Close encounters: international exhibitions and the material culture of the British Empire, c.1880-1940

Apparitions of empire and imperial ideologies were deeply embedded in the International Exhibition, a distinct exhibitionary paradigm that came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Exhibitions were platforms for the display of objects, the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas across and between regions of the British Empire, thereby facilitating contact between its different cultures and societies. This thesis aims to disrupt a dominant understanding of International Exhibitions, which forwards the notion that all exhibitions, irrespective of when or where they were staged, upheld a singular imperial discourse (i.e. Greenhalgh 1988, Rydell 1984). Rather, this thesis suggests International Exhibitions responded to and reflected the unique social, political and economic circumstances in which they took place, functioning as cultural environments in which pressing concerns of the day were worked through. Understood thus, the International Exhibition becomes a space for self-presentation, serving as a stage from which a multitude of interests and identities were constructed, performed and projected. This thesis looks to the visual and material culture of the International Exhibition in order to uncover this more nuanced history, and foregrounds an analysis of the intersections between practices of exhibition-making and identity-making. The primary focus is a set of exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-1880s and early-1900s, which extends the geographic and temporal boundaries of the existing scholarship. What is more, it looks at representations of Canada at these events, another party whose involvement in the International Exhibition tradition has gone largely unnoticed. Consequently, this thesis is a thematic investigation of the links between a municipality routinely deemed the ‘Second City of the Empire’ and a Dominion settler colony, two types of geographic setting rarely brought into dialogue. It analyses three key elements of the exhibition-making process, exploring how iconographies of ‘quasi-nationhood’ were expressed through an exhibition’s planning and negotiation, its architecture and its displays. This original research framework deliberately cuts across strata that continue to define conceptions of the British Empire, and pushes beyond a conceptual model defined by metropole and colony. Through examining International Exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, and visions of Canada in evidence at these events, the goal is to offer a novel intervention into the existing literature concerning the cultural history of empire, one that emphasises fluidity rather than fixity and which muddles the boundaries between centre and periphery.

Eighty years 'Owre the Sea': Robert Burns and the early United States of America, c. 1786-1866.

This thesis represents the first extensive critical study of the relationship between Robert Burns and the early United States of America. Spanning literature, history and memory studies, the following chapters take an interdisciplinary approach towards investigating the methods by which Burns and his works rose to prominence and came to be of cultural and literary significance in America. Theoretically, these converging disciplines intersect through a transnational, Atlantic Studies perspective that shifts emphasis from Burns as the 'national poet of Scotland' onto the various socio-cultural connections that facilitated the spread of his work and reputation. In addition to Scottish literary studies, the thesis contributes to the broader fields of Transatlantic, Transnational and American Studies. Previous studies have suggested that Burns's popularity in the early United States might be attributed to his kinship with 'national' American ideals of freedom, egalitarianism and individual liberty. While some of the evidence supports this claim, this thesis argues that it also wrongly assumes a spatiotemporal unity for the nineteenth-century American nation. It concludes by suggesting that future critical studies of the poet must heed the multifarious complexities of 'national' paradigms, pointing the way to further work on the reception and influence of Burns in other 'global' or, indeed, transnational contexts.

Reconsidering the relationship between early Gothic literature and the Greek classics: the cases of William Beckford and Matthew G. Lewis

The view that Gothic literature emerged as a reaction against the prominence of the Greek classics, and that, as a result, it bears no trace of their influence, is a commonplace in Gothic studies. This thesis re-examines this view, arguing that the Gothic and the Classical were not in opposition to one another, and that Greek tragic poetry and myth should be counted among the literary sources that inspired early Gothic writers. The discussion is organised in three parts. Part I focuses on evidence which suggests that the Gothic and the Hellenic were closely associated in the minds of several British literati both on a political and aesthetic level. As is shown, the coincidence of the Hellenic with the Gothic revival in the second half of the eighteenth century inspired them not only to trace common ground between the Greek and Gothic traditions, but also to look at Greek tragic poetry and myth through Gothic eyes, bringing to light an unruly, ‘Dionysian’ world that suited their taste. The particulars of this coincidence, which has not thus far been discussed in Gothic studies, as well as evidence which suggests that several early Gothic writers were influenced by Greek tragedy and myth, open up new avenues for research on the thematic and aesthetic heterogeneity of early Gothic literature. Parts II and III set out to explore this new ground and to support the main argument of this thesis by examining the influence of Greek tragic poetry and myth on the works of two early Gothic novelists and, in many ways, shapers of the genre, William Beckford and Matthew Gregory Lewis. Part II focuses on William Beckford’s Vathek and its indebtedness to Euripides’s Bacchae, and Part III on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk and its indebtedness to Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus. As is discussed, Beckford and Lewis participated actively in both the Gothic and Hellenic revivals, producing highly imaginative works that blended material from the British and Greek literary traditions.