Many critics consider nineteenth century British Romanticism one of the most political movements in literary history. A major reason for this claim is that the 19th century is recorded in European history as a watershed of economic, social, and political constructions whose consequences and impact reached continents and populations beyond Europe.For example, the Atlantic slave trade, colonization, and the industrial revolution reached their apogee in the century. One outcome of these developments was the new alignments and relationships Europe entered into with African and Asian peoples. The intellectual and social character of these relationships attracted the interest and attention of the English literati who defined the Romantic movement.In particular, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel T.Coleridge, Robert Southey, Percy B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and others will reflect on the turbulent currents of the age's concerns with the ethics and implications of internal social and political arrangements and their historical projections in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In spite of the varied tone of the engravings, essays, poetry, drama and novels that defined the writers' concerns, their works will register compelling voices in literary history.This study focuses mainly on select writings of the Shelleys which respond to the social and cultural ramifications of 19th Century history and politics. A unique aspect of the Shelley's literary engagement is their appropriation and redefinition of classical myths and metaphors to develop "revolutionary" readings of history. In the process, nuanced operations of irony and paradox appear to undermine the "revolutionary" intention critics claim for the Shelleys.Also, this study explores critical assertions that claim that the historical relationships Europeans entered into with other peoples, particularly Aficans, influenced a similar development of radical politics in some Afircan writing. This history is the subject of the Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah novels examined in this study. The examination argues reasons that similar operations of irony and paradox are present in these African writers as they develop other notions of Africa's historical meeting with Europe.

This dissertation demonstrates the ways in which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers employ Christian discourse in order to affirm, contest, or even expand--sometimes concurrently--conceptualizations of power, race, and gender. Furthermore, this project argues that feminist critics need to integrate the examination of the encodings of religion in literature into already existing modes of analysis such as those that take into consideration the significance of gender, race, class, and sexuality. The four authors considered in this study all make use of religious discourse as a political strategy for manipulating positions of female cultural authority and white racial privilege. Each author uses inflections of Christianity in order to claim or contest the privileges of whiteness, assumptions about female sexual purity, and competing visions of women's role in the nation's putative millennial destiny. In her 1859 The Minister's Wooing, Harriet Beecher Stowe develops mutually reinforcing theological, romantic love, and antislavery plots in order to valorize America's Puritan heritage while attempting to establish a providential place for the problem of slavery in the nation's millennial destiny. Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black portrays a black woman with a tumultuous, but nonetheless profound, affiliation with Christianity. Wilson uses a religious framework to expose the national sin of racism and to hint at the latent redemption available to those oppressed by the racial prejudice of hypocritical, white Christians. In her 1872 Who Would Have Thought It?, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton inverts the structures of nineteenth-century nativist anti-Catholic rhetoric to make a case for her Mexican protagonist's white racial and aristocratic cultural purity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's secular and scientific ideology of womanhood, which she articulated in eugenic narratives such as her 1911 The Crux, echoes the religiously-infused domestic ideologies of her great-aunt Catharine Beecher. Indeed, by foregrounding religious historical and cultural contexts, this dissertation offers comparative readings of these novels and authors and exposes the ways in which the manifestations of religion in American literature interlock with the social discourses of race and gender.

In "Travels in the Glittering World": Transcultural Representations of Navajo Country, I compare how Dine (Navajo) writers and Euroamerican nature writers represent their experience of Dine culture and the place of the Navajo Nation. This project repositions the scope of analysis common to broader regional studies of the U.S. Southwest by engaging the many ways that representations of Dine Bikeyah (Navajo Country), as a nation linked to other political entities, have refracted the cultural concerns of several twentieth and twenty-first century writers and filmmakers. Centrally, I consider how representations stand in relation to the cultivation of cultural sovereignty. In doing so, I consider the limits and applicability of interpretive models, including "communitism," the "Peoplehood Matrix," and expansive imaginings of literary nationalism. Following scholars such as Lloyd Lee, I consider how elements of contemporary Dine identity--"worldview, land, language, kinship . . . [and] respect for their ancestors' ability to survive colonialism"--factor into twentieth-century texts (92). Responding to texts addressing several historical periods, I consider how artists address the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, stock reduction, integration into wage economies and the development of extractive industries, relocation, and periods of contemporary migration. Throughout, I consider how rootedness in culture and place allows Navajos to embrace paths of mobility and mindful alliances, which counteract forces which would confine them to the space of the reservation, to the status of a resource colony, or to the role as imagined font of exotic otherness. I consider how Euroamerican nature writers, with limited success, work against the impulse to tint Navajo Country in the sepia hues of primitivist nostalgia to embrace instead a restorative ethos that might support efforts to advance goals of cultural sovereignty. I consider how Dine authors call upon earlier Navajo literary traditions, as well as anti-colonial texts from other cultures, to negotiate the desire to "root" identity in a fixed place while traversing "routes" through and beyond Navajo Country, connecting that nation to larger networks of cultural exchange, urban relocation, economic necessity, travel, and pan-tribal, if not global, alliances working for the purposes of cultural sovereignty and environmental justice.

Jane Austen wrote six novels of manners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each novel is distinguished by an interesting plot, truthful characterization, and natural dialogue. By a skilful combination of these elements she gave her writings a dramatic quality which tempts a reader to consider them as promising material for adaptation to the theatre. In each story a definite pattern may be pointed out in the development of the action. The pattern followed is that of a comedy which follows a natural order of beginning, middle, and end.

Warren thought of many, many things with his duffle bag heavy on his shoulder, his fingers flexing and tightening around the curve of the thick, steel railing, his eyes passing lightly over the business of unloading a troopship, but most of all he thought about going home. For him the worst of the Army was over; for him, even though the actual fighting had ceased many months ago, there had followed the ordeal of occupation, the dreary policing of unpoliceable people. He watched the gangplank moving slowly; he tried to be patient.

An examination of extant historical and literary evidence for the purpose of questioning the standard paradigm of the "Germanization of Christianity". While the melding and inclusion of both Mediterranean and Teutonic elements in Anglo-Saxon poetry has been the subject of extensive research, until relatively recently, scholars have attributed this dynamic largely to a central manipulation of the Christian message by the Roman church with a view towards making it compatible with the societal mores of the (relatively) newly convt..rted Northern Europeans. This thesis will suggest rather, that the presentation of God and Christ in Old English religious verse may have been an exploration by English scribal clerics of theological issues specifically important to their laity. This study is divided into three parts: the historical background of Anglo-Saxon society in the early Middle Ages; Christian conversion in England and later English evangelization in the north; an analysis of structural metaphor and the importance of hidden meaning in extant Anglo-Saxon religious poetry with a specific look at the Christ of Anglo-Saxon poetry as the personification of specifically English ideas of origin, structure and meaning. / Cette these comporte un examen d'evidence historique et litteraire afin de remettre en cause Ie paradigme standard du «Germanisation du christianisme». Bien que la fusion des elements mediterraneens et Teutoniques dans la poesie anglo-saxonne ait ete Ie sujet d'une recherche etendue, jusque relativement recemment on a attribue cette dynamique en grande partie a une manipulation centrale du message chretien par I' eglise romaine, manipulation dont Ie but etait de rendre la foi chretienne conciliable avec l'ethos social des Europeens nordiques nouvellement convertis. Comme hypothese alternative, cette these suggere que par la presentation heroYque du Christ dans leur vers religieux les ecrivains anglo-saxons puissent avoir explore des questions theologiques qui etaient tres importantes pour les Anglais, c'est a dire, dont la provenance etait dans la pensee culturale angbise meme. Cette etude se divise en trois sections: 1. L 'historique de la societe anglo-saxonne dans Ie haut moyen age; 2. La conversion des Anglais en christianisme, et l'initiative anglaise d'evangelisation qui a suivi dans Ie nord de l'Europe ; 3. Une analyse de metaphore structurale dans la poesie religieuse anglo-saxonnf> de survie, et de l'importance la de dans de la «signification cachee» avec un regard specifique chez Ie Christ de la poesie anglo-saxonne comme personnification des idees specifiquement anglaises qui concernent les questions de I' origine, la structure, et la signification du monde. fr

Society in some sense, is the common birthright of all novelists. But for each writer, the word “society” has some particular meaning that is more precise than any general, all-inclusive definition. Society, for Jane Austen, meant the class-structure of her day and of her country. Nothing outside that concerned here as a novelist. The whole broad and varied expanse of eighteenth-century English life composed the society Henry Fielding depicted. Some novelists are interested primarily in a highly sophisticated and intellectual group of people, others in low life, and others still, in people of many social levels.

Ben Jonson wrote that Donne’s work was “longer a knowing than most wits doe live”, and feared that it would perish “for not being understood”. The passage of three and a half centuries has not brought about the fulfilment of Jonson’s prophecy, but it has inevitably added to the difficulty of understanding Donne's poetry. Many of the scientific ideas which underlie a great field of his poetic imagery, and much of the Elizabethan Medicine to which he constantly referred, have now been forgotten. A study of them is rewarded by fresh insight into his meaning.

Portrayal of childhood has become a significant aspect of the history of English prose fiction. Advances in the general understanding of human nature and its problems have brought with them increased understanding of the child and his place in the scheme of things. An examination of the major novels of Daniel Defoe, father of the English novel, will show that society was self-consciously aware of the child and some of his problems as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Note: Missing title page. / Some critics appreciate the early plays of W.B. Yeats for their lyric beauties and ignore or deprecate the later, more dramatic works because in them dramatic values have replaced the lyric element to a large extent. Others suggest that the plays are not dramatic enough. T. R. Henn, for instance, is of the opinion that the last plays must be considered as dramatic poems. The general tendency has been to ignore Yeats as a dramatist while extolling his genius as a poet.