Although Anne Brontë's first novel, Agnes Grey, presents itself as a didactic treatise, Brontë's work departs from many accepted Evangelical tropes in the portrayal of its moral protagonist. These departures create an exemplary figure whose flaws potentially subvert the novel's didactic purposes. The character of Agnes is not necessarily meant to be directly emulated, yet Brontë's governess is presented as a tool of moral instruction. The conflict between the novel's self-proclaimed didactic purpose and the form in which it presents that purpose raises a number of interpretive questions. I argue that many of these questions can be answered through the application of a hermeneutic presented in Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana. Such a hermeneutic shifts the burden of interpretation away from the author and toward the reader in such a way that the moral figure becomes, not a standard to be emulated, but rather a test of the reader's personal spiritual maturity. This sign theory heavily influenced the works of medieval hagiographers such as Ælfric of Enysham, who depended on Augustine's sign theory to mediate some of the less-orthodox behaviors of saints such as Æthelthryth of Ely. I argue that by applying Augustine's hermeneutic and reading Agnes Grey in the context of these earlier didactic genres, the novel's potentially subversive qualities are not only neutralized, but become an important element of Evangelical instruction.

Focusing on works between the 1960s and the early ’80s, this thesis sets the literature of Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) and J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) within the context of twentieth-century architectural theory and history (written), design (drawn), productions (built), professional practice (managed), and pedagogy (taught). The primary aim of this study is to explore the discursive exchange between literature and architecture, while probing the putative association between postmodernity and architecture. By introducing a broader set of social phenomena into debates about postmodernity, my thesis enables a revaluation of how the architectural idiom is interpreted in literature. Using textual and visual analysis, this thesis argues that Barthelme’s and Ballard’s literary works operate at an intersection of the visual arts and mass media. Responding to American and European twentieth-century visual avant-gardes and socio-cultural transformations, architecture participates in the formulation of avant-garde conceptual frameworks. Critically, architecture is not only an aesthetic discipline; it is also a social discourse. Through the discipline’s alignment with ‘new’ and ‘old’ avant-gardes, Barthelme and Ballard use architecture as a point of creative departure to undertake formal and thematic literary experiments. For both authors, contact with the architectural avant-garde has literary consequences. This thesis considers four interconnecting ways literature and architecture ‘speak’ to each other: representation, discourse, formal comparisons, and influence or inspiration. Within my study these topics are examined through critical meditations on architecture from geographical (Fredric Jameson, David Harvey), architectural (Robert Venturi, Charles Jencks) and visual cultural (W. J. T. Mitchell, Marshall McLuhan) sources. Also figuring prominently are epitextual materials, especially archival documentation from the Donald Barthelme Literary Papers at the University of Houston and the Papers of J. G. Ballard collection at the British Library. This thesis opens up new ways of understanding the interart pluralism that characterises the postmodern.

This thesis concerns narratives about Anglo-Scandinavian contact and literary traditions of Scandinavian origin which circulated in England in the post-conquest period. The argument of the thesis is that in the eleventh century, particularly during the reign of Cnut and his sons, literature was produced for a mixed Anglo-Danish audience which drew on shared cultural traditions, and that some elements of this largely oral literature can be traced in later English sources.  It is further argued that in certain parts of England, especially the East Midlands, an interest in Anglo-Scandinavian history continued for several centuries after the Viking Age and was manifested in the circulation of literary narratives dealing with Anglo-Scandinavian interaction, invasion and settlement.  The first chapter discusses some narratives about the reign of Cnut in later sources, including the Encomium Emmae Reginae, hagiographical texts by Goscelin and Osbern of Canterbury, and the Liber Eliensis; it is argued that they share certain thematic concerns with the literature known to have been produced at Cnut’s court.  The second chapter explores the literary reputation of the Danish Earl of Northumbria, Siward, and his son Waltheof in twelfth-century sources from the East Midlands and in thirteenth-century Norwegian and Icelandic histories.  The third chapter deals with an episode in the Middle English romance Guy of Warwick in which the hero helps to defeat a Danish invasion of England, and examines the romance’s references to a historical Danish right to rule in England.  The final chapter discusses the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane, and argues that the poet of Havelok, aware of the role of Danish settlement in the history of Lincolnshire, makes self-conscious use of stereotypes and literary tropes associated with Danes in order to offer an imaginative reconstruction of the history of Danish settlement in the area.

Writers from both world wars, concerned with the representation of war, wrestled with the predicament of partial sight. Their work reveals the problematic dichotomy that exists between the individual’s selective range of vision and the immense scale of conflict. Central to this authorial dilemma is the question of the visual frame: how do you contain – within the written word – sight that resists containment and expression? The scale of the two world wars accentuated the representative problem of warfare. This thesis, by examining a wide range of World War One and World War Two literature, explores the varied literary responses to the topical relationship between sight and reality in wartime. It examines the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End, The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, and Virginia Woolf’s novels Mrs Dalloway and Between the Acts alongside less well-known works such as David Jones’s prose-poem In Parenthesis, the two short stories ‘The Soldier Looks for His Family’ by John Prebble and ‘The Blind Man’ by D.H. Lawrence, as well as William Sansom’s collection of short stories Fireman Flower, and Louis Simpson’s war poetry. This thesis, by focussing on the inherent difficulties of reconciling perception and representation in war, interrogates the boundaries of sight and the limits of representation. The changing place of sight in writing from the two world wars is examined and the extent to which discourses of vision were shaped and developed, in the early decades of the twentieth century, by war experience is explored. The critical containment and categorisation of sight that often dominates readings of sight in texts from both world wars is questioned suggesting the need for a more flexible understanding of, and approach towards, sight.

A definitive text of the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes is here presented. The process by which it was created is revealed in detail. All the extant versions are collated and significant differences between them displayed. For the first time the scenarios written by Britten and his partner Peter Pears and the first surviving draft versions of scenes by the librettist Montagu Slater are published in full. Additions to the draft and final libretto texts and revisions throughout this process by Slater, Britten, producer Eric Crozier and, in the final scene, poet Ronald Duncan, are clarified and a critique provided. Marked differences in stage directions between the libretto texts and music scores are shown and versions selected or created which offer the best indicative detail for performance practice. The edited text is similarly enriched by the inclusion of performance indicators from various sources added by Britten, Pears and the work's first conductor, Reginald Goodall. The edition is introduced by three 'Perspectives' sections which consider (1) Britten's relationship with Slater and working practice with librettists; (2) the relationship of the work to its original source, George Crabbe's poem The Borough, the difference in the portrait and treatment of the character Peter Grimes and the reasons for the difference; and (3) the particular contribution and features of Slater's writing. Thereafter follow an account of the rationale, principles and practice of the edition and introductions to every scene in which the use of source material, the evolution of the text, the plot development and performance issues of the scene, the presentation of characters and the set are delineated, the latter with reference to photographs of the original set hitherto unpublished.

From the adventures of Odysseus to those of the male Grand Tourist, travel has often been regarded as an important rite of masculine self-fashioning. However, as this thesis argues, travel and travel writing also provided a valuable opportunity for women's self-fashioning: journeys offered women a means of altering themselves, enabling them to assume a novel identity abroad and in text, whether it be a subversive or idealised version of themselves. Drawing upon Judith Butler's and Sidonie Smith's theories of performativity, this thesis investigates Victorian women travel writers' impulse to self-fashioning, and argues for travel writing as a performative act of identity-formation. Drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, this thesis also demonstrates the ways in which the instability of women authors' narrative identities gives them a potential for agency, enabling authors to unsettle prescribed gender boundaries and challenge cultural constructions of femininity. In particular, I examine the constructed textual travel identities of the following nineteenth-century British women: Anna Jameson, Susan Horner, Emily Lowe, and Frances Minto Elliot. I highlight the discursive strategies that these four authors use in order to create certain images of themselves for their readers in their travelogues about Italy, all published (or, in the case of Horner, written) between the years 1826 and 1881. Jameson, Horner, Lowe, and Elliot also reconfigure traditional notions of travel and gender in their travelogues to articulate and perform definitions of selves that are not necessarily exemplary – at least not at first glance. I examine the ways in which these nineteenth-century authors adopt apparently undesirable selfhoods ('ill', 'intellectual', 'unprotected', and 'idle') and turn supposed weaknesses into strengths. This thesis also analyses the significance of Italy for the travel narrators and their self-representation in relation to the peninsula. Italy signalled a meaningful difference from Britain, and these authors represent it as a positive space for healing, intellectual growth, pleasure, fulfilment, and self-determination. The constructed identities of these four authors result in 'travel performances' that aim to persuade readers of the narrators' aptitude for travel and of their especially meaningful attachment to, experience of, and understanding of Italy. This thesis does not only provide a space for voices which have until now been little recognised in contemporary scholarship. It also sheds light on an important form of Victorian women’s writing that was a valuable route towards cultural and intellectual authority and self-empowerment, as well as a means of personal and professional self-fashioning.

After graduating from the Literae Humaniores course, which after the mid-nineteenth century came to revolve around Plato’s Republic, Walter Pater’s (1839-1894) professional duties spanning thirty years at Oxford were those of a philosophy teacher and lecturer of Plato. This thesis examines Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism in his work, from his earliest known piece, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Plato is an ideal philosopher, critic, and artist to Pater, exemplifying a literary craftsman who blends genres with the highest authority. Platonism is a point of contact with several of Pater’s contemporaries, such as Arnold and Wilde, from which we can take new measure of their critical relationships regarding aestheticism and Decadence. Pater’s idea of aesthetic education takes Platonism for its model, which heightens one’s awareness of reality in the recognition of form and matter. Platonism also provides a framework for critical encounters with figures across history, such as Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism, evident even in his fiction, seeks the mind of the author, so that his writing enacts Platonic love. Through close reading, we highlight his many references to Plato, identify Platonic subjects and themes, and explore etymological nuances in the very selection of his words, which often reveals a Platonic tendency of refinement towards immateriality, from seen to unseen beauty. As a teacher and an author Pater helped shape Oxonian Platonism, and through his writing we examine how Platonism informs his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style.

This thesis explores the possibility and challenges of international/interracial female friendship and anti-communitarian hospitality through writings of Victorian female travellers to Meiji Japan between 1854 and 1918. It features three travellers, viz. Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes. The introduction delineates the context of key events in the Anglo-Japanese relationship and explores the representation of Japan in Victorian travelogues and literary works. Chapter I considers the philosophical dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida on community, friendship, and hospitality. It demonstrates the potential of applying their thinking, notwithstanding its occasional complicity, to an analysis of the place of hitherto marginalised groups, women and foreigners, in Western philosophical models. Chapter II examines relationships between Bird and Japanese natives, especially her interpreter, Ito in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) in terms of questions of stable identity and translation. It further undertakes a comparative study between the travelogue and Itō no koi (2005) by Nakajima Kyōko. I explore the afterlife of Bird in Japanese literature. Chapter III investigates friendships in Fraser’s A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan (1898). It uncovers her connection with Japanese female writers in oblivion, Yei Theodra Ozaki and Wakamatsu Shizuko. I discuss the influence her friendships had on Fraser’s fictional works such as The Stolen Emperor (1903), especially on the fair portrayals of Japanese women. Chapter IV explores friendships between the sexes in Stopes’ A Journal from Japan (1910) and articulates its relationship with Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911) and Plays of Old Japan (1913). I examine Stopes’ romantic relationship with Fujī Kenjirō and its influence on her career in sexology. It also investigates Stopes’ collaboration with Sakurai Jōji on Nō translation and exposes complex gender, racial, and linguistic politics. The conclusion explores three Japanese female travellers to Victorian Britain, focusing on their contact with local women. It considers Tsuda Umeko’s Journal in London, Yasui Tetsu’s Wakakihi no ato, and Yosano Akiko’s Pari yori (1914).

This study examines Basil Bunting's development as a poet from his meeting with Ezra Pound in Paris in 1923, through his collaborations with Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and other members of the Objectivist circle in the 1930s, up to his meeting with Allen Ginsberg and Tom Pickard in 1960s Britain against a backdrop of social activism and modernist revival. In particular, it seeks to query the critical commonplace that Bunting was a sceptic interested solely in the autotelic form of poetry, and to argue that his revival at the time of the long poem Briggflatts in the sixties should be read historically - as a case study that shows the Poundian tradition of praxis and orality acquiring a newly communitarian, leftist emphasis in the context of post-war Anglo-American poetry. The study draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts and letters held at the Basil Bunting Archive, Durham University, the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas (Austin), and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

This thesis investigates the relations between romance and texts of religious instruction in England between c.1170–c.1330, taking as its principal textual corpus the exceptionally rich literary traditions of insular French romance and religious writing that subsist during this period. It argues that romance is a mode which engages closely with religious and ethical questions from a very early stage, and demonstrates the discourses of opposition in which both kinds of text participate throughout the period. The thesis offers substantial readings of a number of neglected insular French religious texts of the thirteenth century, including Robert Grosseteste's Chasteau d'Amour, John of Howden's Rossignos, and Robert of Gretham's Miroir, alongside new readings of romances such as Gui de Warewic and Ipomedon. This juxtaposition of romance narrative and religious instruction sheds new light onto both kinds of text: romance emerges as a mode with deep-rooted didactic qualities; insular French religious literature is shown to be intensely concerned with the need to compete with romance’s entertaining appeal in literary culture. This oppositional discourse profoundly affects the form of instructional writing and romance alike. The discussion of the interactions between insular French romance and instructional literature presented here also serves as a new pre-history of Middle English romance. The final chapter of the thesis offers several new readings of texts from the Auchinleck manuscript, including the canonical romance Sir Orfeo and the neglected, puzzling Speculum Gy de Warewyk. These readings demonstrate that fourteenthcentury romance intelligently adapts the material it inherits from Francophone literature to a new cultural situation. In these acts of reformation, Middle English romance reveals itself as a discursive space capable of accommodating a wide range of ethical and ideological affiliations; the complex negotiations between romance and instructional literature in the preceding centuries are an important cultural condition for this widening of possibilities.