This thesis examines how concepts and images of nakedness are used to shape literary and theological meaning and experience within the literature and culture of early modern England. It considers how nakedness functions within a number of key literary and spiritual forms, including theological treatises, the spiritual allegory, religious lyrics, and drama. The first three chapters establish the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of nakedness, through an examination of the Bible, the works of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Anglican Church practice and debate, and anatomical texts and practices. The final three chapters offer a close analysis of the meaning and affect of nakedness within three distinct literary forms. This thesis contends that nakedness has a spiritual potency: a spiritual charge recognised and utilised by early modern theologians, preachers and writers, as they debated, defined and expressed their faith. It considers how far the meaning of nakedness is shaped by gender, and how early modern society negotiated the tensions between bodily sanctity and obscenity, naked praise and pornography. The thesis concludes by reflecting how far tropes and experiences of nakedness in our time remain obscurely charged, albeit in non-theological contexts, with something like theological meaning.

Haunted Matters interrogates objects, bodies, and epistemology in a selection of Victorian women’s ghost stories, arguing that these things provided a means through which the chosen writers could critique women’s troubled cultural position in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain. The four authors considered – Charlotte Riddell, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, and Edith Nesbit – were all fundamental figures in the development of the ghost story genre, using this popular fiction form to investigate social arenas in which women were subjugated, professional venues from which they were excluded, and the cultural construction of femininity. Each chapter is thus keyed into a specific aspect of women’s material lives: money and the financial market (Riddell); visual science and the male gaze (Oliphant); object culture and ‘feminine’ mysteriousness (Lee); and fin de siècle marriage and the female corpse (Nesbit). This study argues that these writers – in making things, bodies, and forms of perception central to their ghost stories – implicitly condemned the patriarchal society which perpetuated a range of contradictory assumptions about women, as being both bodily and spiritual, overly invested in the material world or too prone to flights of fancy. Their diverse literary endeavours in this popular fiction form enabled the selected writers to earn money, engage in public discourse, and critique the dominant culture which sanctioned women’s subjugation. Haunted Matters thus questions the ghost story’s designation as an anti-materialist genre through a focus on gender, instead foregrounding the form’s explicit connections to the material world.

This thesis considers the dominating element of ritual in the works of Hope Mirrlees, a theme and structuring framework that grows out of her relationship to the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Harrison's theory, which draws on modern theories of anthropology and psychology and up-to-date archaeological excavations of antiquities, comments on the modernist period through the unique lens of her ritual theory of art. I explore how the grounding of her theory in these fields as well as the visual-tactile practice of archaeology and the body-focused aesthetic of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood point towards a materialist, performative aesthetic centred on process and desire. Her ritual theory, I argue, can be read as a diagnosis of the cultural, intellectual and aesthetic climate of her day, calling for a greater emphasis on emotional, embodied experience in religion as well as art, challenging the individualist intellectualism of theology and what she sees as the static, lifeless nature of realist representation. This thesis concerns itself with the way the writer closest to Harrison, who claims to owe her entire worldview to her, absorbs Harrison's ideas and takes on this challenge. Mirrlees’s work shows a preoccupation with the process of representation, particularly representation of aspects of experience that evades rational understanding and expression: dreams and the workings of the unconscious, and mystical experience. Mirrlees turns to the Romantic tradition for its engagement with these things, locating herself within a strain of Romantic writing that foregrounds dreams, gothic fantasy and mysticism – a strain that Mirrlees, using Harrison’s theory, argues has its roots in primitive ritual. Harrison’s formulation of the ritual origin of art provides a framework for her to pursue her quest of representing the unrepresentable, producing a highly performative literary aesthetic which, like Harrison, never loses sight of the religious, magical function of art. The gem of Mirrlees's oeuvre, this thesis argues, is Paris, which is discussed over two chapters. The first examines the presence of ritual elements in the poem's verbal content, considering how it enacts a post-war ritual of transition into a new age, fuelled by a desire and hope for spiritual renewal and yet marked by a deep ambivalence regarding the future. The second chapter on Paris, the third chapter of the thesis, shows the ground-breaking originality that Paris demonstrates in the way it harnesses typographical space to facilitate an integrated verbal-concrete enactment of ritual. This analysis highlights the importance of the hand-printing tradition from which Paris emerges, and makes use of a broad history of the book and reading habits to show how in itself this crafting tradition and the poem's use of space signify a ritualisation, in Harrison's sense, of book-making; I argue that in making this connection evident with its grounding in ritual theory, Paris marks a unique intersection between ritual and the history of the book. Mirrlees's antiquarianism is a central component of this analysis, as for her it is also a practice steeped in the materiality and mystical experience of ritual, and leads to the artefact-like quality of her concretely spaced, rare hand-printed and hand-bound masterpiece with its enclosed, esoteric ritual. Antiquarianism and a focus on the performativity of language are, this thesis argues, also central to Mirrlees’s fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist, which can be read as a self-reflexive investigation into the themes, tropes and function of the fantasy genre. I highlight the novel’s interrogation of language and narrative as signifiers of reality, and its defence of fantasy as a mode rooted in the psychological processes that give rise, in Harrison’s theory, to primitive ritual.

This thesis examines how collecting was constructed through print culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It suggests that private collecting deviated from the modes of selection, arrangement and display which an increasingly professionalised museum culture employed to render their collections ‘useful’; that is, to make and transmit meaning. It argues that when private collections strayed from these ideal conditions, they threatened rational methods and structures through which meaning was made, and so were derided and marginalised in Victorian literature and culture. From literature’s frequent depictions of maniacal collectors, and through an examination of the collections held at the Cuming Museum, London, I develop two lines of inquiry into the borders between useful collecting and mad accumulation. The first part, ‘too close’, interrogates the collector’s touch, and asks what was at stake when objects were apprehended without the glass cabinets and velvet ropes of nineteenth-century museum displays. It sets out how the museum’s restriction of the tactile sense played a part in the transmission of linear, positivist narratives, and explores touch’s potential for inaugurating an affective relationship between people and things. It uses relics, which were prized in private collections and suppressed in museums, as a prism through which to examine Victorian attitudes toward corporeal knowledge. It also examines the relationship of these contexts to Victorian literature through a sustained analysis of the works of the nineteenth century’s most prolific writer of collectors, Henry James. The second section, ‘too much’, probes the problems with superabundance in nineteenth century collections. It interrogates three loci around which Victorian anxieties about excess were concentrated: the miser, the domestic interior and the lumber room. Examining the ways that textual productions helped to shape the meanings of excess in these contexts, it shows that cultural injunctions against copious collections stemmed from a fear that they exposed systems of creating meaning to irrationality. By investigating the ways in which nineteenth-century print culture, including fictions by Charles Dickens, Vernon Lee, and other writers in the periodical press defined the conceptual boundaries of collecting, this thesis interrogates the idea of ‘the collection’ itself, and highlights practices and practitioners that have not historically laid claim to that label. It argues that what is at stake in the definition of legitimate, useful collecting is access to the means of making knowledge itself.

In 1808, a French maid-servant, Marie (or Maria) Paradis, became the first woman to ascend Mont Blanc, thereby establishing her place in women’s mountaineering history. Paradis’ success was followed by that of a wealthy French countess, Henriette D’Angeville, who successfully summited Mont Blanc in 1838. In her French narrative of the ascent, Mon Excursion Au Mont Blanc en 1838 (translated into English in 1992 by Jennifer Barnes as My Ascent of Mont Blanc), D’Angeville urged women mountaineers to write narratives of their mountaineering, arguing that it was important that they write the “feminine stamp” (xxiv) or feminine experience of mountaineering. Histories of women’s mountaineering, for example, Shirley Angell’s history of the women-only Pinnacle Club, Pinnacle Club: A History of Women Climbing, Bill Birkett and Bill Peascod’s 1989 book, Women Climbing: 200 Years of Achievement bring into the public domain a largely hidden history of women’s mountaineering but provide only tantalising glimpses of the feminine mountaineering experience. Drawing on life-writing scholarship, this thesis explores women’s mountaineering from the early nineteenth century to 1960, reading a range of published and non-published life-writings of women mountaineers including autobiographies, letters and diaries to explore the myriad and complex nuances in women’s mountaineering beyond descriptive history. The thesis also draws on wider women’s mountaineering literature in the form of articles published by women mountaineers in the Year Books published by the Ladies’ Alpine Club, the journal of the women-only Pinnacle Club and occasional articles published within other mountaineering publications such as the Alpine Journal. Taking Paradis’ achievement as the historical starting point, my thesis reads women’s mountaineering narratives through a critical lens which explores the feminine experience of mountaineering using discourses of gender and domesticity. I specifically examine how women mountaineers challenged the culturally constructed values informing their role and identity as women and how they variously narrate their experience to write the “feminine stamp” in mountaineering literature. Whilst the term “feminine stamp” might suggest a universality of experience both in women’s mountaineering and in their narratives – and could therefore claim to be representing a form of essentialism – my thesis will follow the work of Alison Stone in suggesting that whilst the women in this thesis have a common gender, their experience of and relationship to mountaineering is individual. As Stone writes, women need to be “reconceived as a specifically non-unified type of social group” (2) in order that their individuality may be represented. However, Stone also points out there are specific historical instances – women’s suffrage for example – which show that “women can still exist as a determinate group, susceptible to collective mobilisation” (25). For that reason, the focus of my thesis ranges from case studies of individual women mountaineers – for example, Paradis, D’Angeville, Gertrude Bell, Dorothy Pilley and others – to an evaluation of the role played by collective initiatives such as les cordées feminines (women-only ropes in mountaineering), mobilised as a result of membership of a community of women mountaineers. My thesis will examine the role of the Ladies’ Alpine Club and Pinnacle Club in enabling and progressing collective developments in women’s mountaineering and fills a gap in existing research studies of women’s mountaineering literature by reading and considering the previously un-researched diaries of Dorothy Pilley alongside collective achievements. These narratives are placed within wider life-writing discourse and specific cultural and historical contexts such as the fin de siècle in order to offer insights into how women transcended their gendered role in order to become mountaineers. The primary focus of this thesis, for reasons of space and focus is on the life-writings of UK and European women mountaineers. This thesis notes the inter-disciplinary and international nature of research into women’s mountaineering in the fields of leisure and sports studies, geography, feminist and women’s studies, sociology, history and literary studies and, where appropriate, draws on this wider literature for comparative purposes.

This thesis aims to provide an examination of texts produced by and about the New Woman of the late-nineteenth century, with specific reference to the trope of self-harm. It aims to explore the connections between the fictional bodies of text in which the New Woman was represented, and the damaged bodies of women who committed self-destructive acts. It examines both the religious frameworks within which Victorian women’s fiction operated, and three specific forms of self-harm which feature across a range of textual artefacts. To this end, the thesis discusses New Woman novels, poems, and short stories as well as newspaper and magazine articles, archival materials, and popular works of art, all of which discuss or display the damaged female body. The scope of this project is limited to New Woman writing produced between 1880 and 1900, although it does consider the ways in which the New Woman built on, or challenged, discourses about self-harm which appear in materials produced during the earlier half of the nineteenth century. This research demonstrates that New Woman writers drew on forms of self-harm such as anorexia, alcoholism, and self-mutilation, to express their frustrations at the contradictory requirements of women endorsed by conventional religion, at a time during which attitudes towards the body were changing. It shows how the female form embodied various Victorian political and social debates, and how it was deployed as a strategic symbol, in writing which sought to disrupt women’s subordinate position within the patriarchal system. Consequently, this research contributes to the fields of psychiatric history, New Woman studies, and more generally the study of Victorian women’s writing, by examining both canonical and critically neglected texts by women alongside non-fictional materials from the period. It explores both fictional acts of self-harm, and textual strategies, which have yet to be examined in New Woman writing, and which are key to understanding her complicated place in the male-oriented publishing environment of the Fin de Siècle.

In Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain, is presented as a troublesome figure whose vengefulness hastens the collapse of Camelot. This characterization is unsurprising in the light of traditional French depictions of Gawain, but it is distinctly at odds with a rival, Anglo-Scottish tradition that depicts him rather differently as a figure of moderation, wise counsel, and courtesy. Indeed, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this version of Gawain was used by a number of romance writers to explore themes of kingship, identity, and regionalism in England and Scotland. This thesis attempts to explain the complexities and contradictions of Gawain’s role in the Middle English and Middle Scots tradition. Chapter one establishes a “northern Gawain type”, drawing on thematic patterns in four northern Gawain romances: The Weddyng of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, The Avowyng of Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawain. Gawain’s popularity in the north, coupled with similarities in characterization and narrative focus, mark him as an important regional figure. This discussion continues in the second chapter, which examines The Awntyrs off Arthure, a poem specifically concerned with Arthurian kingship and imperialism. In Scotland, Gawain is used in romances to explore pertinent contemporary concerns with the recent loss of Scotland’s kings and attitudes towards English expansion. The third chapter considers Gawain’s role in two Scottish romances, particularly, The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawain and Lancelot of the Laik. The final two chapters examine Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. By exploring these narratives in the context of the “northern Gawain type,” these chapters offer new insights into Gawain’s literary significance for late medieval writers. This thesis offers a reconsideration of Gawain’s reputation in late medieval Middle English and Middle Scots literature. It suggests both why he was such a useful figure for the authors of the northern and Scottish romances and why Malory ultimately chose to reject their reading of him and followed instead the more critical and dismissive French tradition. The lasting legacy of Malory’s Gawain has influenced his reputation and representation in post-medieval Arthurian literature. Yet, his popularity in the north of England and Scotland during the late Middle Ages, and his symbolic significance in discussions of governance, make him a character deserving of rehabilitation in the pantheon of Arthurian knighthood.

The primary aim of this thesis is to bring Allan Ramsay (1684-1748) and James Thomson (1700-1748) into close critical contact for the first time and, in so doing, deconstruct the paradigm of opposition which has previously attached to these two contemporaries. The thesis posits that the separation of Ramsay and Thomson has been effected, retrospectively, by the twentieth-century Scottish critical tradition. The narrow, cultural essentialism exhibited by this body of scholarship has been effectively challenged in recent decades by the work of Gerard Carruthers, and revisionary ‘Four Nations’ approaches to late eighteenth-century British literature have done much to reinstate the importance of what were previously viewed as marginal or peripheral literary locations. Ramsay and Thomson, however, have never been fully united in literary and cultural terms. This thesis demonstrates that Ramsay and Thomson shared, not only a chronological context, but also a creative context informed by a reciprocal engagement with the work of the other and posits that the relationship between these two lowland Scottish writers can be conceived of in terms of a sustained mutual gaze. James Thomson remains entrenched within an English literary canon, despite the efforts of Mary Jane Scott to reclaim him for his native country. Conversely, Allan Ramsay remains firmly rooted in his native Scottish soil as the father of the vernacular revival and the epitome of literary and cultural resistance to a supposed English cultural hegemony in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England. It is true that Ramsay’s and Thomson’s creative trajectories exemplify the literary choices and cultural paths available to a Scottish writer in the years immediately following the Union of Parliaments, but to set them in creative opposition as a result of these choices is a critical commonplace which this thesis challenges. Thomson spent the greater part of his literary career in and around London, whilst Ramsay remained in Edinburgh until his death; clearly the corpora of these two writers were conditioned by the locations of their production. Hence, the thematic structure of this thesis relies on the notion of location, both physical and literary. The first two chapters of this thesis, ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘London’, illustrate the urban contexts of both writers; in so doing they suggest that a mutual gaze was sustained, not only between Ramsay and Thomson, but that a similarly reciprocal relationship and network of influence existed between the literary and cultural centres of Edinburgh and London. The third chapter of this thesis, ‘Nation’, traces the fluid and nuanced literary responses to the concept of nation in a period when national and literary boundaries were in a state of flux. The fourth and final chapter of this thesis, ‘Land’, explores the shifting aesthetic landscape of the period and, with an emphasis on mode and genre, demonstrates Ramsay’s and Thomson’s original contribution to an emerging British poetic, elucidated by an extended analysis of their poetry of place.

This thesis examines three key moments in the intersecting histories of Scotland, Ireland and England, and their impact on literature. Chapter one Robert Bruce and the Last King of Ireland: Writing the Irish Invasion, 1315- 1826‘, is split into two parts. Part one, Barbour‘s (other) Bruce‘ focuses on John Barbour‘s The Bruce (1375) and its depiction of the Bruce‘s Irish campaign (1315-1318). It first examines the invasion material from the perspective of the existing Irish and Scottish relationship and their opposition to English authority. It highlights possible political and ideological motivations behind Barbour‘s negative portrait of Edward Bruce - whom Barbour presents as the catalyst for the invasion and the source of its carnage and ultimate failure - and his partisan comparison between Edward and his brother Robert I. It also probes the socio-polticial and ideological background to the Bruce and its depiction of the Irish campaign, in addition to Edward and Robert. It peers behind some of the Bruce‘s most lauded themes such as chivalry, heroism, loyalty, and patriotism, and exposes its militaristic feudal ideology, its propaganda rich rhetoric, and its illusions of freedom‘. Part one concludes with an examination of two of the Irish section‘s most marginalised figures, the Irish and a laundry woman. Part two, Cultural Memories of the Bruce Invasion of Ireland, 1375-1826‘, examines the cultural memory of the Bruce invasion in three literary works from the Medieval, Early Modern and Romantic periods. The first, and by far the most significant memorialisation of the invasion is Barbour‘s Bruce, which is positioned for the first time within the tradition of ars memoriae (art of memory) and present-day cultural memory theories. The Bruce is evaluated as a site of memory and Barbour‘s methods are compared with Icelandic literature of the same period. The recall of the invasion in late sixteenth century Anglo-Irish literature is then considered, specifically Edmund Spenser‘s A View of the State of Ireland, which is viewed in the context of contemporary Ulster politics. The final text to be considered is William Hamilton Drummond‘s Bruce’s Invasion of Ireland (1826). It is argued that Drummond‘s poem offers an alternative Irish version of the invasion; a counter-memory that responds to nineteenth-century British politics, in addition to the controversy surrounding the publication of the Ossian fragments. Chapter two, The Scots in Ulster: Policies, Proposals and Projects, 1551-1575‘, examines the struggle between Irish and Scottish Gaels and the English for dominance in north Ulster, and its impact on England‘s wider colonial ideology, strategy, literature and life writing. Part one entitled Noisy neighbours, 1551-1567‘ covers the deputyships of Sir James Croft, Sir Thomas Radcliffe, and Sir Henry Sidney, and examines English colonial writing during a crucial period when the Scots provoked an increase in militarisation in the region. Part two Devices, Advices, and Descriptions, 1567-1575‘, deals with the relationship between the Scots and Turlough O‘Neill, the influence of the 5th Earl of Argyll, and the rise of Sorley Boy MacDonnell. It proposes that a renewed Gaelic alliance hindered England‘s conquest of Ireland and generated numerous plantation proposals and projects for Ulster. Many of which exhibit a blurring‘ between the documentary and the literary; while all attest to the considerable impact of the Gaelic Scots in both motivating and frustrating various projects for that province, the most prominent of which were undertaken by Sir Thomas Smith in 1571 and Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex in 1573.

It is a little-known fact that several modernists wrote for children: this project will focus on T.S. Eliot‘s Old Possum‟s Book of Practical Cats, James Joyce‘s The Cat and the Devil, Gertrude Stein‘s The World is Round and Virginia Woolf‘s Nurse Lugton‟s Curtain. While not often thought of as a modernist, I contend that Walter de la Mare‘s short stories for children, especially The Lord Fish, take part in this corpus of modernist texts for children. These children‘s stories, while scarcely represented in critical circles, have enjoyed a wide popular audience and have all been translated into French. Modernism is often considered an elitist movement, but these texts can contribute to its reassessment, as they suggest an effort towards inclusivity of audience. The translation of children‘s literature is a relatively new field of study, which builds from descriptive translation studies with what is unique to children‘s literature: its relation to pedagogy and consequent censorship or other tailoring to local knowledge; frequently, the importance of images; the dual audience that many children‘s books have in relating to the adults who will select, buy and potentially perform the texts; and what Puurtinen calls ‗readaloud- ability‘ for many texts. For these texts and their French translations, questions of children‘s relations to place and space are emphasised, and how these are complicated in translation through domestication, foreignisation and other cultural context adaptations. In particular, these modernists actively write against Rousseau‘s notion of the ―innocent‖ boy delighting in the countryside and learning from nature. I examine the international dialogue that takes place in these ideas of childhood moving between France and England, and renegotiated over the span of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This study thus seeks to contribute to British modernist studies, the growing field of the translation of children‘s literature, and children‘s geographies.