'To Amaze the People with Pleasure and Delight': an analysis of the horsemanship manuals of William Cavendish, the first Duke of Newcastle (1593-1676). William Cavendish published two horsemanship manuals in 1658 and 1667, setting out his method for the noble art of the riding h…
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This thesis considers the development of Evelyn Waugh's and Graham Greene’s Catholicism between 1928 and 1939. Focusing predominantly on Waugh’s and Greene’s novels, it investigates how their writings express Catholic ideas, as well how their faith informs their views of human n…
Whilst researching his bibliography of Neil M Gunn, the writer found photocopies of papers said to have been in Gunn's desk at the time of his death, amongst which were copies of both sides of a handwritten sheet' torn from a looseleaf notebook. This document, produced in respon…
Over the four hundred years which have elapsed since the publication of The Faerie Queene, the effectiveness of Arthur as the central hero of the poem has been called into question time and time again. Critics have objected to the sporadic nature of Arthur's appearances, and to …
This dissertation examines in detail the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, a mid-Victorian English author. It establishes that she was significantly influenced in her writing by the Unitarian social milieu to which she belonged during her lifetime, and by a wide range of other dominant…
This thesis establishes contexts for the interrogation of modern travel narratives about African countries. The nineteenth century saw significant advances in travel in Africa’s interior. For the first time much of Africa was revealed to a Western audience through the reports of…
This thesis argues for a reading of George Eliot s early fiction - Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss - as an exercise in developing what I have termed a poetics of Jesus. This constitutes a poetics that is a space of continual clearing (lichtung) and …
Using unpublished source material at Princeton University, the University of British Columbia, the British Library and the National Art Library in the V&A, this thesis aims to broaden current scholarly understanding regarding Rossetti's exposure to, interest in, and subsequent a…
This study explores the shifting notions of postmodernism developed through Muriel Spark’s fiction, and thereby clarifies this artist’s own postmodernism. I use Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the notion in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), that there is no grand narrat…
This thesis examines the representations of the self as a cultural agent, both reacting to and actively shaping codes of social and artistic respectability, as displayed in the diaries of the canonical Victorian writers Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot…
"Sayling, Stories from the Mothership" is a collection of ethnographic fictions - short stories - adapted from notes, archival materials, and interviews compiled over a year of geographic fieldwork in southwestern Nigeria. Touching on a wide range of themes, from domesticity to …
Desire and pursuit of the whole is the theme which animates all Rose Macaulay s fiction. Her literature-rich childhood nourished both an interest in mysticism and an ambition to write poems. It is in her verse that we first see emerging her careful symbolism of quest, her obsess…
This dissertation systematically evaluates the historicity of the epic poem The Bruce, written towards the end of the fourteenth century and attributed to Archdeacon John Barbour of Aberdeen. For the purposes of analysis, the poem has been divided into 119 discrete episodes, whi…
The main aim of this thesis is to explore Christina Rossetti?s poetic vocation and persona as a nineteenth-century woman poet in the competitive literary marketplace. It begin by mapping out the socio-historical factors that, I argue, shape the construction and reception of wome…
This thesis explores the relationship between the Gothic tradition and Dystopian novels in order to illuminate new perspective on the body in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Anthony B…
This account of Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy takes the form of a critique. It attempts to show the ways in which she falls foul of what she criticises. Murdoch is concerned about the influence of the romantic tradition upon our contemporary (post-war) accounts of morality. Sh…
This comparative study of Byron and Goethe seeks to explore the idea that there may be a far more fundamental similarity between the mode of writing of these two poets than has been noted to date. Although there has been, and continues to be, much written about each poet individ…