This thesis examines three images associated with the manuscripts and early printed editions of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde which I have dubbed “Prostrate Troilus,” “Pandarus as Messenger,” and “Criseyde in the Garden.” These images are artifacts of contemporary textual interpretation that “read” Chaucer’s text and the tale of Troilus. They each illustrate the way in which Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde “read” images, gestures, symbols, and speeches within the narrative, and they show how these characters are constrained and influenced by their individual primary modes of perception. Troilus reads but does not analyze. Pandarus actively reads his own meanings into messages. Criseyde’s reading is reflective. Ultimately, the different interpretive strategies that Chaucer explores in Troilus mirror those of Chaucer’s readers.

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This thesis defines and traces female community across Elizabeth Gaskell's novels Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters. Gaskell utilizes the fictionality of these communities to explore different ways of being for women. Here women control not only the plot, but their own lives.

Characters’ identities are integral to how audiences relate to them. But what happens when the character suddenly alters his or her outward appearance? Are they still the same person? This thesis seeks to argue that disguise does not alter a character’s true nature, as evidenced by Pyrocles in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the Prince in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure. Both Pyrocles’ suit of Philoclea and the Prince’s suit of Lady Happy are successful because, however subversive they appear at first, they ultimately adhere to societal norms of the time. The relationship between the cross-dressed prince and his love interest in both works only appears to subvert heteronormative expectations for the time, but ultimately adheres to these societal norms once the disguised character’s true identity is revealed to his chosen partner.

<p>This dissertation examines the forms of cultural labour performed by devotional rhetoric in the writings of Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and Thomas Traherne. The general hypothesis here is that devotional forms of expression provided seventeenth-century individuals with much more than a means of expressing praise; they offered an imaginative space in which to articulate and mitigate the psychological effects of the de-animation of the sacramental cosmos. More specifically, the dissertation explores how these four writers record and seek to negotiate processes of de-sacramentalization (the separating of divine from mundane orders) by internalizing such processes, by registering them, that is, as an experience that occurs within the self. This staging of political and theological conflict as a division within the self provides devotional writers with a certain symbolic leverage. By situating external forms of conflict as inwardly experienced dramas, seventeenth-century devotional writers presume that the process of individual self-transformation or metanoia , which is the general aim of religious discipline in both Reformation and Counter-Reformation traditions, is also the means for achieving social harmony. In this thesis, I am primarily concerned with how devotional writers use particular rhetorical strategies in an effort to fashion an ideal religious subject, a subject that confronts social and cosmological disorder through acts of devotion and self-discipline. At bottom, then, this thesis examines how the rhetoric of subjection functions in early modern devotional contexts as a means of articulating and mitigating the psychological effects of social and theological crises.</p> <p>In order to address the forms of cultural work at stake in Counter-Reformational and Anglican acts of praise, particularly the forms of self-transformation towards which devotional practices aim, I situate early modern texts alongside contemporary psychoanalysis. The primary goal of this juxtaposition is to illuminate the way that early modern devotional writers seek to transform readers in and through verbal acts of praise. Cognizant of the potential for anachronism in such an approach, I place devotional writers and psychoanalytic theory in dialogue with one another, rather than applying psychoanalysis to early modern works as such. In particular, I examine how both devotional discourses and psychoanalytic theory are concerned with understanding and transforming processes of subjection.</p> <p>Through a series of historically and theoretically informed close readings, this thesis addresses the question of why devotion matters both culturally and psychologically. What is at stake in seventeenth-century Anglican and Catholic forms of devotional writing is nothing less than the most intimate dimensions of sacramental life. What is at stake, in other words, is how individuals articulate and experience themselves as images of God. By examining the way that devotional writers structure the experience of subjection to God, the way they give divine subjection concrete form through fantasy, we will better understand the psychic life of power at a moment in Reformation history when traditional forms of devotional and liturgical expression began to lose their authority.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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No / Bennett questions the rigor of the dating of our sample from which sedimentary ancient DNA was obtained and the reliability of the taxonomic identification of wheat. We present a further radiocarbon date from S308 that confirms the lateral consistency of the palaeosol age. The suggestion of taxonomic false positives in our data illustrates a misinterpretation of the phylogenetic intersection analysis.

This thesis presents a new analysis of British naval policy before and during the First World War which challenges both orthodox and revisionist interpretations of the period and highlights a highly significant yet much neglected facet of Admiralty planning. It argues that safeguarding the British Isles from invasion was one of the Admiralty’s prime concerns between 1888 and 1918 and that these defensive considerations played a hitherto unappreciated role in shaping British naval strategy. By exploiting source material generally overlooked by previous writers, it demonstrates that, contrary to popular historical belief, Britain’s naval leadership planned extensively to ensure the inviolability of the British coastline during this period. Before 1900, these plans were characterized by relying upon an extensive flotilla of small vessels, supported by a small number of old armoured warships, to secure the position in the Channel and North Sea, while the Navy’s most modern warships focused upon the main French Fleet in the Mediterranean. The Admiralty’s willingness to rely primarily upon flotilla craft for home defence ended after 1900, however, when German displaced France as Britain’s primary naval rival. Germany posed a very different threat to Britain than had previously been the case with France, since it possessed a merchant marine large enough to transport a significant military force without major disruption to the normal operation of its commerce and had her naval forces concentrated in northern waters. Despite the paucity of German planning for the invasion of the United Kingdom, the Admiralty became haunted by the possibility of a ‘surprise’ German invasion attempt, launched before the outset of war and escorted by a strong German Fleet. The Admiralty identified the danger of a surprise German raid or invasion by early 1907 and formed a series of highly secretive plans to deploy the Navy’s most modern armoured warships into the North Sea at the outset of war to meet this danger. These plans were updated constantly between 1910 and 1918 as perceptions of the German threat developed. The nature and extent of these plans has highly significant implications for our understanding of naval policy throughout the period, and for our appreciation of the role of sea power during the First World War.

The focus of this thesis is on two pioneering organisations that were at the forefront of the provision of ‘rational’ holidays for the working-class during the early twentieth century: the Co-operative Holidays Association (CHA) and the Holiday Fellowship, founded by Thomas Arthur Leonard in 1893 and 1913 respectively. This research seeks to establish how these pioneers of recreative and educational holidays for working people dealt with the far-reaching changes in social, economic and cultural conditions during the period 1919-2000. It makes a significant original contribution to twentieth-century leisure and tourism history, especially that of the outdoor movement. Utilising important original source material, the research analyses the continuities and changes in these two organisations during the period 1919-2000 and the linkages and differences between them. The thesis explores the way the CHA and Holiday Fellowship dealt with the often conflicting demands of altruism and commercial necessity as the twentieth century progressed and assesses the extent to which they drifted away from their original ideals in order to combat the challenges of consumerism. The research takes a cultural history perspective, contextualising both organisations within a wider history of leisure, with specific reference to ‘rational’ recreation and the Victorian principles of respectability, co-operation and collectivism, and voluntarism. The research shows that the CHA and Holiday Fellowship were distinguishable from other ‘rational’ holiday providers; they had a distinct rural focus and the emphasis of their holidays was on healthy recreation and quiet enjoyment. They were almost unique in that they were equally attractive to women and men. However, both eventually served the middle classes rather than the working class for whom they were originally intended. Nevertheless, these pioneers of recreative and educational holidays unquestionably made a significant contribution to the democratisation of the countryside as a leisure space.