This thesis is the first systematic study of short stories published in the New Statesman [NS] weekly magazine from its foundation in 1913 to 1939. The main question it seeks to address is what type of fiction did a mainstream socialist publication like the NS publish then? By chronologically charting dominant literary figures and themes, the thesis aims to discern significant cultural tendencies and editorial principles of selection. Following Raymond Williams' 'cultural materialism', fiction is read in its relation to social history, as a 'representation of history'. Chapter 1 deals with the foundation of the journal and its first year of publication, mapping out the contradictions between Fabian collectivist ideology and ethical socialism, urban realism and literary Georgianism, country and city. A focus on urban problems of poverty unemployment, philanthropy, and machinofacture is at the heart of the NS's literary concern, in 1913. Chapter 2 focuses on stories published during World War I, and goes up to 1926. It argues that the reality of the War was falsified as a time of rest and relaxation, in line with the journal's political policy of supporting the war effort. The immediate post-war period is read as a time of disappointment and intensified social conflict and struggle. The General Strike of 1926 is a turning point in interwar history. It also ushers in a period of unprecedented cultural activity in the NS. As Chapters 4 and 5 show, the post-Strike period is characterised by the consolidation of the working-class fiction of socialist R. M. Fox; by the rise of the countryside realism of H. E. Bates; and by the rise of the colonial fiction of E. R. Morrough on Egypt (which is examined in the context of Leslie Mitchell's, E. M. Forster's, and William Plomer's responses to empire). Significant contributions by women writers (such as Faith Compton Mackenzie) about travel, duty, and oppression are also made in the late 20s, early 30s. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the magnificent place that Russian fiction occupies in the 30s through the work of Michael Zoshchenko. Though written during the free and experimental 20s, his satiric fiction is published as a sample of Soviet literature of the 30s, thus consolidating the Stalinist line dictated by the political editor, Kingsley Martin, that 'self-criticism' is a central part of Soviet politics and society. Chapter 7 is a tribute to the NS's contribution to reconstructing British realism away from both Victorian moralism and European naturalism. The stories of Bates, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Chamberlain are dominant, conveying different ways of negotiating the pressures of documentary realism and the political developments of the 30s. Also discussed is the unique modernist contribution of neglected Stella Benson, which presents a strong challenge to the usual representationalism of NS fiction. The concluding chapter reads NS fiction in the whole period between 1913 and 1939 as the cultural expression of the new petty bourgeoisie, especially its progressive, politically and socially engaged side. With its focus on ordinariness and lived experience, and its formal experimentation and innovation, NS fiction exemplifies artistic commitment par excellence, a conscious cultural alignment with the actuality and potentiality of the new petty bourgeoisie.

This thesis examines a practice of nineteenth-century novelists which has often been mentioned by critics but never studied in detail - the setting of much of their work in a period a generation or two before the time of writing. Its main focus is on the fiction of George Eliot set in the recent past: Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-58), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), and Middlemarch (1871-72). However I begin by looking briefly at the pioneering novel in the field, Waverley (1814), and go on to discuss three more novels by Scott - Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816) and Redgauntlet (1824) - as well as three by Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50) and The Newcomes (1853-55). Since I aim to discover the attitudes these writers adopted to the recent past, and conveyed to their first readers, this study involves discussion not only of the periods in which the novels are set, but also of the periods in which they were written, so as to establish the knowledge and preconceptions which the books' early readers brought to bear on the fiction. Where possible I quote the responses of actual contemporary readers, notably those of the early reviewers. This thesis draws attention to the various functions a setting in the recent past could serve in nineteenth-century fiction: to arouse nostalgic feelings for a vanished but remembered past, or sympathy for the people of the past, to point out that change is sometimes more apparent than real, to comment obliquely on contemporary issues, to highlight the unchanging features of human nature and human predicaments, to examine the role of the individual in effecting change.

This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).

This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.

This thesis provides a critique of the gaze in Gothic novels and French melodramas between 1790 and 1825. After situating itself historically in relation to the eighteenth century's prioritization of vision, the thesis then progresses in chapters two to seven to textual examinations of visual critiques provided by Gothic novelists. It examines the following authors: Sophia Lee; Ann Radcliffe; Matthew Lewis; the Marquis de Sade; Charles Maturin; James Hogg, and William Godwin. The thesis contends that these Gothic novelists demonstrate the function of the gaze in its most violent and reductive light. In the novels examined, the thesis posits that vision is used as a tool of power, rather than one of education and enlightenment. An examination is made of the imprisoning function of the gaze with reference to psychoanalytical essays on the gaze written by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. These essays help to promote the theory that the Gothic novels studied all portray some form of transgressive gazing: the punishment for this lies in the characters' temporary transition into some form of inanimate image. Whether this be a portrait, a statue, or a dramatic tableau, the transition is indicative of the regressive gaze to the past that the characters have been using. The eighth and final chapter of the thesis turns the focus from Gothic novels to French melodramas. This is done to represent the failure of French melodramatists to regulate the visual responses of their audiences. By examining their critical projects, and the results of them, the thesis concludes by demonstrating the practice, and failure, of the gaze.

This study proposes that modernity is constitutively based upon a synchronic temporality which perpetuates the present of the ego. Within this matrix, history is subject to the processes of subjectivization and the 'otherness' of the past disappears. Postmodernism, it is argued, designates the attempt to disinter a properly historical thinking, or historicity, from the recursive temporality of the modern. This attempt is predicated upon the retroactive temporality of the future perfect which, whilst also a synchrony, arises from a productive tension between the past, the present and the future. The self-divisive time of the future perfect expedites the discomfiture of the ego and its concomitant subjectivization of the past and, by so doing, registers the historicity of that past. The relation between the modern and the postmodern forms of temporality is expressed by the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and symbolic orders. It is argued, moreover, that this distinction is manifest in the narrative forms of the contemporary novel. Whilst the modern form of the contemporary novel replicates the structures of an egocentric repletion of synchrony, the postmodern novel displaces this imaginary problematic to the symbolic. By employing a variety of techniques founded upon retroactivity, postmodern novels are thereby shown to foster a disclosure of the structure of historicity. Within this rubric five novels are given extended consideration: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and John Banville's Doctor Copernicus.

This dissertation investigates the properties of sentimentality by analyzing the move in British literature from a fascination with heightened affect to a celebration of Gothic excess during the period 1768--1796. This study develops an account of sentimentality as a model of agency, theorizes the relationship of sentimental ideology to sentimental narrative form, and traces continuities between the sentimental and Gothic modes through an examination of texts that share a preoccupation with the aesthetics and ethics of sentimentalism. By examining representations of sentimental agency in prose fiction narratives by Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, this dissertation argues that sentimentalism was a contradictory cultural discourse rooted in an unstable complex of assumptions about the ontological status and political implications of social identity. Sentimental narrative dramatizes the parodic potential of a code of behavior predicated on the display of a character's virtue in sympathetic response to suffering. Intrinsic to this display is a dynamic tension between the altruistic ideals of the sentimental ethos and the aestheticized, exploitative and self-consciously theatrical mode that often marks its practice. Torn between disinterest and self-interest, between public duty and private desire, the sentimentalist is a conflicted figure whose aggressive aesthetic is increasingly shown to be at once comically bathetic and darkly menacing.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1993. / "Submitted as Ph. D thesis." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 468-493).

Published also as thesis (Ph. D.) Columbia university, 1918. / Lemcke & Buechner, New York, stamped on t.-p. Bibliography: p. 223-230. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 161-174) Also available in print.