This thesis brings together a collection of works, all of which explore ways in which the prolific twentieth-century writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, engaged with politics. A committed communist from the 1930s onwards, Warner was also a feminist writer and the works discussed here examine the interface between the politics of gender and the politics of the left. The sexual politics of Warner's private life with her long-term partner, Valentine Ackland, also inform her writings, often providing a homosexual undercurrent that offers multiple possible readings. Warner worked in a range of genres over a writing career that spanned five decades. The essays collected here, examine her poetry, short-stories, novels, journalism and life writing to determine the extent to which political activism lay at the core of Warner's life. While scholars have long identified the political engagement of Warner's writings from the 1930s onwards, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Politics of the English Pastoral 1925-1934' argues that Warner was an established political commentator in the 1920s, using the genre of the Pastoral as a means to critique rural politics. 'The Politics of Disclosure and the fable' explores Warner's communist and feminist activism of the 1930s by tracing her use of fable and allegory in her novels of this period, and her involvement in the Spanish Civil War. And 'Nefarious Activities', uses recently revealed MI5 documents that detail the surveillance of Warner and Ackland from 1935-1955; evidence indicating the seriousness of Warner's political works and the perceived threat that she may have posed to the establishment. While this threat was imaginary, it is tesimony to the subversive nature of Warner's writing throughout her career. Together, these essays present a valuable overview of the importance of politics and gender in all aspects of Warner's literary work.

This thesis explores the relationships between music, literature, aesthetics and politics in the novels of James Joyce, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the poetry of Ezra Pound, to show the political relevance of how discourses of musical transcendence appear in these texts. These authors were notably political: Pound was involved with Italian fascism, Warner a Communist Marxist, while Joyce critics have been invested in claiming for him a liberal, humanist political position that is reflected in his writing. This allows me to analyse their engagement with music in light of their politics in order to make connections between aesthetics and politics through music in modernist literature. The texts analysed in this thesis are Joyce’s Chamber Music and Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, his early essays and articles, and his musical theories ‘absolute rhythm’ and ‘Great Bass’, and finally Warner’s Mr Fortune’s Maggot, ‘The Music at Long Verney’, and The Corner That Held Them. I use a methodology, informed by the musicology and philosophy of T.W. Adorno, that moves between aesthetic and social approaches to music. I analyse the political significance of Joyce’s and Pound’s appropriation of musical forms as part of a radical departure from traditional aesthetic practices to articulate a newly modern subjectivity, and arrive at an analysis of Warner’s exploration of the tension between music as both transcendent aesthetic paradigm and material object with political meanings and functions. I argue that the extent to which writers and scholars continue to refer to discourses of musical transcendence as a way of exploring and representing humanity’s relationship with the world means that analyses of music’s social grounding, which can reject problems of signification and meaning, are not sufficient to explain the variety of functions music can fulfil in writing and in thought.

My dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity. / text