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.

This thesis analyses how the British South Asian diaspora is conceptualized, understood and reflected in a selection of female-authored literary texts which engage with the multicultural policies of the British state from the 1950s to the present. The primary sources include Attia Hosain’s Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Kamala Markandaya’s Possession (1963) and The Nowhere Man (1972), Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman seeks the One (2009) and Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune (2012). I conceive of British multicultural state policies as unfolding in three major phases: Assimilation (1950- 1979), Integration (1980-2001), Social Cohesion/Interculturalism (2001- present). The thesis examines these policy changes and illustrates how these shifts are mirrored in and shape the character of British South Asian women’s writings. In the light of this I argue that British South Asian women writers’ engagement with a sense of exile, dislocation or a ‘teleology of return’ along with a symbolic longing to create imaginary homelands has produced new alliances which exist outside what has been called the national time/space in order ‘to live inside, with a difference’. Through the selected writers’ individual attempts to configure new fictional home spaces, a new architecture for the diasporic imagination is constructed around the poetics of home and the multicultural politics of identity. Such cross-cultural literary interventions exist both within and outside colonial and postcolonial genealogies, reconfiguring the critical geographies by which they have been mostly defined. The first two chapters of the thesis attempt to define the complex configurations of the concept of multiculturalism and its interconnections with the terminology of diaspora. I have adopted a reading strategy tracing the South Asian migration history to Britain and the early literary representations which powerfully illuminate the fragmented imagination of the South Asian diaspora in terms of contemporary theoretical paradigms. The next three chapters analyse literary representations by Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Rosie Dastgir, who highlight and complicate the issues of race, ethnicity and gender in relation to the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multicultural policies. The writers use various strategies that testify to the innate relation between the political ‘real’ and the literary ‘imaginary’ and explain how real life experiences provide fuel to the ‘diasporic imaginary’ and affirm the transnational potency of literature.

The twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have Catholicised Shakespeare. At the heart of this movement lie the so-called Lancastrian theories: that Shakespeare spent some time during his `lost years' in Lancashire and that he is to be identified with `Will[i]am Shakeshafte' in the will of the Catholic magnate, Alexander Hoghton of Lea. Although the proponents of the theories - aptly called `Lancastrians' - agree in terms of the identification of `Shakeshafte' with Shakespeare, their arguments vary and sometimes even contradict each other. We have, therefore, Lancastrian theories (plural). They are attempts to investigate the whereabouts of Shakespeare during the `lost years' and to find out the means by which he entered the London theatre. The Lancastrian theories can be seen in part as a counter-movement against recent Shakespeare scholarship that has been preoccupied with theory. Paradoxically, another stimulus for the revival of biographical studies is literary critics' interest in early modem history, which materialist criticism, especially new historicism, has brought in since the 1980s. Religion has become a major issue in Shakespeare studies. The modem historiography of the English Reformation, especially `revisionism', which emphasises the continuation of medieval Catholicism after the Reformation, has provided significant energy for the development of the Lancastrian theories. Furthermore, the Lancastrians have their own agenda - personal ambitions and motivations, some of which are not altogether scholarly. However, these theories are for the most part based on a chain of speculations, and tend to state them as fact. The biographers, whether Lancastrians or not, who believe Shakespeare and his family to have been Catholics are unfamiliar with the religious condition in Elizabethan England, including anti-Catholic acts and the penalties imposed on recusants. Their arguments also neglect other Elizabethan customs. These biographers' lack of profound knowledge of socio-political and religious history of Elizabethan England has produced inaccurate dramatisation of Shakespeare's life. One other disabling tendency among these biographers is to neglect negative evidence and disregard alternative interpretations. Their approaches to Shakespeare biography simplify the complexity of documentary evidence and produce narrowness of view. In Elizabethan England a series of continuous religious negotiations and renegotiations took place. Through this struggle, the clear-cut division between Catholicism and Protestantism was deconstructed, and there emerged `religious pluralism' -a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. It was in this complex matrix that Shakespeare was born, grew up and wrote plays and poems. It is against this cultural background that we should study Shakespeare's life (or lives).

This thesis examines the strategies, diversity and evolution of political, religious, and philosophical dialogues between the publication of Sir William Jones’s The Principles of Government (1782) and Robert Southey’s Colloquies on Society (1829). The dialogue genre during the Romantic period has received scant critical attention, and little is known about its evolution between the ‘death’ of the ‘Dialogues of the Dead’ style towards the end of the eighteenth-century and the satirical and literary innovations demonstrated in the dialogues of Peacock and Landor. This thesis elucidates the very significant changes that occurred in dialogue writing during this period in relation to wider contemporaneous issues concerning the Revolution Controversy, evangelical ‘enthusiasm’, reading audiences, the formation of class identities, the diffusion of knowledge, and the burgeoning of the novel to name but a few. Central to my argument is the notion that dialogue enacts a form of mentoring – a procedure that is intended to either directly or indirectly facilitate a ‘conversion’ within the reader, (and which ultimately becomes subverted only in satire). Such tactics go to the heart of debates concerning education, didacticism, and the reading process itself. Dialogue’s encapsulation of the primal constituent in communication - linguistic interchange - raises fundamental questions regarding the exchangeability of ideas, power relations and ideological manipulation, and as such, I look at how writers and propagandists used dialogue to bolster or critique various ideological standpoints, whilst constantly interrogating the many philosophical and textual problems that the genre poses. I argue that such questions, coupled with the increasing sophistication and interpretative capabilities of reading audiences, made the didacticism of the mentoring scenario untenable by the 1820s. However, I conclude that philosophical dialogue becomes an ‘impossible’ venture without some form of direction and coercion, and following this realization, the satirizing of philosophical debate and the process of dialogue itself became a more viable way of dialogue writing.