Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English Postmodernism (Literature) Great Britain Great Britain'

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1

Carano, Carol Lorraine Phegley Jennifer. "Mad lords and Irishmen : representations of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde since 1967 /." Diss., UMK access, 2008.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Dept. of English and Dept. of HIstory. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2008.<br>"A dissertation in English and history." Advisor: Jennifer Phegley. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Feb. 6, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-292). Online version of the print edition.
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2

Duncan, Helga L. "The poetics of degeneration : literature and libertinism in early modern England /." View online version; access limited to Brown University users, 2005. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3174595.

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3

Pollock, Grace Walmsley Peter. "Signs of secrecy politics of scandal in eighteenth-century english print culture /." * McMaster only, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=1372005921&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1196799786&clientId=22605.

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4

Cameron, Nicholas W. "Reclaimed territory : the plays of John McGrath and the 7:84 theatre company considered as a continuum of twentieth-century theories concerning theatrical form." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/15983.

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Bibliography: pages 617-630.<br>This dissertation proposes to examine the work of John McGrath and the 7:84 Theatre Company as part of a continuum of theatrical experimentation culminating in postmodernism. To clarify the relationship between aesthetic form and social praxis the inquiry proceeds in two salient lines of direction: the first tracing the withdrawal from "realism" of major theorists of modernist ideology, the second defining the political and social milieu which provided the matrix for the development and staging of McGrath's plays. Recognising the partisan disposition of the 7:84 Theatre Company, the focus is on not only the division between political commitment and aesthetic experimentation, but also their potential for conciliation. At stake here is the socio-political nature of dramatic form itself and the contradictions implicit in political theatre's inherent structure. Tested against actual modes of procedure in the staging of McGrath's plays, and against the plays themselves, are the modernist propositions on aesthetics and politics argued within the context of German Marxism by Bloch, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht. The inquiry into problematising representational modes is then extended to include the postmodernist resistance to both realism and modernism, seeking precisely where and how McGrath's theatre supports this opposition. Following a critical dissection of representative texts, the conclusion attempts to establish their validity as postmodernist art, wordlessly disclosing within the parameters of their own language structure what cannot be asserted effectively by the practice of politics itself.
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5

Phillips, James. "The enemy within : division and betrayal in literature of the Second World War." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8402/.

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Although descriptions of civilian experience during the Second World War tend to stress concepts of unity and the nation 'pulling together', much literature ofthe period repeatedly suggests division and distrust, and fears of an 'enemy within' that can be seen directly in the numerous fifth columnist plotlines and more indirectly through stories of personal treachery and duplicity. Here the work of a number of authors writing during World War II is examined, with close comparison of how themes of betrayal and mistrust are woven into their texts. This is placed in context through consideration both of government propaganda warning citizens of the dangers of spies and fifth columnists during the war and social fracturings along gender, class and political lines that were already in existence when war began. The 'enemy within' motif exists in a number of forms and discussion of this is extended to consider, for example, contemporary concerns that the increasing authoritarianism of the British government meant the country was moving towards the fascism it had gone to war to defeat, presentations of the home as an enemy space, and repeated depictions of fragmented identity and trauma that suggest the enemy also exists within the individual psyche.
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6

Qiao, Qingquan. "China in Britain in the interwar period : Bertrand Russell, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Shih-I Hsiung." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2018. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/114332/.

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This thesis examines representations of China and the Chinese in Britain in the interwar period. It selects key writers and texts that demonstrate the importance of genre, location and subjectivity in the imagination of China. This thesis tries to demonstrate that the genre of travel report and the Chinese subjectivity intervene in our rethinking of the relations between British modernism and China and of the very concept of modernism itself. Borrowing from recent theoretical discussions of transnationalism, this thesis looks at how the transnational flow of people, ideas and texts between Britain and China helps us identify modes of thinking of Sino-British relations beyond modernism-orientalism or imperialism-nationalism patterns. It argues for the interactive nature or mutual influence within the cultural contact zone by highlighting the role of the cultural translator or agency in the claim of cultural equivalence or transnational solidarity. I examine the ways in which Russell, Auden and Isherwood interact with and represent Chinese intellectuals to critique capitalism and imperialism. I also look at their ethical dilemmas in their cross-cultural and cross-class representations of the Chinese coolies and lower-classes that reflect how the establishment of socialist transnational solidarity has to face class and national barriers. I also examine the British Chinese writer Shih-I Hsiung's position as cultural translator in both the British and the Chinese contexts and how his works are a response to this inequality. To sum up, this study of the historical cross-border production, circulation and reception of these writers in question aims to demonstrate the interactivity in the cultural contact zone. It contributes to our rethinking of the Euro-centric notion of modernism and of the Western influence/local reception mode of cross-cultural relations. It argues for the positivity of the contact zone in which transnational solidarity is imagined in multiple ways to combat various forms of unequal power relations.
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7

Fairclough, Mary. "The sympathy of popular opinion : representations of the crowd in Britain 1770-1849." Thesis, University of York, 2008. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/12051/.

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This thesis explores representations of crowd behaviour in prose writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain. I argue that accounts of the crowd from a broad range of contexts, genres and political prejudices are united by a common intuition that the peculiar qualities of collective behaviour are provoked by sympathy. Sympathy is a ubiquitous term in eighteenth-century studies, but recent accounts of its political application tend to make it an index of mutual approbation and social cohesion. I argue instead that sympathy is a mode of transmission, a medium for the unregulated political energies that make democratic politics a profound worry for commentatorso f all political persuasionsd uring this period. The model of sympathy on which this study draws is a physiological rather than a moral or emotional one. Sympathyh ad long been associatedw ith quack medicine,b ut during this period it becomes a legitimate medical term for the process through which disorder in one organ of the body is instantaneously transmitted to another distant organ, or throughout the whole body. Though the cause of this phenomenon is often attributed to the nerves, physiological sympathy retains its occult overtones, and is never granted categorical explanation. My work demonstrates how this model of sympathy is applied to the behaviour of crowds in the philosophical, political, literary and periodical prose of the period, reaching greatest intensity at periods of social and political unrest. I argue that the threat of the crowd catalysed by sympathy produces surprising continuities between writers of contrasting political views. While reactionary commentators find it easy to denounce the mob, reformers are often forced to agree that that sympathetic communication makes the crowd ultimately resistant to control. But writers of all political persuasions also attempt to find a positive application for the language of collective sympathy, with varying degrees of success. In this thesis I argue the need to reconsider the understanding and applications of sympathy during the long eighteenth century, to give full consideration to its dynamic social and political function. In addition, I assert the significance of accounts like these to the ongoing analysis of `crowd psychology'. Eighteenth-century descriptions of the crowd in terms of sympathy resonate strongly with contemporary accounts of collective behaviour, demonstrating the extent to which questions raised by commentators at this period still remain to be answered. In chapter one I discuss various investigations of physiological sympathy in eighteenthcentury medical writings, and show how sympathy becomes connected in popular medical texts with electrical and quasi-electrical phenomena, including animal magnetism. I show how these phenomena were explicitly associated with mob behaviour in accounts of the Wilkesite agitations of 1768-1770. Chapter two addresses the representation of revolutionary crowds in the writings of Edmund Burke, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and John Thelwall during the 1790s. I argue that though Burke is forced to revise his conception of sympathy as an emotional force of social cohesion in the wake of the revolution, he is less troubled than his antagonists, for whom sympathetic transmission disrupts any appeal to rational enlightenment. Only Thelwall, I argueoffers a solution to this iirp sse by embracing the physical basis of sympathetic connection. Chaptert hree examinesr epresentationso f collective behaviouri n the periodical press during the years 1816-1819. I show how a vibrant cheap radical press and a concertedc ampaigno f massp olitical protest transformed understandingsth e influence of sympathyo n collective political behaviour.W hile the `respectablep' ress,r eformist as well as conservative, represents the crowd as unruly rabble, cheap radical publications unsettle this judgement by articulating voices from within the crowd. Despite their commitment to the diffusion of knowledge, these journalists exploit the crossover between the spread of reason and the sympathetic diffusion of physical and emotional energies. In chapter four I address two attempts to reclaim the language of sympathy for cohesive, even loyalist political ends. Dugald Stewart's analysis of `sympathetic imitation' makes sympathy the primary stimulus for collective action but refuses to draw the usual reactionary conclusions. A more profound break with condemnations of collective sympathy comes in the work of Robert Southey, David Wilkie, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey, who all present sympathy as a patriotic force, by associatingit with national systemso f communication such as the mail. However, in the wake of further developments in communication, this positive appropriation of sympathy is necessarily short-lived
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8

Kanemura, Rei. "The idea of sovereignty in English historical writing 1599-1627." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610131.

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9

McShane, Jones Angela. "'Rime and reason' : the political world of the English broadside ballad, 1640-1689." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2004. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2708/.

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This thesis explores political broadside balladry in England in the period from c.1640 to the Glorious Revolution, and argues that it was a medium by which the political ideals of Christian humanism were transmitted to a socially and geographically diverse audience. The investigation is based on an analysis of all extant broadsides and titles of the period in conjunction with contemporary sources such as diaries, discourses on literature and politics, state papers and court records. No comprehensive historical study of this material across such a broad period has been done to date. The thesis is divided into three sections: the market, the medium and the message of the broadside ballad world. These analyse the range and nature of products and consumers in the political ballad market, set out the functions of the political ballad and present the political analysis that ballads offered contemporaries as they sought to render comprehensible the political world in a period of momentous change. The findings of the thesis are first, that the use of cheap print as a source by historians necessitates a serious engagement with the material culture, the genre and the content of print products. Second, it challenges the long-standing orthodoxy that the broadside ballad functioned primarily as a news medium and offers an accurate assessment of the ballad genre as political cultural broker between centre and periphery and a more nuanced explanation of the ballad as vehicle of choice for political debate. Third, in the light of material and generic insights and through detailed content analysis, it reveals the way in which the most traditional broadside ballads, printed for most part in black-letter, used Christian humanist ideas, based on Aristotle and the New Testament, to explain the trauma of the civil war and interregnum, to complain at the incursions into law and liberty by corrupt and radical Stuart government and to lay out the constructs and constraints of a political world which made it possible for the xenophobic English to eject an English King in 1688-9 and make a Dutch one acceptable, by dressing him in the mantle of an English Protestant hero.
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10

Goodman, Gemma. "Cornwall : an alternative construction of place." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2010. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3905/.

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This thesis examines representations of Cornwall in literature from 1880 to 1940. It identifies alternative literary ‘Cornwalls’ and seeks to understand their relationship to the predominant ways in which Cornwall has been culturally produced. The Cornwalls identified are all influenced by a nineteenth century seismic shift from mining to tourism. Until its catastrophic collapse mining dominates how Cornwall is represented within and without of the county. Its replacement by tourism gives impetus to different ways of representing Cornwall in literature and other cultural mediums. Touristic friendly Cornwalls – Celtic, exotic, Arthurian – dominate. Economic necessity requires that these Cornwalls persist to radiate an enticing version of Cornwall to potential visitors. Some authors seize upon these dominant images and develop them, but there exists other literary Cornwalls – voices lost, hidden, subsumed –which counter hegemonic representation. Chapter One provides a cultural geography of Cornwall and discusses the dominant constructions of Cornwall in their historical and literary context. Chapter Two examines literature of Cornish mining. Salome Hocking’s novel focuses on the balmaiden, the female mine surface worker, while other mining texts adhere to a narrative of masculine achievement and toil. Chapter Three examines how visiting writers Dinah Craik and Edith Ellis negotiate established constructions of Cornwall. While Craik is unable to imagine a Cornwall uncoupled from Arthurianism, Ellis disengages from dominant representations of place in order to produce a form of literary anthropology. Chapter Four begins by positioning Jack Clemo and Daphne du Maurier as contrasting inheritors of the period of study. Du Maurier’s literature forms part of Tourist Cornwall while Clemo’s novels of the china clay region embrace an antitouristic, bleak, harsh, industrial world. Their literary worlds, however, though disparate, are in dialectic with each other. There can be identified, therefore, connections between the dominant and alternative versions of place under exploration.
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11

Rupp, William H. "A new perspective on British identity : the travel journals of John Byng, 1781-1794." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/48885/.

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The Honourable John Byng (1743-1813; later fifth Viscount Torrington) was a British soldier, civil servant, and diarist who wrote fifteen accounts of his series of pleasure tours between 1781 and 1794. Unpublished in his lifetime, these accounts were re-discovered in the twentieth century and have been in print ever since. Despite their scope (Byng visited two thirds of all English and Welsh counties) and detail (he filled twenty seven manuscript volumes totalling over 2,500 hand-written pages) his writings have been used only sporadically and anecdotally by historians. This dissertation, therefore, seeks to re-position Byng as an historical actor and his writings as a complex historical source that requires detailed re-examination and reevaluation. Doing so reveals that Byng’s journals can inform the historigraphical discussion that surrounds the creation of a ‘British’ national identity and consciousness in the late eighteenth century. Prevailing models stress top down dynamics and external forces that caused the English, Welsh, and Scottish to band together as a Protestant elect in order to survive the onslaught of the large, Catholic, Continental powers of the time. Whilst Byng’s observations do not refute this interpretation, they present a strong argument for the inclusion of ‘sub-national’ (hamlet, village, town, county) identities and loyalties in any attempt to chart British identity formation. To demonstrate this, elements of post-colonial theory, particularly contact theory, are used to show that in Britain Byng moved through a series of encounters akin to those experienced by Europeans in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through his reactions, it is possible to see how these various identities complemented and competed with each other, particularly important social tropes such as politeness. Family composition and relationships with friends are also discussed to illustrate how focusing on individual historical subjects can yield useful insights into broader historical issues. Finally, the experiences of Arthur Young (1741-1820) and William Cobbett (1763-1835), two other well known travellers and commentators, are used to suggest the wider ramifications of the analysis whilst making links to wider study of domestic travel.
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12

Oehle, Birgit. "An audience with the Queen : subversion, submission and survival in three late Elizabethan progress entertainments." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1999. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4519/.

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Three late Elizabethan progress entertainments are being discussed: Cowdray (August 1591), Elvetham (September 1591), and Harefield (July 1602). The Elvetham entertainment has received some critical attention and is comparatively well known due to the extraordinary preparations undertaken for the royal visit, and the fact that a woodcut of an artificial crescent-shaped lake, especially dug for the occasion, has survived. The other two entertainments have been somewhat neglected, and Harefield survives only in fragmentary form. To my knowledge, its text has never been printed in toto, and the thesis will include a transcript of the original manuscript housed in Warwickshire County Record Office. The traditional view that progress entertainments were pastoral tales whose main purpose was to consolidate and confirm existing class structures is challenged. Entertainments are rather complex fictions that serve not merely to establish and preserve the `beautiful relation' between Queen and her subjects, highborn as well as lowly. These occasions were also very much sites for the exercise of power, by monarch and hosts alike. When examining these festivities in their historical and political contexts and illuminating their hosts' backgrounds, significant new interpretations, or at least possible alternative readings, may be found. Most importantly, the entertainments have to be viewed holistically, as events rather than as the texts that have come down to us. The hosts of the first two entertainments were powerful peers who were politically suspect from the regime's point of view. Both these lords, on the other hand, had little reason to love the regime because they had been harassed. Despite this state of affairs, traditional interpretations still maintain that both entertainments were submissive in tenor; that their hosts regarded the royal visit as an honour, and tried to (re)gain the Queen's favour through the spectacles that they were putting on. I would claim that these pageants are far more complex affairs and have to be read on different levels of signification. Far from being submissive, these fetes can be interpreted as challenging the existing order, if not indeed actively trying to subvert it. Having said that, there are country welcomes that seem to conform to the more traditional view of progress entertainments. The third pageant at Harefield was offered by a top-ranking Elizabethan official whose relationship with the Queen was presumably more amicable. Her visit to him was probably intended as a sign of favour, and his motivation in hosting the entertainment may well have been the consolidation of his own position within her close circle of councillors. He would have aimed at maintaining the existing order rather than challenge it; at establishing a `beautiful relation' between all classes. These conclusions can only be drawn, however, once the event as a whole has been studied as well as the surviving fragments of text.
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13

Hagglund, Betty. "Tourists and travellers : women's non-fictional writing about Scotland 1770-1830." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2000. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/1294/.

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In this dissertation I consider the travels, and the travel and other non-fictional writings, of five women who travelled within Scotland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the anonymous author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland; Sarah Murray (later known as Sarah Aust); Anne Grant of Laggan, Dorothy Wordsworth; and Sarah Hazlitt. During this period, travel and tourism in Scotland changed radically from a time when there were few travellers and little provision for those few, through to Scotland's emergence as a fully organised tourist destination. Simultaneous with these changes came changes in writing. I examine the changes in the ways in which travellers travelled in, perceived and wrote about Scotland during the period 1770-1830. I explore the specific ways in which five women travel writers represented themselves and their travels. I investigate the relationship of gender to the travel writings produced by these five women, relating that to issues of production and reception as well as to questions of discourse. Finally, I explore the relationship between the geographical location of travels and travel writing.
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14

Baird, Ian Forbes. "Poems concerning the Stanley family (Earls of Derby) 1485-1520." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1990. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/575/.

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This thesis is an edition of four poems (Lady Bessiye, Bosworth Feilde, Scotish Feilde, and Flodden Feilde) which were written in celebration of the military successes of the family of Stanley, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, at the battles of Bosworth (1485) and Flodden (1513). The introduction discusses the manuscripts and editions, the conditions for which the poems were composed, the style of the poems, and their contributions to the history of the period. The poems are newly edited, and the commentaries attempt, as well as elucidating the meanings of obscure lines, to identify the people and places which would have been of interest to the Stanley family and friends.
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15

Hall, Michael. "Francis Brett Young’s Birmingham : North Bromwich – City of Iron." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2008. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/172/.

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In this thesis I investigate Francis Brett Young’s Birmingham portrait in his North Bromwich novels, showing it to be a valid interpretation, though biased to suit the anti-urban prejudices of its author. Chapter One sets Young in his biographical and literary context. Birmingham during the North Bromwich era (c1870-1939) is examined and the role of novels as historical source established. In Chapter Two I define and explore Young’s North Bromwich canon, one exemplar among many historical realities, and show that the name and soubriquets of North Bromwich interpret Birmingham. Chapter Three investigates North Bromwich’s climate and topography, commercial, political and civic life, indicating clear Birmingham parallels. Chapter Four describes North Bromwich suburbs, housing and transport, each of which accurately replicates Birmingham originals. In Chapter Five I show North Bromwich’s recreational and religious life reflecting Young’s own Birmingham experience. Chapter Six traces North Bromwich’s interpretation of Birmingham’s educational provision, particularly concentrating upon its university’s evolution. Chapter Seven establishes links between North Bromwich and Birmingham medicine, revealing thinly-disguised fictional characters as key Birmingham practioners. Summarizing the above, Chapter Eight confirms the integrity of Young’s North Bromwich portrait and his seminal role in the on-going literary interpretation of Birmingham.
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16

Decker, Tim. "Strategic standards." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file, 298 p, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1456294811&sid=15&Fmt=2&clientId=8331&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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17

Kaat, Jacques. "The reception of Dutch fictional prose in Great Britain : a reception-sociological study of Dutch twentieth century fictional prose in translation in Great Britain (1970-1983) in relation to the Dutch and English literary canon." Thesis, University of Hull, 1987. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:3099.

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18

Allsopp, Niall. "Turncoat poets of the English Revolution." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:72c956c3-ec8b-4b07-ad91-a05b0e72fd39.

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Edmund Waller, William Davenant, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley were royalist poets who changed sides following the English Revolution, attracted to Cromwellian military power, and the reforming aims of the Independents. This thesis contributes to existing scholarship by showing that the poets engaged strongly with theories of allegiance, self-consciously returning to first principles - the natures of sovereignty and obligation - to develop a concept of allegiance that was contingent and transferrable. Their crucial influence was Hobbes. Hobbes collapsed partisan perspectives into a general theory of sovereignty constituted by a de facto protective and coercive power; this was grounded on a psychological analysis of humans' restless appetite for power. The poets' approach to Hobbes was crucially mediated by Machiavelli, who provided a less abstract account of the relationship between individual agency and collective institutions, and whose concept of virtù offered a model for how restless ambition could be harnessed to political order. An introductory chapter sketches out the intellectual background to this body of theory and reflects on the methods used to show how the poets dramatized it in their works. Chapter two considers the disintegration of Waller's courtly poetry under the pressure of civil war, and his resulting turn to rationalist theory. Chapters three and four focus on the immediate aftermath of the revolution, considering the synthesis of Hobbes' and Machiavelli's theories of military power ventured by Davenant, and the influence of Davenant's ideas on Marvell's Machiavellianism. Chapter five focuses on Cowley and his more religiously-inflected account of Hobbesian psychology and political obligations. Chapter six asks how the poets responded to the Restoration of Charles II, and in particular charts their influence on the younger poet John Dryden. With their emphasis on materialist psychology, the turncoat poets abandoned allegory in favour of a mode of dramatization which observed the contingent circumstances in which allegiances could be generated, dissolved, and transferred. They possessed a political conservatism, but a conceptual radicalism which presented a serious challenge to Anglican and constitutionalist discourses of Stuart monarchy.
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19

McKeever, Gerard Lee. "Enlightened fictions and the romantic nation : aesthetics of improvement in long-eighteenth-century Scottish writing." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5768/.

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This thesis participates in the current scholarly reassessment of Scottish Romanticism. Working across conventional Enlightenment and Romantic paradigms, it argues for a ‘long eighteenth century’ view of this writing with salient roots in the Union of 1707. Framed by the rapid economic and social change experienced by Scotland over much of this period, it proposes that Scottish Romanticism is best understood as a modal series of material that engages in various ways with ideas of ‘improvement’, the Enlightenment’s ubiquitous doctrine of progress. This engagement is significantly translated through a negotiation of alternative national identity structures available to Scots at the time: Britishness and forms of Scottishness. As these formations become implicated in a pervasive ‘dialectics of improvement’, Scottish writing develops a series of innovative aesthetic strategies that probe the complex political function of literature. Coordinated around a hegemonic Britishness that is laying claim to the priorities of improvement, forms of Scottishness are repeatedly pushed into alternative roles, including the model of the ‘romantic nation’. Chapters address many of the key Scottish writers of the period as well as some of their less well-known contemporaries, using local case studies as a means to connect and focus the study’s broader concerns. In Chapter One a sequence of fundamentals pertaining to the analysis of Scottish culture is addressed, exploring issues of nation, identity, class and institutional context, alongside the complementary evolution of aesthetic ideologies and cultural nationalisms. Chapter Two turns to Robert Burns as a prime mediator between cultural formations, his sophisticated poetry and self-presentations positioned as crucial to the developing relationship between Scottishness and improvement, while he innovatively heralds future, aesthetic constructions of nationhood. Moving into the early nineteenth century, Chapter Three traces the full emergence of ‘aesthetic nationalism’, primarily in the novels of Walter Scott. Always a contested process, such tension is magnified via the work of James Hogg, before the effects of a pervasive irony in this literary formation are examined. In Chapter Four the improvement problematic in long-eighteenth-century Scotland is further developed, John Galt’s fiction offering extensive reflections, with an ancillary focus on Elizabeth Hamilton shedding light on some key ideological dilemmas and the important role of gender within this trajectory. Finally, a thematic coda uses a reading of Thomas Carlyle to reflect on these aesthetic components of a profound experience of modernisation, their subsequent mediation and continuing relevance.
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20

Khulpateea, Veda Laxmi. "State of the union cross cultural marriages in nineteenth century literature and society /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2007.

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21

Murphy, Amy Tooth. "Reading the lives between the lines : lesbian literature and oral history in post-war Britain." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4243/.

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In existing scholarship of twentieth-century British lesbian history the post-war period has been largely overlooked. Whereas the interwar period and the 1970s and 1980s have garnered much critical interest as crucial loci of lesbian identity formation, the post-war period has been obscured between the two. What work does exist has focused almost exclusively on the creation of lesbian public spaces and lesbian communities. This has been to the exclusion of research into lesbian home and private life, and has also served to obscure experiences of closeted or isolated women. The critical focus on the interwar period in particular has also been facilitated and corroborated by lesbian literary studies, which has used the modernist movement as the backbone for the creation of a lesbian literary canon. This has been to the obscuration of lesbian literature of the post-war period. Furthermore, this academic bias has overlooked the significance of the cultural value of such literature by failing to acknowledge or investigate what lesbians in post-war Britain were actually reading. This thesis positions itself at the intersection of these research gaps. Employing an interdisciplinary approach this project argues for the greater inclusion of post-war literature and post-war lesbian lives in scholarly investigation. Through close textual analysis of a range of post-war lesbian literature and oral history interviews conducted by the author, this thesis presents insights into the minutiae of lesbian life and into the roots of lesbian identity formation within this period. To situate itself within existing historiography this thesis takes as its starting point the lesbian magazine, Arena Three (1964-71), undertaking an analysis of the magazine’s book review column in order to build a picture of the post-war lesbian reader. Following on from this, close textual analyses of lesbian pulp fiction and original oral history transcripts are used to assess representations of domesticity. Specifically the concepts of hetero-domesticity and homo-domesticity are developed and employed to investigate lesbian identities as they existed within both heterosexual and same-sex relationships. Graham Dawson’s oral history theory of ‘composure’ is used to examine how lesbian narrators are successful or unsuccessful in incorporating experiences of hetero-domesticity into wider lesbian narratives. This framework is similarly employed to investigate the ways in which homo-domestic experiences can assist lesbian narrators to achieve composure. Lastly oral history reminiscences of reading in the post-war period are analysed in order to assess the role that literature played, both in lesbian identity formation and in facilitating narrators’ journeys into wider lesbian social worlds.
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22

McMillan, Christopher. "The Scots in Ireland : culture, colonialism and memory, 1315-1826." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7418/.

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This thesis examines three key moments in the intersecting histories of Scotland, Ireland and England, and their impact on literature. Chapter one Robert Bruce and the Last King of Ireland: Writing the Irish Invasion, 1315- 1826‘, is split into two parts. Part one, Barbour‘s (other) Bruce‘ focuses on John Barbour‘s The Bruce (1375) and its depiction of the Bruce‘s Irish campaign (1315-1318). It first examines the invasion material from the perspective of the existing Irish and Scottish relationship and their opposition to English authority. It highlights possible political and ideological motivations behind Barbour‘s negative portrait of Edward Bruce - whom Barbour presents as the catalyst for the invasion and the source of its carnage and ultimate failure - and his partisan comparison between Edward and his brother Robert I. It also probes the socio-polticial and ideological background to the Bruce and its depiction of the Irish campaign, in addition to Edward and Robert. It peers behind some of the Bruce‘s most lauded themes such as chivalry, heroism, loyalty, and patriotism, and exposes its militaristic feudal ideology, its propaganda rich rhetoric, and its illusions of freedom‘. Part one concludes with an examination of two of the Irish section‘s most marginalised figures, the Irish and a laundry woman. Part two, Cultural Memories of the Bruce Invasion of Ireland, 1375-1826‘, examines the cultural memory of the Bruce invasion in three literary works from the Medieval, Early Modern and Romantic periods. The first, and by far the most significant memorialisation of the invasion is Barbour‘s Bruce, which is positioned for the first time within the tradition of ars memoriae (art of memory) and present-day cultural memory theories. The Bruce is evaluated as a site of memory and Barbour‘s methods are compared with Icelandic literature of the same period. The recall of the invasion in late sixteenth century Anglo-Irish literature is then considered, specifically Edmund Spenser‘s A View of the State of Ireland, which is viewed in the context of contemporary Ulster politics. The final text to be considered is William Hamilton Drummond‘s Bruce’s Invasion of Ireland (1826). It is argued that Drummond‘s poem offers an alternative Irish version of the invasion; a counter-memory that responds to nineteenth-century British politics, in addition to the controversy surrounding the publication of the Ossian fragments. Chapter two, The Scots in Ulster: Policies, Proposals and Projects, 1551-1575‘, examines the struggle between Irish and Scottish Gaels and the English for dominance in north Ulster, and its impact on England‘s wider colonial ideology, strategy, literature and life writing. Part one entitled Noisy neighbours, 1551-1567‘ covers the deputyships of Sir James Croft, Sir Thomas Radcliffe, and Sir Henry Sidney, and examines English colonial writing during a crucial period when the Scots provoked an increase in militarisation in the region. Part two Devices, Advices, and Descriptions, 1567-1575‘, deals with the relationship between the Scots and Turlough O‘Neill, the influence of the 5th Earl of Argyll, and the rise of Sorley Boy MacDonnell. It proposes that a renewed Gaelic alliance hindered England‘s conquest of Ireland and generated numerous plantation proposals and projects for Ulster. Many of which exhibit a blurring‘ between the documentary and the literary; while all attest to the considerable impact of the Gaelic Scots in both motivating and frustrating various projects for that province, the most prominent of which were undertaken by Sir Thomas Smith in 1571 and Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex in 1573.
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Künzel, Stefanie. "Concepts of infectious, contagious, and epidemic disease in Anglo-Saxon England." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/50580/.

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This thesis examines concepts of disease existing in the Anglo-Saxon period. The focus is in particular on the conceptual intricacies pertaining to pestilence or, in modern terms, epidemic disease. The aim is to (1) establish the different aspects of the cognitive conceptualisation and their representation in the language and (2) to illustrate how they are placed in relation to other concepts within a broader understanding of the world. The scope of this study encompasses the entire corpus of Old English literature, select Latin material produced in Anglo-Saxon England, as well as prominent sources including works by Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours, and Pope Gregory the Great. An introductory survey of past scholarship identifies main tenets of research and addresses shortcomings in our understanding of historic depictions of epidemic disease, that is, a lack of appreciation for the dynamics of the human mind. The main body of research will discuss the topic on a lexico-semantic, contextual and wider cultural level. An electronic evaluation of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus establishes the most salient semantic fields surrounding instances of cwealm and wol (‘pestilence’), such as harmful entities, battle and warfare, sin, punishment, and atmospheric phenomena. Occurrences of pestilential disease are distributed across a variety of text types including (medical) charms, hagiographic and historiographic literature, homilies, and scientific, encyclopaedic treatises. The different contexts highlight several distinguishable aspects of disease, (‘reason’, ‘cause’, ‘symptoms’, ‘purpose’, and ‘treatment’) and strategically put them in relation with other concepts. Connections within this conceptual network can be based on co-occurrence, causality, and analogy and are set within a wider cultural frame informed largely though not exclusively by Christian doctrine. The thesis concludes that Anglo-Saxon ideas of disease must be viewed as part of a complex web of knowledge and beliefs in order to understand how they can be framed by various discourses with more or less diverging objectives. The overall picture emerging from this study, while certainly not being free from contradiction, is not one of superstition and ignorance but is grounded in observation and integrated into many-layered systems of cultural knowledge.
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Hone, Joseph. "The end of the line : literature and party politics at the accession of Queen Anne." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d847a561-130a-42f0-b78f-2463e9e65535.

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This thesis provides the first full-length account of the political and cultural significance of the accession of Queen Anne. It offers a critical reassessment of the politics of the royal image across a spectrum of texts, events, and artefacts - from panegyrics, newspapers, sermons, royal progresses, and processions to medals, coins, and playing cards. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of party politics to the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century. This thesis nuances that assumption by arguing: (1) that the principal focus of partisan texts was competing representations of monarchy; and (2) that the explosion of partisanship at the start of the eighteenth century was triggered by unrest about the royal succession. Anne was the last protestant Stuart. She had no surviving children. This thesis explores how authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and a great many lesser known and anonymous writers and propagandists conceptualized the end of the Stuart dynasty. Anne's accession forced writers to conjecture on the future succession. There were two rival claimants to the throne after Anne's death: the protestant Electress Sophia of Hanover and Anne's Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward. Sophia's claim was statutory, James's hereditary. Factions emerged in support of both claimants. Almost all topical writing took a stance on the issue. Many sided with the government, supporting Hanover. Yet some writers favoured the illegal but hereditary claim of James Francis Edward; they had to express support in covert ways. This succession crisis triggered not only printed polemic, but also swathes of clandestine manuscript literature circulating in the Jacobite underground. The government took a hard line on Jacobite writers and printers; this thesis documents both their persecution and the techniques they used to evade the law. The thesis concludes by suggesting that this oppositional literary culture only disintegrated after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, and the consequent settlement of the Hanoverian succession, in late 1716. After this point, royal succession ceased to be a major source of political discontent.
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Galluzzo, Anthony Michael. "Revolutionary Republic of letters Anglo-American radical literature in the 1790s /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1610469821&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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la, Ruelle Marc De. "The tangible, the local and the know: the ideology of english literary criticism." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/212770.

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Etzkorn, Timothy M. "How freud explains the tudors psychological motivations and historical understanding of tudor England's religious schism /." [Denver, Colo.] : Regis University, 2009. http://165.236.235.140/lib/TEtzkorn2009.pdf.

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Dawkins, Charlie. "Modernism in mainstream magazines, 1920-37." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:71ef5fb2-9a5a-4277-9b0d-edf307acd1e7.

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This thesis studies five mainstream British weekly magazines: 'Time and Tide', the 'Nation and Athenaeum', the 'Spectator', the 'Listener', and the 'New Statesman'. It explores how these magazines reviewed, discussed and analysed modernist literature over an eighteen-year span, 1920-37. Over this period, and in these magazines, the concept of modernism developed. Drawing on work by philosopher Ian Hacking, this research traces how the idea of modernism emerged into the public realm. It focuses largely on the book reviews printed in these magazines, texts that played an important and underappreciated role in negotiations between modernist texts and the audience of these magazines. Chapter 1, on 'Time and Tide', covers a period from the magazine's inception in 1920 to 1926, and draws particularly on Catherine Clay's work on this magazine. It discusses the genre of 'weekly review' that this new magazine attempted to join, and the cultural place of modernism in the early 1920s. Chapter 2, on the 'Nation and Athenaeum', covers Leonard Woolf's literary editorship (1923-30), under the ownership of J. M. Keynes, and makes use of Keynes's archive at King's College, Cambridge, and Woolf's at the University of Sussex. Chapter 3, on the 'Spectator', covers Evelyn Wrench's editorship (1925-32), and explores the relationship between this magazine, ideologies of conservatism, and modernism. Chapter 4, on the 'Listener', focuses on the magazine's publication of new poetry, including an extraordinary 1933 supplement that printed W. H. Auden's 'The Witnesses'. This work revolves around Janet Adam Smith, literary editor in these years, and draws on Smith's archive at the National Library of Scotland as well as the BBC archives at Caversham. Chapter 5, on the 'New Statesman' in the 1930s under new editor Kingsley Martin, explores a period when modernism was more widely recognized, and pays particular attention to a short text by James Joyce printed in 1932, 'From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer'.
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Pittock, Murray. "Decadence and the English tradition." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6fa01d5c-e900-4ee8-9fb6-a8c3645e0bdd.

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The thesis sets out to do two things. It seeks first of all to describe the revival of interest in the Caroline era which defines the nature of an "English Tradition" in the Eighteen Nineties. Secondly, in doing so it seeks to reappraise three significant poets of that era, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Francis Thompson, in terms of their participation in this revival. The first chapter, "Craving Viaticum", deals with the general background of the Eighteen Nineties period. It suggests that the Symbolist movement equates with the Decadent one in a more direct way than has often been allowed, and deals with the era's enthusiasm for nostalgia and past ages as part of its reaction against current society. It also explores the period's allegiance to hero-figures. The second chapter, "The French Connection: Pater's Part", deals with Walter Pater, and evaluates him in terms of his art and criticism, suggesting how these develop from a nostalgic desire to re-create past ages in the image of his present ideals. The more exaggerated claims made by critics of his work for the influence of French writers on him are questioned, and Pater's relation to the "English Tradition" is discussed. In the third chapter, "The French Connection: Other Approaches", the tendentiousness of those critics who attempt to define the entire Decadent era in Britain in terms of French influences is discussed and exposed. The fourth chapter, "New Births of Decadence: The English Tradition and the Seventeenth Century", deals with the relation of the literature of the period to the Caroline era in detail, and the fifth chapter, "Of Academic Interest", is concerned with analysing this relationship through discussion of both contemporary and present-day critics, adducing statistical evidence to prove a resurgence of interest in the writers of the Caroline era in the period 1880-1910. The sixth chapter, "By the Statue of King Charles: The Jacobite Revival" deals with the political and religious aspects of the Caroline revival, and charts the growth of neo-Jacobitism in the Eighteen Nineties and its relation to literary history. The seventh chapter, "Against Nature: Defining Decadence", suggests that the root of Decadent thinking is myth, and that the counterpart of Symbolism in the world of decadent nostalgia was the iconic religious and political culture of the court of King Charles I, a convenient archetype for Decadent myths of ritual, aristocracy, and martyrdom. This discussion closes the first part of the thesis. "Francis Thompson, Faithful Decadent: Catholics and Criticism" is Chapter Eight. It discusses Francis Thompson in relation to his critics, and the manner in which views of his work have been polarised between two main schools of criticism. Chapter Nine, "Faithful in my Fashion", suggests a resolution of this historically polarised critical discussion by assessing Thompson's poetry in close relationship with the work of the seventeenth-century sacred poets. The tenth chapter, "Waif of Romance: The Poetry of Ernest Christopher Dowson", assesses Dowson in relation to Herrick and the Cavalier lyrists, discussing also how he stands as a type in relation to his age. The eleventh chapter, "Lionel Johnson: One of Those Who Fall: His Life and Ideas", is concerned with the crisis in Johnson's thought over the natures of guilt and beauty, and how this is illustrated in his poetry. The twelfth and final chapter, "The Life and Work of Lionel Johnson: A Long Blast Upon the Horn: His Work and Themes", assesses Johnson's nostalgia for the Stuart era in terms of a resolution of his present poetic crisis through past values. His intellectual and intertextual relationships with Ben Jonson and Marvell are also discussed. The thesis closes with an assessment of Johnson's achievement based on his allegiance to the Caroline revival with which the argument throughout has been concerned.
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Maxwell, Felicity Lyn. "Household words : textualising social relations in the correspondence of Bess of Hardwick's servants, c. 1550-1590." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5257/.

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This thesis collects, transcribes, and, with reference to household documents and contemporary literature, annotates and interprets the surviving correspondence of a constellation of seven upper servants who at various points in the second half of the sixteenth century were stationed at or moved between several country houses and estates of which Bess of Hardwick was mistress. The thesis finds that the extant correspondence of Bess’s servants falls into two categories: (1) letters of management exchanged between Bess and five of her household and estate officers (Francis Whitfield, James Crompe, William Marchington, and Edward Foxe at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire and nearby estates in the 1550s-1560s, and Nicholas Kynnersley at Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire in the late 1580s) and (2) letters seeking practical and political patronage, written in the early 1580s by two of Bess’s gentle-born personal attendants, William Marmyon and Frances Battell, to contacts outside Bess’s itinerant (and at that time politically vulnerable) household. Close literary, linguistic (historical pragmatic), and material readings reveal that all these letters adapt and surpass conventional expressions as they engage in practical problem-solving, complex interpersonal exchanges, and domestic politics. The thesis argues that the manuscript letters materialise dynamic verbal performances of their writers’ specific social roles and relationships — the mistress-servant relationship foremost among them. Each writer simultaneously registers and renegotiates his or her own experience of the mistress-servant relationship through the combination of diverse epistolary features, which include verbal etiquette and page layout, degrees of directness or circumlocution, complexity of syntax, tone, use of emotive language, discourses of pleasure and displeasure, personalised content (which ranges from in-jokes to empathy to distinctive pen flourishes), and explicit expressions of authority or loyalty, as well as job-specific terminology and subject matter. Frequency of correspondence, modes of delivery, and the afterlives of letters are shown to carry further social significance. The correspondence of Bess of Hardwick’s servants acts as a touchstone for the complex role of letter-writing in the formation of social selves and the performance of domestic duties in sixteenth-century England. By accurately transcribing these letters, interpreting them using a unique combination of literary, linguistic, and visual analysis, and reconstructing from these letters and additional archival sources the careers of several servants of one mistress, this thesis opens up new material, perspectives, questions, and methods for early modern cultural studies.
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Deans, Alexander Eden Atkinson. "Labouring bodies, feeling minds : intellectual improvement and Scottish writing, 1759-1828." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/6170/.

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This thesis traces the dynamic between labour and learning as it was figured by Scottish writers in the period 1759-1828. Vocational specialization and engagement with a literary field that traversed professional and disciplinary boundaries were the twin imperatives of the Scottish Enlightenment’s modernising credo. But the division of labour was also associated with a narrowing of intellectual and moral capacity thought to be incompatible with the exhortations of politeness and civility. Leisured cultivation offered readers and writers a middle ground in which to negotiate between these contradictory demands. This study explores the way in which this culture of intellectual improvement was claimed by authors and readers involved in manual labour as a counterinfluence to the rigours of work, and as a civilizing prerogative that extended to all social levels. But others registered significant anxiety towards the destabilising effects of excessive delicacy or refinement, and feared that these might be exacerbated by contact with the necessity of bodily labour. I argue that this contributed to a redressing of the content and purpose of popular education that sought to match it to the role of the lower classes within the economic and political order. Particular attention is paid in the following study to authors who either claimed or were ascribed a labouring identity such as Robert Burns and James Hogg, but I also deal with lesser-known writers, and frame their engagement with intellectual improvement through broader eighteenth-century discourses on the division of labour and the theory of mind. In doing so, I discuss a variety of genres and forms, including philosophical and economic treatises, poetry, memoir, biography, the novel, and the literary periodical.
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Robinson, Emma Louise. "Liberty compromised? : George Orwell, English Law and the Second World War." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7329/.

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This thesis considers George Orwell’s response to the emergency legislation of the Second World War. Considering legal and historical sources alongside his biography and corpus it reassesses the impact of Orwell’s works in the context of his patriotism, Englishness and views on the law. This thesis argues that Orwell’s experiences in Burma and Spain established his expectations – as an Englishman – for the law during a crisis. It juxtaposes Orwell’s pre-war anxiety regarding potentially ‘fascising measures’ to his relative silence when emergency powers were introduced in England, suggesting Orwell tacitly endorsed controversial measures, including internment, in the unique context of the early war. The thesis considers wartime compromises Orwell felt were necessary, noting his complicity in curtailing freedom of speech at the BBC, before his critical voice re-emerged regarding the normalisation of emergency powers. New readings of 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' highlight both their resonance with the English wartime regime and the dangers implicit in emergency legal systems, drawing out Orwell’s concern that eroding English values and legal traditions removed a bulwark against totalitarianism. Given his changing positions concerning individual freedoms this thesis consequently argues for a more nuanced appraisal of Orwell’s reputation as an unwavering defender of civil liberties.
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Jennings, Emily. "Prophetic rhetoric in the early Stuart period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:13643178-0544-4b2b-9ca3-55d6c73a5d26.

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This is a study of the political prophecy in England in a period delimited by the accession of King James I (1603) and the end of the Interregnum (1660). It combines the analysis of hitherto obscure manuscript texts with that of printed works to provide a nuanced account of the uses and reception of prophecies in this period. Chapter One (which focuses on the first decade of James's reign) and Chapter Two (which covers the period 1613-19) approach the analysis of dramatic treatments of political prophecy through the study of prophecy both as a rhetorical buttress to the Jacobean state and as a protest genre. Attentive to the elite bias of the legal documents wherein allegedly oppositionist uses of prophecy are recorded, these chapters heed the counsel of historians who have found literary scholars insufficiently suspicious of the rhetoric of these materials. A focus on dramatic texts, neglected by the historians, reveals that Jacobean playgoers were encouraged to regard both official prophetic rhetoric and official rhetoric about prophecy with scepticism. Chapter Three considers how native and continental prophetic traditions were expanded and repurposed in England around the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, when belief in the purportedly inspired status of prophecies was rare but recognition of their utility as a vehicle for political discussion was nonetheless widespread. Chapter Four explores the adaptation and tendentious exposition of medieval, sixteenth-century, and Jacobean manuscript prophecies in printed propaganda for both the royalist and parliamentarian causes in the mid-seventeenth century. This study of literary and archival sources finds that previous scholarship has overestimated the extent of popular faith in the authenticity of allegedly ancient and inspired prophecies in the early Stuart period. The longevity of purported prophecies, it concludes, was ensured through the recognition, appreciation, and exploitation of their rhetorical affordances.
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Cobley, Jennifer Francis. "The construction and use of gender in the pamphlet literature of the English Civil War, 1642-1646." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2010. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/169833/.

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This thesis examines how the authors of ephemeral print used the gender framework for political ends during the first Civil War. In particular it considers how both the royalist and parliamentarian pamphleteers constructed and promoted a hegemonic, patriarchal definition of manhood amongst their male supporters in order to encourage them to fight for either king or parliament. It also demonstrates how the pamphleteers of each party drew upon deep-seated cultural allusions and a pre-existing language of insult in order to claim that their enemies were ‘unmanly’ or ‘effeminate’ and therefore unable or unwilling to uphold the patriarchal social order. The thesis shows that the pamphleteers of both sides set out to demonstrate that their own men were exemplars of patriarchal manhood, while simultaneously claiming that the anti-patriarchal behaviour of their opponents had betrayed their unsuitability for a position of authority within the commonwealth. Gendered language was therefore a powerful way to legitimise the claim of one’s own side to patriarchal authority and political power while simultaneously delegitimizing the claim of one’s opponents. The introduction outlines the key questions which the thesis seeks to address and gives my reasons for undertaking this study. Chapter one examines the reluctance of past generations of historians to study the wartime tracts and highlights the importance of the new cultural history, gender studies and the linguistic turn in bringing the gendered language of the wartime tracts to academic attention. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the print culture of the Civil Wars. In particular, the pioneering work of David Underdown has led other historians to explore how the wartime pamphleteers made use of cultural references in order to communicate political ideas. Chapter one situates my thesis within these recent developments in scholarship. Chapter two considers the main gendered themes of the parliamentarian tracts during the first Civil War. It explores how and why manhood was constructed and how gendered insult was utilised by the pamphleteers. Chapter three focuses on how three principal royalist personalities were represented in parliamentarian tracts, namely Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria and Prince Rupert. Chapter four considers the broader gendered themes within the royalist literature of the period and tests the assertions of previous historians that royalist propaganda was frequently elitist and self-defeating. Chapter five explores the royalists’ treatment of three key parliamentarian figures: Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller and Lady Ann Waller. It explores the careful treatment that Essex initially received from the royalist polemicists and contrasts this with the increasingly barbed attacks that were made against Waller, particularly by commenting upon the actions of his wife, Ann. The conclusion summarises the key arguments of the thesis and relates my findings to other broader questions regarding the operation and contestation of patriarchal power during the conflict, the practice of printing and how the use of gendered language developed in the polemical works of the later 1640s. The thesis ends with a brief discussion of some areas in which further research might enable us to better understand the vital role that gender played in reinforcing authority during the turbulent 1640s.
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Abraham, Adam. "Spurious Victorians : imitation and the nineteenth-century novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cbf24b85-cc63-42be-ba84-2f065942c4d8.

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In 'A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism', Jerome J. McGann writes, '[A]n author's work possesses autonomy only when it remains an unheard melody'. For the published and successful writer in the nineteenth century, such autonomy was often unattainable. Publications such as The Pickwick Papers inspired an array of opportunistic successors, including stage plays, unauthorized sequels, jest books, song books, and shilling and penny imitations. Despite the proliferation, this strain of writing is rarely studied. This thesis recovers ephemeral, scurrilous texts, often anonymous or pseudonymous, and reads them in the context of their canonical sources. Retrieving bibliographical environments, it demonstrates how plagiaristic, parodic, and willfully unoriginal works impacted on the careers of three novelists: Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot. The thesis argues that formal distinctions among modes of Victorian writing - criticism, parody, and plagiarism - often blur. Further, it argues that our understanding of a particular novelist's work must be broadened to include sequels, spinoffs, and imitations: to know a particular author means to know the spurious and oftentimes bad (morally or aesthetically) works that the author inspired. The Spurious Victorians of the title form something of countercanon to the 'major' writers of the period. Thomas Peckett Prest, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Joseph Liggins, among many others, informed and influenced the literary history that has in turn denied them admission. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, 'If only men of genius were to write, Lord help us! how many books would there be?' Of course, Victorian print culture found room for the genius and the subgenius, Boz as well as Bos. 'Spurious Victorians' recovers works that have been lost from view in order to better understand the process by which an individual authorial voice emerged amid an echo chamber of competing, imitative voices.
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Lazar, Jessica. "1603 - the wonderfull yeare : literary responses to the accession of James I." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a0b0e575-da98-405d-81d8-8ddd0bf53924.

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'1603. The Wonderfull Yeare: Literary Responses to the Accession of James I' argues that when James VI of Scotland was proclaimed James I of England on 24 March 1603, the printed verse pamphlets that greeted his accession presented him as a figure of hope and promise for the Englishmen now subject to his rule. However, they also demonstrate hitherto unrecognized concerns that James might also be a figure of threat to the very national strength, Protestant progress, and moral, cultural, and political renaissance for which he was being touted as harbinger and champion. The poems therefore transform an insecure and undetermined figure into a symbol that represents (and enables) promise and hope. PART ONE explores how the poetry seeks to address the uncertainty and fragility, both social and political, that arose from popular fears about the accession; and to dissuade dissenters (and make secure and unassailable the throne, and thereby the state of England), through celebration of the new monarch. Perceived legal, political, and dynastic concerns were exacerbated by concrete difficulties when James was proclaimed King of England, and so he was more than fifty miles from the English border (only reaching London for the first time in early May); his absence was further prolonged by plague; this plague also deferred the immediate sanction of public festivities that should have accompanied his July coronation. An English Jacobean icon was configured in literature to accommodate and address these threats and hazards, neutralizing fears surrounding the idea of the accession with confidence in the idea of the king it brings. In the texts that respond to James's accession we observe his appropriation as a figure of hope and promise. PART 2 looks to more personal hopes and fears, albeit within the national context. It considers how the poets engage with the King's own established iconography and intentions, publicly available to view within his own writing - and especially poetry. The image that is already established there has the potential either to obstruct or to enable national and personal causes and ambitions (whether political, religious, or cultural). The poetry therefore develops strategies to negotiate with and so appropriate the King's own self-fashioning.
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Melnyk, Veronica. "'Half fashion and half passion' : the life of publisher Henry Colburn." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2002. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/163/.

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This thesis focuses on some of the most significant and least understood aspects of the life of London publisher Henry Colburn (c.1784-1855). Its purposes are to correct the misinformation currently in circulation, to introduce new information, and to reassess Colburn‘s reputation and accomplishments in light of this evidence. The thesis first examines the errors and limitations of previous appraisals of Colburn and how various primary sources can be used to correct and augment them. It next considers Colburn‘s early years before surveying his periodical publications and his controversial publicity methods. The thesis briefly recounts Colburn‘s involvement with the ‘silver-fork’ school of fiction and then examines in greater depth his relationships with writer Benjamin Disraeli and one-time business partner Richard Bentley. Colburn‘s two marriages are also studied as the focus of the thesis moves onto the latter half of his career, his retirement, and his death. The final chapter tenders some general conclusions based on the foregoing matter and suggests further avenues of study concerning Colburn, his role in the history of publishing, and his place in the traditional paradigms of Romantic and Victorian literary culture.
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O'Donnell, Thomas Joseph. "Monastic literary culture and communities in England, 1066-1250." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1905660951&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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Williams, Vivien Estelle. "The cultural history of the bagpipe in Britain, 1680-1840." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5085/.

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Bagpipes and pipers, as cultural identifiers, are embedded within their national culture, charged with symbolisms. British authors have often viewed bagpipes as cultural icons, endowing them with connotations from devilish to virtuous, from rural to military. By analysing literary and artistic references one can perceive how the attitude towards the bagpipe changes with the evolution of Britain’s internal dynamics. Jacobitism contributed in casting a particular light on the bagpipe: it was the ‘voice of the rebellion’. In Scotland this constituted a reason for national pride, while in England the ‘common denominator’ of the Scot-enemy charged the bagpipe with the worst connotations. After Jacobitism stopped being seen as a threat, authors and artists came to view the bagpipe in a different light: the once negative icon was now imbued with ancestral values. The Scot – and the bagpipe by synecdoche – was romanticised: as James Boswell wrote, “The very Highland names, or the sound of a bagpipe, will stir my blood, and fill me with [...] a crowd of sensations with which sober rationality has nothing to do” (1785). The words of many Romantic authors contributed in characterising the instrument, endowing it with implications the influence of which is still relevant today.
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Kozain, Rustum. "Contemporary english oral poetry by black poets in Great Britain and South Africa : a comparison between Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mzwakhe Mbuli." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20139.

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Bibliography: pages 242-266.<br>The general aims of this dissertation are: to study a form of literature traditionally disregarded by a text-bound academy; to argue that form is an important element in ideological analyses of the poetry under discussion; and, on the basis of this second aim, to argue for a comparative, rigorously critical approach to the poetry of Mzwakhe Mbuli. Previous evaluations of Mbuli's poetry are characterised by acclaim which, the author contends, is only possible because of under-researched criticism, representing a general trend in South African literary culture. Compared to Linton Kwesi Johnson's work, for instance, Mbuli's poetry does not emerge as the innovative and progressive art - in both content and form - it is claimed to be. Mbuli and his critics are thus read as a case study of a general trend. Johnson and Mbuli mainly perform their poetry with musical accompaniment and distribute it as sound-recording. This study's approach then differs from the approaches of general oral literature studies because influential writers on oral literature - specifically Walter J. Ong, Ruth Finnegan and Paul Zumthor - do not address the genre under investigation here. Nevertheless, their writings are explored in order to show why particularly Ong and Finnegan's approaches are inadequate. The author argues that using the orality of the poetry as an organising, theoretical principle is insufficient for the task at hand. On cue from Zumthor, this study suggests an approach through Cultural Studies and conceives of the subject matter as popular culture.
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41

Higgins, Benjamin David Robert. "We have a constant will to publish : the publishers of Shakespeare's First Folio." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ab876515-5984-46a5-8bf0-8346165fb583.

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This thesis is a cultural history of the publishing businesses that financed Shakespeare's First Folio. The thesis argues that by 1623 each of the four businesses that formed the Folio syndicate had developed an influential reputation in the book trade, and that these reputations were crucial to the cultural positioning of the Folio on publication. Taking its lead from a dynamic new field of study that has been called 'cultural bibliography', the thesis investigates the histories and publishing strategies of the business owned by the stationers William and Isaac Jaggard, who are usually thought of as the leading members of the Folio project, as well as those owned by William Aspley, John Smethwick, and Edward Blount. Through detailed analysis of the publishing strategies of each stationer, the thesis puts forward new theories about how these men influenced the reception of the Folio by transferring onto it their brands, and the expectations of their readerships. The business of each Folio stationer was like a stage with an audience assembled around it, waiting for the next production to emerge. This thesis identifies the publishing activities that attracted the audiences of the Jaggards, Blount, Smethwick, and Aspley, and ultimately suggests the Folio was granted significant legitimacy through the collaboration of these men. After an introductory chapter that locates the thesis in its scholarly field, the first chapter tells the history of syndicated book publishing in England, and reviews what we know of the pre-production process of the First Folio, taking a particular interest in how the publishing syndicate formed. The following chapters then form a series of case studies of the four publishing businesses, reviewing the apprenticeships and careers of each stationer before suggesting how those careers created a context of meaning for the Folio. These case studies focus on the authoritative reference publishing of the Jaggards, the religious publishing of William Aspley, the geographical location of John Smethwick's publishing business beside the Inns of Court, and the cultural achievements of Edward Blount. In conclusion the thesis explores the idea that it was the unique partnership of these businesses that consecrated the Folio as an emblem of literary taste.
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Logan, Sandra Ann. "Willing subjects : historical events and rhetorical occasions in early modern England /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9981962.

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43

Joiner, Sandra Carol. "Charlotte Mew: An Introduction." TopSCHOLAR®, 1989. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1717.

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Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) published short stories, essays, and poetry between 1894 and the time of her death. She published a slim volume of poems in 1916, a few of which place her as one of the great English poets. Indeed, both Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf thought her one of the greatest living female poets. Mew is particularly interesting as a poet who was born in the Victorian period, published during the “decadent decade” of the nineties, throughout Edward’s reign, and well into the reign of George V. Although few of Mew’s poems are dated, there is a gradual yet continual change from her early work to her latest. In her work, Mew questions her relationship with God, nature and humanity. She asked questions asked by Emily Bronte, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. Like them, she was knowledgeable in the new science and believed in its results. She was a seeker for a workable philosophy on which to base her life, which she never fully found. It is both painful and fruitful to join her in her search through her works as she tries to come to terms with these issues.
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Raye, Lee. "The forgotten beasts in medieval Britain : a study of extinct fauna in medieval sources." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2016. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/93165/.

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This thesis identifies and discusses historical and literary sources describing four species in the process of reintroduction: lynx (Lynx lynx), large whale (esp. Eubalena glacialis), beaver (Castor fiber) and crane (Grus grus). The scope includes medieval and early modern texts in English, Latin, and Welsh written in Britain before the species went extinct. The aims for each species are: (i) to reconstruct the medieval cultural memory; (ii) to contribute a cohesive extinction narrative; and (iii) to catalogue and provide an eco-sensitive reading of the main historical and literary references. Each chapter focuses on a different species: 1. The chapter on lynxes examines some new early references to the lynx and argues that the species became extinct in south Britain c.900 AD. Some hard-to-reconcile seventeenth century Scottish accounts are also explored. 2. The chapter on whales attributes the beginning of whale hunting to the ninth century in Britain, corresponding with the fish event horizon; but suggests a professional whaling industry only existed from the late medieval period. 3. The chapter on beavers identifies extinction dates based on the increasingly confused literary references to the beaver after c.1300 in south Britain and after c.1600 in Scotland, and the increase in fur importation. 4. The chapter on cranes emphasises the mixed perception of the crane throughout the medieval and early modern period. Cranes were simultaneously depicted as courtly falconers’ birds, greedy gluttons, and vigilant soldiers. More generally, the thesis considers the levels of reliability between eyewitness accounts and animal metaphors. It examines the process of ‘redelimitation’ which is triggered by population decline, whereby nomenclature and concepts attached to one species become transferred to another. Finally, it emphasises geographical determinism: species generally become extinct in south Britain centuries before Scotland.
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Sawyer, Daniel. "Codicological evidence of reading in late medieval England, with particular reference to practical pastoral verse." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8c21053f-e347-4349-9cc4-b1fa0229e95a.

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This study advances and adds detail to our history of the reading of verse in England c.1350-1500. Scholarship has established major twelfth- and thirteenth-century changes in reading, and linked these changes to manuscripts containing the modern Middle English verse canon. Historians of early modern reading have also argued for distinctive changes in their own period. But the examination of reading between these two clusters of change has been limited. This study therefore asks how later medieval Middle English verse was read. The surviving copies of The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, two hugely successful religious instructional poems, form the primary body of evidence. This body is augmented by reference to hundreds of other manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Together, these can reveal much about what was normal and abnormal in reading. They are also an important part of the context for the reading of more canonical Middle English verse. Manuscript studies often proceeds through case studies of individual books and unusual evidence such as marginalia. This thesis turns to codicology to understand more widespread evidence for reading, combining qualitative case studies with quantitative techniques borrowed and developed from continental scholarship. The first chapter examines evidence of provenance, revealing that both The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae were read by an impressive range of people and remained current into the sixteenth century. The second chapter considers the navigational aids used in copies of both poems. Reading in this period has been characterised as 'discontinuous', but it could be discontinuous in diverse ways, and readers also read continuously. The third chapter is a large-scale study of books' size and shape, showing how these features can reveal books' reading histories, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. The fourth chapter contends that readers in this period attended closely to rhyme and probably read for balanced rhyme structures. The fifth chapter uncovers the ways in which these poems were rewritten for new readers and investigates the composition of the Southern Recension of The Prick of Conscience, arguing that this new text was partly a formalist intervention. The conclusion summarises the new 'baseline' history of the reading of Middle English verse which is offered here, and gestures towards implications for our reading of the Middle English poems which are canonical today.
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Lloyd-Jones, Glyn Francis Michael. "Britain after the Romans : an interdisciplinary approach to the possibilities of an Adventus Saxonum." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1019806.

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In the fifth century, after the departure of the Romans, according to tradition, which is based on the ancient written sources, Britain was invaded by the Angles and Saxons. This view has been questioned in the last century. The size of the ‘invasion’, and indeed its very existence, have come into doubt. However, this doubting school of thought does not seem to take into account all of the evidence. An interdisciplinary, nuanced approach has been taken in this thesis. Firstly, the question of Germanic raiding has been examined, with reference to the Saxon Shore defences. It is argued that these defences, in their geographical context, point to the likelihood of raiding. Then the written sources have been re-examined, as well as physical artefacts. In addition to geography, literature and archaeology (the disciplines which are most commonly used when the coming of the Angles and Saxons is investigated), linguistic and genetic data have been examined. The fields of linguistics and genetics, which have not often both been taken into consideration with previous approaches, add a number of valuable insights. This nuanced approach yields a picture of events that rules out the ‘traditional view’ in some ways, such as the idea that the Saxons exterminated the Britons altogether, but corroborates it in other ways. There was an invasion of a kind (of Angles – not Saxons), who came in comparatively small numbers, but found in Britain a society already mixed and comprising Celtic and Germanic-speaking peoples: a society implied by Caesar and Tacitus and corroborated by linguistic and genetic data.
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Iles, Katharine. "Constructing the eighteenth-century woman : the adventurous history of Sabrina Sidney." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7211/.

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The story of Thomas Day’s attempt to educate a young girl according to the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the aim of marrying her, has often been referred to as a footnote in Enlightenment history. However, the girl chosen by Day, Sabrina Sidney, has never been placed at the centre of any historical enquiry, nor has the experiment been explored in any depth. This study places Sabrina at its centre to investigate its impact on her and to examine the intellectual and societal debates that informed Thomas Day’s decision to educate a wife. This thesis argues that Sabrina Sidney was in a constant state of construction, which changed depending on a myriad of factors and that constructions of her were fluid and flexible. These constructions were both conscious and unconscious and crucially, they were created as much by Sabrina as by those around her. This research concludes that placing minor historical figures to the centre of historical enquiry fundamentally changes the histories of which they are a part and that it is possible to use a variety of sources to construct a rich and detailed biographical study that offers a new perspective on the English Enlightenment.
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Sneddon, Sarah J. "The girls' school story : a re-reading." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14883.

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The very mention of the genre of the 'girls' school story' tends to provoke sniggers. Critics, teachers and librarians have combined throughout the century to attack a genre which encourages loyalty, hard work, team spirit, cleanliness and godliness. This dissertation asks why this attack took place and suggests one possible answer - the girls' school story was a radical and therefore feared genre. The thesis provides a brief history of the genre with reference to its connections with the Victorian novel and its peculiarly British status. Through examination of reading surveys, newspapers and early critical works it establishes both the popularity of the genre amongst its intended audience and the vitriolic nature of the attack against it. Biographical information about the writers of the school story begins to answer why the establishment may have been afraid of the influence of the purveyors of girls' school stories. By discussing their depiction of education, religion, women's roles and war the dissertation shows in what respects the genre can be seen as radical and shows how the increasing conventionality of the genre coincided with its decline in vigour and popularity. The influence of the oeuvre is then revealed in the discussion of its effects on adult literature.
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McClelland, Lauren S. "Studies in pre-Reformation Carthusian vernacular manuscripts : the cases of Dom William Mede and Dom Stephen Dodesham of Sheen." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5256/.

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In the field of manuscript studies, the identification of individual scribes and the reconstruction of their lives and work through examination of manuscript material has recently undergone revival. This thesis contributes to that field by presenting two biobibliographical case-studies of two fifteenth-century scribes and Carthusian monks, William Mede and Stephen Dodesham of Sheen. It sets out to demonstrate the value of an integrated biographical and comparative approach in the examination of the making and circumstances of making of manuscript books. This is demonstrated by building scribal biographies based on the integration of evidence from documentary record and the analysis of the material manuscript output of Mede and Dodesham. Dodesham, as the more prolific of the two, has been more fully investigated in recent scholarship. New documentary evidence, however, has necessitated a fresh appraisal of his life and the contexts of his copying, contexts which I argue are strongly educational. I show that Mede’s life and work as a Carthusian reader, copyist, and perhaps writer, is therefore worth further scholarly investigation. Chapter one considers the current state of the field of historical biography and, more specifically, scribal biography. It assesses the usefulness of integrating biographical and codicological approaches in the study of manuscripts and provides a definition of codicology in its broader sense (as a means of writing biobibliographical histories). As not all aspects of codicology are considered here, I also identify those aspects of codicological enquiry I have chosen to apply to the manuscripts of Mede and Dodesham. The case is made for the usefulness of codicological methods as a means of interpreting historical material. As the main focal points of this study are the lives and work of two Carthusian scribes, chapter two provides context on the Carthusian life, incorporating an evaluation of recent work on Carthusian textual culture, a brief summary of the Order’s history, its administrative structure, Carthusian spirituality, its participation in the intellectual culture of the late medieval period, how it responded to changing patterns in devotion, and its members’ attitudes and approaches to the acts of reading, writing and copying. This background is essential in contextualising the scribal activity of Mede and Dodesham and will be referred to in the following chapters. Chapters three and four are dedicated to the case studies examining the lives and work of William Mede and Stephen Dodesham of Sheen. Chapter three, containing the case study of William Mede, includes analysis of his Anglicana and other idiosyncratic features of his hand; full descriptions of each of the six manuscripts so far attributed to him; and study of his language and punctuation practices, which vary, I argue, depending upon for what sorts of audience Mede is writing or copying. A detailed study of the Speculum devotorum demonstrates this adaptive scribal behaviour in action and also investigates the possibility that Mede may have been the author of the text. The above are all discussed in relation to the making and circumstances of making of Mede’s manuscripts. The conclusion to the chapter offers a summary of Mede’s life and work and makes the case for the importance of further investigation of this Carthusian scribe. Chapter four, the case study of Stephen Dodesham, includes a reappraisal in light of new evidence of his early scribal career, including his ordination at Sheen charterhouse, potential connections with the prominent Dodesham family of Somerset and connections with middle-class, professional families in London and around the south-western counties of England. This new evidence has made it possible to more firmly place the contexts of Dodesham’s manuscript copying. Much of chapter four is dedicated to analysing his language, and providing brief descriptions of those manuscripts so far attributed to him; the above all discussed in relation to the making and circumstances of making of Dodesham’s manuscripts. The conclusion offers a summary of Dodesham’s life and work and makes the case for the importance of further investigation as of particular interest in the areas of developing literacy and education. In chapter five, I bring both case studies together, assess the usefulness of the biographical approach in the context of this particular study, and evaluate its successes and limitations as a framework for combined biographical and codicological investigation.
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McFall, Edwin K. "Tragic hero to antichrist : Macbeth, the Oedipus Tyrannus of the English Renaissance /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/10234.

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