Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

History

Advisor

Timothy Alborn

Committee Members

Martin J. Burke

Rachel Sagner Buurma

James G. Cantres

Subject Categories

Cultural History | European History | Intellectual History

Keywords

Britain, Empire, Education, Criticism, Culture, Politics

Abstract

Between the 1860s and the 1980s, the concept of culture articulated by Matthew Arnold provided a widespread and persistent language for making claims about who was ready for inclusion in British politics and identity and who was not yet ready or even incapable of being included. Scholarship on Arnoldian culture has often focused on presenting just one version of Arnold, whether as a cultural elitist, a progenitor of literary studies, or proponent of “doing away with classes.” This dissertation instead shows that Arnold’s concept of culture was so pervasive and persistent because he could be appropriated and redefined by people who filled in their own ideals of perfection and their own programs of education reform. It presents a genealogy of these successive appropriations of Arnold in Britain and its empire, such as those of middle-class women and of subalterns in Ireland and India. The specific policies, education reforms, and curricula on behalf of which people invoked him, however, were inevitably divisive. Arnoldian culture was consistently pulled to the right by exclusionary uses of culture as a “holding pen” for the working class, women, and colonial subjects, or as a bulwark against the alleged anarchy of mass politics and the philistinism of American mass media. It was only at the end of the 1960s, when the British New Left abandoned Arnoldian arguments for education reform, that Arnold became associated with the conservative pole of subsequent culture wars in Britain and the United States.

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