The increased availability and circulation of practical writings on medicine in the vernacular in late medieval England resulted in a new cultural lexicon heavily informed by medical learning. This achieved purchase through the blending of a technical, Latinate vocabulary, rooted in a scholarly European medical tradition, with a one informed by Christian practices and ritual. This thesis identifies how medical language provided a constitutive and malleable register that proved amenable to diverse appropriations. A prominent instance of this was the susceptibility of medical knowledge to metaphorical deployment: authors of religious texts could elucidate the abstract theological concepts of sin and salvation by anchoring them in the ailing or diseased body. In another sense, the supreme physiological knowledge which medical learning nominally afforded could provide a means of visualising the soul. The tendency of medical writers to offer normative ideals of the body, as well as of temperament and character, accorded with religious authors’ concerns of the regulation of sinful behaviour. Furthermore, medical language offered literary authors a means both to advance and undermine the idea of a language that could itself be health-inducing. In pursuing the mutually generative interactions between medical, spiritual, moral and literary discourses, this thesis analyses a wide range of late medieval writings: they include medical or other technical writings by John Arderne, Guy de Chauliac and Bartholomaeus Anglicus; literary works by Geoffrey Chaucer and Robert Henryson; mystical works by Richard Rolle and the Book of Margery Kempe; hagiographies and sermons; and monastic rules and customaries. It demonstrates the sweep of themes and concerns that medical discourse could be applied to, including piety, romance, morality, incarceration, charity, satire and theology. It attests to the productive and significant place of medical language in medieval English culture and its constitutive role in the development of English literary language.

This thesis connects the discourses of transatlanticism, erotic communication, women and agency in the nineteenth century. It examines four modes of communication: mesmerism, spiritualism, telegraphism and epistolary correspondence, in relation to discourses of female sexuality and power in Anglo-American literature. The exploration of these modes from a feminist point of view will help re-evaluate the presence of women within nineteenth-century transatlantic communication systems and specifically the representation of female voices within public spaces. The Industrial Revolution and the increase of transportation between Britain and America enabled the emergence of various forms of psychic and written communication that constituted a solid background for gender subversion. Women’s active participation in mesmerism and spiritualism, which prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1830s and late 1840s, was a significant cultural subject that opened the door for unconventional reinterpretations of gender roles within clairvoyant systems of mediation. The description of women’s performative acts during mesmeric and spiritualist practices in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Florence Marryat’s There Is No Death (1891) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Three Spiritualist Novels (1868; 1883; 1887) subverts the gendering of communication and discourse as masculine. Bodily acts of mesmerised women such as gazing and female mediums’ acoustic contact with spirits through the sound effects of table-rapping violate the boundaries between domestic and social spheres and warrant their sexual autonomy. Moving from supernatural to embodied forms of communication, the thesis explores the place of Anglo-American women within nineteenth-century written correspondence such as telegrams and letters, the circulation of which helps acknowledge female desire outside the domestic space and subverts patriarchal spatial structures. With reference to Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), the thesis shows how women act as conduits of their sexual desire and become agents of knowledge exchange via working at telegraph offices or simply writing and posting private letters. In relation to this, the thesis also considers the association between epistolary adestination, desire, flames and textual purity in Dickens and Poe’s fictions of fire. The thesis concludes that women’s interactive presence in nineteenth-century communication systems continues to influence and develop twentieth- and twenty-first-century media for the empowerment of feminine sexual expression against opposing patriarchal voices.

This thesis undertakes an investigation of the female tragic hero, through the engagement of and reflection on intertextual strategies in a range of writings from the classical to the present. Rewritings of female characters became a motif of second-wave feminism, which began in the late 1970s, where intertextual exploration was regarded as a useful feminist tool for revisiting patriarchal constructions of women in literature and other media. In particular, the genre of Tragedy was a key focus for rewriting, the desire to revisit the great tragic female figures of earlier literatures. Beyond this, the application of theories of femininity and feminist theory to female tragic characters provides a lens through which to re-read these characters, as ever-present and ever-evolving stereotypes of female-ness that are still powerful, inspiring and open to rewriting. The thesis first explores key concepts in discussions of Tragedy and a variety of relevant feminist theories. The thesis then proceeds to focus on a particular canonic tragic period of literature – Classical, Religious, and Renaissance, respectively – while discussing specific characters as representative of female figures of the age, alongside later rewritings of them. Through these readings, the thesis seeks to demonstrate how stereotypes of femininity are constructed, and how they may be demystified. The final chapter further engages some of these stereotypes as they have entered popular culture. By attempting to analyse a corpus of texts from differing time periods and cultures, this thesis develops the suggestion that female characters across time and space have been realised through their depiction as human beings striving for their own authorship and scripts, and so rewriting Tragedy in ways that might now be regarded as “postmodern”.

Poets, linguists, ornithologists and musicologists have wrestled with the apparently irreconcilable difference between the language of birds and the human forms that attempt to 'recapture' its 'rapture', in Browning's phrase. My thesis traces an alternative approach that was developing in the eighteenth century, in which the emphasis was on analogies between animal and human language (for example between the nestling learning to sing and the child acquiring speech). Such analogies worked both ways, and were given a variety of social and political, as well as aesthetic, meanings. The thesis explores this double relationship in texts including scientific treatises, works of popular birdlore, poetry, and fiction. The introduction gives an overview of the argument of the thesis and traces the historical origins of the debate about the relation of human language to the language of birds. Chapter 1 discusses the increasingly 'scientific' approaches to birdsong in the late 18th and 19th century, from Daines Barrington's 'Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds' to Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). Chapter 2 looks at the ways in which ideas about social class and education inflected the debate about the origins and nature of language. The remaining three chapters present case-studies drawn from the work of John Clare, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Chapter 3 argues that Clare uses his knowledge of how birds learn . to sing as a way of reflecting on his own experience of' learning' to be a poet. Chapter 4 focuses on the serious comedy of the 'strange companions' in Barnaby Rudge (1841), the talking raven and his 'idiot master' Barnaby. The final chapter opens with the scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) in which Tess is asked to 'whistle' to Mrs D'Urberville's bullfinches, and concludes with a close reading of some of Hardy's poems about birds and birdsong.

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This thesis seeks to explore the figure of the vampire in its specific historical contexts throughout the nineteenth century. It is an in-depth look at the social and cultural events which inspired literary appearances of the vampire from its oral beginnings in the eighteenth century and through each decade of the nineteenth century. It discusses how specific historical events and personal experiences of the authors of vampire fiction might have impacted the presentation of the vampire in those decades. It also details the shifting attributes of what constitutes a vampire, and how the motif is transmitted in terms of literary format. Broadly, it seeks to demonstrate that there is no set vampire canon, and no singular vampire figure. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to challenge received notions about the vampire, to chart its transformations, and thereby to attend to the complexity of a motif being constantly reworked in new historical and cultural contexts.

This thesis exploits the tendency within the early modern period for intellectual eclecticism in order to understand how educated renaissance figures understood the nature of knowledge. Through a detailed study of how both John Donne and John Milton interpreted, acknowledged, and assimilated the understanding gained through their scientific reading and interests into their artistic, literary, and philosophical writings, this thesis outlines a variety of the period’s reflections on the nature of knowledge. Amongst these philosophies, questions of the permissibility of gaining access to information, hierarchical relationships between the knowledge accessed through emergent scientific practices and established literary traditions, and the influence of modern technology upon the quality (and even the trustworthiness) of learning gathered through such endeavours act to establish a collection of academic strategies which early modern intellectuals used to help them navigate the rapidly expanding landscape of knowledge. In pursuing the areas outlined above, the thesis uses an innovative chronological methodology which – whilst fairly common amongst Milton studies – is unusual in the field of Donne scholarship. The predominantly chronological methodology offers several benefits to the thesis. Notably, it allows for the progress and development of ideas over the lives of both writers to be examined. Furthermore, this methodology causes texts to be read according to their merit rather than their arbitrarily assigned ‘historical importance’. Thus, the thesis offers new and detailed readings of texts covering the breadth of Donne and Milton’s respective corpuses selected for their value to the thesis’s remit. It is for this reason that the thesis offers extensive readings of not only major canonical works such as Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, ‘The First Anniversary’, and Donne’s Sermons but also affords the same level of attention to Ignatius His Conclave, and Milton’s Commonplace Book. The chronological methodology also causes a heightened focus upon intertextual readings within the thesis – with prose and poetry considered alongside each other so as to produce a richer and fuller understanding of the respective authors’ canons that is not limited by genre. The thesis, ultimately, offers two intersecting case studies of educated individuals which – in some areas – offer a broader understanding of how the emergence of new areas of knowledge and new classifications within the panorama of human learning were interpreted, managed, and accommodated.

Control is at the heart of issues surrounding the use of a digital artefact. In one sense, digitisation democratises knowledge; it makes that knowledge freely available to a large audience irrespective of who the audience member is, their education or place in the social hierarchy. In spite of this perceived egalitarianism, there are still limits in place; the material contained within those digital artefacts is still, for the large part, unintelligible to the layman, and the information imparted still chosen by an elite. This thesis attempts to explore several different concepts: the idea of cultural capital as suggested by Bourdieu, and whether the digitisation of cultural artefacts reinforces the cultural divide or emancipates knowledge; the Derridean notion of the archivist as both prison warden and creator of cultural value, with the manuscript captured in a form of house arrest: and considers Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum and applies it to the digital artefact, questioning whether digitisation erodes our understanding of the real to such an extent that we destroy it. All this is done through the framework of digitisation of the Hengwrt Chaucer, MS Peniarth 392D, possibly the oldest extant version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, held at Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth, and discussions surrounding the use of social media to enhance the Library’s exhibition of their cultural artefacts. Ultimately, I hope to establish whether the digital has the potential to undermine the system, to truly emancipate knowledge from its theoretical and cultural restraints. To do this I will be examining the physical Hengwrt (MS Peniarth 392D) as well as its digital counterpart. I have chosen to identify and include comment upon the relevant literature in Chapters 1 and 2 of this thesis, and to incorporate it into the body of the work rather than having the review as a defined element of the thesis. I have done this because the synthesis of primary, secondary and tertiary literature I have employed covers a broad area and, where it has been collated for the purposes of other studies and research (in the case of Bourdieu, for example, his work consisted of qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to represent his discussion of habitus and cultural capita) I can present an overview of mixed sets of data over several different fields of research (Chaucerian research, for example, in juxtaposition with Bourdieuian theories of cultural capital and Baudrillard’s conception of the death of the real). Furthermore, I felt it was important to include a wide range of secondary literature in a range of fields as this represents a key element in data gathering and, in the case of a field such as cultural value, allows for the fact that my primary evidence might not be deemed adequately weighty to support the weight of my conjecture.

This thesis is an examination of contemporary exilic Palestinian life writing in English. Attentive to the ongoing nature of Palestinian dispossession since 1948, it focuses on how exile is narrated and the ways in which it informs models of selfhood within a context of conflict and loss. This involves adopting a framework of settler colonialism in order to understand the conflict. Broadly speaking, the thesis conceives of Palestinian life writing as a form of testimony posing an urgent and necessary counternarrative to the hegemony of the Israeli discourse on Palestine/Israel. The thesis examines life writing by different generations of Palestinians, from those who experienced the Nakba of 1948, to those born as second-generation Palestinians in their parents' adopted homelands. It does not limit itself to examining the work of those at a geographical distance from Palestine but also looks at narratives by those who live, or have lived, under Israeli occupation. This has required paying particular attention to the difference between 'internal' and 'external' exile. Recognising that Palestinians who live in Palestine/Israel still sometimes articulate their experience as a form of exiling is an integral aspect of this research. The thesis argues that while the ongoing conflict impacts the identity formation and experiences of all the writers under consideration, nonetheless each author is inevitably guided by distinct geographies, temporalities, imaginings and frames of reference, which ultimately determine their relationship to Palestine and what it means to consider themselves exiled. I am, therefore, particularly mindful of the plurality of exilic experience, even while ideas of communality are still hugely important. The thesis consists of three author-led chapters - on Edward Said, Ghada Karmi and Rema Hammami - followed by a final chapter on anthologised life writing, which looks at the work of seven authors. Raising questions of form and how one deals with both the commonality and complexity of exile, this final chapter aims to show recent developments in English-language Palestinian life writing. By demonstrating the distinct ways in which exiled Palestinians relate to Palestine/Israel, this thesis seeks to contribute in particular towards two areas of study that have, for the most part, failed to engage substantially enough with Palestine (or, indeed, with each other): postcolonial and auto/biography studies. These subfields of cultural criticism and their wealth of scholarship therefore provide the necessary tools for this research, but they are also held to account for the relative lack of attention paid to Palestine and the extant nature of the conflict. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that exilic Palestinian life writing sheds its own light on matters of great import to postcolonial and auto/biography studies - matters such as statelessness, belonging, testimony, selfhood and self- representation - and that there are intersecting aesthetic and ethical reasons for ensuring the visibility of Palestine within these areas of study.

A literary text subjectively fictionalizes and narrates one dimension of the total structure of an epoch; it reveals the reciprocal interplay between personal experiences and historical formations through the aesthetic incarnation of a unique personal perspective on the real that is also derived from a social position and origin in relation to a social structure. In order to analyse economic, cultural and political histories in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century mediated through the represented experiences of characters in fictions of the post-war period, this dissertation focusses on the literary works of four different post-war authors, Alan Sillitoe, Sam Selvon, Doris Lessing and James Kelman. Each of these writers depicts a wide range of social, cultural and political circumstances and interactions in their special historical modes in order to expose specific dimensions out of the totality of real life through the depiction of the multifaceted and subjective experiences of fictional characters. Alan Sillitoe’s literary works literalize the class antagonism constructed upon the dichotomy of ‘them’ and ‘us’ through the inner and outer conflicts of the ‘white’ working-class characters and portray the socio-historical reality of class consciousness and its emergence as part of the particular and complex historical conditions pertaining in the UK; Sam Selvon’s novels provide a different interpretation of migrant-ness and displacement and fictionalize the poverty and misery of his ‘black’ working-class characters in relation to the mass migration flows facilitated by the Nationality Act of 1948; James Kelman portrays and mediates the disintegrating and alienating impacts of post-industrial capitalism upon the Scottish working-class characters, reveals the victimization process of the Scottish working-class characters by governmental authorities and bureaucracy, and adds a third dimension to the discussion centred around race, nationality and class; Doris Lessing’s fiction helps articulate the discussions in the UK regarding the rejection of the dominant orthodoxy in the Labour Party and of the legacy of Stalinism and the employment of a range of reforms on issues like gender, sexuality and civil rights during the formation of the New Left. This dissertation mainly argues that class still matters and that, if it is to be adequately demonstrated, there is, therefore, a strong argument for a return to the writings of Karl Marx, to the Marxist concept of alienation, and to Marxist economics rather than simply drawing on the tradition of Marxist aesthetics – the most pervasive way in which Marxism has entered literary criticism. In this context, I attempt to justify the still valid ‘lessons’ of Marxism’s historically concrete theoretical approach as well as Marxism’s still valid historical power. I hope to reveal Marxism’s distinctive relevance to the process of estrangement, atomization and reification in post-war society in order as well to offer a refutation of the current standard criticisms and dismissals of Marxism. This dissertation, focusing on prominent new class approaches as well as theoretical studies and debates on race and ethnicity in Marxist literature, will frame an analysis through an approach to the question of estrangement. The overall aim is to reconceptualise the broader economic, cultural and social framework of the processes of alienation and of escape mechanisms employed by the individual as defence mechanisms in capitalist cultures. Over the course of the study, it will also be suggested that the concept of identity should be taken into account in a more radically intersectional manner and that one-dimensional postmodern identity politics is unable to give a materialistic articulation of poverty and subordination within the larger context of global economics. The thesis develops an anti-establishment, egalitarian and emancipatory framework in reading its authors: one which might also be implemented as part of a movement that aims to critique, resist and overthrow injustice and oppression.