The thesis recontextualises the fiction of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writer Rudyard Kipling by exploring aspects of Victorian Buddhism in a selection of his published work. It demonstrates his engagement with a variety of Buddhist histories and cultures, showing a serious artistic and imaginative response to and interpretation of Buddhism. Focusing primarily on the novel Kim, the thesis develops existing criticism, examining the character of the lama. Additionally, it studies features of Victorian Buddhism other than textual sources, drawing on work by scholars in fields such as the history of art and the history of religion. As well as considering varied Buddhist elements in Kim, the thesis examines the theme of the survival of the soul, situating short stories from various periods of Kipling's writing life in the context of scholarly debates about Nirvana and reincarnation. Attention is also given to critically neglected travel writing from the Letters of Marque series written for periodical publication. Kipling's work is shown to be deeply concerned with and sympathetic to Buddhism and Buddhist cultures.

This thesis analyses the work of the artists living and painting in the area around the fishing village of Cullercoats and examines the conditions which fostered and maintained this colony during the period 1870 to 1914. As part of this process, two hitherto disparate bodies of scholarship are considered in tandem. Firstly, the increasing number of studies into European artists' colonies, encompassing consideration of both the phenomenon itself and of the artworks produced at them. Secondly, the locally-based recovery of late-Ivth-cenrury north east artists and their milieu, which has grown out of regional exhibition projects. Exposing the very clear areas of commonality between the two spheres of study underscores the central questions which this thesis addresses; namely, can the group of artists at Cullercoats be described as a colony; and if so, why has it been so consistently denied a place in colony surveys to-date? Answers are sought by engaging with a number of inter-related issues. These include the particular economic and social conditions which could sustain a local artists' colony and the variety of art clubs, exhibition spaces and sales venues which the colony fostered: the specific elements which are necessarily present to mark out a 'colony', rather than merely a 'sketching ground': the wider contemporary awareness of the colony and its work and how this compares with similar coastal colonies in Britain: the unpicking of the ideologies which underpinned the Naturalist subject in British art in the late-LOth century, including issues of race and gender ideals, nationalism and regionalism, tourism, and anxieties over urbanisation and industrialisation. The scope of this thesis demands an inter-disciplinary approach, combining social, economic and political history, gender studies, the wider field of 'cultural studies', as well as the usual analytical tools of the art historian. In essence, the thesis combines an empirical and theoretical contextualisation as the framework for a fresh perspective on the position and work of the Cullercoats artists' colony, which has wider implications for our understanding of European Naturalism and the colony phenomenon.

My dissertation examines the political and formal aspects of poetry written by working-class women in England and Scotland between 1830 and 1880. I analyse a poetic corpus that I have gathered from existing publications and new archival sources to assess what I call the “literary labour politics” of women whose poetry encounters, represents, and reacts to socio-historic change. The poetry of working-class women sheds light on the multidimensional intersections between poetry about labour and poetry as labour. I show that British working-class women writers were essential in the development of a working-class poetic aesthetic and political agenda by examining how their poetry engaged with European politics, slavery, gender inequality, child labour, education, industrialism, and poverty. The first section surveys the political and formal nature of the poetry written by working-class women immediately before and during the Chartist era to argue that gender complicates the political rubric of the working class during a period of intense social upheaval. I discuss the poetry of women who were published in James Morrison’s The Pioneer, as well as E.H., F. Saunderson, Eliza Cook, “Marie,” and Mary Hutton. I read their poems against those written both by eighteenth-century working-class women writers and male Chartists to illuminate the intervention of nineteenth-century women in these literary and cultural contexts. The second section interrogates the politics of working-class women’s poetry published after the dissolution of the Chartists in 1848 through a discussion of two pseudonymous “factory girl” poets, Fanny Forrester, and Ellen Johnston. I argue that even as working-class women’s poetry increasingly engaged with broad social issues, it also reflected the continuing importance of poetry itself as a means of individual empowerment and worked against the prose tradition to argue for the unique possibilities of poetic expression. The thematic and formal complexity of the poetry of these working-class women allows us to assess the various poetic strategies they developed to respond to the urgent and vexed issues of social reform and personal and national relationships, as they articulated poetic and personal identities as women labouring poets against a society not attuned to their voices. / Appendix B comprises an anthology of the poems discussed in this dissertation.

This study analyses the oscillations between realism and romance in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. In these novels, the shift from realism to romance is often mediated by scenes of female reading. This thesis explores the relationship between female reading and genre and argues that the conventional story patterns of past texts exert a strong influence on a woman’s ability to conceptualize her own identity and shape her life story.

This thesis is interested in Wilkie Collins’s blurring of high and low, authoritative and non-authoritative discourses, in The Law and the Lady, The Moonstone and Armadale. It looks at how these novels undermine the legal system, realism, and medicine respectively—three discourses that presumed high levels of authority during the nineteenth century. Collins supplements this undermining of authority by privileging less official approaches to human understanding and behavior. I argue that it is this self-reflexive subversion of Victorian normative values that renders his novels deserving of critical attention and reconsideration within the canon

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This thesis examines Oscar Wilde’s theories of art in connection with specific debates ongoing in Victorian psychology as it emerged in the periodical press. By cross examining Wilde’s periodical contributions with psychological theories, concepts and discussions disseminated through periodicals this thesis offers a contextual account of Wilde’s creativity. Scholars generally look to Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks to gain an insight into his interaction with scientific culture. While the notebooks are an invaluable source to scholars they only cover Wilde’s learning in the 1870s and therefore exclude the influential context of the 1880s when he was engaged as a journalist for numerous periodicals and newspapers. Chapter one will demonstrate how reading Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray alongside neighbouring articles in the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine reveals the hidden context of psychology in which the editors of the issue attempted to establish the text. The second chapter explores Wilde’s engagement in the disputes over psychological nomenclature alongside the psychology of George Henry Lewes, James Sully and other contributors. The third chapter will investigate the network in which Wilde’s reviewing for the Pall Mall Gazette established him. Wilde’s exchanges with aesthetic theorists and fellow reviewers Sully and Grant Allen will also be documented. The fourth chapter will demonstrate how Wilde creatively engaged with theories of atomism, emotionalist psychology and physiological aesthetics. The final chapter will examine the ethical questions posed by Wildean aesthetics in relation to scientific naturalism. Wilde originally communicated his theories through periodicals but also delivered lectures (which were reported in magazines), as well as eventually transforming his periodical articles into book publications. While this thesis places the onus on the periodical formats of Wilde’s texts, his lectures and revised editions of his writings will also be examined where relevant.

The fiction of Dickens and Collins abounds with references to the illegitimate. In the mid-Victorian period there is an increase in illegitimate characters and circumstances which relates both to the topicality of the issue and to events in the authors individual and collaborative private lives. Illegitimacy addresses personal and social anxieties in four major novels of the 1850s and 1860s: Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57) by Dickens and The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862) by Collins. Dickens analyses illegitimacy in Bleak House psychologically and socially through Esther Summerson, but her narrative reveals contradictions between Dickens challenge of contemporary attitudes towards the illegitimate and his subscription to the moral code behind the views. In Little Dorrit Dickens confines his study of illegitimacy to character in order to examine the psychological consequences of illegitimacy on the individual. The novel suggests that illegitimacy is another form of social and legal imprisonment. In contrast in The Woman in White Collins exploits the sensationalism surrounding illegitimacy by using it to create an exciting plot at the inception of the sensation genre. His suggestion in this novel that bastards are legally blank and able to reconstruct their identity is continued in No Name; this later novel directly challenges the laws defining and controlling illegitimacy. While Collins never matches Dickens integration of social and moral issues into the novel s structure, the older author appreciated Collins strength in creating detective narratives. Illegitimacy was relevant to the private lives of both Dickens and Collins in the period. While the authors always tried to keep their public and private lives separate, their romantic relationships reveal a personal motive for discussing the plight of the illegitimate in their novels. There is a distinct possibility that Dickens had an illegitimate child with his mistress Ellen Ternan while Collins had three illegitimate children with Martha Rudd. The novels articulate the tension between what Dickens and Collins the authors were trying to achieve and what the novels themselves disclose.

This dissertation studies the concept of “love” in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s "Poems and Ballads" [1866]. As I argue in Chapter One, there has been surprisingly little critical discussion of the concept of love in "Poems and Ballads," and what there has been is flawed in that it inadvertently reinforces the longstanding charge of Swinburne’s “meaninglessness,” obscures the ways in which the love of "Poems and Ballads" is an informed critical response to the culture of the time, and tends to render the poems and their dramatic speakers interchangeable. In Chapter Two, I attempt to redress the ahistoricism that has dominated these discussions by explaining how the love of "Poems and Ballads" arose in response to the “cult of love” of Swinburne’s contemporaries, which he, informed by ideas that he inherited from his Romantic forbearers, viewed as an impoverishment of sensual experience, and consequently of humankind’s creative capacities—as dramatized through his speakers’ “refusals” of love and its imaginative possibilities. In Chapter Three, I explore two such “refusals,” expressed through the voices of the very different speakers of the “Hymn to Proserpine” and “The Triumph of Time.” After clarifying some sources of confusion, I trace how both of these characters, by means of different philosophical and psychological pathways, come to turn away from love and (in doing so) their own poetic potential. In Chapter Four, I turn to “Dolores,” in which the speaker’s rejection of love drives him to the “perverse spiritualism” that Swinburne identifies with the Marquis de Sade. Although the speaker succumbs to creative impotence, I argue that he is capable of recognizing his own inadequacies, and to welcome a poet who can “kiss” and “sing” like Catullus once did (340-42). Finally, in Chapter Five, I argue that, in the Sappho of “Anactoria,” Swinburne provides a dramatic model of (the development of) the kind of poet who could “see love,” in all of its volatility and violence, and still “choose him.” In concluding the chapter, I also claim that Swinburne suggests, in Sappho’s relation to her future readers, how such a poet might inspire others to “choose” love. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2014-04-23 10:34:46.253

The implication of belief, that association between the veridical ghost tale and the fictional ghost tale—an association resulting from the onslaught of reason and science, and consequently spiritual doubt—remains largely responsible for the fictional ghost tale’s critical demise. A rise in the spiritualist movement produces a specific literature that coincides with the rise in interest in its fictional counterpart. Both the veridical ghost tale and the fictional ghost tale reach their heights in popularity at precisely the same time; not coincidental, but well planned by talented writers who viewed the preoccupation with ghosts as a platform from which a variety of contemporary issues could be candidly dealt. The Victorian literary ghost figure simultaneously, and ingeniously, fills a spiritual void, satisfies a consumer need for entertainment, and provides an opportunity for cultural commentary. The voice of the Victorian ghost, and the subsequent understanding of its haunted are of distinct cultural significance.