Robert Pollok’s The Course of Time was one of the best-selling long poems of the nineteenth century, outstripping works by much better known contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. Yet today, Pollok and his poem are almost entirely forgotten by scholars and general readers alike. This thesis explores the factors behind the poem’s enormous, decades-long popularity and its later sudden decline, arguing that neither can be understood without a recognition of the poem’s distinctiveness as a Romantic-era Miltonic theodicy written from an evangelical Scottish Calvinist perspective. In contrast with most of his Romantic peers, Pollok used the Miltonic model to defend, rather than to challenge or reinterpret, traditional Christian doctrines under siege in the early nineteenth century, especially biblical authority, final judgment, heaven, and hell. As the first comprehensive examination and close reading of The Course of Time in the modern era, this study begins with an exploration of Milton’s significance for the British Romantics as a whole and compares that with his peculiar importance for Pollok, which lies primarily in the theodicean model of Paradise Lost and Milton’s embodiment of the ideal of the Christian poet. Next, the study considers three figures contemporary with Pollok whose influence may have been decisive for The Course of Time: Lord Byron, whose short lyric “Darkness” inspired Pollok’s poem and whose religious skepticism Pollok sought to challenge; theologian John Dick, who provided a theological framework and polemical stance that Pollok may have adopted; and apocalyptic Scots preacher Edward Irving, who called for a new Milton to affirm biblical understandings of judgment in an epic poem, and who did so shortly before Pollok began The Course of Time. Following, I undertake a close reading of the poem to investigate its larger didactic aims and performance as a “sermon in verse” intended to offer cautionary examples to its readership. The final chapter examines the poem’s reception history through reviews, analyses, and commentaries and considers the reasons behind its dramatic rise to popularity and precipitous decline and near-disappearance decades later, finding both rooted in its deep religiosity and distinctive identity as a traditional Miltonic theodicy in the Romantic age. A comprehensive examination of the poem and its history thus provides valuable insights into the changing relationship between religion and wider culture in the nineteenth century, the uses of literature as a vehicle for theological content and instruction, and the important and often overlooked role that religion played in Scottish Romantic literature.

This thesis focuses on the genre of libretto, the sung words for music theatre. The “little book” which accompanies every operatic performance is not just an extended program note to the spectacle, but in fact a substantial literary form in its own right. However, despite the immense influence of Wagner, the output from librettists in an operatic collaboration, has been serious ignored; indeed in opera the aesthetic function of language is frequently diminished and foreshortened, because it is often re-directed by and within the music. The result is that librettists are often seen as offering words to be “decomposed” by composers in the process of operatic collaboration. Opera, in the English language, finally achieved its rightful status, alongside its European counterparts, during the second half of the twentieth century. The thesis is intended to encompass something of the vast diversity of this genre and discusses a number of individual works as constituting legitimate literary artefacts in their own right. There will be five chapters featured in the thesis and each chapter is devoting to a specific theme.

This study is intended as a dialogue between literature and theology, utilizing selected works of the playwright and novelist, Henry Fielding (1707-54). While historical studies of Fielding have clearly yielded much of importance, a broader and less deterministic assessment concerning the latent ambivalences of this, one of the earliest novelists, has yet to be explored. Such an assessment has implications for the current relationship between, and the separate study of, literature and theology. The methodology is informed by an awareness of human frailty (what Fielding described as HUMAN NATURE) and centres upon the use of a specific interpretative tool that I call misplacement. By this, I mean the continuous parting with the ineffable – the perpetual recognition that, in writing, there is always a sense of the other, be that an alternative path not taken, the nagging sense of the numinous, or the coming to terms with the ludicrous nature of the human condition. Such fragile, comedic alterity provides a weak metaphysical root which is shared by both literature and theology. To illustrate the effects of such misplacement, this thesis sets the novels of Henry Fielding alongside works of contemporary philosophical theology such as the post onto-theological critique of Gianni Vattimo and John Caputo, as well as alongside postmodern works of fiction, such as those of Vonnegut and Calvino. In so doing, common critical zones such as epistemology, ethics, mimesis, canonicity, and revelation are investigated. The result of this analysis is that, in all these areas, the novel form, in Fielding’s hands, displays a powerful comic resonance with a theology which seeks to move beyond a strictly deterministic approach. Thus, we discover that Fielding’s work, rather than simply being expressive of proto-Enlightenment principles, actually subverts those assumed securities regarding the status of the individual and his place in the world, before God. In its conclusion, this study reveals the challenge of recognising the inescapably theological nature of the novel and that theology itself, is fictive. This assessment points to a greater need for further shared exploration of the relationship between theology and literature - to their mutual benefit.