This dissertation examines the literary responses to the British “good taste” movement in the work of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and John Betjeman. Bolstered by the increased prominence and influence of design experts in the early-twentieth century, critics and designers sought to improve public taste in Britain. The didactic and rhetorical strategies these taste reformers employed gradually convinced Britons that their nation, which lagged behind its European neighbours in accepting modern design, was in the throes of a “taste crisis.” The increased authority of design experts, the public enthusiasm for decoration, and the growth of the market for household goods led not only to a widespread fascination with design, but also to the formulation of an increasingly narrow and orthodox definition of “good taste.” I analyze these authors’ critical and literary writing, relying, in many cases, on their unpublished or neglected work in order to reveal the development of their taste theories. I argue that these writers, dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the “good taste” movement’s stultifying and homogenizing effects, produced a “dissident” taste theory in reaction to the consensual and codified notion of “good taste.” Chapter One considers Huxley’s often overlooked role as the editor of House & Garden magazine in the context of his early fiction and his gradual conversion to mysticism. Chapter Two examines the architectural novels of Evelyn Waugh, noting, in particular, the inherent tensions he navigated between modernity and tradition, Philistinism and theory, theology and aesthetics. Chapter Three studies John Betjeman’s roles as critic, poet, guide-book writer, and preservationist, charting the development of his tastes from international modernism to local eclecticism. Rather than accepting the easy distinctions between “good and bad” taste, Huxley, Waugh, and Betjeman—themselves so often criticized for being unyieldingly absolute in their worldviews—attempted instead to articulate a “taste between,” one that fused the aesthetic, ethical, and psychic components of taste in an imaginative spectrum, rather than an orthodox system.

This dissertation examines the literary responses to the British “good taste” movement in the work of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and John Betjeman. Bolstered by the increased prominence and influence of design experts in the early-twentieth century, critics and designers sought to improve public taste in Britain. The didactic and rhetorical strategies these taste reformers employed gradually convinced Britons that their nation, which lagged behind its European neighbours in accepting modern design, was in the throes of a “taste crisis.” The increased authority of design experts, the public enthusiasm for decoration, and the growth of the market for household goods led not only to a widespread fascination with design, but also to the formulation of an increasingly narrow and orthodox definition of “good taste.” I analyze these authors’ critical and literary writing, relying, in many cases, on their unpublished or neglected work in order to reveal the development of their taste theories. I argue that these writers, dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the “good taste” movement’s stultifying and homogenizing effects, produced a “dissident” taste theory in reaction to the consensual and codified notion of “good taste.” Chapter One considers Huxley’s often overlooked role as the editor of House & Garden magazine in the context of his early fiction and his gradual conversion to mysticism. Chapter Two examines the architectural novels of Evelyn Waugh, noting, in particular, the inherent tensions he navigated between modernity and tradition, Philistinism and theory, theology and aesthetics. Chapter Three studies John Betjeman’s roles as critic, poet, guide-book writer, and preservationist, charting the development of his tastes from international modernism to local eclecticism. Rather than accepting the easy distinctions between “good and bad” taste, Huxley, Waugh, and Betjeman—themselves so often criticized for being unyieldingly absolute in their worldviews—attempted instead to articulate a “taste between,” one that fused the aesthetic, ethical, and psychic components of taste in an imaginative spectrum, rather than an orthodox system.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when organizations such as the Early English Text Society began making an increasing variety of medieval texts accessible to Victorian readers, the "everyday life" of the past became an important subject of historiography. For many of William Morris's contemporaries, this project of social history and textual recovery provided welcome evidence to support either narratives of nostalgia for an ordered past or a comforting liberal sense of progress; for Morris himself, however, the everyday life of the medieval past offered an array of radical possibilities for creative adaptation. Morris's broad reading in newly recovered medieval texts, his library of manuscripts and woodcut books, and his personal experience of medieval domestic architecture were more instrumental in developing his sense of the past than were such artefacts of high culture as the great cathedrals and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, since it was through the surviving items of everyday use that Morris could best approach the creative lives of ordinary medieval men and women. For William Morris, the everyday medieval "art of the people" was collaborative, de-centralizing, and devoted to process rather than to the attainment of perfection. Morris consistently works to strip ancient texts of their veneer of authority, resisting the notion of the rare book as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. His response to the art of the past is a radical process, in which reading is not mere "poaching" on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but an immersive activity in which any reader can be intimately and actively engaged with the artefact from the earliest moment of its production. Such active reception, however, as diverse and fallible as the individuals who practice it, requires in turn an ongoing creativity in the form of adaptations of, and even collaboration with, the past. Morris's theory of creative adaptation was consequently itself not static, and this dissertation traces its evolution over Morris's career. In his early poetry, Morris reveals his sense of the limitations of the historical record as his characters grasp simultaneously at fantasies and physical objects to make sense of the crises in which they find themselves, suggesting the incomplete and unstable circumstances of textual reception itself. In the socialist lectures and fiction of the 1880s, Morris makes use of surviving and imagined fragments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imperfection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illustrators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Morris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulating a vision of the romance genre itself as a popular art, equally capable of transformation over time as are the artefacts of everyday life that Morris creatively employs in his fictions throughout his career.

This project explores early modern conceptualizations of the body, offering a cultural history of the belly. I apply the tools of literary, historico-cultural, and discourse analysis to textual depictions of the digestive organs and the processes of digestion they perform. Concentrating particularly on the nexus of body, culture, and language, and continuously foregrounding the material underpinnings of linguistic expression, I argue that representations of the digestive organs serve to naturalize ideology and that digestion is itself an apt metaphor for the processes by which ideology is internalized. In my first chapter, I argue that the stomach is a central site through which hierarchies of gender are expressed and assimilated. I analyze Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in the context of early modern cultural metaphors associated with the stomach and in the context of medical theories of digestion, according to which hotter male digestion is superior to colder female digestion. Drawing upon Marx’s economic theory and his less-noted physiological rhetoric, in Chapter Two I trace how increasing commodity exchange and concomitant changes to social relations are reflected in, and promoted by, a paradigm shift in medical interpretations of the physiological functions of the liver. Chapter Three offers a more detailed and literary analysis of this process, demonstrating how Spenser’s allegory of the body in Book Two of The Faerie Queene participates directly in the ideological work necessary for the transition to capitalism by naturalizing the consumption and production of commodities driving it. The focus of Chapter Four is on the use of bodily metaphors of excretion in colonialist propaganda to legitimate the enforced migration of those described as England’s “excrements” to the colonies. Influenced by Norbert Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process,” I read these metaphors in light of altering social attitudes towards literal excrement, and I demonstrate how representations of the body’s excretory organs in Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island mirror the social processes of the “civilization” and discipline of self, nation, and Other.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when organizations such as the Early English Text Society began making an increasing variety of medieval texts accessible to Victorian readers, the "everyday life" of the past became an important subject of historiography. For many of William Morris's contemporaries, this project of social history and textual recovery provided welcome evidence to support either narratives of nostalgia for an ordered past or a comforting liberal sense of progress; for Morris himself, however, the everyday life of the medieval past offered an array of radical possibilities for creative adaptation. Morris's broad reading in newly recovered medieval texts, his library of manuscripts and woodcut books, and his personal experience of medieval domestic architecture were more instrumental in developing his sense of the past than were such artefacts of high culture as the great cathedrals and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, since it was through the surviving items of everyday use that Morris could best approach the creative lives of ordinary medieval men and women. For William Morris, the everyday medieval "art of the people" was collaborative, de-centralizing, and devoted to process rather than to the attainment of perfection. Morris consistently works to strip ancient texts of their veneer of authority, resisting the notion of the rare book as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. His response to the art of the past is a radical process, in which reading is not mere "poaching" on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but an immersive activity in which any reader can be intimately and actively engaged with the artefact from the earliest moment of its production. Such active reception, however, as diverse and fallible as the individuals who practice it, requires in turn an ongoing creativity in the form of adaptations of, and even collaboration with, the past. Morris's theory of creative adaptation was consequently itself not static, and this dissertation traces its evolution over Morris's career. In his early poetry, Morris reveals his sense of the limitations of the historical record as his characters grasp simultaneously at fantasies and physical objects to make sense of the crises in which they find themselves, suggesting the incomplete and unstable circumstances of textual reception itself. In the socialist lectures and fiction of the 1880s, Morris makes use of surviving and imagined fragments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imperfection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illustrators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Morris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulating a vision of the romance genre itself as a popular art, equally capable of transformation over time as are the artefacts of everyday life that Morris creatively employs in his fictions throughout his career.

This project explores early modern conceptualizations of the body, offering a cultural history of the belly. I apply the tools of literary, historico-cultural, and discourse analysis to textual depictions of the digestive organs and the processes of digestion they perform. Concentrating particularly on the nexus of body, culture, and language, and continuously foregrounding the material underpinnings of linguistic expression, I argue that representations of the digestive organs serve to naturalize ideology and that digestion is itself an apt metaphor for the processes by which ideology is internalized. In my first chapter, I argue that the stomach is a central site through which hierarchies of gender are expressed and assimilated. I analyze Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in the context of early modern cultural metaphors associated with the stomach and in the context of medical theories of digestion, according to which hotter male digestion is superior to colder female digestion. Drawing upon Marx’s economic theory and his less-noted physiological rhetoric, in Chapter Two I trace how increasing commodity exchange and concomitant changes to social relations are reflected in, and promoted by, a paradigm shift in medical interpretations of the physiological functions of the liver. Chapter Three offers a more detailed and literary analysis of this process, demonstrating how Spenser’s allegory of the body in Book Two of The Faerie Queene participates directly in the ideological work necessary for the transition to capitalism by naturalizing the consumption and production of commodities driving it. The focus of Chapter Four is on the use of bodily metaphors of excretion in colonialist propaganda to legitimate the enforced migration of those described as England’s “excrements” to the colonies. Influenced by Norbert Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process,” I read these metaphors in light of altering social attitudes towards literal excrement, and I demonstrate how representations of the body’s excretory organs in Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island mirror the social processes of the “civilization” and discipline of self, nation, and Other.

This dissertation focuses on a Romanticism that was profoundly global in scope, and examines the boundary-crossing literary techniques of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. These authors saw identity as delimited by artificial borders, and we witness in their work competitions between local and global, immediate and infinite, home and away – all formulated in spatial terms. This thesis argues that by using motifs and philosophies associated with “borderless” global travel, these authors radically destabilized definitions of nature, history, and the home. Wordsworth and the Shelleys saw the act of travel as essentially cosmopolitan, and frequently depicted spaces outside of familiar boundaries as being rich in imaginative vitality. Their fiction and poetry abounds with examples of North American primitivism, radical modes of transportation, and unknown territories sought by passionate explorers. Importantly, they often used such examples of foreignness to rejuvenate familiar spaces and knowledge – these were individuals determined to retain a certain amount of local integrity, or connection with the reluctant minds who feared alien contexts. As such, they were each aware of the fragility of embedded minds, and the connection of these minds to bordered historical contexts. Aware of the dangers posed by uninhibited imaginative movements, they depicted travel as an artistically seductive activity. Their impulse as authors was thus to use global experiences as a tool of literary expression, while refraining from a total abandonment of local responsibility. This dissertation therefore argues that the imaginative experience of space in the Romantic period was profoundly split, tethered on the one hand to custom and familiarity, and on the other aspiring to boundless global freedoms.

This dissertation focuses on a Romanticism that was profoundly global in scope, and examines the boundary-crossing literary techniques of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. These authors saw identity as delimited by artificial borders, and we witness in their work competitions between local and global, immediate and infinite, home and away – all formulated in spatial terms. This thesis argues that by using motifs and philosophies associated with “borderless” global travel, these authors radically destabilized definitions of nature, history, and the home. Wordsworth and the Shelleys saw the act of travel as essentially cosmopolitan, and frequently depicted spaces outside of familiar boundaries as being rich in imaginative vitality. Their fiction and poetry abounds with examples of North American primitivism, radical modes of transportation, and unknown territories sought by passionate explorers. Importantly, they often used such examples of foreignness to rejuvenate familiar spaces and knowledge – these were individuals determined to retain a certain amount of local integrity, or connection with the reluctant minds who feared alien contexts. As such, they were each aware of the fragility of embedded minds, and the connection of these minds to bordered historical contexts. Aware of the dangers posed by uninhibited imaginative movements, they depicted travel as an artistically seductive activity. Their impulse as authors was thus to use global experiences as a tool of literary expression, while refraining from a total abandonment of local responsibility. This dissertation therefore argues that the imaginative experience of space in the Romantic period was profoundly split, tethered on the one hand to custom and familiarity, and on the other aspiring to boundless global freedoms.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Timothy A. Dayton / This thesis project seeks to reconcile the literary criticism of Marxist critic and advocate of literary realism Georg Lukács with the writing of postmodern author Thomas Pynchon in order to validate the continued relevance of Lukácsian aesthetics. Chapter 1 argues that Lukács’ The Historical Novel is not only a valid lens with which to analyze Pynchon’s own historical novel, Mason & Dixon, but that such analysis will yield valuable insight. Chapter 2 illustrates the aesthetic transition from the historical drama to the historical novel by using Lukács’ ideas to explicate The Courier’s Tragedy, a historical drama found within the pages of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Chapter 3 applies Lukács’ ideas on the “world-historical” figure and the “mediocre” hero of the classic historical novel to Mason & Dixon. Chapter 4 asserts that Mason & Dixon enables contemporary readers to experience the novel as what Lukács calls a “prehistory” to the present. This chapter also illustrates how the prehistory of Mason & Dixon anticipates Pynchon’s nonfiction essay “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” Finally, this chapter demonstrates how Pynchon avoids the pitfall of modernization in Mason & Dixon, which Lukács defines as the dressing up of contemporary crises and psychology in a historical setting. Chapter 5 ties together the work of the previous four chapters and offers conclusions on both what Pynchon teaches us about Lukács, as well as what Lukács helps us to learn about Pynchon.

My argument assesses and reconfigures binary structures in Shakespeare’s plays and in Shakespeare criticism. I contend that ideas in early modern literature often exhibit three aspects, but that critics, who mostly rely upon a binary philosophical vocabulary, tend to notice only two aspects at a time, thereby “digesting” the third. My opening chapter theorizes the superimposition of triadic structures upon dyads, arguing that this new polyrhythmic strategy helps recapture an early modern philosophical perspective by circumventing the entrenched binary categories we have inherited from the Enlightenment. In Chapter Two, I examine the relationship of tyranny and conscience in Tudor politics, Reformed psychology, and Richard III. Early modern political theorists often employ a binary opposition of kingship and tyranny, and historians typically draw a binary distinction between absolutists and resisters. I argue that there were in fact three ideological positions on offer which these binaries misrepresent. As well, Reformed psychology emphasizes the relationship of the individual subject and an objective God, unmediated by community, and I propose that this opposition of subjectivity and objectivity digests the idea of intersubjectivity. In Richard III, Shakespeare interrogates the implausibility of Tudor political binaries and stages a nostalgia for intersubjective community and conscience. In Chapter Three I read the debates on value in Troilus and Cressida alongside contemporary economic writings by Gerard de Malynes on currency reform and “merchandizing exchange.” Our current models of value – intrinsic and extrinsic, use and exchange, worth and price – are emphatically binary, but the mercantile practices that Malynes describes depend upon a triadic conception of value. My contention is that Troilus and Cressida becomes a less problematic problem play when value is conceived as triadic rather than dyadic. In Chapter Four I explore early modern scepticism in connection with Coriolanus. Reading Montaigne and Wittgenstein in parallel, I distinguish between various conceptions of truth that are regularly grouped together under the blanket term “scepticism.” Then I turn to read Coriolanus as an experiment in competing modes of early modern epistemology, arguing that the play ultimately endorses the same sort of polyphonous Pyrrhonian scepticism that we find in Montaigne and Wittgenstein.