This thesis approaches the poetry and devotional prose of Christina Rossetti from a new angle, examining the possibility that her work may demonstrate the influence of Gothic literature, which Rossetti read during childhood and in her early career as a poet. Though both during her lifetime and in more recent critical studies, her work has been considered mostly with regard to her Tractarian faith and her gender, this thesis will argue that Rossetti's work is preoccupied with Gothic, often in unexpected ways. This examination of Rossetti's Work in the light of Gothic both complements and augments, rather than superseding, criticism which examines her work from theological or feminist viewpoints. This study approaches Gothic as a fractured genre, which manifests an assortment of tropes, motifs and styles which have come to be identified by the general term of Gothic. To read Rossetti's work as fractured Gothic opens up a new perspective, one which situates her Work in a different milieu, and which is significant for the study of Rossetti's work, but which also provides a different way of reading Gothic. This thesis engages with recent criticism of Rossetti as well as with work on Gothic, examining aspects of Rossetti's work which were previously neglected, particularly in a sustained consideration of poetry as a vehicle for Gothic. To read Rossetti's poetry as Gothic raises and examines issues that have been overlooked, as well as opening up works by Rossetti that remain largely neglected. The Work of Christina Rossetti raises important questions about the relationship between Gothic and Christianity which this thesis will explore.

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The thesis represents the first critical edition of Ford Madox Ford's first volume of poems, The Questions at the Well (1893), accumulating all relevant bibliographical material and providing an original methodology for the editing of literary texts. A long prefatory essay discusses the theory, practice and paradoxes of cutting-edge textual editing, e.g. types of intention, 'intentional error', authorial and editorial revision, forms of censorship, the 'ideal' text, 'final version', 'last version' and 'separate work', 'textual primitivism', hypertext, and New Historicism and the 'socialization' of texts. This essay provides the theoretical basis for the editorial procedure I have created, which rests on taking as reading text the first printed version, including probable errors (authorial or otherwise), and to use an extensive critical apparatus to register textual variants, to discuss cruces in the copy-text and to supply explanatory notes. The thesis also supplies details of the variant states in which the poems appeared, a 'Bibliography of Unpublished Poems', an 'Index of Titles' and an 'Index of First Lines'. This edition is the foundation for a larger project: the Complete Poems.

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