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This thesis explores the Romantic origins of nineteenth-century American poetic tradition; it looks at the relationship between the English Romantics and major nineteenth-century American poets. My research focuses on the Romantic lines of continuity within nineteenth-century American poetry, identifying them as central to the representation of American cultural and literary identities. American poets shaped their art and national identity out of a Romantic interest in their native nature. My study particularly explores the diverse ways in which major American poets, of this time, reacted to, adapted and reformulated Romantic ideals of nature, literary creation, the mission of the poet and the aesthetic category of the sublime. It traces connections and dialogues between American poets and their Romantic predecessors, including Blake, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. This thesis is inspired by the strong and abiding academic interest in Romantic studies, and aims to advance new readings of nineteenth-century American poetry in a transatlantic literary and cultural context. It attempts to cover a wide range of nineteenth-century key poetic works in relation to Romantic visions, ideals and forms. Developing a chronological line of enquiry, my thesis highlights the paradox of writers seeking to establish an original, distinctive American literary canon while still heavily deriving ideas and techniques from other, non-American sources. An introductory chapter outlines the historical and cultural framework of the Anglo-American literary relationship, focussing on its sensibilities, tensions and affinities. Chapter two considers how Bryant and Longfellow reformulated the Romantic pastoral tradition in their representations of American landscape, which helped toward shaping a peculiar national poetic canon. Through examining Emerson’s poetic achievement in the light of the Romantic tradition, chapter three challenges Emersonian claims of originality and self-reliance. Chapter four addresses Whitman’s Romantic preoccupations and interests alongside his groundbreaking innovations manifested in his attitudes towards nature, human body and urban landscape as well as his experiments with poetic language and form. Chapter five attempts to interpret the seeming idiosyncrasy of Dickinson’s work in the light of the poet’s dialogues with her Romantic precursors. Above all, this study examines how Romanticism worked upon the minds and art of nineteenth-century American poets, aiming to provide refreshing interpretations of nineteenth-century American poetry in the context of the broader transatlantic Romantic tradition.

This thesis presents a theory of structural irony gleaned from the irony theorised and performed in the texts of thinkers whose works operate on the border of the (non)propositional: Plato, Friedrich Schlegel, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. While focusing on the irony performed in the texts of Jacques Derrida, and using his engagements with these thinkers as a frame, this is not a theory of “Derridean” irony, but an irony (primarily) elaborated through a deconstructive approach and vocabulary. Structural irony is seen to take the form of the transgressive step/counter-step of parabasis and the non-hierarchical disorder of parataxis. It is an anacoluthic force/weakness, and exhibits the conjunctive/disjunctive trait of hyphenation. It is neither of cynical, aesthetic distance nor humorous, parodic engagement, but is a productive movement of (impossible) negotiation between terms. Irony is an expression of the beyond, within, and this reworking of borders and limits is performed in the fragment/aphorism. The (ir)responsible step taken in Derrida’s texts is understood as a mode of structural irony, and it is proposed that the stylistic changes that occurred in Derrida’s “later” texts were in part due to the autoimmunity caused by an overexposure to the “laws of the interview”. Throughout the thesis styles that manipulate the unmasterable excesses of irony are investigated, and each chapter ends with a reading of one of Derrida’s more “literary” or “performative” texts, while recognising and playing with the falsity of such generic makers or divisions. Inscribing Derrida within a tradition of thinkers of the non-thetic both extends readings of that tradition and of irony itself, while affording a valuable way of approaching the “structures” within Derrida’s texts. Irony is not presented as the transcendental signifier of deconstruction, but as a profitable way of understanding deconstruction and its relation to other writers.

This doctoral thesis is the first comprehensive study of contemporary English translations of French lyric poetry during the Caroline period. While there has been extensive study of translations from French literature of other genres, notably drama, translations of lyric poetry have been largely ignored. The thesis examines the translations within the context of literary and cultural trends in France and England during the seventeenth century. Differing cultural tendencies and reader expectations are evident both in the selection of particular poems for translation, and in the changes translators made to their source texts. Chapter one contains background information on the social and literary relations between France and England during the seventeenth century, and an overview of the social and political conditions in which poetry was written in each country. Chapter two investigates where and how translators obtained the texts of the poems they translated, and in particular the use of the recueils collectifs as sources for translations. Chapters three, four and five provide a thematic overview of the most significant and interesting translations. The themes chosen - eroticism, love and nature - constitute those most popular with translators, and the representation of these themes in both the original poems and the translations is closely connected to wider literary and cultural tendencies in both France and England. Having provided a thematic overview of the translations, chapters 6 and 7 examine some of the more technical and linguistic aspects of the practice of translating from contemporary French poetry in Caroline England. Chapter seven studies the translation of the French lyric voice, and the effects of this on the representation of themes, particularly love and nature. Chapter eight examines the English treatment of some aspects of seventeenth-century French prosody, placing these and the changes made by translators in the context of prosodic developments in both France and England. The conclusion highlights patterns identified in translators' handling of the source texts; these draw attention to the literary and cultural differences between France and England in the seventeenth century, and demonstrate that French poetry is altered in English translation to suit the tastes of translators and their intended English readership.

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The Disabled Body investigates disability life-writing and what it reveals about the experience of disability, disability studies and its attendant identity politics, and the role of embodiment in writing. It combines a comparative analysis of theoretical models with close readings of a range of inter-related primary texts in order to theorise new, literary ways of appreciating disability and embodiment. The thesis begins by focusing on the limitations of the dominant social model of disability and their impact upon approaches to disability life-writing within disability studies. Expanding upon Tom Shakespeare's assertion that the social model is a political intervention rather than a robust theoretical model, I argue that the rejection of autobiography by initial literary approaches to disbaility in the 1990s was based on the criteria of the identity politics informed by the social model, which disregards individual, personal and experiential accounts of disability as embodiment. A growing number of thinkers, such as Rose Galvin and Jim Swan, have since criticised the social model for such neglect. By combining such positions, I construct a theoretical framework through which to re-examine autobiographical writing with regard to four authors with disabilities presented as a sequence of case studies: Christy Brown, Christopher Nolan, Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer and Christopher Reeve. Following G. Thomas Couser's distinction between writing from 'disability experience' and writing from 'disability culture', I complement analyses of this sequence of autobiographies with an examination of several anthologies of writing by disabled authors, which are implicated in a 'disability culture' based on social model identity politics. In the course of this thesis I demonstrate how an analysis of the experiential aspect of disability life-writing can bring a new understanding of the way in which the body makes itself known in language, which is of significance not only to literary disability studies in general but also to the wider field of literary studies.

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This thesis examines ancestral narratives in selected novels by Yvonne Vera, Maryse Condé, and Calixthe Beyala.  My working definition of narrative chiefly draws upon Gérard Genette’s three-pronged conception of narrative as a story, text, and the telling of that story, and extends to the influences that society has upon the stories.  I investigate ways the female ancestral figures in the six novels recount their narratives, and the extent to which such narratives constitute legacies for the present. The thesis is informed by studies in postcolonial theory, specifically the concept of recovering the past, and the way in which the act of re-writing has challenged colonial stereotypes.  My argument is that by presenting ancestral narratives that expose the ancestors’ vulnerabilities and flaws, the three writers challenge the concept of meta-narratives which may base their validity on recollections of a glorious past.  The implication, for the descendents, is that claiming the past’s heritage is also an act of introspection, interrogating the idea of a sacrosanct narrative, transmitted from the past to the present. The first part focuses on the novels of Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera.  My focus is on the way the two grandmothers in Vera’s <i>Nehanda </i>and <i>Under the Tongue</i> recount other people’s narratives at the expense of their own stories.  I analyse <i>Nehanda,</i> in which Vera fictionalises the story of the spirit medium by the same name, who, in the novel, narrates the past and future of her community.  I then move on from the idea of Nehanda as a communal grandmother figure to a different type of narrative, one in which a grandmother speaks to her traumatised grandchild, Zhizha, in <i>Under the Tongue.</i> The second part is on Maryse Condé’s <i>Moi … Tituba, Sorcière …Noire de Salem </i>and <i>Victoire, Les Saveurs et Les Mots</i>.  My focus is on the challenges that the two grandmothers face as they attempt to recount narratives in societies that already have preconceived notions about them. In the third section, I read Calixthe Beyala’s largely autobiographical <i>La Petite Fille du Réverbère </i>as the character’s re-evaluation of her grandmother’s memory, focusing on the way the grandmother’s narratives at times give her grand-daughter, Tapoussière, a sense of discomfort, even as the latter seeks to claim a connection with her grandmother.  Finally, I read Beyala’s <i>Les Arbres en Parlent Encore</i>, specifically the grand-mother’s self-doubt, especially after having struggled to carve her own narrative space, not only as a questioning of the past, but also as an act of self-introspection, against which the writer assesses her own narratives, fictional and autobiographical.

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