In the following pages I have attempted a study of the political activities of an ordinary, member of Parliament during some of the most, eventful years of early party history. Andrew Marvell was not, I think, until the very last years of his life of any very great importance as a politician. In the House of Commons, where Sacheverel, William Coventry, Cavendish and Williams voiced the opinions of their party, Marvell was seldom heard

The principal purpose of this study is to examine a particular group of five English Gawain-poems: Gawain and the Green Knight, The Grene Knight, The Turk and Gawain, and the two versions of the Carl of Carlisle (MS. Porkington 10 and the Percy Folio version) - the 'Enchantment Group' (omitting The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine, also 'Enchantment' poems), in order to bring out their essential thematic unity, and their dependence upon the same basic 'folktale' and Arthurian motifs and upon the central poem of the group, Gawain and the Green Knight. In the examination of these five romances, in Part II, the same structural lay-out and the same motif-headings are used where possible, in order to underline this unity.

Critics of seventeenth-century literature have long accepted that John Dryden was influenced by early-modern scepticism, but no consensus has been reached about which of the many varieties of sceptical ideas from this period inform his work. The early theory that Dryden displayed a predisposition to newly-revived ancient Greek scepticism was persuasively challenged by the claim that he was sceptical only insofar as his early critical writings show strong parallels with the sceptical method of the New Scientists. Subsequent to this, a small number of scholars have formulated new ways of interpreting scepticism in Dryden's poems and plays which are based on the use of literary strategies at the local or textual level rather than on demonstrable affinities with any one philosophically sceptical worldview. Though insightful, the work of these critics remains incomplete, and often considers Dryden in relation to writers who followed him in the eighteenth century when the intellectual climate had significantly changed. Expanding upon this research, this thesis argues that Dryden's scepticism can be identified with a number of sceptical impulses which emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With reference to Dryden's contemporaries, it concentrates on rereading largely canonical texts from across his career in the immediate historical context of their writing, demonstrating, as its primary theme, that Dryden's scepticism was informed by the political and philosophical concerns of the late seventeenth century, and, as its secondary theme, that the nature of Dryden's sceptical insight was bound up with the demands of genre and his ever-changing role as public poet. The thesis begins with an expositional chapter on existing critical responses to Dryden's scepticism. This clarifies the degree to which scepticism was the product of historical and political forces at play in Dryden's work. The second chapter, which focuses on the early part of the 1660s, argues that Dryden's interest in scepticism ostensibly reflects a belief about the value of the scientific mode of speculative inquiry in developing new ideas about literary creation, but that this was underlined by a sense of anxiety about the outcome of post-Restoration Stuart policy. The third chapter, dealing primarily with Dryden's plays, shows that Dryden expresses political anxiety through parallels of his own devising at a time when questions were being asked of the Stuart monarchy, and when political theories of a largely secular kind were beginning to receive serious consideration. The primary theoretical focus of this chapter is the reception of Thomas Hobbes in the late seventeenth century, and the importance of Hobbes's contract theory in Dryden's own political formulations. The fourth chapter evaluates Dryden's religious writings, and finds that Dryden embraces sceptical paradox as a legitimate method of theological argument until his conversion to Catholicism when he adopts a position closer to the fideism of early sixteenth-century sceptics. The fifth chapter explores how sceptical comment in his translations of Lucretius exemplify a new phase in Dryden's career, one in which he begins to renounce his role as a public poet. The subject of renouncing the public role is continued in the sixth chapter, which addresses Dryden's translations from Juvenal and Persius; keeping in mind the tightening of censorship laws, which forced Dryden and writers like him to seek the subterfuge of classical voices in this period, the sixth chapter also shows how the satirical complaints of Juvenal and Persius allowed the poet to express his own discontents about the social and cultural values of Britain after the Revolution of 1688.

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This thesis looks at the poetic use of the autobiographical father figure in the works of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Paul Durran, Michael Longley, John Montague and Derek Mahon

A longstanding critical map which has perpetuated the differences between British and American poetries is currently in the process of being redrawn. In recent years, there has been a marked interest in literary criticism which seeks to explore the rich and complex interplay between the two nations and their respective poetries. Despite this being a necessary dialogue, the contextualisation of women poets in this important field of enquiry has been largely unrecognised. This thesis responds to the problem of female negation by setting up a critical and cultural context which explores the poetic tendencies of nine Anglo-American women poets whose publishing histories span 1913-2006: British-born poets, Mina Loy (1882-1966) and Denise Levertov (1923-1997), and American-born poets, H.D. (1886-1961), Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991), Ruth Fainlight (1931-), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Anne Stevenson (1933-), Anne Rouse (1954-) and Eva Salzman (1961-) The intent of this study is to argue that the intersection of cultural duality and gender lends this poetry by Anglo-American women a particularly dynamic energy which generates a rich fretwork of spatial negotiations. This is primarily achieved through the poets' use of symbols which reflect their preoccupations with living as an outsider who oscillates in and between two places. Often, although not exclusively, metaphors of estrangement are explicitly gendered and signify the search for a female space. The theoretical work of French feminist and poststructuralist, Julia Kristeva and Marxist philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, proposes that the condition of the social outsider can be harmonised within the imaginative space of poetry, thus offering writers the potential to 'change and appropriate' the limitations of the social space in which they find themselves. Especially appealing for expatriate women poets then, the creative writing process precipitates their empowerment, liberation and the opportunity to reimagine a parallel world to inhabit. The concept of space and how it is perceived imaginatively in this range of poetry determines the thematic structure of the thesis. Individual chapters focus upon locations, homes, journeys, bodies and landscapes, and myth. The formation reflects a progression from spaces that are grounded in material conditions, as with locations, the home, and journeys, towards spaces that are highly intimate and abstract, as with bodies and landscapes, and myth. Responding to the limitations of binary discourses that uphold the divide between American and British poetries, as well as to the lack of feminist engagement with cultural discourses, this thesis offers a number of frameworks for reading Anglo-American poetry. While rejecting prescriptive definitions, it endeavours to set up a sufficiently open narrative that can encompass poets dating before the twentieth-century, contemporary poets in the current climate, as well as poets who will continue to complicate the AmericanlBritish axis in the future.

Traditional Blake scholarship has rarely ascribed value to the materiality of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. My on-going PhD project aims to demonstrate the necessity of studying the materiality of Blake’s texts by using an interdisciplinary methodological framework to highlight the pedagogical functions of illuminated printing. Exploring the composition, printing, and distribution of Blake’s prints in a series of focussed micro-histories and paratextual micro-studies has helped the project to identify the various ways in which Blake manipulated his media to educate his readers. In unravelling the pedagogical potential of Blake’s works, the project promotes an understanding of a material medium which has remained largely unexplored in terms of its print culture contexts, revealing how Blake’s unique position as an engraver, artisan, and educator was hinged upon the materiality of his prints.

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a form of autism, a condition which affects communication, imagination and social interaction abilities. As a person with AS, my perspectives on life and its meaning, relationships and the social world are different from those of other people. This project is designed to be twofold – firstly to provide insights into life with AS in a form of literature which people can relate to; and secondly to allow the AS person to be able to see their own condition reflected in an accessible form. This document is intended to be used by those with Asperger syndrome, their parents and families, and professionals who work with them. It reflects on autism in general, the triad of impairments from an Asperger perspective and complications resulting from this condition. It is also an exploration of the world of poetry, the use of form, a variety of metres which were popular at different times, and involving poetic challenges of expressing emotion and feeling. This work goes into themes such as relationships and friendships, sense of time and space, sensory difficulties, growing up as an AS person, obsessional behaviour patterns, communication problems and other AS issues. It is designed to raise awareness of the AS condition and provide support to those who have it, while at the same time being entertaining and accessible to the general population.

The ‘committed’ writer as envisaged by Jean-Paul Sartre was one who used the medium of prose to incite the reader to effect change in the world; according to Sartre, poetry, with its tendency to treat language as an end in itself, could not be committed in this sense. There were, however, numerous poets in late nineteenth-century England who believed otherwise, writing verse intended to advance particular political causes. This thesis examines several of them, concentrating on writers who were committed to varieties of left-wing radicalism, and predominantly inspired by the aesthetics of the Romantic tradition. The Introduction sets out the historical and theoretical context of the thesis, with reference to the twentieth-century arguments of Sartre, Adorno and Bourdieu, which can be traced back to earlier debates on aestheticism. Chapter 1 looks at A.C. Swinburne’s engagement with the Italian republican cause in the poems published as Songs before Sunrise (1871), which exhibit his tendency towards idealised abstraction. Chapter 2 considers William Morris, a pivotal figure in the nascent socialist movement of the 1880s, whose background in writing medievalist narrative verse both shaped and limited his series of Chants for Socialists (1885) and the sequence The Pilgrims of Hope (1885-6). Chapter 3 looks at Edward Carpenter, a socialist writer and campaigner who wrote the long utopian poem Towards Democracy (1883-1904), inspired by Walt Whitman’s vision of homosexual comradeship. Chapter 4 surveys various ‘minor’ versifiers and commentators active in the same socialist milieu as Morris and Carpenter, including those who contributed to the songbook Chants of Labour (1888). Finally, Chapter 5 considers younger fin-de-siècle poets who diverged from the socialists either on grounds of aesthetic philosophy (e.g. Wilde) or political ideology (e.g. Kipling). A brief Afterword reflects on the seemingly diminished prospects for political verse in the twenty-first century.

This thesis is a study of the eighteenth-century editions of the works of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599). Its five chapters are structured chronologically around the major editions of Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–1596). These editions have never been studied, and the principal aim of this thesis is to use bibliographical analysis to establish information about their production. A bibliographical description of each edition is given in an appendix. Each chapter maps the relationships between printers, booksellers, editors, and illustrators, and examines their reasons for publishing Spenser. I trace who owned, or thought they owned, the Spenser copyright, and how they defended it. The issue of copyright was negotiated alongside broader questions of who owned Spenser culturally and politically. He was appropriated to conflicting ends: in the 1710s supporters of the Hanoverian succession used an edition of Spenser to confirm their sense of national identity, whilst in the 1730s the Patriot Opposition used his works in miscellanies, musical performances, illustrations, and landscape gardens to undermine George II’s ministry. These processes turned the literary past into a commodity, and books of Spenser’s poetry became fashionable luxury items. Editors stood to gain from competing to produce the most comprehensive historical biographies, prefaces, notes, and textual collations. Their strategies varied according to whether they considered Spenser’s works to be neoclassical, Gothic, or romantic; I situate their conclusions in the contexts of eighteenth-century literary editing, and show that some current assumptions about Spenser’s texts are founded on myths created by early editors. After 1774 editions of Spenser became more affordable following amendments to copyright law, and in the 1790s they were exported to America; far from creating consensus about how, or even if, he should be read, this only made him more malleable to interpretation, appropriation, and commodification.