Anns a'cheud leth de'n trächdas, tha mi a' toirt tarraing air an t-suidheachadh ann an Eirinn, carson a ghabh na Gäidheil thall ri ideblas steidhichte cho daingeann air creideamh agus athartha, agus gu de na treithean litreachail a dh'eirich mar thoradh air an seo, nach fhaighear air an taobh seo de Shruth na Maoile. Tionndaidhear a-nuairsin a ghabhail beachd air an eachdraidh a-bhos, 's mi a'feuchainn ri barrachd solais a leigeil asteach air tachartais nan deich bliadhna air fhichead fror-thäbhachdach eadar cur-gu-buil Reachdan Idhe agus toiseach Cogaidhean nan Tri Rioghachd bho dheireadh nan 1630an air adhart. Bithidh mi a'coimhead air na h-aobharan - an dä chuid aobharan geärrthreimhseach agus aobharan fad-threimhseach -a tha air cül nan atharrachaidhean sochmhalairteach a bha a'sior sgapadh rd nam bliadhnaichean ud. 'S iad na h-atharrachaidhean seo, agus abhuil a bh'aca air saoghal nan Gäidheal bho äm Athaiseag Theärlaich II air adhart, a bhios fainear dhomh anns an därna leth de'n t-saothair. Bha an Gaidheal a'sior ghabhail barrachd de'n t-saoghal fo 'shröin, ach aig an aon äm - gu dearbh, gu ire mhöir mar thoradh air na h-atharrachaidhean ud - ghreimich e na bu theinne ri särbheachdan an t-seann shaoghail. Air cül an t-suidheachaidh seo tha iomagain fhasmhor mu na bliadhnaichean ri teachd, äm, a-reir coltais, 'nuair nach biodh röl aig na Gaidheil idir; agus cuideachd mu dhol-sios a'choluadair ghaisgeil a bha mar bhonnsteidh do'n fhein-iomhaigh aca, gu sönraichte do dh'fhein-iomhaigh nam fireannach. Gu ire co-dhiü, b'ann mar thoradh air an iomagain seo a bha aobhar nan Stiübhartach cho feillmhor a-measg nan Gäidheal anns a'cheud leth de'n ochdamh linn deug. Chunnaic mi iomchaidh dä shleachd - mu fhäs obair na creachadaireachd -a ghleidheadh 's a chur ris an trächdas mar eärr-rädh.

How much are we aged by biology, and how much by culture? Age criticism is a relatively new discipline – the word ‘ageism’ was only coined in 1968 by sociologist Robert Butler – but it has been asking this question since its inception. Feminists were among the first to investigate the idea of ‘age identity,’ and during the 1980s a handful of American older lesbian feminists took the women’s movement to task about its own ageism. Writers like Baba Copper and Barbara MacDonald argued that age is not only a state of mind but a political construction, anticipating much that has now become mainstream in the thinking of age identity. Since then, there has been a growing recognition that ‘age ideology,’ from birthday cards to employment law, delivers negative messages about ageing as decline, deterioration and loss. But there are still not enough representations of older people – and especially older women – which offer a positive paradigm for ageing, one that goes beyond platitudes of acceptance, or, more insidiously, the chimera of retaining ‘youth’ in old age. My thesis traces the early work of lesbian and feminist writers as they explored the subjectivity of older women at a time when this was still rare. I argue that this writing still has much to offer in challenging conventional and negative ideas of agerelated changes, without sentimentalising or denying physical, as well as social, pain. I begin by setting out an overview of the theory that has accompanied this writing, including Copper and MacDonald’s work. In particular, I explore its expansion in Margaret Gullette’s theory of diachronic identity, in which the fluid character of identity means that many ages can exist simultaneously, and Kathleen Woodward’s notion of a ‘mirror stage’ in midand older life. Such concepts provide guiding tools for my subsequent analysis of lesbian age writing. The thesis goes on to examine novels, life writing and poetry by older lesbians, organising the material thematically: chapters deal with menopause, memory and forgetting, sexuality and mortality respectively. The conclusion hinges on lesbian age theory as an aspect of feminist and gender research based at the interface of queer and age identities. Minority writing on oldness has a particular usefulness in delineating the specificities of difference, or what critic Margaret Cruikshank has called ‘the “inbetween worlds” within aging.’ Work by older lesbians can be seen as a tool for both understanding and shaping the experience of old age. This very particular literature, through its emphasis on continuity, friendship and community, refuses prescribed ‘life stages’ and instead offers paradigms for conscious and comfortable ageing.

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This thesis analyses the printed texts of six London Lord Mayors’ Shows, of the years 1614-1619, demonstrating how the two authors – Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday – innovated textually within this genre. Its methodology is original in two ways. Firstly, it examines the Shows as whole entities, analysing how they function as individual texts. This helps to identify the development of textual strategies across the genre, differentiating the strategies within each Show. Secondly, and most importantly, the thesis examines the Shows as texts, applying textual and literary analysis to identify authorial strategies in each work. This textual perspective allows the thesis to identify three principal strategies in the Shows examined. Firstly, it shows that writers used the Show’s ‘occasionality’ – that is, proximity to a real event – in innovative ways, utilising a variety of strategies to respond to the works’ historical and cultural context. ‘Occasionality’ is thus demonstrated to be more variable than scholars have previously assumed. So too, the thesis identifies diverse ways in which authors use strategies of intertextuality, showing that this concept, too, is unstable as used in this genre. Finally, two of the Shows are shown to challenge and complicate the relationship between the printed text and the event of performance which it supposedly commemorated – that is, the actual procession of the newly-elected Lord Mayor with Company and City dignitaries through London after signing his oath to the King on October 29th. The thesis uses close analysis of historical and textual detail to outline the nuanced and different ways in which Shows responded to their immediate context, utilised other textual sources and interrogated the then-vexed issue of print’s relationship to an event of performance. The thesis thus shows that in these three textual areas, Lord Mayors’ Shows are much more variable and complex than scholars have previously acknowledged.

This research derives from analysis of cases of suspicious infant death recorded in Sussex Coroners’ inquests between 1485 and 1688. It examines both infanticides and child murders, following the early modern practice of defining “infant” as up to age seven. The historical records, which are summarised in several theme-based tables, are combined with close readings of imaginative texts, including plays by Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster, broadside ballads, and pamphlets. Archival and literary accounts are examined in the context of early modern works concerning law, religion, and the body, alongside recent studies of women’s history, and childbirth. Anthropological theories concerning rites of passage, liminality, waste and abjection invite new ways of thinking about early modern attitudes toward infant life. They reveal the range and complexity of child murder and infanticide, and its motives. This analysis includes the involvement of men and married women and discusses the structuring of dangerous motherhood by the linguistic similarities of crime pamphlets and breastfeeding literature. It suggests that, far from being unthinkable, infanticide might have been encouraged (by mothers, friends, masters), and could be facilitated by communities’ ambivalent attitude toward young life. Communities and authors are seen to be aware of the mental conditions which might have led married, as well as single, women to kill their infants. Archival and creative texts and visual representations reveal a society imbued with ideas of infant death, and inform us about seventeenth century motherhood. While the focus is early modern, a concluding Interlude and Epilogue bring the research up to date with a discussion of recent cases and works by writers such as Bond, Ravenhill and McDonagh. These suggest that many modern behavioural patterns, and playwrights’ ways of writing about them, have remarkable similarity to those of the early modern period.

Anthropologist Carole M. Counihan states ‘the predominant role of women in feeding is a cultural universal, a major component of female identity, and an important source of female connections to and influence over others’. In early modern English ideology, a gendered concept of virtue hinged on self-denial and sexual continence, the connection between sex and food was a common cultural trope, and femininity was primarily associated with nature and the body rather than a (masculine) intellectual. Thus women’s ingestion of food became ideologically fraught: an acceptance and perpetuation of individual circumstance and subordinate status. Refusing it, therefore, is an act of disruption. This thesis selects case studies of elite women, whose symbolic function and position at the apex of household structure rendered them uniquely able to refuse readily available nutrition. Often royal, the state of their bodies possessed great practical and political significance. After focusing specifically on the motivations, effects and uses of food refusal for women including Catherine of Aragon, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Katherine Grey, and Arbella Stuart, this thesis then analyses male playwrights' attempts to reappropriate the specifically feminine behaviours of self-starvation and reintegrate them into the dominant cultural paradigm, with special attention to works inspired or influenced by its case studies. Examining ideological manipulations (for instance, inedia as self-inflicted punishment for sexual transgression rather than a defiant assertion of the right to sexuality, or an acceptable means of suicide in response to oppression or violation), it aims to explore ways in which physicality and femininity can be deconstructed and reconstructed to serve particular ideological needs and moments, and concludes by discussing elite women's behaviour in relation to modern-day anorexia and eating disorders, reflecting on similarities, differences and the cultural and psychological insights offered by the comparison.

This thesis is a study of the posthumous literary reception and reputation of Alfred Tennyson, from the year of his death, 1892, to 1950. Its focus is on allusions to Tennyson's work in poetry, fiction and drama, but it also takes works of criticism and journalism into account, as well as other evidence of Tennyson's continuing readership in the period. The thesis approaches the period by decades, involving in-depth assessments of Tennyson's influence on the work of writers as diverse as Conrad, Housman, Austin, Forster, Bennett, Owen, Sassoon, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. Their various responses - from the appreciative to the scornful, the ambivalent to the oedipal - are put into context using works of criticism which discuss Tennyson, by both canonical writers such as A. C. Bradley and F. R. Leavis as well as less famous critics. The thesis calls into question Bradley's idea of a 'reaction against Tennyson' having already reached its peak by 1917. I will show that, in reality, Tennyson's influence and popularity endured long into the twentieth century, and that the aftermath of the Great War meant that the poet's work was truly at its nadir of popularity in the late 1920s and 1930s. The thesis will also address Tennyson's ultimate resurgence in popularity in the 1940s, partly as a result of the impact of World War II but partly as the writers who had seemed radical earlier in the century (not least T. S. Eliot) felt more comfortable about accepting their influences. The thesis ends by placing this in the context of the wider revival of interest in Victorian literature and culture in the 1940s and early 1950s The appendix of the thesis is a database of Tennyson's poems which appeared in anthologies in the period.

This thesis identifies and examines a conjunction between white postcolonial cultural and species concerns within recent novels from South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The argument takes as a starting point a suggestion by Philip Armstrong that postcolonial and animal studies discourses might form an alliance based on a common antagonist: humanism. Here, this idea is applied in the context of literature by white postcolonial writers. I explore the extent and nature of the alliance and the degree to which it can be called successful within the selected novels. Each of the five chapters concerns a different text, and the thesis is also divided into two sections. The first addresses the contrasting approaches to humanism and to animals offered by J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001). The second addresses the representation of these themes in Fiona Farrell's Mr Allbones' Ferrets (2007), Julia Leigh's The Hunter (1999), and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), set in the past, present and future respectively, to illustrate the temporal dimension of the white postcolonial-animal alliance in question. Overall, the thesis emphasises the relevance of species concerns within white postcolonial culture, and posits the existence of a thread running through contemporary white postcolonial novels in which animals are a priority. All of the novels examined here, I argue, represent animals as more than victims in relation to humanist discourse: they emphasise animals' potential to disrupt that discourse by affecting the attitudes of individual humans or by resisting humanist endeavours by their own actions. The result of this, I suggest, is that animals appear as allies in white postcolonial cultures' attempts at self-definition against historical colonialism and contemporary globalisation, while white postcolonial literature portrays animals in ways that promote positive human perceptions of them.

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No description available.