Beyond orientalism: 'The Stranger' and 'Colonial Cosmopolitanism' in the romantic period novel

Going beyond Orientalism in its examination of novels dealing with British colonisation in the West, as well as the East Indies, the postcolonial frame of my thesis develops recent theorisations of the Romantic ‘stranger’. Analysing a range of novels from the much anthologised Mansfield Park (1814), to less well-known narratives such as John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) and Sir Walter Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well (1823), my thesis seeks to account for a model of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ within fiction of the period. Considering the cosmopolitan dimensions of the transferential rhetoric of slavery, my thesis explores the ways in which, Jane Austen, Amelia Opie and Maria Edgeworth consider the position of women in domestic society through a West Indian frame. Demonstrating the need for reform both at home and abroad, such novels are representative of a fledgling cosmopolitanism that is often overlooked in current criticism. In seeking to account for ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ as a new model for reading fiction composed during the Romantic period, my thesis attempts to add further nuance to current understandings of sympathetic exchange during the process of British colonisation. In chapters four and five I will develop my analysis of novels dealing with colonial expansion in the Caribbean to consider novels which deal with the Indian subcontinent. Although stopping short of questioning colonial expansion, discourses of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’, as my thesis demonstrates, provided a foundation for humanitarian and cultural engagement which was mutually transformative for both the coloniser and the colonised.

Wondrous transformations: rereading and rewriting wonder in contemporary anglophone and francophone fairy tales

This thesis compares contemporary anglophone and francophone rewritings of traditional fairy tales for adults. Examining material dating from the 1990s to the present, including novels, novellas, short stories, comics, televisual and filmic adaptations, this thesis argues that while the revisions studied share similar themes and have comparable aims, the methods for inducing wonder (where wonder is defined as the effect produced by the text rather than simply its magical contents) are diametrically opposed, and it is this opposition that characterises the difference between the two types of rewriting. While they all engage with the hybridity of the fairy-tale genre, the anglophone works studied tend to question traditional narratives by keeping the fantasy setting, while francophone works debunk the tales not only in relation to questions of content, but also aesthetics. Through theoretical, historical, and cultural contextualisation, along with close readings of the texts, this thesis aims to demonstrate the existence of this francophone/anglophone divide and to explain how and why the authors in each tradition tend to adopt such different views while rewriting similar material. This division is the guiding thread of the thesis and also functions as a springboard to explore other concepts such as genre hybridity, reader-response, and feminism. The thesis is divided into two parts; the first three chapters work as an in-depth literature review: after examining, in chapters one and two, the historical and contemporary cultural field in which these works were created, chapter three examines theories of fantasy and genre hybridity. The second part of the thesis consists of textual studies and comparisons between francophone and anglophone material and is built on three different approaches. The first (chapter four) looks at selected texts in relation to questions of form, studying the process of world building and world creation enacted when authors combine and rewrite several fairy tales in a single narrative world. The second (chapter five) is a thematic approach which investigates the interactions between femininity, the monstrous, and the wondrous in contemporary tales of animal brides. Finally, chapter six compares rewritings of the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ with a comparison hinged on the representation of the forbidden room and its contents: Bluebeard’s cabinet of wonder is one that he holds sacred, one where he sublimates his wives’ corpses, and it is the catalyst of wonder, terror, and awe. The three contextual chapters and the three text-based studies work towards tracing the tangible existence of the division postulated between francophone and anglophone texts, but also the similarities that exist between the two cultural fields and their roles in the renewal of the fairy-tale genre.

Women's writing networks in Spanish magazines around 1900

As an output of the HERA Travelling Texts project, created with the aim of uncovering the realities of women’s literary culture on the fringes of Europe during the long nineteenth century, this study was conceptualised to find out more about the networks of women writers in Spain around 1900, using the digitised corpuses of contemporaneous periodicals as the primary source material. Each chapter of the study centres on a particular periodical, which is used as the starting point for the community of writers and readers, both real and imagined. This thesis looks at the realities of the literary culture for creative women in the late nineteenth century-early twentieth century, exploring the strategies used by women (and men) to support each other in their literary endeavours, how they took inspiration and courage from each other, how they promoted their own names, and how they were received by wider society. The study will also focus on the transnational nature of this literary culture, looking at how women of different nations influenced each other’s work, with a view to understanding more about how cultural change takes place. Finally, this thesis hopes to persuade the reader that the periodical is a rich and under-utilised resource for discovering more about the lives of women writers and their network of relationships.