Through the life and work of James Crossley, this thesis explores the important and often neglected significance of middle-class power and influence in the nineteenthcentury industrial city of Manchester. Born in the first year of the century, Crossley can be considered a paradigm of one section of a class divided along political and sectarian lines. He was a lawyer by profession, and a 'Church and State' Tory by inclination. After successive defeats, political ambitions gave way to antiquarian and especially literary interests, which he pursued in common with an influential network of other like-minded individuals. It is principally in this area that he made a significant contribution to the cultural maturation of the burgeoning city, and achieved the highest recognition during his lifetime. The principal topics investigated in successive chapters, through manuscript and printed sources, are: 1) Education and early literary interests. 2) The beginnings of a lifelong friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, many of whose novels depended on source material provided by Crossley. Early literary journalism in Blackwood's Magazine and the Retrospective Review. 3) Legal training, the formation of the Manchester Law Association. 4) Political affairs, particularly in opposition to the Charter of Incorporation. 5) Dickens's visits, the expansion of Manchester's cultural infrastructure, including the Athenaeum Club 6) The growth and importance of publishing societies in the nineteenth century. Crossley's role in shaping and maintaining the Chetham Society. 7) The founding of the Manchester Free Public Library, Crossley's part in the selection and purchase of the stock, and the public recognition of this work. 8) The importance of the private collector in nineteenth-century literary research. Crossley's collection (particularly of the works of Daniel Defoe), and his influence on the work of contemporary bibliographers. 9) The Manchester man of letters, his accomplishments and status. It was concluded from this study that the life and achievements of James Crossley provide a valuable insight into the cultural development of Manchester in the nineteenth century.

published_or_final_version / English Studies and Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

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The present work explicates the concept of "the messianic" as it figures in the work of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin in order to establish the foundation of a useful (and, one hopes, potentially innovative) critical approach to the works of Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, John Fowles, as well as to novelistic fiction generally. This foundation rests on a common quality of the messianic as it figures in Derrida and Benjamin's respective corpora. In their conception the messianic refers not to some individual of divine, semi-divine, or even mortal origin who is charged with functioning as the world-historical agent by whose deeds history itself comes to an end, and a new holy, paradisiacal order is thereby founded, but to the aspirational tenor to humankind's orientation to futurity. The messianic finds expression in the myriad instantiations of human beings' future-oriented activity. As such, it achieves a sort of spectrality--or, to borrow the term Marx applies to the commodity, a phantom-like objectivity--having a somewhat intuitive apprehensibility, if in fact not form or substance.Novelistic fiction, which exploits its own spectrality in a bid for arranging impossible arrangements, realizing impossible realities, ordering impossible orders, attempts to occupy an impossible-to-occupy space between on one hand, the catastrophic present and the messianic future, and on the other hand, the future to come and the future as it is wished to be. Wracked by the tension created by its allegiance to chance, the contingent, and the aleatory on one side, and to the deterministic, the necessary, and the climactic or teleological on the other side, novelistic fiction achieves its particular character precisely through pursuit of its abortive program, just as humanity achieves its character, to the extent that such a notion is legitimate, precisely through its abortive program, which is nothing more no less than survival, than living on.

The existence of specific lexical features marking the speech of female characters in Roman Comedy is signalled in scholiastic literature, and has been confirmed by modern quantitative research. This thesis, focusing on the comedies of Plautus, investigates the question of why the playwrights made specific linguistic choices for female personae. / Greek and Roman literary theory stipulated that the speech of women in drama had to be constructed so as to reveal the speakers' feminine nature. Philosophical doctrines that construed gender as a polar opposition evince a fundamental distinction, defining male as 'bond' and female as 'boundless'. The association of female with boundlessness, it is argued, also determines woman's position with respect to speech. A study of Greek New Comedy reveals that the reflections on female nature and expression found there depict woman as adverse to limits, a concept which Plautus seems to have subsequently adapted from his sources. / Donatus's scholia to Terence characterize female speech as disorderly and disrespectful of the norms of verbal interaction. Concrete linguistic patterns are rationalized as symptoms of 'softness' and querulousness, both representing the female propensity to violate interpersonal limits. The text of Plautus, examined for meta-textual asides on female speech, confirms the scholiast's observations. An inquiry into the Plautine perception of blanditia reveals that female mannerisms are interpreted as tokens of a contagious moral disorder, and that they earmark the feebleness of female (and effeminate) personae. The otherness of female complaints, emphasized during the performance of palliata by both verbal and para-verbal means, is intimately associated in the text of the comedies with the chaos within women's minds. Female speech patterns in Plautus thus illustrate the concept of infirmitas sexus.

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This thesis presents an account of the relationship between literary Theory and close reading in Joyce studies. Throughout, 'Theory' is understood not in a general, conceptual sense, but as a word we use to refer to certain specified intellectual developments in the literary academy that have taken place over roughly the last half-century. Working from the basis that little can be deduced regarding the contentious relationship between Theory and close reading as long as the issue remains an abstract one, the thesis works towards a description of that relationship based upon scrutiny of key works in the field. To that end, it performs a series of case studies of some of the more significant attempts to combine a deep Theoretical commitment with rigorous textual analysis. The argument developed is that in a significant number of cases a commitment to reading 'Theoretically' has led the critic into an erroneous reading of the literary text under discussion. The possibility of such error is defined with reference to a set of standards which, the author hopes, will be accepted by most scholars working in the field. Alongside this primary concern, the thesis sets out a technique of close reading designed to minimise the chances of such errors occurring. This technique is referred to as Thematic Stylistics. Requiring both broad and deep engagement with literary texts, it aims to encourage both fidelity and sensitivity when put into practice, and thereby to act as a balance to the suggested tendencies of Theoretical reading. This technique is not left as a set of bare principles, but is exemplified in alternate chapters with reference to errors discussed during the critique described above. Together, the critique of Theory and the outline of Thematic Stylistics are taken to provide a constructive suggestion for the future of the academy.

Although much has been written on the 1930s as a period of ferment and innovation in New Zealand’s literary culture, the immediate post-war period has remained largely unexamined. As an outcome, literary histories have tended to downplay the significance of the Centennial publications and overlooked the impact made by the literary-cultural periodical to the post-war literary economy. The formulation of a conversation within the pages of the journals and the associated creation of the culture-critic were central to the cultural nationalism of the period 1947-61. It is argued in this thesis that the ‘long fifties’, the years from the cessation of the Second World War through to the early sixties, were a discrete moment in New Zealand’s literary history. To understand the success of the journals as a form of intervention their founding needs to be traced not only to Phoenix and Tomorrow – journals of the thirties – but also to the programme of publishing that was part of the 1940 Centennial celebrations. Under the leadership of J. C. Beaglehole and E. H. McCormick, the Centennial publications contested the existing structures of cultural authority that lay with the amateur historian and the literary criticism of the ‘bookmen’. Beaglehole and McCormick professionalised the discourse of history writing and literary criticism through the introduction of academic practice, and, significantly, a rigorously critical engagement with the formation of national identity. Their critical engagement acted as an encouragement to the founding of the literary-cultural journal during the late 1940s: Landfall begun publishing in 1947 and Here & Now followed in 1949. This thesis argues, however, that alongside these two independent journals there needs to be placed the Listener under the editorship of M. H. Holcroft, and that these three publications created sites where the imaginative could sit next to the critical, and that this development was based on the belief that the absence of a critical undertaking would stunt the growth of the culture’s imaginative and creative undertaking. During the period 1947-61 the development of a specific form of intervention in the writing of the culture-critic can be detected. The culture-critics sought to actively engage the reading public in a conversation; therefore, they wrote for the periodicals in a style that was accessible but discriminating; they understood that they had a specific function within society. Furthermore, the primacy attached to the cultural authority of Brasch and Landfall is contested, and it is instead claimed that an exclusive focus on Landfall distorts the overall temper of the post-war years. Landfall was but one site where the developing national consciousness was published and assessed; it was a disputatious time.

This thesis is the first ever survey of Shetland’s literature. The large body of material the thesis covers is not well known, and, apart from Walter Scott’s 1822 novel The Pirate, and Hugh MacDiarmid’s sojourn in the archipelago, Shetland is not a presence in any account of Scottish writing. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ has been written to address this absence. Who are Shetland’s writers? And what have they written? These are the fundamental questions this thesis answers. By paying close attention to Shetland’s writers, ‘The Literature of Shetland’ extends the geographical territory of the Scottish canon. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ covers a chronological period from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Virtually no creative poetry or prose, either written or oral, survives in Shetland from before this time so, after a brief discussion of the fragmentary pre-nineteenth century sources, the thesis discusses the archipelago’s literature in eight chronologically arranged chapters. Chapter One concentrates on a group of three obscure early nineteenth-century Shetland authors – Margaret Chalmers, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, and Thomas Irvine – and also explores Scott’s involvement with the northern isles. Chapters Two and Three discuss an important period at the end of the nineteenth century, in which books and newspapers were published in Shetland for the first time, and in which a number of pioneering and influential local writers emerged. Jessie M.E. Saxby became the first professional writer from Shetland and, in the work of George Stewart, James Stout Angus, Basil Anderson, and especially J.J. Haldane Burgess, the Shetland dialect developed as a serious literary idiom. These writers laid down foundations for much of what came next. Chapter Four discusses the end of this period of growth, with James Inkster posed as the last significant figure of his generation, and the war poet John Peterson as the first local writer to depart from the literary principles which developed in the Victorian era. Chapter Five looks at the work Hugh MacDiarmid did in Shetland from 1933-1942. MacDiarmid is not really part of the narrative of the thesis, but the work he produced in the isles is vast. Because he does not need to be introduced in the way the other writers do, this chapter takes a different approach to the rest of the thesis and looks at MacDiarmid’s Shetland-era work alongside that of Charles Doughty. Doughty was a crucial presence for MacDiarmid during his time in the isles, and considering their work together opens up a better understanding of the work MacDiarmid did in Shetland. Chapters Six and Seven discuss the second major period of growth in Shetland’s literature, focussing on the writers associated with the New Shetlander magazine, an important local journal which emerged in 1947. The final chapter then looks at contemporary Shetland authors and asks how they negotiate the literary tradition the thesis has worked through. This chapter also discusses the Shetland-related work of several non-native authors, Jen Hadfield being the most well known. In moving through these authors, as well as providing necessary introductory material, several general questions are asked. Firstly, because almost all the writing studied emerges from the isles, the question of how each writer engages with those isles is consistently relevant. How do local writers find ways of writing about their native archipelago? Do writers who are not from Shetland write about the islands in different ways than local people? The thesis shows how Scott and MacDiarmid, the two most famous non-native authors dicussed here, draw on earlier literary sources – the sagas and the work of Doughty – to construct their respective creative visions of the isles. And, in discussing the work of local authors, it will be shown that, in the early period covered in Chapter One, landscape is the most prominent idea whereas, from the Victorian era to the present day, the croft provides the central imaginative space for Shetland’s writers. A second question that runs through the thesis is one of language. Almost every local author has written extensively in Shetland dialect, and this study explores how they have developed that language as a literary idiom. The thesis shows how Shetland dialect writing gets underway in the 1870s, and how writers have continued to expand and diversify that literary tradition. The two most innovative figures to emerge are J.J. Haldane Burgess and William J. Tait and, after demonstrating how the corpus of writing in Shetland dialect has grown, the thesis concludes by examining the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the vernacular legacies their predecessors have left. Extensive use of the local language gives Shetland’s writing a regional distinctiveness, and this thesis shows how some writers have been enabled and inspired by that idiom, how some have taken dialect writing in exciting new directions, but also how some have felt limited by it and how, by not using the language, some writers have been unfairly ignored by local editors and critics. The thesis also shows that, in its two main eras of development – at the end of the nineteenth century and in the middle of the twentieth – Shetland’s writers took their cues from the general movements in Scottish writing. In the Victorian period, developments in local letters paralleled the interest in regionality and upsurge in vernacular writing that are marked characteristics of Scottish writing at the time. And, in discussing the emergence of the New Shetlander and the writers associated with it, the thesis demonstrates how the second period of flourishing in Shetland’s literature is part of the wider cultural movement of the Scottish Renaissance. The picture of Shetland’s literature the thesis offers is a self-consciously heterogeneous one. Despite the marked use of the vernacular, the thesis resists moving towards an encompassing definition of the large body of work covered, preferring to celebrate the diversity of the writing that Shetland has inspired during the last two centuries. Questions of engagement with the local environment and the use of the local language are constantly asked, but the primary scholarly contribution offered by ‘The Literature of Shetland’ is a realignment of Scotland’s northern literary border.