Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Edwardian literature'

The aim of this thesis is to re-evaluate the literary work and reputation of the novelist and dramatist, John Galsworthy. It concentrates mainly on the social novels that were written between 1904 and 1915, and presents a critical analysis of these major works. In particular, it examines Galsworthy’s technique and his engagement with contemporary problematic social issues, drawing comparisons with the work of other major Modernist and Edwardian writers. It observes that Galsworthy’s reputation has never recovered from the partisan attacks and general disparagement of his work by writers of the early phase of literary Modernism such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. It argues that these negative evaluations of Galsworthy are not only motivated by the interests of the self-appointed literary elite, but also a poor and misleading account of his work on both aesthetic and ideological grounds. This thesis attempts an intervention into literary history that will by establish a fairer evaluation of Galsworthy’s work by analysing the self-serving Modernist construction of Edwardian culture as stylistically and politically retrograde, a phase of post-Victorian stagnation, and fundamentally a prelude to Modernist experimentation. The apparent need for Galsworthy to epitomise this situation has resulted in an enduring distortion of his narrative style, and especially his socially progressive ideals; the narrative of Galsworthy as retrograde Edwardian was perpetuated throughout the subsequent twentieth century by the influence of Leavis. In attempting to redress this legacy of misreading the thesis develops a working distinction between the terms ‘Modernism’, as both affiliation and critical idea, and ‘modernising’ as a more judicious evaluation of Galsworthy’s achievement.

Invasion literature is a branch of fiction that enjoyed significant popularity in Britain prior to the First World War. Focusing on invasion narratives of the Edwardian period, this thesis foregrounds the literature’s representation of domestic political issues. These include debates over national identity, the campaign for compulsory military service, and the sociopolitical upheavals of the late-Edwardian period. Through emphasising the importance of these internal themes, the thesis argues that such narratives were vehicles for multifaceted critiques of British society rather than one-dimensional predictions of invasion. Exploring the ideological origins of these narratives, the thesis questions the dominant understanding that invasion literature was a Tory product. The genre is instead interpreted as a product of the British ‘Radical Right’. Presenting invasion literature as a repository of varied contemporary anxieties, the thesis reconsiders the analytical value of the ‘Edwardian Crisis’, arguing that narratives of invasion illustrate a pronounced sense of approaching crisis. This thesis therefore offers an original contribution to modern British political and cultural history, and invasion literature studies.

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) va escriure catorze novel·les que reflecteixen el conjunt de costums i creences del període eduardià. Tot i que ell era reconegut per la seva poesia i assajos, cal repassar les seves novel.les atentament de bell nou, ja que són l’instrument que utilitza per explicar les seves idees mitjançant narracions, sovint estranyes i divertides alhora, que d’antuvi foren considerades literatura d’evasió, però que expliquen el seu pensament més clarament que en altres possibles exposicions teòriques. Des del seu punt de vista catòlic punyent Belloc fa referència a la Reforma anglicana i la consegüent plutocràcia emergent, la intromissió de la cultura europea en les institucions angleses, la historiografia Whig (la interpretació que en fan els progressistes liberals), el desig de la gent normal per ascendir socialment i la frustració que sol acompanyar l’intent. Belloc analitza la nostra relació amb els diners: com els guanyem, en què els invertim i quines són les nostres prioritats econòmiques. És sagaç i albira el paper emergent de la dona i com s’ho fa per arribar als primers llocs de poder, encara que Belloc sovint presenta imatges estereotipades de la dona. La tesi intenta descobrir les capes ocultes, plenament significatives, que rauen en les novel·les humorístiques d’en Belloc i la seva aplicació a formes actuals de pensament i conducta. En la seva tasca de novel·lista Belloc s’esforça per descriure les passions humanes i la nostra follia. Malgrat que les seves novel·les foren escrites des del 1904 al 1932, les opinions sobre els seus contemporanis són vigents avui dia, perquè la natura humana és la mateixa que aleshores i mai no canvia, com tampoc ho fa la nostra ambició i afany de domini.
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) escribió catorce novelas que reflejan el conjunto de costumbres y creencias de la época eduardiana. Aunque es conocido sobre todo por su poesía y ensayos, sus novelas merecen ser revisadas atentamente puesto que expresan la densidad ideológica de Belloc a través de narraciones divertidas, incluso extrañas, a las que inicialmente se etiquetó como literatura de evasión. Sin embargo estas novelas contribuyen a expresar su esfera de pensamiento de forma más clara que en otros teóricamente posibles tratados académicos. Desde su punto de vista inequívocamente católico Belloc introduce temas como la Reforma anglicana y la plutocracia que inmediatamente se originó como nueva clase emergente, la influencia de la cultura europea en las instituciones inglesas, la interpretación Whig de la historia (historiografía ‘oficial’ que elaboran los liberales a partir del siglo XVIII) y el deseo irrefrenable del ciudadano de a pie por ascender en la escala social, con la frustración que suele acompañarlo. Con su característica vena humorística y mirada satírica, Belloc va analizando nuestras obsesiones pecuniarias: cómo ganamos dinero, en qué lo invertimos y cuáles son nuestras prioridades económicas. Su sagacidad le lleva a vislumbrar el papel de la mujer, cada día más preponderante, y de qué manera accede a los máximos puestos de decisión, si bien a menudo ofrece imágenes femeninas estereotipadas. La tesis intenta desentrañar las capas de significación ocultas en las novelas humorísticas de Belloc y extrapolarlas al pensamiento y conducta contemporáneos. Con su habitual perspicacia Belloc se esfuerza en describir las pasiones humanas. Pone el espejo frente a nuestra insensatez. Aunque sus obras de ficción abarcan el período que va de 1904 a 1932, las observaciones que realiza sobre sus coetáneos siguen vigentes en la sociedad actual, puesto que la naturaleza humana no cambia básicamente, ni tampoco nuestra ambición y afán de dominio.
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) wrote fourteen novels that reflect the set of habits, customs and beliefs of the Edwardian period. Even though he was well known for his poetry and essays his novels deserve closer attention, as they convey Belloc’s ideological load through weird, amusing stories that were originally considered escapist fiction, but that constitute a more specific expression of ideas than other more formal documents. From his trenchant Roman Catholic point of view, Belloc refers to the English Reformation and the subsequent emerging plutocracy, the interference of continental culture into English institutions, the Whig interpretation of history, and the ordinary people’s urgency to climb up socially and their inherent frustrations. With his peculiar sense of humour and satirical outlook, Belloc dissects our pecuniary attitudes. He analyses how we earn money, what we invest it in, and what our economic priorities are. He is perceptive enough to glimpse the growing role of women and how they achieve top positions, although he often goes on using stereotypical female representations. This thesis analyses significant hidden layers of meaning in Belloc’s comic fiction and their application to present day modalities of thought and behaviour. As a novelist, Belloc makes an effort to describe human passions and casts light on our follies. Even though his fiction books span from 1904 to 1932, the views he applied to his contemporaries are also in force for current society, since essential human nature does not change, neither does human greed and desire to dominate others.

British contemporary writer Zadie Smith is often representative of cosmopolitan writers of the twenty-first century: in both her fiction and nonfiction, she joins a multicultural background and broad, varied interests to an ethic based on the importance of interpersonal relationships and empathetic respect for the other. But while Smith is often considered the poster child for the contemporary British cosmopolitan, her ethics are in fact rooted in the one rather staid member of the canon: EM Forster, whose emphatic call to ‘only connect’ grounds all of Smith's fiction. Her latest novel, 2012's NW, further expands her relationship to Forster in highlighting both the promise and the limitations of empathy and cosmopolitan connection in the context of modern urban British life. This paper uses Kwame Anthony Appiah's definition of “rooted cosmopolitanism” to explore Forster's and Smith's shared ethics. I argue that their relationship grounds and influences Smith's literary rooted cosmopolitanism: that while she writes books for the age of globalization, her deliberate ties to the British canon suggest an investment in maintaining and reinvigorating the British novelistic tradition as a pathway to a collective British identity that is as expansive, modern, and empathetic as her novels.

This study focuses on a series of late-century works by women writers that incorporate facets of theatrical performance into the printed book. Literary drama was a common genre of the Victorian and Edwardian period, used by writers such as Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold to elevate drama to the status of literature, a term synonymous with the printed page and the experience of reading. However, this project examines a series of women writers who, in contrast, used this hybrid form to challenge the assumed superiority of text. The values ascribed to the printed page—that it was a disembodied enterprise unattached to the whims of its audience or the particularities of its author—were antithetical to the experiences of women writers, whose work was often read in the context of their gendered bodies. My study proceeds chronologically, reading the literary dramas of five writers—George Eliot, Augusta Webster, Katharine Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper (writing under the pseudonym “Michael Field”), and Elizabeth Robins—alongside changes in print practice and theatrical staging as well as evolving discourses about “literariness.” I argue that these women allude to theatrical performance in the text to show that the page always bears the physical traces of its authors and its audience. Each chapter blends book studies with performance studies, showing the way the form of a work invites particular responses from its readers. Overall, this project has two goals: one, to recover marginalized texts by women writers and revise narratives about the period to incorporate these pieces; and two, to span the scholarly chasm between Victorian poetry and drama and demonstrate, instead, the mutually constitutive relationship of these two art forms.

In his writing on the nature and purpose of the novel between 1895 and 1911, Wells endorses artistic principles for their social effects. His public lecture on “The Contemporary Novel,” written in 1911 in response to a debate with Henry James, is the most lucid articulation of his artistic principles, and his later autobiographical reflections on the debate obscure the clarity of the earlier version. Wells’s artistic principles emerge in his reviews of contemporary fiction for the Saturday Review (1895–1897), where he extends Poe’s concept of “unity of effect” to the novel and justifies his preference for social realism with a theory of cultural evolution. His views develop further in the context of sociological and philosophical debates between 1901 and 1905. Wells commenced the century with a sceptical view on the social effects of literature, but his exposure to British Pragmatism encouraged him to revive the principles developed in his reviewing. The view on Wells’s conception of the novel presented in this thesis challenges the prevailing view that he began his career with a set of purely artistic principles, adding sociological and intellectual apparatus after the turn of the century.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.
Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 454 p. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: David Riede, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 420-454).

The present study opens up the field of Catalan connections with English literature. The importance of Edwardian influences on the general transmission of English authors and works is demonstrated. Original data on the reception of G.K. Chesterton, the Edwardian figure with a most remarkable impact in Catalonia, is brought to light (Chapter 1, Appendix 1), followed by discussion of the presence of H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw and an account of the reception of Well's early fiction (Chapter 2); their influence sheds new light on the aspiration of an élite to modernise Catalan culture. Catalan translations of English fictional works produced in the period 1918-38 (Chapter 3, Appendix II) are linked to the reception of the roman anglais in the context of the crisis of the roman à thèse, and the meditating influence of French criticism is revealed. The values of romance, adventure, and the common man (from Defoe to Stevenson, from Stevenson to Conrad) constitute the recurrent thread associated with the English tradition and with the Edwardian fictional canon, as these were mediated from France to Catalonia. This panorama of transmission enhances an understanding of Catalan views of the novel, in the light of Edwardian values (Chapter 4), as exemplified in Carles Riba's critical appraisal of two Catalan authors, in the appeal of Joseph Conrad's narrative technique and its influence on J.M. de Sagarra, as well as in the comparison of Frank Swinnerton's Nocturne (a best-seller of 1917) and its Catalan counterpart, M. Teresa Vernet's Les algues roges. This thesis also includes a chronology of the reception of Chesterton and a list of Catalan translations of English works of fiction.

Issues which faced Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include the effects of new scientific theories on traditional religious belief, the impact of technological innovation, the implications of mass literacy and the changing role of women. This thesis records how such issues are reflected in contemporary literature, focusing on the emergence of popular culture and the best seller, a term which conflates author and novel. The first English best seller was Marie Corelli and, by way of introduction, Part I offers a summary of her life and her novels and a critical overview of her work. Part II of the thesis examines how the theory of evolution undermined traditional religious belief and prompted the search for a new creed able to defy materialism and reconcile science and religion. Contemporary literature mirrors the consequent interest in spiritualism during the 1890s and the period immediately following the Great War, and critical readings of Corelli�s A Romance of Two Worlds and The Life Everlasting demonstrate that these novels - which form the nucleus of her personal theology, the Electric Creed - are based on selections from the New Testament, occultism and, in particular, science and spiritualism. Part III of the thesis looks at the emergence of �the woman question�, the corresponding backlash by conservatives and the ways in which these conflicting views are explored in the popular literature of the time. A critical examination of the novella, My Wonderful Wife, reveals how Corelli uses social Darwinism in an ambivalent critique of the New Woman. Several of Corelli�s essays are discussed, showing that her views about the role of women were complex. A critical analysis of The Secret Power engages with Corelli�s peculiar kind of feminism, which would deny women the vote but envisages female scientists inventing and operating airships in order to secure the future of the human race. Interest in Marie Corelli has re-emerged recently, particularly in occult and feminist circles. Corelli�s immense popularity also makes her an important figure in cultural studies. This thesis adds to the body of knowledge about Corelli in that it consciously endeavours to avoid spiritualist or feminist ideological frameworks, instead using contemporary science as a context for examining her work.

Issues which faced Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include the effects of new scientific theories on traditional religious belief, the impact of technological innovation, the implications of mass literacy and the changing role of women. This thesis records how such issues are reflected in contemporary literature, focusing on the emergence of popular culture and the best seller, a term which conflates author and novel. The first English best seller was Marie Corelli and, by way of introduction, Part I offers a summary of her life and her novels and a critical overview of her work. Part II of the thesis examines how the theory of evolution undermined traditional religious belief and prompted the search for a new creed able to defy materialism and reconcile science and religion. Contemporary literature mirrors the consequent interest in spiritualism during the 1890s and the period immediately following the Great War, and critical readings of Corelli�s A Romance of Two Worlds and The Life Everlasting demonstrate that these novels - which form the nucleus of her personal theology, the Electric Creed - are based on selections from the New Testament, occultism and, in particular, science and spiritualism. Part III of the thesis looks at the emergence of �the woman question�, the corresponding backlash by conservatives and the ways in which these conflicting views are explored in the popular literature of the time. A critical examination of the novella, My Wonderful Wife, reveals how Corelli uses social Darwinism in an ambivalent critique of the New Woman. Several of Corelli�s essays are discussed, showing that her views about the role of women were complex. A critical analysis of The Secret Power engages with Corelli�s peculiar kind of feminism, which would deny women the vote but envisages female scientists inventing and operating airships in order to secure the future of the human race. Interest in Marie Corelli has re-emerged recently, particularly in occult and feminist circles. Corelli�s immense popularity also makes her an important figure in cultural studies. This thesis adds to the body of knowledge about Corelli in that it consciously endeavours to avoid spiritualist or feminist ideological frameworks, instead using contemporary science as a context for examining her work.

This thesis analyses the figure of Arthur, in a period spanning the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, when that figure became increasingly protean and multifaceted, and the audience for the Arthurian legend grew in both size and variety. It argues that many authors wrote through Arthur, as well as about Arthur, using the figure to understand and test their own ideas about ideals (e.g. of manliness, kingship, or heroism) as well as problems (such as war, despotism, or ungodliness). This thesis analyses Arthur by considering him as a 'type', using a definition of the term that highlights a paradox: a type, in a scientific sense, is both perfect (an exemplary model) and normal (common enough to be representative). When applied to Arthur, it means that he is both a perfect, or near perfect, example, but is also to some extent a 'normal' human being. Different authors analysed in this thesis emphasise different aspects of the figure, according to whether they focus on Arthur's perfection or his normality. Other meanings of the word 'type' are also applied when relevant: the idea is not to force all versions of Arthur into a single or definitive category, but to retain the complexity of how Arthur is characterised and written about in texts. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to put the figure of Arthur into critical focus, and explain why he has been returned to so often in history.

In this thesis I argue that understanding Forster’s effeminate male characters is central to understanding the novels that they appear in. Tibby in Howards End and Cecil in A Room with a View are often viewed as inconsequential figures that provide comic relief and inspire pity. But if, instead of keeping them at the margins, readers put Tibby and Cecil in direct contact and conflict with the dominant themes of gender identity, gendered power structures, and gender equality in these novels, these characters develop a deeper significance that details the fin de siècle’s ever-changing attitudes regarding prescribed gender roles for both men and women. Indeed, by examining Forster’s feminized male characters, one can chart the development of these roles in both the larger world and Forster’s prescription for gender evolution in his novels.

Partant de la définition que donne Patrick Brantlinger du gothique impérial victorien, ce travail aborde la manière dont l’Egypte, à travers le prisme de l’archéologie, est devenue un objet littéraire dans les dernières années du XIXe siècle. À mi-chemin entre science et aventure impériale, l’archéologie – et, plus particulièrement, l’égyptologie – est vite devenue un motif gothique, comme en témoignent les nombreux romans et nouvelles qui composent le genre de la mummy fiction. En examinant les écrits de Bram Stoker, Henry Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle et Sax Rohmer, entre autres, cette thèse considère la manière dont le motif archéologique a parcouru différents genres populaires, depuis le roman d’aventures jusqu’au fantastique, avant d’être approprié par le roman policier. L’étude de ces textes révèle combien l’histoire antique de l’Egypte, liée à un imaginaire magique, fascinait autant qu’elle effrayait dans la mesure où elle semblait ébranler les certitudes de la science moderne. Dans le même temps, l’histoire politique contemporaine de l’Egypte – et son statut ambigu au sein de l’Empire britannique – générait également une certaine angoisse, qu’alimentait la crainte du déclin et de la dégénérescence de l’Empire et de la civilisation britannique. La représentation fictionnelle de l’antiquité égyptienne – et de la figure de la momie en particulier – traduit la peur grandissante avec laquelle les Britanniques considéraient un Empire qui, à la manière des momies égyptiennes, menaçait de se soulever et de se venger du colonisateur. C’est ainsi que l’archéologie peut être lue comme une métaphore des relations et des angoisses impériales tandis que la momie incarne ce que l’on peut interpréter comme un refoulé impérial arraché aux profondeurs de l’inconscient collectif britannique au moment même où Freud développait les méthodes de la psychanalyse
Taking Patrick Brantlinger’s definition of late-Victorian imperial Gothic as a starting point, this dissertation considers how Egypt became a literary object in the late nineteenth century through the prism of archaeology. Pertaining as much to science as to imperial adventure, archaeology – and Egyptology in particular – soon entered fiction as a Gothic trope, as is evinced by the great number of novels and short stories that form the genre of mummy fiction. By focussing on texts by Bram Stoker, Henry Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Sax Rohmer, among others, this work examines how the archaeological motif travelled through various popular genres, from the adventure novel to the fantastic, before being taken up by writers of detective fiction. The study of these texts reveals that Egypt’s ancient history, full of magical potential, was an object of fascination as well as fear insofar as it seemed to shatter the certainties of modern science. Meanwhile, the modern political history of Egypt – and its ambiguous position within the British Empire – also engendered a certain anxiety, fuelled by a more general concern about the decline and degeneration of the Empire and British civilisation. The depiction of Egyptian antiquity in fiction – and the figure of the mummy in particular – conveys the growing unease with which the British viewed an Empire which, quite like Egyptian mummies, threatened to rise and wreak its revenge upon the coloniser. Thus, archaeology came to stand for a metaphor of imperial relations and anxieties while the mummy embodied what can be read as an imperial repressed excavated from the depths of the collective British subconscious at the time when Freud was developing the method of psychoanalysis

碩士
國立臺灣大學
外國語文學研究所
100
This thesis begins with my doubts on the close link between Victorian bourgeois domesticity and femininity. Recent scholars have studied “domestic masculinity” of mid-Victorian married men, yet they ignore “male domesticity” of late-Victorian and Edwardian bachelors, particularly when the cases come from children’s texts. In this thesis I intend to dissect bachelor’s life, idyllic nostalgia and homoeroticism in the representations of male domesticity in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes (1911). I also adopt two far-reaching series featuring bachelor’s friendship, male domesticity and homoerotic potentials as references. One is Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown series, including Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), both fusing Victorian boy’s adventure story and the public school story. The other is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927), the world-renowned detective series and male romance. By juxtaposing adult fiction such as Sherlock Holmes with Edwardian children’s literature, I put the above three texts into the crossover fiction category with intertexuality to evidence the existence of adult issues like homoeroticism in children’s texts. With regard to scholars of children’s literature and gender theory, I share with them the critical perspectives of childhood, Victorian domesticity and male homosociality; however, I further analyze the ways writers of Edwardian children’s literature use to transform the tabooed issue of homosexuality into homoerotic hints. By targeting their texts at duel readership, they emphasize friendship of cohabited bachelors and exclude feminized domesticity in their works.

This study examines late Victorian and Edwardian British mummy fiction as a response to the manifold anxieties of the last twenty or so years of the nineteenth century up to the First World War in Great Britain. Mummy narratives of this time reveal the genre to be a very flexible one, partaking not only of the expected Gothic form, but also making fascinating stories out of invasion narratives and mystery fiction, all the while commenting on—and trying to solve—the various challenges of the day. After an introductory chapter that sets the stage for my project, I examine problems of empire and worries about a failing masculinity in the second and third chapters of my study. My fourth chapter looks at the epistemological competition of science and the occult as ways of knowing. I conclude my examination of mummy fiction with a look at silent mummy films as a way to look ahead at the changes that occurred when mummy narratives began to be told in visual form. The whole of the project is examined through a New Historical approach, as I attempt to delineate the place of mummy fiction within the broader discourses of the period. The picture that emerges from the study is one that depicts a worried nation concerned with scientific and social advancement while at the same time largely working to maintain the status quo.
Department of English

This dissertation describes and examines the fictional representations of friendship between middle-class boys at all-male public boarding schools during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries in England. In the texts under consideration, romantic friendships embody educational, social, and spiritual ideals; readings of sermons, letters, memoirs, and book illustrations contextualize these ideals and suggest that they mirror a broader ideological framework in the culture. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and F. W. Farrar's Eric (1858), which consolidate the tropes of the schoolboy narrative, self-consciously reflect the philosophical and educational standards of Thomas Arnold, Headmaster at Rugby School from 1828 to 1842. For Arnold, highly emotional friendships, based on Christian values, helped to develop piety and to reflect, in earthly terms, the spiritual brotherhood that all "men" share with God. Friendships in Charles Dickens's fiction also conform to many of these narrative and ideological constructs. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) represents the comforts of compassionate friendship, while David Copperfield (1849-50) illustrates the torturous complexity of the schoolboy romance. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), Dickens alludes parenthetically to Mortimer and Eugene's school days in order to evoke the history and depth of their adult friendship. Edwardian fiction presents a revised discourse on schoolboy friendship, with expressions of affection breaking through a strenuous emotional reserve. In E. M. Forster's A Room With a View (1908), the schoolboy Freddy Honeychurch invites George Emerson to share an uninhibited bond (the "Sacred Lake" bathing scene) that both contrasts with the atomized heterosexual relations in the novel and presages their eventual brotherhood (when George marries Freddy's sister Lucy). The animals in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) inhabit a homosocial society modelled on Grahame's fantasy of the public school. E. F. Benson's David Blaize (1916) dignifies friendship between boys in spite of the political, intellectual, and aesthetic breakdown of male identity and relations that resulted from the oppressive traumas over masculinity indicative of the fin-de-siecle.

Late-Victorian and Edwardian British ideology represented male homosexuals as psychically and somatically arrested. In response, many middle-class, male homosexual writers drew on versions of Hellenic pederasty and primitivism to distinguish between youthful strains and more degenerate forms of homosexuality, or to celebrate the youthful homosexual and his potential to educate and regenerate a corrupted heterosexual culture. Drawing on Michel Foucault's insight that power does not simply repress deviance but also has the potential to produce oppositional "reverse discourses," I examine how the generational fictions of these writers employed and partially transvalued the very terms that were used to denigrate them in order to legitimate and affirm male same-sex desire or some strains of male same-sex desire. In the first section of the dissertation, entitled "Youthful and Degenerate Homosexualities," I examine how Oscar Wilde and E. F. Benson distinguish between corrupted and youthful, privileged forms of same-sex desire that they align with Hellenic values, as mediated through contemporary national and imperial concerns. In the second section, entitled "The Youthful Homosexual versus Aged/Corrupted Heterosexual Culture," I examine how Edward Carpenter and E. M. Forster use the youthful homosexual to critique their culture's obsession with developmental narratives and to construct a dialectical model of history in which the homosexual plays the crucial role of recovering a lost, organic wholeness associated with working-class and primitive, non-Western cultures. The project draws gay literary theory into conversation with postcolonial studies. The writers I examine link their critique of heterosexist developmental ideology to their indictment of colonial Britain's contempt for "primitive" peoples and its obsession with progress. They also draw on cross-cultural data to denaturalize Western assumptions about same-sex desire. However, they ignore their implication in the imperial privilege they critique. I use this vexed conjunction between anti-homophobic and anti-colonial concerns to explore the possibilities and limits of an alliance between contemporary postcolonial theory and a hitherto Western, metropolitan-centered, gay literary theory.

In the period 1890-1914, such playwrights as G. B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Henry Arthur Jones, and Elizabeth Robins led a movement to revive the drama as an intellectual art: these playwrights sought to create a theater that could treat social and political issues and themes hitherto banned from (or limited in treatment on) the public stage while at the same time retaining the theater's hold over a popular audience. In the case of Jones, Wilde, and Shaw, each playwright would revise his early style to create plays that had strong ties to more traditional popular dramas but which nonetheless offered a critique of those older, expected forms. Despite the severe limitations in the theater, dramatists had room for experimentation in the relation of genre to the mise en scene. The nineteenth-century theater had been notable for its preference for "fantasy" genres, such as melodrama and farcical comedy; at the same time, however, the audience maintained an appetite for realism in the staging of plays. It is in this seeming opposition of dramatic form and theatrical realization, the mechanistic and fantastic versus the hyper-real, that the innovators of this period could find a way to change the older drama while working within it. Victorian stage "realism" was in fact carefully contained within generic structures that artificially "solved" social problems depicted in the plays. Wilde, Jones, and Shaw would all manipulate conventions of genre and scenic effect in order to make overt the problem of defining the "real" in the theater. On another front, their critical and theoretical writings analyzed this troublesome connection between the worlds on-and off-stage, and were intended to change the way audiences viewed plays by providing a critical "frame." The Edwardian playwrights also faced the problem of enforced generic continuity, and some of them, particularly St. John Hankin, Harley Granville Barker, and John Galsworthy, would use the continuing popularity of realism to undermine melodramatic structure. Often the settings of their plays, in their mannered distortion of traditional representative scenes, alter the desires of the audience for generic conformity.