The thesis investigates the prophetic in Wordsworth's ‘golden decade' (1798-1808). It establishes the following arguments: the prophetic in Wordsworth should not be treated of only incidental interest; it is a mode of his self-fashioning, as well as a mode of his writing, channelling the poet's anxieties about his authorship, readership, reception and posterity. The thesis contains an introduction and a short conclusion, with two main sections amounting to 7 chapters. Chapter 1 to 3 form Part I, focusing on the prophetic as a mode of self-fashioning. Chapter 1 re-examines The Prelude, arguing that self-doubts and struggle are inherent to Wordsworth's prophetic aspirations. Chapter 2 discusses three major reasons that make Wordsworth's self-fashioning as a poet of prophetic quality possible: personal aspirations, knowledge economy, and prophetic discourse of his time. Chapter 3 investigates anxieties generated in self-fashioning: anxiety of influence and anxiety about reception. Chapter 4 to 7 form Part II, exploring the prophetic as a mode of writing. Chapter 4 studies the apocalyptic vision of the rupture in human history in Lyrical Ballads. Chapter 5 looks into Wordsworth's concern with the nation in ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty'. Chapter 6 focuses on the dual prophetic quality of The White Doe of Rylstone and its links to discourse of duty and Catholic Emancipation. Chapter 7 studies the prophet-like speaker and the prophetic nature of the narrative in Peter Bell. It also considers the discrepancy between the poet's ideal reader and his actual reader as the reason why the poem fails to appeal. The claim to innovation in the thesis is that it offers a corrective reading of the prophetic as a mode of self-fashioning and a mode of writing in Wordsworth. It also sheds new light on the poet's acclaimed major works such as Lyrical Ballads, as well as widely criticised minor ones such as Peter Bell.

This study investigates the role and significance of Cuvier's science, its knowledge and practice, in British science and literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. It asks what the current account of science or grand science narrative is, and how voicing Cuvier changes that account. The field of literature and science studies has seen healthy debate between literary critics and historians of science representing a combination of differing critical approaches. This study asks whether we can continue work to synthesise historicist and formalist approaches, and suggests using a third narrative based approach to achieve a full complement of methodological tools. This in turn should provide more nuanced critical readings. In certain novels it has allowed me to shift the focus on literature and science enquiry to different decades. This study looks for “science stories” from scientific discourses in The Last Man, The Mill on the Floss and Bleak House. I have demonstrated the centrality of Cuvier to British science in the first half of the nineteenth century and that science's role as a model for the natural and human world, as well as informing the unstable systems of narrative characteristic of the novel genre and form. Cuvier's Essay initiated a lasting period of scientific centrality and legitimacy in British science and representation in British novels. His law of correlations applied to geology made his science both an important narrative and analogous to the empirical truth-seeking mode of the novel. The paleontological process becomes both a model for organic unity in Victorian fiction and a mode of narrative production. Cuvier's science and its discourse both produce and are reproduced in nineteenth century novels.