English and Related Literature

Percy Shelley proposed a solution to mankind’s problems, to the diseases of unnaturalness; he proposed that man should adopt the natural diet in order to walk into a “paradise of peace” as depicted at the end of Queen Mab. The diet was based upon the principles of vegetarianism, of ethics and the rights of animals; however, the diet also had far reaching political implications. This dissertation explores how Shelley’s early discourse on diet was also a rejection of man’s systems, of his hierarchy, politics and of his religious establishments.  Shelley argued for social equality and a sustainable approach to the environment, ultimately recognising man’s ecological responsibility; thus, I claim Shelley as an early representor of green politics. By applying the ideas of contemporary ecocriticism to Shelley’s Queen Mab and its associated prose, these themes are highly thematic within his work and arguments for vegetarianism: he advocates a more sustainable approach to agriculture, one that would reduce the environmental impact of man’s diet. The discourse on the natural world that Shelley provides is a romantic utopian vision on how he thinks man should live his life; central to it, and unifying the rest, is vegetarianism: it makes man natural once more.

With such a range of influences it is not surprising that Heaney has been compared with ‘every poet who suffers from "the anxiety of influence," who struggles under the burden of his poetic heritage”’ and critics have sought to explore the manner in which he established an ‘individualized poetic voice’ . In his 2006 volume of poetry District and Circle, Heaney’s engagement with Western literary traditions clearly underscores this struggle; however, as he draws upon previous traditions, Heaney reveals how he has banished anxieties of influence to the fringes of his work and found a distinct poetic voice by reshaping the literary past within a contemporary, post-9/11 poetic world.

It is Langston Hughes who said that: ‘Whatever forms Negro poetry has taken in the last century...
the subject matter of Negro poetry... has remained more or less constant: the problems of freedom in a white dominated society’ (Hughes, “200 Years” 93). His own experiments with jazz forms, fusing street aesthetic with musical poetry, would eventually lead to fruition in the form of modern rap performance.
Hughes’ assertion that black art is more often than not unified by a conscious striving for justice and equality can be seen today even in some of the most commercial of works. I believe reading Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ alongside the work of Langston Hughes elucidates how this album works as a form of manifesto, not just for ethnic artistry but for the black community as a whole. Of particular importance to my argument will be Hughes’ landmark essay, ‘The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain’.
By opening a conversation between these two texts, I hope to further explain the cultural relevance of Kendrick Lamar’s album as a modification of Hughes’ arguments for any ethnic artist, succeeding through hindsight and experimentation where Hughes was limited by time and place. As a modification to the ‘Langstonian’ argument of ‘The Racial Mountain’, the implications of a mountain transformed to something more tangible and accessible to a new generation is a welcome one, and one that can be found at the core of ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ through its central metaphor of the cocoon.

This thesis argues that the representation of both the 'girl' and 'girlhood' within children's literature can be best understood through a reading of space and place. The opening chapter considers the Golden Age of children's literature, and investigates The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and four of Angela Brazil's most typical school stories: The Fortunes of Philippa, For the Sake of the School, The Mystery of the Moated Grange and The School in the Forest. It is argued that these stories represent an attempt to mediate between an unorthodox idea of girlhood and an Arcadian stereotype whilst effectively rendering neither. The second chapter considers the mid-twentieth century and argues for a tentative aesthetic of liberation, substantiated through analyses of the St Clare’s and Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton, and A Little Love Song by Michelle Magorian. Chapter three shifts towards the contemporary period of children's literature with analyses of Murder is Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens, and My Name is Mina by David Almond, and argues that the contemporary notion of girlhood is characterised by the apparently contradictory idea of permitted transgression. It is concluded that the nature of girlhood within children's literature faces an imminent crisis; whether to consolidate the perspective of the child to the exclusion of the adult, or to pursue an ever greater aetonormative perspective. The findings of this thesis also come to question the role of the golden age within children's literature and suggests that rather than reading a golden age as temporally definite, it can be, instead, recognised thematically.

"“We must know for certain”: Sergeant Cuff, the father of the modern detective, gives us this assurance in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. If we know one fact for certain a whole case can be built, and this way of discovering the truth is, ostensibly, central to both The Moonstone and The Woman in White. And yet one novel provides us with an inadequate justice system, and the other a faulty detective. These works are held up as examples where thorough documentation is key to knowing and compiling an accurate view of the case, but at the same time both usher in inexplicable, key moments of supernatural knowledge that the plots hinge on.

While the epistolary style of both novels suggests that we can ‘look’ at events vicariously through the accounts of others, both contain these inexplicable moments of supernatural ‘seeing’ which jar on the reader. How do these singular and unquestioned moments of prophecy interplay with the collaborative presentation of knowledge in The Woman in White and The Moonstone?

In a complex web of detective work, opium-fuelled experience, psychological self-discovery and the supernatural, the side of Collins that created ‘Ghost Wilkie’ comes out to play, and ultimately denies us knowledge of our ways of knowing, investing certainty in family ties, racial stereotyping and hallucinogens while undermining the evidence of our eyes and making ‘seeing’ a trick of the mind that delays our access to the truth rather than providing a key to it."

"Despite the unique strangeness of Charles Dickens’s later Uncommercial Traveller articles, including the Voice of Conscience shaking passengers to pieces (“Aboard Ship”) and the sad image of the children of the East Hospital for Children Dickens promises to immortalise (“A Small Star to the East”), the later journalism and fiction have not had the same intense scrutiny as Dickens’s earlier work. His formative years have been the focus of much recent critical scholarship, from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens (2011) to Robert L. Patten’s Charles Dickens and 'Boz': The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (2012), and the autobiographical fragments that appear in Forster’s biography have been used as a key to unlocking his novels. However, the relationship between the fiction, journalism and reality of Dickens’s life is an unstable one that becomes more conflicted – and more important – in the last years of Dickens’s life.

The way personal history shapes identity and artistic production, a theme which had followed Dickens since the publication of David Copperfield, merged with the ageing author’s concerns about the traces that are left once we have passed away, revealing further questions about the relationship between what we experience and what we have to show for that experience in later life, and after death in public memory. These issues troubled Dickens, and with the decision to go on another American reading tour, a new edition of All The Year Round and more experimental pieces like “George Silverman’s Explanation”, his actions seem to stubbornly resist the image of the worn out man, old before his time, instead showing a talented writer self-consciously molding his place in history through a series of interesting journalistic choices.

Within the articles of 1867-70 Dickens fleetingly takes on a range of unusual identities including archeologist (“On an Amateur Beat”), eulogist (“The Late Mr. Stanfield”), child (“A Holiday Romance”) and priest (George Silverman’s Explanation”) among others, seemingly effacing his own sense of self. He steps out of his familiar narrative voice to look at the wider

implications of childhood and death: these works are narrated by the Uncommercial Traveller, George Silverman, even William Tinkling, aged eight, close to the age Dickens would have been when he entered the Blacking Factory, allowing Dickens both to tell his history and write over it.

Dickens had long since ceased to be the Boz of his early career and, even at this late stage, was still evolving from “industrial-age author” (Patten 2012) into a new kind of writer and public figure, one who would specify in his will that no monument should be erected to him and that he should be remembered through his works only. Let us both honour and ignore this request: by looking at snapshots of the ways in which Dickens presented himself in these very different kinds of writing between 1867 and 1870, I will examine how Dickens used his personal history and childhood experience to ask questions about the traces that remain after death, both of the self and of the artist."

When Charles Dickens died, the nation saw an almost unprecedented outpouring of grief. The first literary celebrity, and household friend to many, it is unsurprising that his death was followed by an incredible number of biographies, memorial volumes and reminiscences from friends, acquaintances and those cashing in on the death of a national treasure. Early publications included a Biography of the Inimitable written by a pornographer, a continuation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood written by an American who claimed that Dickens’s ghost revealed the story’s resolution to him and the problematic but seminal Life of Charles Dickens, censoring, rewriting and reshaping the author’s image posthumously. These problems are compounded by Dickens’s own playful approach to autobiographical writing, which has meant Dickens scholars (and indeed Dickens’s contemporaries) have struggled to separate fact from fiction – and the treasures from the trash. The early works that Dickens’s grieving public would have consumed have received little critical attention, but together they give us exciting insight into Victorian attitudes to celebrity and the blocks on which much Dickens scholarship, and much of our knowledge about the author himself, has been built.

This paper explores how some of the works of the 1870s attempted to solidify a calculated image of Dickens, from the very first memorial volumes that appeared only a month after the author’s death written by the notorious John Camden Hotten to John Forster’s controlled (and controlling) Life-and-Letters-style offering. Many aspects of this image still influence our reading of Dickens, from Forster’s blacking factory revelations to the idea of a larger-than-life man who is very much one of his own characters, and the post-mortem parrying that Dickens’s friends and family conducted gives new insight into Victorian Biography as a genre, as well as better understanding of the Dickens ‘myth’ as it exists today.

- Emma Butcher – Drunken Degeneration: Corrupting Clubs and Masculine Monsters in Bessie Gordon’s Story.

- Emily Bowles – Re/Shaping Identity: The Beginnings of the Dickens "Myth".

Emma Butcher's paper exposes Victorian anxieties about club culture and failed fatherhood through an overlooked example of ‘temperance trash’. By climaxing with an explicit alcohol-induced child murder, the narrative provides a previously overlooked and convincing offering to Victorian studies of defective paternity, drunkenness and domestic masculinity.

Emily Bowles’s paper explores some of the earliest biographies of Dickens and how they each attempted to solidify a calculated image of the author, from the very first memorial volume that appeared only a month after his death written by the notorious pornographer John Camden Hotten to John Forster’s controlled (and controlling) Life-and-Letters-style offering.

The after-dinner speech occupied an unusual literary space for the Victorian public figures called upon to deliver them: it blurred the boundary between public and private and between fiction and non-fiction and, despite strict formal conventions, allowed some individuality and experimentation. The speaker addressed a select audience but a record of the speech might also be circulated in pamphlets, newspapers or, in the case of Charles Dickens, form an important part of biographies for over a hundred years.

Dickens was an uncommon case among speech-makers: according to Trollope, "He spoke so well, that a public dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if was in the chair" (Hollington 452). However, much less attention has been paid to Dickens as a speech-maker than as a public reader, even while his earliest biographers used anecdotes from them verbatim to describe his life, taking them out of context to serve their purposes.

This paper will explore the ways in which Dickens used speech-making to shape his public image in the 1860s, at a time when his relationship with the public was on shaky ground following his separation from his wife. By exploring key speeches from this period, I will show how Dickens created a particular image of himself and his career and gave glimpses of the life he wished he had, rather than the troubled upbringing revealed in Forster’s seminal Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74). I will argue that speech-making worked with Dickens’s writing, giving him another medium with which to experiment and allowing for the particular blend of authenticity and artifice that recurs in his journalism and fiction.

Taking place during the centenary of the First World War, 'Nature at War' is an interdisciplinary one-day symposium organised by the Postgraduate Forum of the Centre for Modern Studies at the University of York, exploring the dynamic between nature (broadly-conceived) and war from the mid-nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries.

Taking place on 2nd June 2015 at the University of York, this interdisciplinary one-day symposium aims to give postgraduate students across the arts and humanities the opportunity to develop interdisciplinary debates and ideas around the concept of identity, questioning the way in which identities are (re)formed, constructed and explored psychically and spatially in the modern world.

‘Portable property!’ is the mantra of Great Expectations’ Wemmick. The centrality of objects to Victorian families, homes, and public culture, can be seen wherever you turn: the auction in Vanity Fair; the jewellery Dorothea denies herself in Middlemarch; the Great Exhibition. Even working-class homes take pride in their ‘bright green japanned tea-tray’, as Mary Barton emphasises, even if they only have six teacups and need extra visitors to bring their own.

In Orlando, Woolf characterised the Victorian period as ‘heterogeneous, ill-sorted objects piled higgledy-piggledy in a vast mound’. Victorians are famous as collectors, hoarders, but also as curators. This is the era that saw not only the Great Exhibition, but the founding of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the opening up of the National Gallery and British Museum to cheap public entry, and new historical disciplines, archaeology and anthropology, epitomised in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum.

Recent developments in material culture and thing theory have highlighted objects’ diverse practical as well as symbolic functions. We want to extend these discussions by asking some persistent questions: why were Victorian homes so full of clutter? Do changing fashions – for example, the development of Steampunk – change the way we relate to this? Victorian objects, particularly buildings, still surround us today: do objects change their meaning in new contexts? Does this also apply to objects that came to Britain from around the world; and what about objects created in the industrial powerhouse of northern England to be exported worldwide?