Project (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Project (Liberal Studies Program) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (doctoral)--Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 2002/2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Habilitationsschrift--Frankfurt am Main. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-225) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 2002/2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis is a study of a recurring figure or trope of post-war British school stories wherein a ‘radical’ character enters a school or classroom setting to introduce an alternative concept of learning or education. The radical may be a teacher or a student. Teacher types include the tyrannical pedagogue; the ostentatious but ultimately self-serving teacher-sophist; the charismatic, benevolent Master; and the predatory teacher. Representations of the pupil include the loving disciple; the disloyal pupil; the autodidact; and the student-creator whose steals the Master’s knowledge and runs, fashioning new worlds from it. While these types vary from story to story, all modern classroom radicals challenge the way teaching and learning are practised in their educational institutions. In doing so, they reflect on the purpose of schools and the political ambitions behind knowledge construction. The post-war British school story classroom radical asks perennial questions about the modern site of pedagogy. What gives one the right to teach? Why must one be taught? What is true teaching? How should one educate and to what end? This thesis begins with a historical overview of British school story fiction, and argues that this flamboyant school-story character emerges from the debris of World War Two. My thesis moves on to focus on eight key novels, plays and autobiographies: Lord of the Flies (William Golding, 1954), To Sir, With Love (E.R. Braithwaite, 1959), Forty Years On (Alan Bennett, 1968), Black Teacher (Beryl Gilroy, 1976), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1981), Another Country (Julian Mitchell, 1981), The History Boys (Alan Bennett, 2004) and Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005). Chapter One focuses on radical dissent in the 1930s classroom, using Spark’s and Mitchell’s retrospective accounts. Chapter Two considers black teacher radicalism from the late 1950s to the 70s, using Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love and Gilroy’s Black Teacher. Chapter Three takes the reader up to the 1980s, analysing the containment of radicalism in the figure of Alan Bennett and his work. Chapter Four discusses the limitations of classroom radicalism and the future of the school story radical in contemporary fiction, by examining the earliest and latest of the school stories selected for attention, Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). In the former radicalism is punished but idealised. The latter imagines a future of such a level of institutionalisation that radicalism in the classroom or elsewhere will have been rendered simply unthinkable. This thesis demonstrates that the radical in the classroom narrative trope is always didactic. Whether or not one is encouraged to agree with the radical, the implicit role of the radical character in the British school story is to educate the reader to think critically about the world and their place within it. Paradoxically, repeated textual examples of the radical’s failure and/or incorporation into the establishment point a type of critical pedagogical radicalism that is inherently conservative. This summation is supported by a brief genealogy of educational discourses and debates in Britain post-World War Two. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

The thesis reassesses the presence of French émigrés from the 1848 revolution within a British context. In particular, it investigates their role in the transfer of the wide-ranging and often contradictory wealth of revolutionary concepts and political doctrines among the small but influential coterie of Victorian radicals and journalists who welcomed them and disseminated their ideologies. The part played by the transmission of these ideas within the 'continuity thesis' regarding radicalism in Britain is thus re-examined, challenging the premise that there was a complete political hiatus between the Chartism of the 1840s and the advent of socialism at the end of the nineteenth century. The varied transnational spaces within which revolutionary ideas were exchanged, debated and promoted are explored together with the vectors through which they were transmitted to a British public by figures as diverse as G.J. Harney, Ernest Jones, John Ludlow and Charles Bradlaugh. The thesis shows how these connections stimulated a new political language inspired by different strands of French socialism, secularism, republicanism and Freemasonry, and how this exposed both divisions of class and political direction within British radicalism while paradoxically encouraging a sense of patriotism. The quarante-huitards are here firmly located between the previous French migration to Britain beginning in the 1830s and the subsequent arrival of Communard refugees in 1870- 71, as well as within the wider continental émigré community. Through biography, the backgrounds and lives of certain figures within both groups are traced including Louis Blanc and other 'chiefs' in exile, as well as members whose years in Britain, like that of Jeanne Deroin, have until now been obscured. The impact of influential figures with whom they associated such as Mazzini and Marx are also considered, during a distinct period that was witnessing the decline of Chartism and ushering in a new spirit of commercial liberalism as reflected in the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862.

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Thesis--Northwestern University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 437-441). Also issued in print.