Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

George Eliot filled her novels with discussions of art and references to specific paintings and sculptures. Though this element of her fiction is easy for the contemporary reader to overlook, it was well loved by her Victorian readership, and is invested with a great deal of thematic content. This thesis analyzes representations of the visual arts in Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, investigating the way that art becomes inseparable from Eliot’s larger moral themes of sympathy and historical consciousness.

The glory of war is dead, and the Great War killed it. Soldierly dignity, heroism, and proper field chivalry; all laid to waste by a single mortar round at Arras. This ethos—a vestige of Greek warrior worship—stood little chance against the trenches. It either drowned in the fecal trench muck at the Somme or staggered back—in tatters, if that—a broken soul; another victim of the so-called “Good Fight.” And there were many victims. An entire generation, even, lost to the trenches. But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that home front in England didn’t even get it.

In this thesis, I explored the relationship between Shakespearean tragedy and romance, specifically how each genre treated themes regarding resurrection and the imagination. In romance, I discovered that the imagination became a portal to reality--a way through which characters understood and accepted impermanence, decay, and death. I used romance to illuminate tragedy's failures, showing that in both King Lear and Othello the imagination acts as a mask against the real. I called these imaginative spaces “dream worlds”--fantastical plains in which characters chased their impossible longings for eternity and perfected romantic love. This refusal to engage with the real, I concluded, makes resurrection impossible in tragedy. I was also deeply influenced by the criticism of Harold Goddard, who tends to read Shakespearean tragedy as romance and finds resurrection in both King Lear and Othello. I engaged with his criticism by creating the dream worlds to prove that the imagination can only act as a shield against reality in tragedy.

This thesis seeks to explain Elizabeth Bowen's preoccupation with social outcasts in her novels and ghosts in her short stories through her conception of space. Because psycho-emotional boundaries possess such overwhelming importance in her fiction, the transgression of these boundaries constitutes a threat to the dominant social order, and Bowen's plots revolve around the consequences of this. As a result, ghosts and innocents are manifestations of the same force within Bowen's writing, but which she simply indulged in different forms.

In critical discourse surrounding the poetry of William Wordsworth, it has become generally acceptable to describe the course of the poet’s career by means of a theory of “decline.” In its most common form, this theory argues that Wordsworth’s best poetry was written during one “Great Decade” (1798-1807)—an isolated epoch of prolificacy and genius. His subsequent works, it is argued, neither surpass nor equal his initial efforts; the course of his career after 1808 may be best described in terms of declivity, ebb, and decline. Due to its ideological complicity with the very texts it engages, and due to its construction as a “myth” of criticism, the theory of decline ultimately becomes a reductive premise that precludes understanding Wordsworth’s apparent downtrend as a complex but explicable process. This study therefore seeks to provide a critical explanation for the process of decline so often observed in Wordsworth’s poetry. In essence, I contend that the perceptible downtrend in Wordsworth’s verse is the direct consequence of continuous, career-long processes of revision or self-editing. This self-editing took two forms: First, the explicit form, whereby Wordsworth actually emended his poetry; and second, the implicit form, whereby Wordsworth sought, through his poetry, to amend his self-image by constructing an autobiography tailored to fit an idealized poetic identity. This analysis thus reveals and explicates Wordsworth’s possible motives for revision—the fluctuating demands made upon the poet by the poet himself. Because these demands represent the operative (if unstable) principle underlying specific textual changes, one may infer from their character the reasons why Wordsworth’s later poetry suffers in revision. By attending to the process whereby earlier verse was continually revised in order to fit a conceptual or poetic context for which it was not originally intended, I demonstrate how the actual substance of Wordsworth’s poetry was compromised or attenuated through a reductive (re)appropriation of its own materials. Unlike many critics, I do not treat Wordsworth’s revisions as the signifiers of some external change. Instead, my approach keys upon the conflict between Wordsworth’s efforts to realize a stable poetic identity and the representational and rhetorical limitations of poetic form, particularly with regards to autobiography. Drawing on the work of Susan Wolfson, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, I argue that Wordsworth’s revisionary practices are motivated by an agonistic process best described as “autobiographical anxiety” or the “‘anxiety of influence’ turned inward.” Ultimately, I conclude that Wordsworth’s decline was the consequence of an overarching ethic of composition which, because it privileged revision as a means of changing not only poetry but the poet himself, allowed self-consciousness to become a self-defeating agent.

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

This study presents an attempt to understand the political and aesthetic relationship between two of Modernism’s most enigmatic authors, Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford by examining their novelistic practice in light of their writings on politics and social criticism. A close look at the use of ironic distance, a hallmark feature in our understanding of modernist fiction, in Tarr (1918) and The Good Soldier (1915) reveals both authors conscious effort to distance themselves from their novel’s subjects, Fredric Tarr and John Dowell respectively. In light of both novels’ satirical element, a scathing attack on bourgeois narcissism caused by the wealthier class’ persistent attempts to identify with hollow and self serving social roles through the sham-aristocratic prestige created by England’s pre-war commodity culture, and the fact that both Fredric Tarr and John Dowell are artist figures that somehow resemble their creators, this project reinterprets Ford and Lewis’ ironic distance as an instance of self-distanciation. From this we can infer that both Ford and Lewis were invested in the modernist idea of impersonality, not just as a artistic or literary technique, but as the artist’s only means of escaping the narcissistic and slothful trap of modern subjectivity, and that, along with the production of modernist art, they saw a continual self-effacement as the price of authenticity, therefore inspiring in them the conviction to live as “uncelebrated stylists.”

In recent years, deconstruction theory has emerged as a key method for exploring public address, organizational culture, and literary discourse. Deconstruction theory encourages tearing apart hierarchy and established order to gain insights about the artifact being studied. Furthermore, the theory questions surface or superficial messages and encourages the reader to explore signals hidden below the surface. Deconstruction discounts context and places faith in experience. Using the early plays of Samuel Beckett, this research explores deconstruction as a method to create messages. This new perspective transports deconstruction from a set of theoretical concepts into basic assumptions that enhance communication. This study suggests that deconstructive inventors use processes previously associated with deconstructive criticism to reveal their own beliefs. Furthermore, this study correlates deconstructive invention with rhetorical tropes – metonomy, synecdoche, metaphor, and irony – to create depiction-based persuasion, which asks the rhetor to suspend logic and evoke emotional response.

To scholars of Victorian literature, Samuel Butler has always been a rebel who strikes out at society with wide-ranging criticism. After years of studying subjects as varied as music, art, biology, literature, and theology, Butler felt (like many Victorian writers) that he could make valuable social comments with his satires, travelogues, biological studies and one novel. Critical studies of Butler have tended to treat in broad outline all facets of his life and work. This study, however, examines in depth Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh, as the focal point of his critical analysis of Victorian society. It treats the work as a sociological novel showing the main character Ernest Pontifex manipulated by harsh societal forces and presents the thesis that man needs to be freed from restrictive social determinism. It is thus the purpose of this study to suggest that Samuel Butler wrote The Way of All Flesh to summarize his criticism of Victorian society and to set forth his plea for a society governed by the principle rational moderation in human affairs. To demonstrate this thesis, the present study will begin with Butler’s life, emphasizing his study with schoolmasters, exposure to the clergy, and life with his parents in an attempt to show the development of his unconventional attitude toward contemporary society. A short introduction to Butler’s life is particularly important to study of The Way of All Flesh because this novel contains a great deal of pure autobiography. Following this introduction, the three strongest areas of sociological comment will be examined as they appear in The Way of All Flesh. Victorian schoolmasters, clergymen, and parents all force Ernest Pontifex to suffer a repressive existence. An inquiry into Butler’s criticism of these three social types and their influence Victorian society will form the main body of this study. The next chapter of this thesis will be devoted to explaining how Butler proposes to solve the problems that he has introduced with his social criticism. Following this chapter, the conclusion will summarize the main ideas of this study and will deal with Butler’s critical reputation. Also the conclusion will show the debt our freer society owes to Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh by examining some similarities between his novel’s social criticism and other targets of social criticism found in four influential twentieth century novels of rebellion. It will finally be seen that Samuel Butler was not a flawless novelist (or for that matter, a flawless philosopher), but the critical message of his Way of All Flesh far outweighed the strengths or weaknesses of its artistic form for a whole generation of anti-Victorians.