in the culture at large.

This research considers the impact of Scottish romanticism on the construction of literary identity in the Canadas prior to Confederation (1867). I argue that early Scottish dominance in literary Canada, and similarities faced by both countries in defining a sense of self—including participation in a wider empire (or Union), populations divided by language and religion, and the need for a distinct identity in the face of a dominant neighbour to the south—all contributed to a tendency on the part of Canadians to look to Scotland as a model. Through an examination of early Canadian literature and on-going British constructions of the colony, the thesis considers the manner in which Scottish romantic strategies of literary nationalism are deployed and manipulated in the process of articulating a Canadian identity. Particular attention is paid to the works of John Galt and Major John Richardson, while tropes examined include the construction of landscape and settlement narratives, stadial histories, the historical novel, national tale and the depiction of a national history, and the manipulation of a romanticised Scottish military past in constructing Canadian history.

Over the last two decades, our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and work has been expanded by an unprecedented number of biographies, memoirs and personal correspondence published for the first time. As a result, academic research has been able to plot a series of connections between the writer’s literary work and the cultural and historical moments that shaped it. Beckett has been hailed as a poet whose work engages like no other with the atrocities of the Second World War. This thesis takes as its starting point an issue that often arises in evaluations of the writer, but which has never before been explored in detail: the theme of trauma. With reference to the work of prominent contemporary theorists, this project elucidates what we mean by the term trauma, and why it can be useful to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s work. Drawing on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, and others, this thesis diagnoses traumatic symptoms and gestures in Beckett’s post-war writing. It identifies the role that ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ plays in some of his late theatrical texts. And, moreover, the thesis begins to trace the role that trauma can play in our understanding of language and meaning. Adopting a broadly poststructuralist view, this study engages with texts by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida to ask how trauma challenges the status of language and the Western humanist subject. It will demonstrate how how trauma problematises our understanding of walking and thinking in Beckett’s post-war prose; where the presence of live theatrical production is unsettled by traumatic repetition; and why Beckett’s plays for radio undermine our expectations of twentieth-century modernity. While charting the way that Beckett uses and adapts traumatic themes and ideas, the thesis observes how the term signals a broader crisis in Western humanist understandings of time, place and identity.