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Many famous authors have had paracosms—imaginary worlds created in childhood that are marked by very detailed conventions, like languages or dialects, history, culture, geography, publications, politics, military, and sometimes even deities. Three such authors are Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and Lewis Carroll. These authors had an intense and lasting attachment to their paracosms, and this relationship influenced their later work. Since the study of paracosms has just arisen in the last two decades or so, a majority of the work done on the paracosms of famous authors has been concentrated in three traditional spheres: literary, biographical, and psychological. When we recognize the early work of these authors as "paracosms" specifically, we bring together the three disciplines to create a more complete picture of the relationship between the author, the paracosm, and the published work. The focus of the paracosmic approach is to look at four main aspects of the paracosm: its longevity, the paracosmist's desire to keep the paracosm private, the control an author has over his or her paracosm, and the unity the paracosm affords by drawing many disparate pieces of work together into a whole. Because of these factors, an author who has a paracosm has a very different relationship with their published and unpublished works than an author whose early works are not paracosms. In my paper, the early works of the Brontë sisters and Lewis Carroll are looked at through the lens of the paracosmic approach, and this relationship is examined. This method serves as a model for future study of other authors who have had paracosms, in order to develop a more detailed and complex analysis of the interaction between the author, his or her private world, and the works which made them famous. The paracosms of Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë—the countries of Angria and Gondal—lasted more than twenty years, having a serious impact on the relationships of the siblings to each other and to the outside world. The sisters, particularly Emily, invested a great deal of energy to keep their paracosms a secret from non-family members. The consistency of the rules the Brontë sisters set up for their paracosms gave them a special kind of control over their worlds, and the unity of the locations in their paracosmic worlds helped shape the way they constructed location-interaction in their published fiction. The paracosm of Lewis Carroll took the form of private family magazines, of which Carroll was the editor, affording him total control over the details of form and content of these magazines. The periodicals continued for several years, and though at first they were compilations of work from the entire family, Carroll's siblings soon lost interest. His perseverance in the creation of these magazines long after his siblings' desertion, and his reluctance to publish work first written for his magazines under his real name (Charles Dodgson) illustrate two of the paracosmic features of the attachment he formed with these magazines—the sustained interest and desire for secrecy that makes paracosms unique. Furthermore, the fact that the paracosm takes the form of a magazine let Carroll combine many separate pieces of writing into a coherent whole, and the control he exercised over the final publishing of Alice in Wonderland was so intricate and demanding as to be reminiscent of the total control he had when editing his family magazines. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass began as paracosms—he told these stories privately to his child-friends, the Liddell sisters, in installments over time at their request. After a time, he bound a version of these stories for Alice Liddell, and was convinced to publish them. The transition from paracosm to heterocosm—a fictional world shared by many people—was a complex one for Carroll, and his extensive correspondence with his illustrators and publishers speaks to the difficulty he had relinquishing the privacy and control of his paracosm to others.

The guiding principle of this study is that Williams's engagement with English studies cannot be understood in terms purely internal to the discipline of English. As well as writing against the official culture of liberal and conservative literary studies, Williams also wrote in opposition to what he read as the orthodoxies of Marxist thinking on literature, culture and politics. Arguing first against Marxist literary criticism as he knew it from the 1930s, he maintained an ever sceptical and ever critical stance towards the later trends of Althusserian and poststructuralist theory, while at the same time continuing his always defining commitment to socialist politics. While the terms of this larger argument are necessarily present throughout, Chapter Five focuses on them more narrowly, and traces their development in Williams' thinking from the late 1950s through to the development of the concept of cultural materialism in Marxism and Literature in 1977.

Introduction: Debating English -- Part One: Managing English -- Chapter One: Pioneers and Heretics -- Chapter Two: Vocabulary Control and Colonialism -- Chapter Three: Literary Simplification and the Global Subject -- Part Two: Making English -- Chapter Four: Basic's Critics and World English -- Chapter Five: The Carnegie Conference and Its Discontents -- Conclusion -- Bibliography.

Bibliography: pages 221-230. ; The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between George Orwell and Raymond Williams as reflected in their respective writings on politics, letters and language. The study aims to provide a close historical reading of exemplary texts written by Orwell and Williams. This involves: description of the historical context in which the texts were produced; close analysis of the selected texts; and summarising their related writings in these three areas in order to place the 'exemplary texts' in the context of their work as a whole. Finally, having thus provided a synthesis of their respective thoughts on politics, letters and language, the similarities and differences between Orwell and Williams are derived. The conclusion drawn in this study is that notwithstanding several important differences, Orwell and Williams share a number of fundamental assumptions and beliefs in these defined areas. In their 'political' writings, they share a reliance on the evidence of experience; a sense of Britain as a society governed ultimately by consensus rather than by conflict; and a commitment to similar forms of socialist-humanism. In their work on letters, they both resist the dominant definitions of 'literature'; they both explore the relation between 'politics' and 'letters'; and they both seek to use 'letters' in the service of (socialist) 'politics'. In their understandings of language, both Orwell and Williams assume a 'unified subject' that precedes language as the source of meaning; they both insist on the existence of some pre-linguistic 'reality'; and they share a sense of language as being in some way constitutive. The differences between Orwell and Williams can be summarised as follows: first, they wrote in different contexts; second, they represent different constituences of British socialism (Orwell middle-class and Williams working-class}; and third, whereas Orwell is a popular essayist, Williams is a literary academic, who explores the many concerns they share with greater subtlety and care.

This dissertation develops from the contention that a significant body of the literary activity of white South Africans since the 1970s can be characterised as a form of modernism. This characterisation devolves less upon the formal attributes of a body of literary writing than upon the particular position it occupies In the cultural sphere during this period . That position is one of political and cultural marginality. White writing is distanced from both the official culture of the state and an emergent populist culture associated with the urban social collectivities that begin to play an increasingly important role in the political life of South African society during the 1970s. In an introductory section, a comparison is drawn between the responses to social marginality within South African white writing and the reconsiderations of the political mission of literature by Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, formulated in post - War France. The first chapter sets out a brief description of the cri sis that besets the South African social formation during the 1970s. The racial logic upon which the South African economy and social order is subtended comes under attack from two related sources. The first is the growing economic and political instability of the racial-capitalist system, while the second is renewed resistance to the manifest racially-ordered inequalities sponsored by that system. As discussed in the second chapter, this gathering crisis of their society impells white writers and intellectuals to question and revise long-held paradigms of thought and practices of representation, drawing on the resources of comparable revisions of established paradigms taking place in western thought. Equally, these writers and intellectuals become concerned with the critical re-examination of established accounts of the ethical vocation and social function of intellectual and literary work. But white writers and intellectuals were, in the polarised political conditions of the 1970s, unable to find a home in emergent internal opposition organisations predicated, for the most part, on versions of an anti- colonial nationalism. In the third chapter, consideration is given to the critique that begins to circulate in the period, of the associations of the South African literary and literary-critical establishment with the interests of white hegemony. This critique leads white writers such as Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee to reject a literary tradition found to be rooted in a colonial past and embodying colonial assumptions that are no longer tenable. This rejection of their cultural patrimony leads white writers to seek new ways of imagining the relationship between their writing and their society, as well as new forms capable of representing that altered relationship. At the same time however, this critical reflection upon the coloniality of established literary practices and forms, distances white writing from the populist and realist concerns of writers associated with emergent oppositional cultural formations . Developments during the 1970s serve to make the cultural sphere an important zone of political contestation. In the fourth chapter some of the tactics and manoeuvres in this contest are disc us sed. White writers adopt a modernist defence of their relative isolation from political actuality and their failure to conform to the requirements of a socially-committed literature. The development of a body of committed literature by black writers is discussed. However, the formal inconsistency of this literature ' s relationship to " realism" indicates that in the South African situation, "realism" and "modernism" are less a matter of the formal characteristics of a given body of literary work than a description of the differentiations in the audience, social function and ambitions of white and black writing. The dissertation is therefore aimed at pro vi ding an account of the historical ground that gives rise to this racial division of literature and literary activity in South Africa. Such an account serves to historicise and contextualise the various positions on commitment, artistic responsibility, the politicisation of art and the question of the capacity of cultural organisations to prescribe the form or content of artistic production, which are the subject of controversy in present-day South Africa.

This dissertation examines how America looked on paper around the time of the Revolution. With a continent that they barely knew, facing threats of dissolution, and forced not only to preserve but to capitalize upon their title to the backcountry, leaders of the early republic used literary narratives as vehicles for recording the shape of the terrain and facilitating its domestication. Writings about place, including natural histories, topographical essays, and exploration accounts, provided a medium for imaginatively transforming a country perceived mostly as wilderness, and evaluating how the economic and strategic resources of otherwise unmanageable territories might serve the union. The mediation between ideology and the land, prevalent through all of these works, brought the physical space that the United States had acquired from England within the domain of letters. Authors framed the still largely unsettled continent according to the conventions of neo-classical science and aesthetics, and within the European concept of a state. The original setting, along with its inhabitants, in turn, disappears or takes on a different visage through the act of description. For the newly framed government, America existed as a place on the map and as a literary text, one that would eventually alter the physical environment and alienate its previous inhabitants…

This dissertation examines how America looked on paper around the time of the Revolution. With a continent that they barely knew, facing threats of dissolution, and forced not only to preserve but to capitalize upon their title to the backcountry, leaders of the early republic used literary narratives as vehicles for recording the shape of the terrain and facilitating its domestication. Writings about place, including natural histories, topographical essays, and exploration accounts, provided a medium for imaginatively transforming a country perceived mostly as wilderness, and evaluating how the economic and strategic resources of otherwise unmanageable territories might serve the union. The mediation between ideology and the land, prevalent through all of these works, brought the physical space that the United States had acquired from England within the domain of letters. Authors framed the still largely unsettled continent according to the conventions of neo-classical science and aesthetics, and within the European concept of a state. The original setting, along with its inhabitants, in turn, disappears or takes on a different visage through the act of description. For the newly framed government, America existed as a place on the map and as a literary text, one that would eventually alter the physical environment and alienate its previous inhabitants…

This dissertation examines how America looked on paper around the time of the Revolution. With a continent that they barely knew, facing threats of dissolution, and forced not only to preserve but to capitalize upon their title to the backcountry, leaders of the early republic used literary narratives as vehicles for recording the shape of the terrain and facilitating its domestication. Writings about place, including natural histories, topographical essays, and exploration accounts, provided a medium for imaginatively transforming a country perceived mostly as wilderness, and evaluating how the economic and strategic resources of otherwise unmanageable territories might serve the union. The mediation between ideology and the land, prevalent through all of these works, brought the physical space that the United States had acquired from England within the domain of letters. Authors framed the still largely unsettled continent according to the conventions of neo-classical science and aesthetics, and within the European concept of a state. The original setting, along with its inhabitants, in turn, disappears or takes on a different visage through the act of description. For the newly framed government, America existed as a place on the map and as a literary text, one that would eventually alter the physical environment and alienate its previous inhabitants…