This thesis explores the phenomenon of poetry in British Sign Language. Whilst previous scholars have examined the form from linguistic and literary perspectives, no work has yet fully addressed the unique visual properties of British Sign Language as it is exploited creatively. This study situates current understandings of sign language poetry, tracing the influences of ocularcentrism and logo centrism on the discipline of deaf studies. 'Sign language poetry' is then recontextualised through the phenomenology ofMerleau-Ponty and Derridean grammatology to emerge as Signart - the performed and performative, visual and embodied artform of sign language communities. In addition to examining the theoretical frameworks through which academic, literary and artistic institutions might perceive and encounter it, Signart is explored through interviews with Signartists, their audiences, and those who have not previously been exposed to Signart. A pilot translation of a Signartwork uncovers the significance of image in the form and leads to the adoption of a/r/tography as 'blurred' research method involving art practices, research and translation. A collective of visual artists is established to examine image in a core sample of four Signartworks, and further data is collected through two public events staged at the Royal West of England Academy. The results of these investigations suggest Signart as not only blended acts of literature and drawing (here called illumination), but also of gesture-dance, compositional rhythm and cinematic properties which effect a social SCUlpture of deafhood within signing communities. The blend of artforms within Signart invites comparison with the concerns of the modernist project; with ideas of synthesis, of synaesthesia and particularly of Gesamtkunstwerk. To illustrate the relevance of these concepts to an expanded understanding of Signart, the thesis draws on art epistemology and the ideas and works of a number of modernist and post-modernist artists - notably Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys.

This thesis explores the essentially composite nature of early modern printed books, and how the material configurations of individual volumes were used for a variety of literary ends. It contends that modern scholarship on early modern printed poetry has focused on individual texts, and has largely overlooked the tendency of books in this period to gather more than one major text in a single volume. This thesis aims to recover the creative design exercised by the poets, editors, and publishers who selected and arranged multiple works in one book. It argues that texts presented in a shared material context present readers with the opportunity to read between the poems (thematically, formally, narratively, etc.), and describes this phenomenon as ‘material intertextuality’. By reading early modern collections of poetry in this way, it proposes specific new readings of a number of canonical authors – George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Samuel Daniel – as well as providing a methodology for reading other writers in this period. Reading the text within the context of the book has a number of ramifications for the study of early modern literature more generally, including recovering an early modern structural and organisational imagination, challenging canonical boundaries (by attending to the multiple authorship of many texts), revitalising the study of ‘minor’ works by major literary figures, and informing editorial practice in modern editions of these texts.

Few post-war Anglophone poets have constructed an intellectual hinterland as rich and problematic as Geoffrey Hill. This thesis examines one crucial strand of his thought: the deeply-implicated, yet uneasy imbrication of poetry and theology, style and faith. In the essay ‘Language, Suffering, and Silence’, Hill proposes ‘a theology of language’, while in the preface to his 2003 collection of essays Style and Faith, he insists that with exemplary writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘style is faith’. Finally, in ‘Eros in F.H. Bradley and T.S. Eliot’, Hill searchingly touches on the central problem in considering art in relation to faith: ‘the fundamental dilemma of the poetic craft [is] that it is simultaneously an imitation of the divine fiat and an act of enormous human self-will.’ This thesis proposes that such a ‘fundamental dilemma’, while a source of anxiety for Hill’s post-Eliotic poetics, energises and enriches his poetry. I argue that Hill’s ‘theology of language’ is derived from two radically-opposed intellectual traditions: one lineage from the philological diligence of the English Reformation, the other from the apotheosis of style in the post-Romantic poetics of individuals such as Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats. I situate Hill’s thoughts on the relationship of poetry to religious faith in terms of his intellectual and aesthetic engagements with literary precursors: John Donne, John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W.B. Yeats.

What You Brought with You is a collection of free verse poems accompanied by a contextualising exegesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of English (Creative Writing) at the University of Leicester. The poems in the collection seek to examine familiar subjects through a humorous, sideways glance at the situation. They aim to approach the material with a light touch. Each poem attempts to reveal quirky and interesting elements in ordinariness. Employing quotidian subject matter, content and speech results in accessible, relevant poetry that attempts to examine social mores, behaviour and ideas. Following on from the collection the exegesis is divided into four chapters. The guiding democratic principles of accessibility and specificity permeate the entire text. The first chapter examines the technical role of poetic closure in the successful delivery of a poem. By likening the poem to a joke, the chapter argues that the all-important poetic payoff is achieved through careful setup. The second chapter focuses on content within the poems and looks at on the role of ekphrasis both as an inspiration for particular poems within the collection and in the development of the wider poetic. Building on the tradition of utilising life experience as art material, this chapter examines the fundamental importance of one’s personal involvement in reality in the process of shaping poetic intentions. The third chapter explores the particular use of tangible objects within the poems, and examines the disposable and ordinary nature of these articles and finds a triangular link between ideas, people and objects. The fourth chapter looks at quotidian speech and notes how the poems are structured along familiar speech patterns and how these patterns influence the content, sound and visual appearance of the poems. The exegesis concludes that these technical and content-based decisions are fundamental ingredients in the creation of a culturally relevant dialogical poetry.

This dissertation is about Milton’s moral vision of the passions in a century that thought passions were the difference between a free body and a materially determined body, justified knowledge and error, paradise and hell – in short, the difference between a virtuous life and an enslaved soul. In what has been called an ‘affective turn’ within literary studies, Passions on Trial adds to the growing body of scholarship characterised by a fascination with early modern agency, passions, senses, humours, and the body, and proposes that the next turn points towards ethics. My dissertation contributes to the field of knowledge by providing the first full-length study of Milton’s thinking on the passions throughout his life. It argues that seventeenth-century passions help develop Milton’s concepts of matter and knowledge, agency, and ethics.

This thesis presents, in Part One, fifty poems in an unpublished collection entitled Hold Your Breath and, in Part Two, close readings of four poems published in Louis MacNeice’s final collection The Burning Perch. The introduction to Part Two provides a detailed analysis of particular aspects of MacNeice’s life and work that have informed the close readings of his poems, with special attention to his work in radio. This study of poems from his final collection will establish that, far from being detrimental as some commentators have argued, his radio work at the BBC had a positive influence on his poetry. Rather than acting in opposition, his work at the BBC and his writing of poetry benefited creatively from each other. By resisting any temptation to ‘pigeon-hole’ his work, and reading the poems with reference to the wider contexts in which he wrote, it is possible to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of MacNeice’s work and his ability to extend boundaries. The readings are a personal response which recognises what MacNeice himself would have regarded as the ‘impure’ nature of the poems. The title of the collection could serve as the title for both parts of the thesis, as it can be taken to express both an awareness of the fragility of life and the sense of excitement and anticipation that such an awareness brings to living. In essence it is this awareness that is explored in both the collection and the commentary.

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This study considers marginal modernist writers' negotiations of counter-currents in political thought, especially in terms of literary and political strikes, moments at which the minor collective consolidates. Their theories of what democracy might mean to the twentieth century can be seen as important in a reinterpretation of the moment of modernism. The writers explored are neither reactionary nor apathetic, but imbricated in a cultural nexus that incorporates mainstream and radical currents, and that cannot be delineated by national or international categories. Their figuration of collectives and their fashioning of political agency are particularly relevant to considerations of the individual artist-intellectual and the engaged political activist, and the poems, plays and other discursive writings explored here respond to issues of commitment and the radical form in which that commitment might be expressed. By focusing on close readings of British poetry (and other discursive forms) written in the period 1914-1939, I read minor modernist literature's socially real content as being expressive of a modernist dialectic which takes experimental literary form as a technique to represent the contradictions of modern society. Each chapter is historically embedded in the context of the work, taking the form of four case studies analysing the flashpoints in the history of the inter-war period. These chapters centre on writers who could be considered as part of a minor Anglo-American modernist continuum, who are set in dialogue with the European avant-garde. Chapter one focuses on John Rodker and Mary Butts, writing in the context of pacifist debates and the state of exception during the First World War. Chapter two, on Mina Loy, considers her manifesto style in relation to post-war constructions of democracy, particularly in its implications for poetic subjectivity. Chapter three, on Hugh MacDiarmid and Edgell Rickword, isolates the General Strike of 1926 as a high-point of British historical radicalism, yet to be considered as a major topic of British literary engagements. The British Surrealist movement of the 1930s constitutes the focus of chapter four, with writers such as Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings and David Gascoyne central to an analysis of representational poetic strategies in terms of their access to and influence on political and social reality. My conclusion is a kind of coda to the concepts of social realism latent in much of this work, bringing the study into the contemporary by way of an analysis of experimental form and the socially real in contemporary poetry of the British Poetry Revival, considering work by Andrew Crozier, Roy Fisher and Barry MacSweeney.

This dissertation demonstrates some of the interconnections for T.S.Eliot between poetry, philosophy and drama. Drawing on a range of material from throughout his career including Inventions of the March Hare, the argument focuses on Eliot's verse up to 1922, paying paiticular attention to his gravitation towards the Jacobethan drama. Critics have often stressed that Eliot's writing places an emphasis on 'impersonality'. This disse1tation shows how this well-known notion in Eliot's work might be re-examined, arguing that a dramatic exchange might be described as impersonal, not because it is without personal emotion, but because it is interpersonal, taking place between persons, between 'points of view'. A shmt preface at the outset discusses the senses of the 'dramatic' and the 'theatrical'; it also outlines relevant questions surrounding the practice of allusion in Eliot's poetry. Thereafter, the work is divided into five chapters, with some concluding remarks. Chapter One argues for a reconsideration of the senses of impersonality in relation to the dramatic and the theatrical. It opens with a discussion of Eliot's early piece on Hamlet. Next, the senses of the word 'impersonality' are examined: 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is discussed; critical accounts of Eliot and impersonality are considered. The third section sets Eliot's work among other, contemporary accounts of theatrical impersonality, in paiticular, performances and performers. The chapter concludes by addressing some of the psychological contexts surrounding the words 'impersonal' and 'depersonalization', and compares these to the fascination in Eliot's work with dramatic doubleness. Chapter Two addresses the relations between Eliot's academic background in philosophy and his subsequent interest in plays. The first section discusses the essay on 'Ben Jonson', and its interest in 'figures' and their 'worlds'. Next, F. H. Bradley's theory of judgement is considered in detail. The final section analyses Eliot's disse1tation on Bradley, and shows how this philosophical background influenced his interest in dramatic form. Chapter Three consists of an account of Eliot's beginnings as a poet. It opens with a discussion of Inventions of the March Hare, and outlines the compound influence of the Jacobethan drama and Laforgue on these early poems. The second section addresses aspects of the emergence of vers fibre. It considers both French and Anglo-American contexts, contrasting these with Eliot's senses of the dramatic and the impersonal. The final section explores the allusions to Jacobethan plays in Eliot's own remarks on vers libre, and discusses their practical implications through 'Gerontion'. Chapter Four examines an intense high-cultural enthusiasm for puppetry, and sets Eliot's verse against this background. It opens with an account of the theatrical vogue for marionettes, and discusses the theory and practice of monodrama. The chapter then considers levity and seriousness in 'Sweeney Erect', and concludes with a discussion of the dramatic and the theatrical in 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales'. The final chapter explores the dramatic and the theatrical in The Waste Land. The first section . analyses the representations of dramatic voices, exploring impersonation, the histrionic, and the word 'personage' . The second part examines the drafts of 'A Game of Chess' and considers several of the intricate allusions to The Duchess of Malji, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Ending with an example from Eliot's verse outside of this patticular chronological frame, the concluding remarks consider how the argument of the disse1tation might be expanded.

This thesis offers a new reading of Christina Rossetti’s poetic texts which situates them within the context of liminality. I define liminality here as a site of ambiguity, change and unfulfilment between two states, whilst emphasising its potential for transformation and transgression. I examine multiple narratives – personal and communal, linear and cyclical, spatial and temporal – which emerge from Rossetti’s complex texts, and highlight two major approaches used: layering and silencing. The range of works I analyse includes both famous and lesser known poems, secular and spiritual writing, from “Winter: My Secret” (1857) and “Goblin Market” (1859) to “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children” (1865) and ““Resurgam” (1883). With this wide range, I demonstrate that similar approaches are used throughout Rossetti’s writing from her earliest poems to her later work. I begin the thesis with a focus on the fragmentation of the poetic self into observer and observed and examine the power acquired by the speakers/protagonists through the distance and seclusion of the liminal space. This enables the liminal space to shape a new identity for the speakers/protagonists. In Rossetti’s poetry, the liminal personae become defined by the space they inhabit, or are trapped in, on visual, physical, psychological and sound levels. This positioning helps them to acquire (or re-gain) personal history, memory and a voice. I proceed to explore the conflict between the seen and the unseen, revelation and illusion, in Rossetti’s work, paralleling this with photographic experiments by Lady Hawarden. This enables me to trace the use of the threshold in both poetic and visual languages. Rossetti’s speakers are unable to cross this threshold yet they still struggle to gain control over the outside world. From visual explorations I move on to consideration of sound and suggest that rhythm and rhyme function in the same way as Rossetti’s use of tropes of sight/deprivation of sight. Rossetti introduces rhythmical lapses and repetitive constructions as a means of controlling and shaping reality. Sound repetition subverts our expectations, while sound disruptions create negative spaces which serve as markers of the apocalyptic and the threshold. This idea of negative space is closely linked to the ideas of absence and unfulfilment and is pivotal in understanding Rossetti’s poetry. I argue that Rossetti’s theology is based on negation and that this is extended to her secular poems as well. Christina Rossetti’s poems are characterised by oppositions of absence and exuberant presence on all textual levels. In the final part of my thesis, I examine the transformation of the speaker’s/narrator’s self. I read the ideas of unfulfilment against the self-recognition of the speakers and show their inner splits and subsequent alienation. In this way, unnaming and silencing work as ways of defining the boundaries of the self through negation.