Victorian literary criticism has within it a longstanding tradition of inquiring about the degree to which literature of the period reflects the realities of nineteenthcentury Christian faith. Many of these studies are admirable in the way that they demonstrate the challenges confronting religion in this period of dynamic social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific change and growth. Similarly, this study will examine the critical intersections between nineteenth-century Christianity and literature. However, this project is unique by virtue of the methodology used in order to access both the expressed and latent perspectives on Victorian faith at play within a given text. I propose that that a spatial, place-based reading has heretofore been largely ignored in critical explorations of nineteenth-century faith and literature. While, literary criticism utilising concepts related to spatiality, geography, topography, and place have increased within recent decades, these critical works are largely silent on the issue of the narrative representations of “place” and the expression and understanding of Victorian Christianity. This project suggests a model for just such a reading of nineteenth-century texts. More specifically, this thesis proposes that by reading for sacred place in the Victorian novel one is able to explore the issue of Christianity and literature from a unique and neglected point of narrative and critical reference. Using Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure as primary texts, this study demonstrates that a careful exploration of sacred place within a particular narrative reflects an author's and, more broadly, a culture's perceptions of a faith. Reading Victorian religion from the vantage point of place acknowledges that place is itself an inescapable and fundamental medium through which individuals and cultures mediate the most mundane and the most exhilarating of their personal and collective experiences and beliefs. Similarly, faith, especially in nineteenth-century England, is a dominant and pervasive metaphysical ideology that is connected to and possesses repercussions for virtually all aspects of individual and social life. A critical reading that unites place and faith – these two fundamental paradigms of human experience and understanding – will inevitably provide fertile soil for a productive reading of the texts under consideration.

The thesis examines the historical and contemporary engagements of philosophical anarchism in the selected writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dambudzo Marechera in a bid to establish an anarchic poetics that emerges between them. Both use poetry and prose to express opposition to values and relations characterising authoritarian societies while also expressing alternative social, political and personal values. The unusual pairing of two writers who wrote and lived in very different times inevitably prompts an enquiry into the various trajectories of philosophical anarchism, Romanticism and postcoloniality in world literature. The aim is to blur the stereotypical nature of writers and writings from specific regions of the world and instead argue for an interliterary and intertextuality tradition as the new critical idiom. This thesis also analyses the social functioning of poetry and fiction in social reform and political revolution. Juxtaposing the perspectives of and writings from different spatio- temporal and cultural locations is necessary to emphasise the continuity of ideas, the evolution of theory and philosophy and the historical interconnectedness of humanity as explained by Edward Said's notion of 'contrapuntal juxtaposition.' The writings of Shelley and Marechera do raise important questions about society and the state and continue to address serious political issues. As will be demonstrated, the literature of Shelley and Marechera is not static, it grows and develops with each new reading, it is continually changing, and for this reason it is essentially moving. This study contributes to the fields of literary anarchist theory, postcolonialism as well as Romantic studies by extending a conceptual bridge between the political and literary histories of ideas in which Shelley and Marechera are both ambassadors.

The thesis seeks to demonstrate that Conrad does not fit at all into the manly-heroic tradition which his work is often approached as belonging to. By tracing the entwining of masculine and homoerotic imagery in his major and minor works, as well as in the often neglected late novels, it is possible to discover ample evidence to suggest that he would be more accurately- if somewhat shockingly for critical tradition placed in the tradition of homosexual literature. Appended to the main body of the thesis is a glossary of homosexual codewords- words that were widely understood to refer to what was then the otherwise unmentionable crime of homosexuality from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This glossary is drawn both from the homosexual prose and poetry of the era, as well as from what evidence we have of wider public usages in contemporary newspapers, court-reports, diaries, letters, etc. At present, there is no recognition of, or collation of, the vast majority of these words in any dictionary of historical or sexual slang.

This thesis examines how and why the English clown emerged and declined by focusing on jest-books and comic actors such as Tarlton, Kemp and Armin. The jest-book, Tarlton’s Jests is the key publication in the development of jester-clowns in Renaissance drama. This account traces the authoring, editing, and printing of jest-book publications, along with the transmission of their copy-texts to clarify the dissemination of theories of clownery. The thesis explores the English clown tradition based on the presences of Kemp and Armin, who in their writing practices link the development of clowning in print to the theatre stage. This study then offers a critical analysis of the influence of jesting heroes on comic characters in play-texts from Shakespeare to Dekker and Heywood. By considering the rich resources of jests appropriated by these playwrights, the various forms of the clowns’ development are clarified. The tradition and characteristics of the English clown resulted from a unique cultural synergy: the connection between the stage clowning of the time and its underlying theories. This interaction between societal change and the resultant cultural products is considered as an achievement of the Early Modern interdependence between print and performance.

The first part of this thesis offers an analysis of Elizabethan poetical treatises, such as Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, in terms of Michel Foucault’s discursive formations, and the ways in which they were instrumental in redefining the sixteenth century literary terrain of poetry, prose, drama, poetics and literary criticism. It examines the role of contributory factors such as the Puritan attack, Renaissance humanism, the Ramist reform of logic and rhetoric, increased levels of literacy and printing. It explores conflicting definitions of poetry in the early modern period and its changing role and function, and the appropriation of significant elements from other discourses, notably rhetoric, arguing that this process constituted part of the wider reorganisation of contemporary knowledges. The second part of the thesis is concerned with the work and practice of the writer George Gascoigne, author of the first poetical treatise in English and his importance as an Elizabethan poet.

This thesis proposes that the character of Grendel’s mother in Beowulf is a manifestation of a mythic type, derived from studies of European goddess figures and named here as the Woman in the Water. This myth takes the form of an inherent association between femininity and water, and connotes the binary oppositions of birth and death, creativity and destruction, and the overarching themes of chaos and transience. By examining the imagery in Beowulf and its contemporary literature, this thesis studies the figure of Grendel’s mother in the context of this myth, looking at how the nature of motherhood and the element of water combine to form a powerful symbolic image emblematising the transience of life. These images are interpreted within a psychoanalytical framework as well as a mythic contextual one, providing the myth with an analogue in the human subconscious; that of the abject mother, a figure which represents the inevitable return of life to the void of the womb. The thesis concludes by demonstrating how the entire poem can be read with the character of Grendel’s mother and the battle against transience in mind, and how it complements the poem’s overall theme and structure.

This thesis investigates Lyly's ironic use of traditional images, character types, plot situations, and forms of expression to suggest that Euphues was conceived in a spirit of extravagance. Part One examines the irony in Lyly's drama. His technique is based upon the principle of contrast, the part always to be considered in the light of its context. The integration of the songs supports their claim to Lyly's authorship. Sometimes the play is 'framed' by pertinent prologue and epilogue, confirming the effect of context. Lyly's court comedies aroused and complimented Queen Elizabeth but also contained a hidden element of instruction and request. Part Two suggests that Euphues was an ironic exhibition of false wit, sophistry, and rhetorical artifice intended to test the reader's power to discriminate substance from style. Lyly remains uncommitted to the style and the attitudes of Euphues. Part Three offers further evidence of Lyly's subtlety in wording and his skill in other-statement. A tradition of ironic euphuism is traced through Gascoigne, Pettie, Lyly and Shakespeare. The conclusion summarises the motives of the ironist.

Abstract Modernism tends to be criticised, internationally, as politically conservative. The objection is often valid, although the charge says little about the quality of artistic achievement involved. This article argues that the alliance between Modernism and political conservatism is by no means a necessary one, and that there are instances where modernist vision has been used to convey substantive political insight, effective social critique and solid resistance. To illustrate the contrast,the article juxtaposes the abstract Modernism associated with Ben Nicholson and World War 2, with a neglected strain of South African railway poetry which uses modernist techniques to effect a powerful critique of South Africa’s apartheid dispensation. The article sustains a distinction between universalising modernist art that requires ethical work from its audiences to achieve artistic completion, and art in which modernist vision performs the requisite ethical work within its own formal constraints. Four very different South African railway poems, by Dennis Brutus, John Hendrickse, Alan Paton, and Leonard Koza, are examined and contextualised to demonstrate ways in which a modernist vision has been used to portray the social disruptions caused by apartheid. Modernist techniques are used to turn railway experience into a metonym for massive social disruption,without betraying the social reality of the transport technology involved.

This thesis is concerned with narrative constructions of women's identities in texts by contemporary Scottish and Irish women writers. I focus on texts by A. L. Kennedy, Liz Lochhead, Angela Bourke, Éilís Ní Dhubhne and Marina Carr. The theoretical framework of my analysis has been inspired by these writers' concerns with the relationship between narrative and reality. An important idea derived from the study of this relationship is that one's voice often, if not always, accommodates others' voices and is modulated by the power they convey. This power, derived from traditions that naturalise legitimate subjectivity constructs, steers and disciplines narrators, characters borne in these narrators' voices, as well as to whom they speak, readers or other characters, affecting the representations of the realities they inhabit. In my thesis, I examine literary explorations of the power through which narratives voices operate to constitute identities. The vision of voice as necessarily accommodating others' voices has suggested the use of Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia in my analyses. The idea that an other's voice speaks in one's voice has sent me to Derrida's theory of citationality and to Judith Butler's theory of discursive reiteration and subjectivity. Regarding the act of narrating as an act of citation, I examine the role of narratives in shaping identity by providing subject positions derived form a citational chain of stories. The analysis of the relationship between narrative and reality undertaken in this thesis is interdisciplinary, involving elements of narratology theory, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and social theory. The main argument can be summarised thus: myth is a manifestation of authority in the discursive acts through which we present ourselves to ourselves and to others in social reality. These discursive acts are to an extent acts of citation that reiterate subjective identities which, through this reiteration, have become naturalised, normative and constraining. The kind of subject they constitute is produced at the expense of alternative possibilities of cultural expression.

The thesis offers a reading of Rebecca West's longer fiction as texts constituted by disputing authorities. It begins by placing West in a socio-historical context, showing how her own life, personal and political interests were insistently grappling with questions of authority. It moves on in the second chapter to examine the contradictions inherent in the patterning of narrative structures in West's fiction. The third chapter considers the construction of authority within narrative contexts as a complex of textual power relations. A reading of female subject positions as sites of gendered struggle comprises the last chapter. Together these demonstrate the necessity for the redefinition of the notion of authority, a move which has significant implications for the meaning and relevance of power in respect of art and female subjectivity. In the course of the thesis, I draw on a selection of West's non-fiction writing and journalism, as well as autobiographical and biographical material, in order to furnish 8 context for her work, and to highlight the significance of opposing voices heard through the fictional texts. My readings are made from a feminist perspective (no extended study of West's fiction has hitherto been made from this pOSition), and are influenced by the writings of a range of feminist critics and theoreticians.