The years between 1815 and 1825 were a period of social and cultural flux. This thesis examines what I take to be the most significant literary genre of that period, the magazine. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the London Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine, along with a host of other, less commercially successful magazines, emerged as a dominant cultural force in these years. I place these magazines in a context of rapid literary and urban expansion, in which distinctions between commercial and aesthetic, literary and non-literary, and high and low cultures became newly anxious. Magazines, I suggest, illuminate a literary culture that was not as clearly divided as either traditional Romantic criticism or New Historicist cultural critiques have suggested. Rather, magazines stand at a midpoint between high and low cultures, neither of which could define itself except in relation to the other. I argue that magazines are significant precisely because their intermediate status offers the best guide to a newly confusing republic of letters. Chapter One discusses the development of the magazine from its eighteenth-century roots, and argues that Leigh Hunt’s Examiner is the most important influence on the new magazines. In Chapter Two I challenge Jon Klancher’s influential model of magazine readerships, and argue for a model of the magazine market dependent not on exclusion, but on connections between magazines and across a culture. In Chapter Three I propose a model of metropolitan culture, defined by its indistinctness, that underlies my conception of the magazine form as a whole. Here I discuss T. G. Wainewright’s art criticism for the London Magazine, arguing that it revels in the cultural indeterminacy that magazines so adeptly theorise. Chapter Four turns from the metropolis to the print market, arguing that magazine writers recognised that it had begun to resemble the London streets. But rather than rejecting the newly expanded “reading public” like many of their contemporaries, magazine writers enjoyed a new sense of freedom, even while they sensed the limits of that freedom. Many writers in the period sought to oppose literature and commerce, and in Chapter Five I again place magazines between these two categories. Thomas De Quincey made himself into a commercial success by claiming a literary identity that was opposed to the marketplace, but Blackwood’s, in a brilliant reversal, made itself into literature by flamboyantly asserting its commercialism.

This study aims to offer a new literary biography of Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632) and demonstrates the ways in which he refashions his principal source, Geoffrey Chaucer. The first chapter considers Dekker in both literary and theatre histories, situating him amongst his collaborators: Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. This chapter also aims to re-evaluate Dekker’s achievement in history, starting from Dekker’s presence in Henslowe’s Diary, his ‘part’ in the War of the Theatres, his theatre writing, followed by his observations of London written during the plague years, his imprisonment, and his posthumous historical reception. The second chapter investigates how Dekker uses Chaucer, whose ‘book’, I argue, is a common theatrical source book that offers the playwrights quick access to stories and plots. To provide evidence of Dekker’s readership of Chaucer, I trace the early modern editions of Chaucer available in Dekker’s time and survey Dekker’s reading of Chaucer from his early career to his late years. The final three chapters concentrate on Dekker’s uniquely creative refashioning of Chaucer in theatrical terms. Chapter Three examines how Dekker turns Chaucer’s serious Clerk’s Tale, a ‘text of loss’, into a comic parody, re-titled as The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil. Chapter Four investigates Chaucer’s legacy of the festive and the carnival, whose ideas of ‘game’ and ‘play’ in The Canterbury Tales directly influence Dekker’s Westward Ho and Northward Ho, wherein I call the Ho plays Dekker’s ‘game’ plays. Chapter Five demonstrates the ways in which Dekker transforms the tropes of Chaucer’s Loathly Lady in The Wife of Bath’s Tale into performative metaphors in The Roaring Girl, a fantasy satire. This is the first attempt to discuss and study, in full, Dekker’s texts alongside their source. Through Dekker’s Chaucerian re-imaginings, we see the playwright’s three-dimensional transformation of his source and the ways he visualises his performances.

The overall argument of this thesis is that Anthony Burgess’s literary journalism enables us to make a nuanced reading of his own Catholic novels. My definition of ‘journalism’ is necessarily wide: it takes in television and radio work, as well as published book reviews and interviews. Although previous commentators have established useful connections between Burgess’s novels, his journalism has been consistently overlooked and undervalued. As a result of this neglect, there is no published study of Burgess’s journalistic writing. This is also the first thesis to make extensive use of Burgess’s manuscripts, letters, diaries and other archival materials. The Worm and the Ring (1961), Tremor of Intent (1966) and Early Powers (1980) offer useful examples of ‘confluence’ between fiction and journalism. These novels pick up and develop a variety of material - often, but not exclusively ‘Catholic’ - which Burgess engages with elsewhere, in essays and reviews. The act of reviewing is seen to be crucial part of the process of fiction-writing, and Burgess’s journalism (on Greene, on spy fiction, and on the idea of the Catholic novel) appears to flow into these blocks in a fairly straightforward way. The ‘conflict’ of my title refers to A Clockwork Orange and Burgess’s subsequent journalistic statements about it. His post factum prefaces and other journalistic articles on the novel’s composition are shown to be at variance and typescript evidence. The theological implications of the variant endings are examined carefully, with reference to Burgess’s writings about the theological dispute between Saint Augustine and Pelagius.

Beckett's female characterization in his later works is, in marked contrast to his earlier work, broadly in sympathy with the notion of 'feminine' style and feminist concerns. Yet in his earlier texts, the female is grotesque, devouring, sexually provocative, and silenced. It can be argued that Beckett's representations of the female and Ireland intersect, and change as his relationship to Ireland and an Anglo-Irish tradition changes. Proposing that Beckett's self-imposed exile has influenced such changes, this thesis, using a psychoanalytic framework, traces discourses of mourning, melancholia and abjection in his works, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often the objects of loss in the psychoanalytic model. By exploring the correlations between the representations of Ireland and the female throughout Beckett's oeuvre, this thesis aims to shed new light on Beckett's literary practice as well as contributing to the fields of Irish and feminist studies.

I identify Coleridge‘s tragic vision as his engagement with catastrophe in search of a redemptive meaning. I examine Coleridge‘s plays, critical lectures, and commentaries on Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, and I reinvestigate some of his most famous works, such as 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel'. Chapters: 1). Introduction: Romantic Tragedy and Tragic Romanticism: I establish my interpretation amidst other theorists. I assess the presence of Classical tragedy in Coleridge‘s education, and the important changes that occurred in scholarship on Greek tragedy in Britain during the Romantic period. I acknowledge the important influences of Greek, English and German tragedians. 2). Transgression and Suffering: I suggest that Coleridge intends his reader to experience suffering vicariously for the purpose of moral benefit, fulfilling the same function that he identifies in Greek tragedy. 3). Real-Life Tragedy: Coleridge interprets events around him as tragic cycles of suffering and catharsis for political purposes, suggesting that the hardships of the French Revolution, and even the deceit of an innkeeper, are exemplary misfortunes. 4). The Tragic ‘Impulse’ and Coleridge’s Forms of Incompletion: Analysing Coleridge‘s use of the excerpts from his rejected play Osorio to form new poems, I argue that this instigates lifelong patterns of reinventing doomed literary projects, with reference to such concepts as synecdoche and the fragment. 5). The Lear Vocation: Coleridge’s Tragic Stage: I challenge a popular notion that Coleridge was prejudiced against theatre by demonstrating that, in his staged dramas, Coleridge exploits as well as criticizing the conventions of the contemporary stage and calls for reform in theatres. 6). The Tragic Sage. I claim that Coleridge made lifelong efforts to establish himself as a sage, dramatizing his own hardships to enhance his authority as an advisor. From youth Coleridge depicts himself as an embattled, prophetic figure, likening himself to Cassandra. Drawing on W.B. Yeats‘s comparison to Oedipus, I examine the various techniques Coleridge employs to establish himself as a survivor of and commentator on catastrophe. 7). Failed Sacrifices and the Un-Tragic Coleridge: Finally I argue that Coleridge, having settled into orthodox Christianity, abandons the tragic philosophy, expressing fears that suffering might be in vain, and therefore that catastrophe should be avoided in reality and as a literary theme. Ironically, this point is clarified in a lecture on Aeschylus.

My Ph.D. is an intervention on three levels: it works on the theoretical level as an investigation into the usefulness of Pascale Casanova’s theory of world literature; it sheds new light on the relation between Welsh and Anglocentric British literary spaces in the twentieth century; and it radically re-positions Edward Thomas, the ‘quintessential English poet’, as a pioneering writer in an Anglophone Welsh literature. This dissertation begins by setting out some revisions to Casanova’s model before investigating whether this modified theory can be applied to dominant and dominated literatures within Britain. Subsequent chapters provide a case-history of how this might be achieved by focusing on Thomas, a figure of division among Welsh and English critics alike. While Welsh critics, for various reasons, have failed to claim Thomas for their literature, other, non-Welsh, critics have placed him in an English tradition. These include Robert Frost and Walter De la Mare, both of whom read his work as a representation of the rural England for which he supposedly died, as well as Edna Longley who, following a critical line initially developed by Philip Larkin, presents Thomas’s poetry as the ‘missing link’ in a native English poetic tradition. By bringing to light Thomas’s literary journalism, mainly out of print since it was written, as well as biographical factors long obscured behind the focus on his death as a British soldier, I am able to show how Casanova’s revised model, when applied to Thomas, reveals a radically different writer to the one who has been critically received. Thomas, I contend, should be read as an English-language Welsh writer who dissimilates from an anglicized British literary space by disseminating Welsh folk material to a wider audience, by promoting writers from other English-language national traditions, by importing French literary models into his work, by defending gay writers in the post-Wilde trial era, and by subverting the Englishness of typical rural locales. Re-positioning the ‘quintessentially English’ Thomas makes more urgent the question that some critics have begun to address: of what will a post-imperial, or even a post-British, English identity consist?

Playing at Being: Style, Ethics, and W.B. Yeats, offers a reading of the canonical Irish poet by looking at how the tradition of European aesthetic and romantic philosophy informs both Yeats’s poetics, and the critical premises of those who have written on him. Although I employ the traditional literary method of close reading, I am also concerned to philosophically question the ground of literary value. My tutelary authorities for this endeavour are Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond critically evaluating Yeats, I aim to define the value of literary style through Yeats, and, in doing so, make connections between literature, knowledge and ethics. At the heart of my study is the argument that there is a fundamental relationship between literary accomplishment and the practice of political sovereignty expressed at the individual and national level. By showing how literature, especially poetry, engages and qualifies statements of cultural authority, my thesis ranges from the philosophical to the sociological.

This thesis explores representations of urban space in work published between 1962 and 2007 by British writers Doris Lessing, Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. I read these texts alongside a body of influential urban literature, with an emphasis on the spatial theory developed by postmodern scholar Fredric Jameson in the late 1980s. I argue that, despite claiming to provide a universally valid description of the contemporary urban experience, the spatial categories proposed by Jameson are inadequate for a reading of women's urban writing. My research turns to an alternative framework, which brings together insights from feminist and non-feminist cultural geography and psychoanalysis. My examination of urban texts by Lessing, Roberts and Maitland highlights a persistent interest in gender categories and their role in shaping the individual experience of the metropolis. In particular, I focus on women's struggle to articulate their identity against Enlightenment definitions of public and private spheres in post-1960 London. A second but equally important concern regards the potential of the city to enhance individuals' engagement with spirituality and to reinforce a sense of community that is rooted in a religious worldview. In view of the fact that questions of gender and spiritual identity are commonly overlooked by both Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern urban theory, my central argument is that women writers' accounts of urban experience undermine the Enlightenment gendering of space, while at the same time challenging the revision of the Enlightenment performed by postmodern scholars. In exploring the ways in which women writers' representation of the metropolis is informed by an engagement with gender and spirituality, my research bridges the gap between explorations of urban space and gender, on the one hand, and gender, community and spirituality, on the other, contributing to an enhanced reading of late-twentieth-century, and early-twenty-first-century, urban imaginaries.

This thesis investigates “English Hecubas” as they appear in the recurring stories my culture tells itself about legendary Troy. Analysing a necessarily select number of Hecubas, spanning from the twelfth to the twenty-first century, I uncover a history of intricate cultural negotiations as theatre, literature and pedagogy attempt to domesticate the grief-stricken Trojan queen and recruit the classical past into the service of an ever-changing English present. My interest lies in the performative potential of texts. I therefore consider the reception of English Hecubas as they are culturally activated, looking to textbooks and classrooms, play-texts and theatres, print material and their readerships, insisting that schoolmasters, pupils, actors, authors, spectators and readers remain visible as the creators of meaning. Adopting ‘Presentism’ (as developed by Terence Hawkes) as my theoretical approach, the thesis is structured achronologically. This configuration gestures toward a more synchronic reading of Hecuba, replicating twenty-first century encounters with ancient mythological characters, by starting with our present “situatedness” yet juggling accumulations of history gathered with each prior acculturation. Classical Hecubas (of Homer’s Iliad, Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Seneca’s Troas), entered England in the Renaissance via the imported texts and tenets of continental humanism. Pre-existing Hecubas of England’s oral tradition, medieval romance epics and indigenous Troynovant myths were forced into dialogue with their long-lost textual origins. This clash of Hecubas occurred within a crisis of mourning, resulting from the Reformation’s radical alteration of English funeral rites, which left maternal grief a culturally contentious site of anxiety. Thus, within its eight-hundred year span, the thesis repeatedly returns to the Renaissance to investigate the origins of the modern English Hecubas with which I begin. Hecuba’s grief can lead her to gouge out men’s eyeballs and murder their sons; tactics of accommodation and assimilation have been necessary to render this potentially violent ‘alien’ valuable within England’s cultural lexicon. By exposing the systemic marginalisation, mitigation, suppression and sublimation of Hecuba’s maternal grief and fury, this study hopes to recuperate the value of Hecuba’s essential mourning work.

Critics have long recognised the conflicting tendencies towards progress and conservatism in George Eliot, which are reflected in the behaviour of her characters. This study focuses on the oscillating pattern of desire in this behaviour. As the characters alternately fight with and succumb to their desires, these desires seem to be disproportionately intensified, often leading to tragic consequences. The thesis seeks to analyse this process in the light of G. W. F. Hegel's and Jacques Lacan's elaborations on the nature of desire, which provide the theoretical basis for the discussion of the fiction. While Lacan sees desire as seeking its own sustenance and intensification, ultimately converting itself into a desire for an unfulfilled desire, Hegel sees desire as a movement of self-consciousness towards a return to itself that is accomplished by desiring the desire of another self-consciousness, that is, recognition. The thesis will explore several variations on the logic of desire which divert it from its path towards recognition, and these can also be seen as various types of addiction: namely, the art of hunger, Protestantism, money-hoarding, Orphic desire, the vicious circle of writing, the gambling appetite and the dialectic of homecoming. By examining through close reading how these motifs are given vivid illustration in George Eliot's fiction, this thesis will demonstrate that the theme of intensified desire is a prominent feature that runs throughout her works and is of central importance in understanding the complex emotional lives and interactions of her characters. The myth of Orpheus's descent to the underworld, which depicts an intensification of a desire for a structurally unattainable love object that is the dead Eurydice, can be seen as a paradigm that is applicable to Eliot's early works. The ascetic figure of Maggie in The Mill on the Floss is then compared to the hunger artist in Franz Kafka's short story, through analysing the abundant food references in the novel. Her adolescent asceticism can be figuratively understood as a kind of anorexia and later develops into a kind of bulimia in her relationship with Stephen. Silas in Silas Marner, too, can be seen as a hunger artist in his addiction to work, until he is freed from his fixation through raising Eppie. In Middlemarch, there is a continuity between the earlier figure of Maggie and Dorothea, and also between Silas and Casaubon. Dorothea, who marries Casaubon out of her art of hunger, utilises her marital relationship to work out and overcome that same art of hunger, guided by Ladislaw as the advocate of spontaneous enjoyment. In the other unhappy marriage, Lydgate's relationship with Rosamond is examined in relation to his appetite for gambling, and that appetite is then seen to play a central part in Daniel Deronda where it is related to Gwendolen's mode of desire, which feeds off and intensifies the desires of others until it is stifled by Grandcourt. Deronda, on the other hand, finds a tentative solution to the impasses of desire in his commitment to the Jewish cause, which can be understood in relation to the text's references to the myth of Ulysses. The centrality of the problem of desire in Eliot's fiction is finally underlined by its reappearance in the work of one of her important successors in the exploration of the psyche, Henry James, whose The Portrait of a Lady can be seen to inherit its critique of desire from Daniel Deronda.