Staging Tudor Royalty: Religious Politics in Stuart Historical Drama (1603–1607) examines the plays and pageantry about the Tudor royals in the context of three major events: the Hampton Court Conference (1604), the Anglo-Spanish Peace Negotiations (1603–1604) and the Gunpowder Plot (1605). Chapter 1 provides an historical survey of the political and legal controversies concerning religious belief and practice from Henry VIII’s creation of the royal supremacy (1533–1534) to Elizabeth’s final year as queen (1603). Chapters 2 through 5 comprise four case studies, each of which centres on a play or pageant about the Tudor royals and its relationship to one of the aforementioned events. Chapters 2 and 3 examine Thomas Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie (1604) and Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604), dramatizations of Elizabeth’s years as princess and the later years of Henry VIII’s reign respectively, in light of the puritan campaigns for church reform and religious toleration surrounding the Hampton Court Conference. Chapter 4 examines the uses of the Tudors in Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment, a detailed account of James’s royal entry of March 1604. In particular, I focus on the London-Dutch community’s celebration of Tudor religious and economic commitments to the Protestant Low Countries in relation to the early Stuart negotiations for an end to the Anglo-Spanish war. Chapter 5 discusses Thomas Dekker’s allegorical rendering of the later decades of Elizabeth’s reign, The VVhore of Babylon (1607), as a commentary on the Stuart government’s response to Jesuit insurgency following the Gunpowder Plot. In order to situate these plays and pageants in their precise contexts, each of the four case studies incorporates a variety of historical evidence ranging from royal proclamations to religious polemics, from stories of martyrdom to state trials. This thesis offers a topical reading of play and pageantry in which the Tudor past engages with the seminal political-religious issues and controversies of early Stuart England.

Staging Tudor Royalty: Religious Politics in Stuart Historical Drama (1603–1607) examines the plays and pageantry about the Tudor royals in the context of three major events: the Hampton Court Conference (1604), the Anglo-Spanish Peace Negotiations (1603–1604) and the Gunpowder Plot (1605). Chapter 1 provides an historical survey of the political and legal controversies concerning religious belief and practice from Henry VIII’s creation of the royal supremacy (1533–1534) to Elizabeth’s final year as queen (1603). Chapters 2 through 5 comprise four case studies, each of which centres on a play or pageant about the Tudor royals and its relationship to one of the aforementioned events. Chapters 2 and 3 examine Thomas Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie (1604) and Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604), dramatizations of Elizabeth’s years as princess and the later years of Henry VIII’s reign respectively, in light of the puritan campaigns for church reform and religious toleration surrounding the Hampton Court Conference. Chapter 4 examines the uses of the Tudors in Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment, a detailed account of James’s royal entry of March 1604. In particular, I focus on the London-Dutch community’s celebration of Tudor religious and economic commitments to the Protestant Low Countries in relation to the early Stuart negotiations for an end to the Anglo-Spanish war. Chapter 5 discusses Thomas Dekker’s allegorical rendering of the later decades of Elizabeth’s reign, The VVhore of Babylon (1607), as a commentary on the Stuart government’s response to Jesuit insurgency following the Gunpowder Plot. In order to situate these plays and pageants in their precise contexts, each of the four case studies incorporates a variety of historical evidence ranging from royal proclamations to religious polemics, from stories of martyrdom to state trials. This thesis offers a topical reading of play and pageantry in which the Tudor past engages with the seminal political-religious issues and controversies of early Stuart England.

This dissertation examines the modes, means, and merit of the literary production of short stories in London periodicals between 1850 and 1870. Shorter forms were derided by contemporary critics, dismissed on the assumption that quantity equals quality, yet popular and respectable novelists, namely Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, were writing and printing them. Navigating discourses about literature and writing to delineate and ascertain the implications of the contextual position of certain short stories, this study characterizes a previously unexamined genre, here called the Market Story. Defined by their relationship to a publishing industry that was actively creating a space for, demanding, and disseminating texts based on their potential to generate sales figures, draw attention to a particular organ, author, or publisher, or gather and hold a captive audience, Market Stories indicate their authors’ self-aware commentary on the relativity of literary and generic value, and ultimately constitute a discourse on value. Following an outline of the historical field in which market stories were produced, Chapter One reads Trollope’s six “Editor’s Tales” as intensely comic and interrogative of extant conceptions of cultural and literary value; Trollope glories in the exposure and dismantling of seemingly-reliable externality. Chapter Two considers “Somebody’s Luggage” as Dickens’s argument for the contrivance of literary genre insofar as it constructs an exaggerated system of exchanges whereby the short story generates unprecedented income. Chapter Three moves to Gaskell’s “Cranford Papers” to argue that their diligent tracing of the careful consumption of small wholes and cultivation of irregular habits constitutes an insistence on the plurality of appropriate models of consumption and value. Shifting the discussion from content to form, Gaskell’s text throws the shape of the market story into relief. Finally, Chapter Four considers Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” as a figurative argument that generic and literary value is always inextricably contextualized. As literary works and cultural products, these stories embody the tensions between the utilitarian and the ‘purely’ artistic that underwrote much nineteenth-century discussion of art and culture, and these authors were unmistakably aware of the external conditions enabling and affecting the production and valuation of literary work.

This dissertation examines the modes, means, and merit of the literary production of short stories in London periodicals between 1850 and 1870. Shorter forms were derided by contemporary critics, dismissed on the assumption that quantity equals quality, yet popular and respectable novelists, namely Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, were writing and printing them. Navigating discourses about literature and writing to delineate and ascertain the implications of the contextual position of certain short stories, this study characterizes a previously unexamined genre, here called the Market Story. Defined by their relationship to a publishing industry that was actively creating a space for, demanding, and disseminating texts based on their potential to generate sales figures, draw attention to a particular organ, author, or publisher, or gather and hold a captive audience, Market Stories indicate their authors’ self-aware commentary on the relativity of literary and generic value, and ultimately constitute a discourse on value. Following an outline of the historical field in which market stories were produced, Chapter One reads Trollope’s six “Editor’s Tales” as intensely comic and interrogative of extant conceptions of cultural and literary value; Trollope glories in the exposure and dismantling of seemingly-reliable externality. Chapter Two considers “Somebody’s Luggage” as Dickens’s argument for the contrivance of literary genre insofar as it constructs an exaggerated system of exchanges whereby the short story generates unprecedented income. Chapter Three moves to Gaskell’s “Cranford Papers” to argue that their diligent tracing of the careful consumption of small wholes and cultivation of irregular habits constitutes an insistence on the plurality of appropriate models of consumption and value. Shifting the discussion from content to form, Gaskell’s text throws the shape of the market story into relief. Finally, Chapter Four considers Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” as a figurative argument that generic and literary value is always inextricably contextualized. As literary works and cultural products, these stories embody the tensions between the utilitarian and the ‘purely’ artistic that underwrote much nineteenth-century discussion of art and culture, and these authors were unmistakably aware of the external conditions enabling and affecting the production and valuation of literary work.

This dissertation works to illuminate modern poetry’s ambivalent stance toward the concept of utopia through the work of two of its most politically engaged practitioners. One of the most quoted literary maxims of the twentieth century is W.H. Auden’s assertion, in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” For Yeats, poets serve as harbingers of new worlds, imaging more ideal societal orders while working to actualize these private speculations in the public realm – a viewpoint which Auden, always concerned to define poetry’s social niche, finds both ludicrous and naggingly attractive. This dissertation examines this ambivalence, tracing the two poets’ modulating views on poetry’s world-building capacities, and their shifting stances toward the Shelleyan analogy between poetic forms and social formations. Spanning a period from the 1880s of early Yeats to Auden’s death in 1973, and devoting two chapters to each poet, I take up the following questions: Why is their work so often concerned with the future? What images of better worlds does it present? And more expansively, how can lyric poetry – so often predicated upon solitude – work to embody social aspirations? Given the sheer prevalence of an affirmative future-orientation in the two poets’ work, I see them as embodying (albeit in various ways at different stages in their careers) a poetics of utopia, whereby both poetry itself and the vocation of writing it stand as crucial manifestations of the impulse to strive after better ways of life in more ideal futures. Engaging with theorists of utopia from Lewis Mumford and his contemporary Ernst Bloch to, more recently, Fredric Jameson and Ruth Levitas, I work to mediate among the various senses of “utopia” with which the two poets engage in their work. Writing in dialogue with recent efforts to recuperate the drive for social change at the root of the utopian impulse, I highlight the centrality of this impulse not just to the work of Yeats and Auden, but to twentieth-century poetry more generally, as it strives to underscore its indispensability to our search for better futures.

This dissertation is a fully-annotated scholarly edition of John Fletcher's 1624 play <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i>. Fletcher's comedy of intrigue about two couples who wed under false pretenses was his final non-collaborative play and represents the culmination of his achievements as a comic dramatist. It has received surprisingly little attention for a play that remained a staple of English and American theatres into the 1860s. The introduction to this edition is the most comprehensive study of the play to date. The critical examination of the domestic politics and structural patterning of the play argues that <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i> presents marriages that become protective spheres to shield spouses from the twin depredations of economic necessity and tyrannical power once the spouses have given up the urge to dominate each other. A section on Fletcher's language and style explores what Dryden praised as its imitation of the "conversation of gentlemen." The study of Fletcher's source material considers not only the two Spanish narratives he adapted, but also the resources of the King's Men and their theatres which influenced the play's composition. The introduction then contextualizes the play in its initial historical moment and the ways it reacts to England's preparations for war and the marriage negotiations for Prince Charles. The final two sections of the introduction examine the play's circulation in print and on stage. The stage history is supplemented by two appendices: a calendar of nearly 800 known performances and a collation of changes made in acting editions of the play. A recognition of the style and ubiquity of <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i> will aid scholars in understanding continuities of taste and repertoire in English drama.

My dissertation investigates the role of intellectual weekly periodicals such as the Nation and Athenaeum and the New Statesman as mediators between the book trade and the audience for so-called serious books. The weeklies offer a productive lens through which to examine the labels commonly applied to early twentieth-century intellectual culture. The rise of a mass reading public and the proliferation of print in this period necessitated cultural labels with a sorting function: books, periodicals, and people were designated as "highbrow," "middlebrow," "modernist," "Georgian," "Bloomsbury." Through an analysis of the intellectual weeklies, a periodical genre explicitly devoted to the appraisal of intellectual culture, I argue for a critical revaluation of cultural labels as they were used in the early twentieth century and as they have been adopted in later scholarship. Using quantitative methodologies influenced by book history, Chapter One argues that the weeklies' literary content was characterized by the periodicals' reciprocal relationship with the book trade: publishers were the weeklies' most significant advertisers, and the weeklies, in turn, communicated information about new books to their book-interested readers. Through an analysis of two series of articles published in the Nation and Athenaeum in the mid-1920s, Chapter Two considers the weeklies' negotiation of their dual roles as forums for public debate about intellectual culture and advertising partners with the book trade. Chapter Three analyzes the book review itself, which found its evaluative function called into question as the number of books and periodicals multiplied rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter Four examines the vituperative discourse directed at the intellectual weeklies by the Cambridge quarterly Scrutiny. These attacks reveal not only Scrutiny's disappointment with the specific weeklies of its day but also the paramount cultural responsibility it ascribed to the intellectual weeklies as a genre. By considering the intellectual weeklies' relationships with the book trade, the book-buying public, reviewing, and other intellectual periodicals, my dissertation emphasizes the importance of the intellectual weeklies within the cultural field of interwar Britain and argues for a reconsideration of their role in the production and labeling of intellectual culture during this period.

In Anglophone postcolonial fiction of the twentieth century, myth is used as a framing device that contains and interrogates historical event, thereby functioning as a form of alternative history. Despite the prevalence of cross-cultural symbolic systems and radically hybrid forms of narration, the dominant method of reading myth in postcolonial literary criticism remains dependent on conceptual models that construct myth as originary racial narrative. This particular approach fosters readings of contemporary secular myths of “nation”, “land” or “identity” within culturally monolithic frames. I scrutinize the intersections between early structuralist approaches to myth, and later post-structuralist deconstruction of myth and suggest a postcolonial reading of myth as the ideological coded middle space between sacred and secular narrative. Focusing on four novels from Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Caribbean, I demonstrate the continued influence and adaptability of myth to narrate vastly different historical and socio-cultural contexts. Taking into account several major shifts in the conceptualization of twentieth-century myth criticism , I develop a critical vocabulary for comparative readings of myth which interrogates existing discourses on the categories of “archetype”, “ideology” and “symbol”. My approach is comparativist, and foregrounds the importance of locating myth within literary and socio-cultural context. The introduction to this study defines the field of myth criticism in relation to postcolonial fiction. I provide outlines of the theoretical positions drawn from Carl Gustav Jung, Roland Barthes, Northrop Frye and Bruce Lincoln and demonstrate the relevance of each in relation to reading myth in the four novels under survey. The first chapter looks at the way Alfred Yuson exposes mythic constructions of Filipino identity in The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café (1987). The second chapter provides a comparative study of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) and Allan Sealy's The Everest Hotel A Calender (1998). This chapter analyzes Ondaatje and Sealy's employment of the Fisher King myth as a device for narrating radically different visions of postcolonial community. The third chapter analyzes the function of archetype as a vehicle for ideology in Wilson Harris's Jonestown (1996). The conclusion of this study suggests the way this method of analysis can provoke further critical inquiry in the field of postcolonial myth criticism.

This dissertation is a fully-annotated scholarly edition of John Fletcher's 1624 play <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i>. Fletcher's comedy of intrigue about two couples who wed under false pretenses was his final non-collaborative play and represents the culmination of his achievements as a comic dramatist. It has received surprisingly little attention for a play that remained a staple of English and American theatres into the 1860s. The introduction to this edition is the most comprehensive study of the play to date. The critical examination of the domestic politics and structural patterning of the play argues that <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i> presents marriages that become protective spheres to shield spouses from the twin depredations of economic necessity and tyrannical power once the spouses have given up the urge to dominate each other. A section on Fletcher's language and style explores what Dryden praised as its imitation of the "conversation of gentlemen." The study of Fletcher's source material considers not only the two Spanish narratives he adapted, but also the resources of the King's Men and their theatres which influenced the play's composition. The introduction then contextualizes the play in its initial historical moment and the ways it reacts to England's preparations for war and the marriage negotiations for Prince Charles. The final two sections of the introduction examine the play's circulation in print and on stage. The stage history is supplemented by two appendices: a calendar of nearly 800 known performances and a collation of changes made in acting editions of the play. A recognition of the style and ubiquity of <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i> will aid scholars in understanding continuities of taste and repertoire in English drama.

My dissertation investigates the role of intellectual weekly periodicals such as the Nation and Athenaeum and the New Statesman as mediators between the book trade and the audience for so-called serious books. The weeklies offer a productive lens through which to examine the labels commonly applied to early twentieth-century intellectual culture. The rise of a mass reading public and the proliferation of print in this period necessitated cultural labels with a sorting function: books, periodicals, and people were designated as "highbrow," "middlebrow," "modernist," "Georgian," "Bloomsbury." Through an analysis of the intellectual weeklies, a periodical genre explicitly devoted to the appraisal of intellectual culture, I argue for a critical revaluation of cultural labels as they were used in the early twentieth century and as they have been adopted in later scholarship. Using quantitative methodologies influenced by book history, Chapter One argues that the weeklies' literary content was characterized by the periodicals' reciprocal relationship with the book trade: publishers were the weeklies' most significant advertisers, and the weeklies, in turn, communicated information about new books to their book-interested readers. Through an analysis of two series of articles published in the Nation and Athenaeum in the mid-1920s, Chapter Two considers the weeklies' negotiation of their dual roles as forums for public debate about intellectual culture and advertising partners with the book trade. Chapter Three analyzes the book review itself, which found its evaluative function called into question as the number of books and periodicals multiplied rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter Four examines the vituperative discourse directed at the intellectual weeklies by the Cambridge quarterly Scrutiny. These attacks reveal not only Scrutiny's disappointment with the specific weeklies of its day but also the paramount cultural responsibility it ascribed to the intellectual weeklies as a genre. By considering the intellectual weeklies' relationships with the book trade, the book-buying public, reviewing, and other intellectual periodicals, my dissertation emphasizes the importance of the intellectual weeklies within the cultural field of interwar Britain and argues for a reconsideration of their role in the production and labeling of intellectual culture during this period.