This dissertation examines three generations of the Beeston family and its revolutionary impact on the developing world of seventeenth-century London theatre management. Like other early modern businesses, the Beeston enterprise thrived on commercial innovation, the strategic cultivation of patronage, and a capacity to perpetuate itself dynastically. England’s mid-century political crisis disrupted the family’s commercial supremacy but its management system would endure as the de facto standard structuring successful theatre business long after the Restoration. Following a critical introduction to the early history of theatrical management, the thesis’s four chapters chart the creation and institution of the Beeston management model. Chapter One examines the early career of Christopher Beeston, a minor stageplayer from Shakespeare’s company in the 1590s who set out ambitiously to reshape theatrical management at Drury Lane’s Cockpit playhouse in 1616. Chapter Two analyzes Beeston’s later career, particularly his unique appointment as “Governor” of a new royal company in 1637. New evidence suggests that the office was a reward for service to the aristocratic Herbert family and that traditional preferment was therefore as important as market competition to the creation of the Caroline paradigm of autocratic theatrical “governance.” Chapter Three explores the overlooked career of Elizabeth Beeston who, upon inheriting the Cockpit in 1638, became the first woman in English history to manage a purpose-built London theatre. New evidence concerning her subsequent husband, Sir Lewis Kirke, an adventurer to Canada, ship-money captain, and Royalist military governor, indicates political ideology motivated their joint effort to keep the Beeston playhouse open during the civil wars. Chapter Four addresses the question of why the larger Beeston enterprise eventually collapsed even as the management system it refined continued to support later theatrical entrepreneurs. During the Interregnum, contemporaries anticipated that William and George Beeston, Christopher’s son and grandson, would eventually dominate a renascent London stage; however, managers such as William Davenant and Thomas Betterton ultimately adapted the Beeston system more efficiently to the political environment after 1660. Thereafter, exhausted patronage, lost assets, and the abandonment of family tradition marked the end of the Beestons’ influential association with the London stage.

This dissertation examines the function of textual communities in England from the early Middle Ages until the early modern period, exploring the ways in which cultures and communities are formed through textual activities other than writing itself. I open by discussing the characteristics of a textual community in order to establish a new understanding of the term. I argue that a textual community is fundamentally based on activity carried out in books and that perceptions of linguistic distance stimulate this activity. Chapter 1 investigates Bede (c. 673–735) and his interest in multilingualism, coupled with his exploration of the boundaries between the written and spoken forms of English. Picking up on an element of Bede's work, I argue in Chapter 2 that Alfred (r. 871–899) and his grandson Æthelstan (r. 924/5–939) found new ways to make textuality the defining quality of the emerging West Saxon kingdom. In Chapter 3, I focus on the intralingual distance in the textual community surrounding the works of Ælfric (c. 950–1010) and Wulfstan (d. 1023). I also discuss the role of contemporary or near-contemporary manuscript use in forming a textual community at the intersection of ecclesiastical and political power. In Chapter 4, I examine the activities of a textual community in the West Midlands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By glossing Old English texts and rethinking English orthography, this textual community both renewed the work of Anglo-Saxon writers and enabled the activity I discuss in Chapter 5. Chapter 5 argues for a more constructive rationalization of the curatorial and editorial activities of Matthew Parker (1504–1575) than has been presented hitherto. I argue that Parker's cavalier methods of conserving and editing his books in fact represent responses to the textual models he found in those manuscripts. An appendix presents the text and translation of the preface to Parker's edition of Asser's Life of King Alfred. I close with a discussion of the production and use of books, followed by an illustration of the ongoing importance of textual community in England by highlighting the layers of use in a single manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20) that links together the chapters of this dissertation.

This thesis argues that the Middle English alliterative prosody of the Piers Plowman tradition was influenced by a discourse combining law, history, homily and poetry which was inherited from the administrative practices of the Anglo-Saxon period. As literary and legal textual genres developed recognizably distinct formal characteristics in the later Middle Ages, the combination of homiletic rhetoric and alliterative sound-patterning evoked a surviving discourse in which the formal characteristics of poems and documents were less clearly distinguished. Thus insofar as it evoked Anglo-Saxon textual culture, Piers Plowman provided a formal model which was particularly suitable to criticisms of political institutions that consolidated their power by developing new distinctions between the genres of bureaucratic texts. In each of the texts and traditions studied – Wulfstan’s homiletic law code I–II Cnut and its Latin translations, The First Worcester Fragment, Laȝamon’s Arthurian Brut chronicle-poem, The South English Legendary "Life of St. Egwine", and the Piers Plowman tradition poem Mum and the Sothsegger – apparently “literary” devices are used to authorize historically-based “legal” claims, particularly on behalf of ecclesiastical institutions looking to maintain their local influence in the face of increasingly consolidated royal administrative authority. Though oaths played a much less important procedural role after the Norman Conquest than they did in the Anglo-Saxon period, the appearance of "creative" authenticating procedures in "commemorative" texts created the appearance of orality to post-Conquest readers, to criticize a government which claimed its English "common" law to originate in the remotest recorded antiquity, even as it abandoned the practices actually recorded in the earliest surviving law codes and documents to be written in England. Comparing these texts allows a deeper understanding of their shared authenticating strategies, and also a re-appraisal of the methods we use to describe the relationships between medieval documents and authors, literature and law, texts and contexts. Appended to the dissertation is an edition of the SEL "Life of St. Egwine." Because Egwine's hagiographic tradition is so thematically invested in political concerns and closely interconnected with legal documents attributed to Egwine himself, the edition provides an opportunity to take a "disjunctively" literary and diplomatic approach to the tradition, in the process exploring some of the practical implications of the larger theoretical issues raised by the thesis as a whole.

This dissertation explores the presence of the divine feminine in Indic river myths of the Ganga, the Narmada, and the Meenachil as represented in the three novels: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It challenges masculinist nationalistic narratives, and identifies itself as a feminist revisionist work by strategically combining Indian debates on religious interpretations with Western phenomenological and psychoanalytical perspectives to open up productive lines of critical enquiry. I argue that the three postcolonial novelists under survey resurrect the power of the feminine by relocating this power in its manifestation as the turbulent and indomitable force of three river goddesses. In their myths of origin, the goddesses are “unchaste,” uncontainable, and ambiguous. Yet, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian patriarchy manipulated and coerced women for their political purposes. They denied female agency in order to promote a brand of nationalism bordering on religious zeal and subjugation through imposed paradigms of chastity. The patriarchy conflated the imaginary chastity of the mother goddess in her multiple manifestations--including but not limited to the River Ganga--with the exalted position forced upon the young Indian widow. Popular art of the colonial period in India dismantled the irrepressible sexual ambiguity of the divine feminine for the Indian population, and reinvented her as a chaste, mother figure (Bharat Mata, or Mother India), desexualized her, and held her up as an iconic, pervasive figurehead of the Motherland. Ironically though, the makeover of the uncontrollable, “chaotic” feminine into this shackled entity during and after the Indian freedom struggle is just the kind of ambiguity that appears in discourses of nation building. By reaffirming the archaic myths of the feminine, Ghosh, Mehta, and Roy dislodge the colonial project and the patriarchal Indian independence movement that sought to “chastise” the divine feminine. I suggest that in these three novels pre-colonial images of the river goddesses--presented in all their ambiguous, multiple, and fluid dimensions--are a challenge to the Indian nationalist project that represents the goddesses one dimensionally as an iconic figure, unifying the geo-body of India and symbolically projecting her as the pure, homogenous Bharat Mata.

Located on the interstice between Media Studies and Literary Theory, my dissertation explores the emerging genre of photo-fiction -- literary works that incorporate photographic images into the manuscripts -- and its impact on the commemoration of traumatic historical events. I argue that the way we represent and remember historical traumas is dependent on the media in which images emanating from these events are produced and circulated; put differently, the context of these images shapes our engagement with them. By examining literary works that incorporate photographs into their printed text, I explore textual and visual representations of historical trauma (such as the two World Wars, the Balkan wars of the Nineties, and 9/11). The authors whose works I analyze (Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon, W.G. Sebald) grant photography a new status: the inserted images transcend traditional “authentification strategies” and draw attention to the convergence of realism and indexicality featured by these photographs. These authors’ employment of photographs from various media (television, internet, printed press, encyclopedias and archives) questions not only the technical qualities of each medium but the veracity and accuracy of evidence. Photography’s capacity to secure and store information is put radically into question, not only because the new contexts of these images, but because of the manipulations and reconfigurations the movement between media has brought about. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the literary montage, I suggest that literature provides an apt arena to examine the reception to images. By literary montage I mean the opening up of a new dimension in which visual and verbal elements are juxtaposed, and the disjunctions and gaps between them encourage readers to become active participants in the creation of narrative. Photo-fiction’s interplay between images and texts therefore not only sheds light on the mechanics of representation, but demand from its audience to reflect on the way we interpret and respond to historical traumas in a society saturated with images.

This dissertation examines three generations of the Beeston family and its revolutionary impact on the developing world of seventeenth-century London theatre management. Like other early modern businesses, the Beeston enterprise thrived on commercial innovation, the strategic cultivation of patronage, and a capacity to perpetuate itself dynastically. England’s mid-century political crisis disrupted the family’s commercial supremacy but its management system would endure as the de facto standard structuring successful theatre business long after the Restoration. Following a critical introduction to the early history of theatrical management, the thesis’s four chapters chart the creation and institution of the Beeston management model. Chapter One examines the early career of Christopher Beeston, a minor stageplayer from Shakespeare’s company in the 1590s who set out ambitiously to reshape theatrical management at Drury Lane’s Cockpit playhouse in 1616. Chapter Two analyzes Beeston’s later career, particularly his unique appointment as “Governor” of a new royal company in 1637. New evidence suggests that the office was a reward for service to the aristocratic Herbert family and that traditional preferment was therefore as important as market competition to the creation of the Caroline paradigm of autocratic theatrical “governance.” Chapter Three explores the overlooked career of Elizabeth Beeston who, upon inheriting the Cockpit in 1638, became the first woman in English history to manage a purpose-built London theatre. New evidence concerning her subsequent husband, Sir Lewis Kirke, an adventurer to Canada, ship-money captain, and Royalist military governor, indicates political ideology motivated their joint effort to keep the Beeston playhouse open during the civil wars. Chapter Four addresses the question of why the larger Beeston enterprise eventually collapsed even as the management system it refined continued to support later theatrical entrepreneurs. During the Interregnum, contemporaries anticipated that William and George Beeston, Christopher’s son and grandson, would eventually dominate a renascent London stage; however, managers such as William Davenant and Thomas Betterton ultimately adapted the Beeston system more efficiently to the political environment after 1660. Thereafter, exhausted patronage, lost assets, and the abandonment of family tradition marked the end of the Beestons’ influential association with the London stage.

This thesis argues that the Middle English alliterative prosody of the Piers Plowman tradition was influenced by a discourse combining law, history, homily and poetry which was inherited from the administrative practices of the Anglo-Saxon period. As literary and legal textual genres developed recognizably distinct formal characteristics in the later Middle Ages, the combination of homiletic rhetoric and alliterative sound-patterning evoked a surviving discourse in which the formal characteristics of poems and documents were less clearly distinguished. Thus insofar as it evoked Anglo-Saxon textual culture, Piers Plowman provided a formal model which was particularly suitable to criticisms of political institutions that consolidated their power by developing new distinctions between the genres of bureaucratic texts. In each of the texts and traditions studied – Wulfstan’s homiletic law code I–II Cnut and its Latin translations, The First Worcester Fragment, Laȝamon’s Arthurian Brut chronicle-poem, The South English Legendary "Life of St. Egwine", and the Piers Plowman tradition poem Mum and the Sothsegger – apparently “literary” devices are used to authorize historically-based “legal” claims, particularly on behalf of ecclesiastical institutions looking to maintain their local influence in the face of increasingly consolidated royal administrative authority. Though oaths played a much less important procedural role after the Norman Conquest than they did in the Anglo-Saxon period, the appearance of "creative" authenticating procedures in "commemorative" texts created the appearance of orality to post-Conquest readers, to criticize a government which claimed its English "common" law to originate in the remotest recorded antiquity, even as it abandoned the practices actually recorded in the earliest surviving law codes and documents to be written in England. Comparing these texts allows a deeper understanding of their shared authenticating strategies, and also a re-appraisal of the methods we use to describe the relationships between medieval documents and authors, literature and law, texts and contexts. Appended to the dissertation is an edition of the SEL "Life of St. Egwine." Because Egwine's hagiographic tradition is so thematically invested in political concerns and closely interconnected with legal documents attributed to Egwine himself, the edition provides an opportunity to take a "disjunctively" literary and diplomatic approach to the tradition, in the process exploring some of the practical implications of the larger theoretical issues raised by the thesis as a whole.

This dissertation examines the function of textual communities in England from the early Middle Ages until the early modern period, exploring the ways in which cultures and communities are formed through textual activities other than writing itself. I open by discussing the characteristics of a textual community in order to establish a new understanding of the term. I argue that a textual community is fundamentally based on activity carried out in books and that perceptions of linguistic distance stimulate this activity. Chapter 1 investigates Bede (c. 673–735) and his interest in multilingualism, coupled with his exploration of the boundaries between the written and spoken forms of English. Picking up on an element of Bede's work, I argue in Chapter 2 that Alfred (r. 871–899) and his grandson Æthelstan (r. 924/5–939) found new ways to make textuality the defining quality of the emerging West Saxon kingdom. In Chapter 3, I focus on the intralingual distance in the textual community surrounding the works of Ælfric (c. 950–1010) and Wulfstan (d. 1023). I also discuss the role of contemporary or near-contemporary manuscript use in forming a textual community at the intersection of ecclesiastical and political power. In Chapter 4, I examine the activities of a textual community in the West Midlands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By glossing Old English texts and rethinking English orthography, this textual community both renewed the work of Anglo-Saxon writers and enabled the activity I discuss in Chapter 5. Chapter 5 argues for a more constructive rationalization of the curatorial and editorial activities of Matthew Parker (1504–1575) than has been presented hitherto. I argue that Parker's cavalier methods of conserving and editing his books in fact represent responses to the textual models he found in those manuscripts. An appendix presents the text and translation of the preface to Parker's edition of Asser's Life of King Alfred. I close with a discussion of the production and use of books, followed by an illustration of the ongoing importance of textual community in England by highlighting the layers of use in a single manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20) that links together the chapters of this dissertation.

This dissertation explores the presence of the divine feminine in Indic river myths of the Ganga, the Narmada, and the Meenachil as represented in the three novels: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It challenges masculinist nationalistic narratives, and identifies itself as a feminist revisionist work by strategically combining Indian debates on religious interpretations with Western phenomenological and psychoanalytical perspectives to open up productive lines of critical enquiry. I argue that the three postcolonial novelists under survey resurrect the power of the feminine by relocating this power in its manifestation as the turbulent and indomitable force of three river goddesses. In their myths of origin, the goddesses are “unchaste,” uncontainable, and ambiguous. Yet, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian patriarchy manipulated and coerced women for their political purposes. They denied female agency in order to promote a brand of nationalism bordering on religious zeal and subjugation through imposed paradigms of chastity. The patriarchy conflated the imaginary chastity of the mother goddess in her multiple manifestations--including but not limited to the River Ganga--with the exalted position forced upon the young Indian widow. Popular art of the colonial period in India dismantled the irrepressible sexual ambiguity of the divine feminine for the Indian population, and reinvented her as a chaste, mother figure (Bharat Mata, or Mother India), desexualized her, and held her up as an iconic, pervasive figurehead of the Motherland. Ironically though, the makeover of the uncontrollable, “chaotic” feminine into this shackled entity during and after the Indian freedom struggle is just the kind of ambiguity that appears in discourses of nation building. By reaffirming the archaic myths of the feminine, Ghosh, Mehta, and Roy dislodge the colonial project and the patriarchal Indian independence movement that sought to “chastise” the divine feminine. I suggest that in these three novels pre-colonial images of the river goddesses--presented in all their ambiguous, multiple, and fluid dimensions--are a challenge to the Indian nationalist project that represents the goddesses one dimensionally as an iconic figure, unifying the geo-body of India and symbolically projecting her as the pure, homogenous Bharat Mata.

Ce mémoire comprend deux volets : une étude théorique et un texte de création littéraire. Dans un premier temps, il s’agir d’étudier le rôle du désir dans la démarche thématique et philosophique employée par l’écrivain Wilson Harris dans son roman The Palace of the Peacock. Ainsi démonterons-nous dans le premier chapitre que Harris se sert – de façon paradoxale – du désir empirique pour faire valoir les limites mêmes de celui-ci. Nous aborderons dans le deuxième chapitre le rapport problématique qu’entretient, chez Harris, la subjectivité féminine avec la subjectivité masculine. En particulier, nous examinerons la représentation de ce rapport sous la forme de métaphores ayant trait à l’environnement et à l’anatomie. Nous avancerons que le caractère problématique que revêt le rapport entre subjectivités féminine et masculine dans le roman est en quelque sorte nécessitée par l’écriture même de Harris. Dans le troisième chapitre, nous prendrons part aux débats sur la poétique qui animent la littérature contemporaine afin de situer notre propre élan vers la création littéraire. En même temps, nous entreprendrons une tentative de récupération de certains des concepts théoriques formulés par Harris, en lien avec notre propre poétique. S’ensuivra notre projet de création littéraire, intitulé HEROISM/EULOGIES, qui constitue le quatrième et dernier chapitre du mémoire. Ce texte, extrait d’un projet d’écriture créative plus vaste, trace les mouvements d’un certain nombre de sujets à travers une Amérique imaginée. / This study contains two parts: a theoretical component and a literary text. The theoretical component discusses desire as a thematic and philosophical methodology in Wilson Harris’s The Palace of the Peacock. Chapter one argues that Harris paradoxically makes use of forms of empirical desire to demonstrate its epistemological limits. Chapter two discusses the problematic situation of female subjectivity in relation to male subjects, through environmental and anatomic metaphors, which Harris’s writing necessitates. Chapter three discusses contemporary poetics in order to situate my impetus for literary writing and attempts to salvage some of Harris’s theoretical concepts in dialogue with my own poetics. Chapter four contains the creative writing project, HEROISM/EULOGIES—an excerpt from a larger project—that charts the movement of various subjects across an imagined American landscape.