This thesis explores the relationship between poetry and sculpture in the work of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939). I focus on Yeats’s poetical and critical engagement with Celtic Revival statuary, public monuments in Dublin, the coin designs of the Irish Free State, abstract sculpture by the Vorticists and the modernists, and a variety of objets d’art. The thesis shows that beyond constructing vague analogies between sculptural form and poetic form, Yeats’s lifelong engagement with a range of sculptors and sculpture movements led to more nuanced pairings of poetics and sculptural aesthetics. Drawing on archives, letters, contemporary articles and debates, this thesis foregrounds the poet’s engagement with sculptors and art writing on sculpture that have received only partial and fragmentary attention to date. Chapter one traces Yeats’s art school education, where he studied with George Russell and the sculptors Oliver Sheppard and John Hughes, and his imagining of an inter-arts Celtic Revival from 1884 to 1901. Chapter two examines his responses to Dublin public monuments and political readings of sculpture from 1898 to 1925. In chapter three I consider his role in redesigning the Free State coinage and his interest in Carl Milles and Ivan Meštrović, from 1926 to 1928. Chapter four examines Yeats in conversation with the sculpture writing of Henri Gaudier-Brzerska and Ezra Pound that proliferated the modernist ‘little magazines’ of early-twentieth century London, and the poet’s subsequent fascination with Constantin Brancusi. The fifth and final chapter surveys Yeats’s late poetry on sculpture and some of the profounder sculptural-poetic pairings borne from a lifelong interest in the art of sculpture. This project contributes to the intersecting fields of Yeats studies, Irish literary and visual culture studies, and new modernist studies.

This thesis offers a critical re-evaluation of representations of bodies, health and disease across almost a century of European and North American colonial encounters in Oceania, from the late eighteenth-century voyages of James Cook and William Bligh, to the settlement of Australia, to the largely fictional prose of Herman Melville’s Typee. Guided by a contemporary and cross-disciplinary analytical framework, it assesses a variety of media including exploratory journals, print culture, and imaginative prose to trace a narrative trajectory of Oceania from a site which offered salvation to sickly sailors to one which threatened prospective settlers with disease. This research offers new contributions to Pacific studies and medical history by examining how late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century concepts of health and disease challenged, shaped and undermined colonial expansion in Oceania from 1768-1846. In particular, it aims to reassess the relationship between contemporary thinking on bodies, health and disease, and the process of colonial exploration and settlement in the period studied. It argues that this relationship was less schematic than some earlier scholarship has allowed, and adopts narrative medical humanities approaches to consider how disease and ill-health was perceived from individual as well as institutional perspectives. Finally, this thesis analyses representations of bodies, health and disease in the period from 1768-1846 in two ways. First, by tracing the passage of disease from ship to shore and second, by assessing the legacy of James Cook’s three Pacific voyages on subsequent phases of exploration and settlement in Oceania.

Since the 1960s there has been a shift in social and cultural perceptions of women in Ireland and India which resulted in a proliferation of women's writing in English and other languages. Among the writers who came into prominence in the last fifty years, Anglophone poets Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian and Paula Meehan from Ireland as well as Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Melanie Silgardo and Sujata Bhatt from India have achieved national and, for some, international acclaim. Their publications and careers as editors, translators, educators and activists attest to the significance of female voices in shaping a contemporary poetic canon, yet the work of these writers remained largely unexamined until the last two decades. Contributing to the fields of Irish studies, Indian studies and comparative feminist research, this dissertation demonstrates parallels in women's texts, experiences and personal histories that extend across cultural and geographical borders. Irish and Indian poets who began publishing between the 1960s and 1980s have faced similar challenges in their careers due to institutional practices of the nation-state and publishing industry, yet, the intersections of each poet's sex, ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, class, caste and socio-economic background has led her to respond in ways that differ from her contemporaries. Using case studies of seven poets writing in English–Boland, McGuckian, Meehan, Das, de Souza, Silgardo and Bhatt–I create a transnational comparison of the personal, social and cultural pressures placed on women's poetry and their careers. This project examines poetry and book history through historical and political narratives, archival research, interviews, creative industry practices and feminist theories to explore how Irish and Indian women poets respond to and challenge the politics of writing in their home countries and abroad.

This thesis examines representations of Charles Dickens in the period 1857 to 1939, arguing that both the period and the texts themselves have been critically overlooked and treated as homogeneous in the history of Dickens’s reputation and biographical archive. It analyses biographical discourse including Dickens’s speeches and journalism in the period 1857 to 1870, John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74), auto/biographical writings by Dickens’s family from 1880 to 1939, institutional forms of commemoration in the twentieth century, and writings by Dickens’s collaborators and colleagues George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates, Percy Fitzgerald, Marcus Stone and Wilkie Collins. It shows that there are recurring questions of memory, self-fashioning, authority, authorial identity, interpretation and commemoration, and provides a fuller understanding of the history of Dickens biography. The texts are brought into dialogue with letters, articles and unpublished archival material. Chapter 1 focuses on Dickens’s self-construction with regard to his childhood and career, and his approach to death. It shows how Dickens was thinking, writing and speaking autobiographically in the 1850s and 1860s, highlighting the author’s ambivalence about commemorating writers. Chapter 2 contextualises Forster’s biography against other accounts from the 1870s, contending that the Life’s success stems not only from its revelations about Dickens’s childhood but also from Forster’s attempts to interpret and explain Dickens, which tie together biography, literary analysis and the idea of the ‘characteristic’ Dickens. Chapter 3 discusses accounts published by the Dickens family alongside other commemorative acts, including the editing of letters and the founding of the Boz Club and the Dickens Fellowship. Chapter 4 offers a nuanced analysis of the different kinds of life writing undertaken by Dickens’s ‘young men’, analysing Collins, Fitzgerald and Stone as well as the better known Sala and Yates. Together the chapters offer a metacritical analysis of Dickensian biographical discourse in the period.

This study of Paul Muldoon hinges on the Northern Irish poet's 1987 arrival in the United States. Principally, it asks what bearing the American move has had on the vertiginous changes in scale, allusiveness, and formal sophistication that have come to define the second half of his career. Focussing in the main on his longer forms in both the poems and lectures, I argue that Muldoon's emigration has shifted his oeuvre into a serially expansive, polymorphous phase, and that his later works are enmeshed with the new cultural and academic models he encounters in the States. In what I see as their commitment to global and persistently Transatlantic allusive traffic, Muldoon's long forms testify to the pleasures of mobility, even when returning as they often do to the poet's Irish heritage and memories of early life. This Transatlantic traffic will be the study's central focus. Chapter 1 considers Muldoon's first full collection of poetry produced in America, Madoc: A Mystery (1990). Its title poem pivots on a Transatlantic departure, and, as I aim to show, marks a definitive turn in his poetics towards Joyce, the formal avant-garde, and ludic models of self-conscious postmodern obscurity. Chapter 2 offers the first full-scale treatment of Paul Muldoon as critic. In a series of long-voyage lectures from his American years, To Ireland, I (2000) and The End of the Poem (2006), Muldoon announces himself on the critical scene not only as a 'stunt reader' but, I argue, an extraordinarily Freudian thinker, as this thesis considers in full. Chapter 3 examines his poetics of the slip from The Annals of Chile (1994) onward as a new serial genre in Muldoon's later U.S. career, and explores the merits of his mistakes in formal, erotic, intertextual and political terms. Finally, Chapter 4 addresses the importance of memory and the long poem for Muldoon in America, examining the architectural blueprint of ninety rhyme-words which ranges over five consecutive volumes from The Annals of Chile to Maggot (2010). As I hope to show, this blueprint involves an extensive palimpsestic performance of memory and mourning that is ceaselessly Transatlantic, weaving Muldoon's Irish past and American present into a suggestively autobiographical magnum opus.

This thesis considers the importance of wastepaper in early modern England. More than a rhetorical trope, I argue that repurposed pages were both materially and figuratively useful. Drawing on a range of textual and archival sources, I show how layers of meaning developed around paper fragments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that, because of a widespread sensitivity to the life cycle of paper, visible in its surfaces and folds, wasted pages prompted imaginative work. With particular attention to how waste objects serve as palimpsests of multiple events and histories, I consider how wastepaper intersected with ideas of temporality, and how it came to be a potent emblem, or 'thing to think with', in the period.

This project seeks to examine and analyse motherhood as presented by selected Indian women writers, paying particular attention to selected works by Ashapurna Debi, Mahasweta Devi, Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Nandita Bagchi. My research engages with their literary representation of motherhood for a number of reasons. First, their works are illustrative of the discursive norms of the particular society and culture ‒ or intersection of cultures – in which they were produced. Second, and perhaps more importantly, their creative portrayals provide a “space of contention” that contributes to re-conceiving prevalent ideas of motherhood and thus offers alternative visions. Drawing upon feminist scholarship on motherhood and postcolonial feminism, this thesis, in the course of its four chapters, focuses on four thematic areas, namely maternal subjectivity and agency, the mother-daughter relationship, motherhood and diaspora and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these concerns in order to identify the ways in which the representations reconceptualise the notion of motherhood from and against multiple perspectives. Another concern is whether these Indian women writers’ visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood (a term which is in turn intimately linked to our understanding of womanhood) as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses. Exploring connections between the fictions’ content and form, the thesis interrogates which literary modes the writers mobilise and how they variously articulate their visions. In conclusion, I argue that this project furthers feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women’s writing and the overarching area of motherhood and literature by suggesting a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood – one which is ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

Since the 1970s, the world has seen the ascendance of a new form of global capitalism and, underlying it, a new ideology with its own set of core beliefs and assumptions: neoliberalism. The rise of neoliberalism has had a profound effect on society, culture, and life worldwide. This thesis offers an analysis of one part of that broader socio-cultural picture. It explores how a specific cultural form with a particular societal focus, the literary genre of the Bildungsroman, has been adapted by authors seeking to use the genre to address the dominant political-social system of their day. The Bildungsroman has its roots in the rise of capitalism, and the exploration of certain socio-political problems is central to the genre through its core focus on the relationship between human development, the individual, and society. As such, the rise of a new, dominant form of capitalism has particular significance for it. Taking four novels by four significant authors from across the lifespan of neoliberalism – Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) – this thesis examines how each author has sought to examine, reclaim, redeploy, and problematise the genre in order to address neoliberalism. Two key features of neoliberalism are of particular significance here: neoliberal ideology’s individualised models of human behaviour and societal functioning, and neoliberal capitalism’s global dominance and systemic functioning. Each case-study demonstrates something about how these aspects of neoliberalism have overlapped with, co-opted, and undermined core elements that enable the Bildungsroman to function as a tool for socio-political exploration and critique, and so about how neoliberalism functions culturally. Through these analyses, this thesis explores not only what neoliberalism can tell us about the Bildungsroman but also what the Bildungsroman can tell us about neoliberalism.

This thesis investigates the entanglement of David Jones’ portrayal of the sacrifice of Christ with his experience of the First World War, particularly through his depiction of landscape. In the face of the jingoistic, sentimental and ironic uses of the image of Christ’s sacrifice in relation to the war amongst his contemporaries, the Roman Catholic convert David Jones was interested in the sacrifice of Christ understood sincerely as a theological mystery in relation to the war, and he reflected on his experience for nearly 20 years ‘in tranquility’ before seeking to express it in art. In the interim (c. 1919-1935), his experience both of Roman Catholic liturgy and his extensive reading and conversation in the heated early 20th-century theological and anthropological debates about the sacrifice of Christ in relation to pre-Christian sacrificial figures provided him with a radically different model for thinking about the relationship between the sacrifice of Christ and the suffering of soldiers in the landscape than the politicised rhetoric of the war. Jones’ unusual and strongly modernist sense of visual and verbal artistic ‘shape’ enabled him to portray the sacrifice of Christ as related to the war by means of immanent presence instead of according to typological ‘comparison’. He therefore relinquishes neither the horror of the war’s violence nor the hope that it can be ‘redeemed’ by the dynamic action of Christ at the source of creation permeating history. Jones presents the ravaged landscape of the war, therefore, as radiating a glimmer of Christ’s sacrifice from the hidden dimension of eternity; he presents the crucifixion of Christ, conversely, as a flourishing landscape that shows the scars of the WWI battlefield transformed by incorporation into it. His strongly sacramental sense of the function of artwork therefore seeks a real participation in the work of ‘redemption’ seen in the understanding of Christ’s sacrifice as a theological mystery.

This study aims to redress the almost complete critical marginalisation of Ann Radcliffe’s post-1797 works, published in a four-volume collection entitled "Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance; St. Alban’s Abbey: A Metrical Tale, with some Poetical Pieces by Ann Radcliffe, to which is Prefixed a Memoir of the Author with Extracts from her Journals" (1826). I examine the major works of this collection, beginning with Radcliffe’s last novel, "Gaston de Blondeville," before providing a critical analysis of her two longest narrative poems, "St. Alban’s Abbey" and "Salisbury Plains: Stonehenge." In arguing for a widening of the bounds of Radcliffean scholarship to include not just her well-known Gothic romances of the 1790s, but also her later works, I contextualise Radcliffe’s post-1797 texts alongside Sir Walter Scott’s "Ivanhoe" (1820) and his earlier narrative poetry. Examining Radcliffe’s later work in the context of Scott’s historical fiction allows us to see Radcliffe’s innovation as a writer post-1790s. It also highlights the striking thematic reciprocity which exists between Radcliffe’s post-1797 texts and Scott’s historical fiction. These works display varying responses to a larger revival of interest in Britain’s early heritage, exemplified through Radcliffe’s and Scott’s exploration of the nature of antiquarian study and medieval romance forms. In tracking this thematic reciprocity, this study uncovers a little-acknowledged "conversation," initiated by Radcliffe’s post-1797 works with Scott’s oeuvre. The forthcoming chapters define the specific nature of this "conversation," in which Radcliffe first anticipates and then responds to Scott’s unprecedented literary success in the field of historical fiction.