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This thesis addresses an area which has been neglected within the predominantly secular emphasis of post nineteenth-century Romantic scholarship: the impact of religious revivalism on literary Romanticism. It argues that the affective culture of Methodist evangelism actually anticipated literary Romanticism in its commitment to a religion and a language 'of the heart' . My study considers the stylistic and ideological affinity between some Methodist and 'Romantic' writing from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth- century, with specific reference to the culture of 'enthusiasm'. I explain how enthusiasm is identified with both religious and creative inspiration, but consider the problematic implications of this association. The problem is centred in enthusiasm's historical identification with religious fanaticism, and thus with subversive challenge and excess. My thesis discusses the acute embarrassment which this association generated for the Wesleyan Methodist leadership, and for some prominent Romantic writers. I consider how this embarrassment was manifested, within a literary context, in strenuous efforts to distinguish a respectable, genuine inspiration from its dangerous or spurious equivalent. I argue that the ambivalent feelings aroused by religious enthusiasm reflect a persistent discomfort with its plebeian and feminine associations. My study explores the various stylistic strategies employed by John and Charles Wesley, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt, to distance themselves from vulgar and insincere religious zeal while remaining committed to the affective precepts which inspired their work and writing. This involves examining affinities in the literary theory and practice of John Wesley and Wordsworth, and Hazlitt's implicit distinction between 'gusto' and enthusiasm. I provide an analytical balance between the production and reception of key texts, including Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion. Close stylistic analysis demonstrates how the writers' language reveals contradictory allegiances to rational precepts and the ardent impulses of a 'religious' inspiration.

This thesis examines literary appropriations of the Virgin Mary in the early modem period to argue that she continued to occupy the early modern imagination. The Virgin Mary operates as a lieu de memoire, recalling the Catholic medieval past, but she was refashioned in new terms in the early modern period to ruminate on issues such as mnemonic prayer, material spirituality, motherhood and breastfeeding, female voice, appropriate grief and female authority. By reading a variety of genres, written by both men and women, Protestant and Catholic, from across the period, the thesis argues for the Virgin's sustained relevance. It demonstrates how the Virgin was contested and adapted for various ideological ends. often against the customary religious and gendered understandings of her significance. The Virgin Mary’s body is central to literary appropriations and the thesis argues that Marian imagery retained potency, relevancy and power precisely because of the figure's controversial femininity and her bodily status as virgin mother

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The thesis aims to produce a reconsideration of the queer spaces articulated in 1980s and 1990s literary criticism through the corporealising theory of gender and sexuality in the recent development of Australian material feminism and Rita Felski‟s idea of transient time. It particularly focuses on interpretations of transgender characters in critical readings of Renaissance drama and contemporary fiction. The academic fields investigated are thus late twentieth-century Renaissance criticism of gender and sexuality, late twentieth-century queer interpretations of transgenderism and transgender characters in contemporary literature, contemporary transgender studies and material feminist theory. Chapter 1 introduces a queer space articulated by discourses of gender and sexuality in 1980s and 1990s criticism of Renaissance drama. It concludes that the historical methodology of the critics is flawed and that the idea of Renaissance queerness is built as a contrast to late twentieth-century queerness. Chapter 2 is a reconsideration of the Renaissance anatomical sources used by the canonical critics introduced in the previous chapter. It establishes that the queer idea of sex and gender developed through these should rather be read in light of the more corporeal Renaissance discourse of monstrosity. Chapter 3 reconsiders the transgender characters in Shakespeare‟s Twelfth Night and As You Like It and introduces a reading of Middleton and Dekker‟s The Roaring Girl from a point of view that introduces Renaissance sexual monstrosity as a formation of corporealised though flexible gender subjectivity. Chapter 4 introduces a late twentieth-century queer space partly articulated in relation to the Renaissance queer space. It critiques the theoretical foundations of late twentieth-century queer theory, introducing transgender responses to „queering‟ readings of transgender bodies, as well as queer theorists‟ own attempts to narrativise themselves as points of incoherence in Butler‟s model and introduces a corporealising material feminist perspective of gender subjectivity as a more accommodating alternative. Chapter 5 reconsiders queer readings of transgender characters in Angela Carter‟s The Passion of New Eve. It concludes that the novel has been evaluated from a queer perspective and that it offers a more interesting comment on sex and gender if read from a material feminist point of view. Chapter 6 discusses John Cameron Mitchell‟s Hedwig and the Angry Inch as one transgender narrative that has been critiqued by transgender academia and Gore Vidal‟s Myra Breckinridge as a transgender narrative that has been approved. It analyses and critiques the reasons for the texts‟ reception and formulates a new poetics of corporeal gender based on the idea of nomadic gender subjectivity developed in the works of the Australian school of material feminists. The thesis finally exchanges a queer reading of transgender characters for a nomadic corporeal reading that better accommodates the historical discourses surrounding the Renaissance material, the literary content of the contemporary fiction, and the idea of transgender identity as it is considered in transgender studies.