This thesis is a three part examination of the role of perceptions of gender in the developing category of mental illness and disability during the inter-war period in England using Virginia Woolf's literature and essays, most prominently Mrs. Dalloway and her personal essay, "A Sketch of the Past." These texts provide a foundation for analyzing how disability can be represented in literature in a way that gives disabled characters a voice and simultaneously criticizes the ways in which perceptions of normalcy are defined and reinforced through literary forms. The thesis also responds to contemporary feminist scholarship that has evaluated Woolf's disabled characters in problematic methods that discount the significance of disability.

This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are solemn, serious texts written by British or Irish men, and the stories they tell concern young British or Irish men struggling, often alone, in pain, and under the threat of impending age, through a brutal, violent, and amoral world.

This project aims to study fossil amphibian and reptile (herpetofaunal) remains from Quaternary sites in the British Isles. This neglected group of vertebrates hold great potential for Quaternary Science. Collectively, they cover a wide range of ecological tolerances, although individual species often have very specific tolerances. The biology and ecology of individual species are discussed (Chapter 2) to facilitate their use in Quaternary palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, and an account of previous work on fossil herpetofaunas is given (Chapter 3). Very little work on fossil herpetofaunas has been carried out in the British Isles, mainly due to a lack of the required osteological expertise. The preparation and study of a modern osteological collection (Chapter 4), for comparative purposes, has therefore constituted a large and essential part of the project. The resulting manual for the identification of fossil herpetofaunal remains, appropriately illustrated with SEMs and hand-drawn figures, is presented (Chapter 5). The difficulties encountered in identifying some taxa are discussed in detail, and points of caution are stressed where necessary.

This paper investigates how Aphra Behn's The Rover and Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside complicate understandings of femininity and masculine dominance over female sexuality. The paper looks specifically at the "rake," and how he instigates questions about female identity and sexual assault. The paper also looks at the rake in regards to adulterous relationships. Finally, the paper analyzes the use of the female perspective in The Rover to highlight the importance of framing discussions about femininity and female sexuality outside of male discourse.

In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare anatomizes Lucrece's body-fragments the whole, splits apart the parts. He does so not only to expose the otherwise concealed act of rape-which is hidden within the mysterious and "invisible" female genitalia-but to indicate that Lucrece's parts, through analogy with Pagan and Christian figures and theories, are powerful, even combative, but always pure. In the first section, individual body parts connect Lucrece with so-called "wild women," including the Amazons, Medusa, and Philomela. In the second section, body parts either link Lucrece, or sever Tarquin, from the Divine. In the final section, Classical Mythology and Protestantism conflate in the dis-embodied figure of Helen of Troy. The body-Lucrece's, Tarquin's and the figures on the tapestry-is explored in metaphorical parts, dismembered, or apotheosized/de-corporealized in an attempt to prove that a raped woman may retain her subjectivity along with her innocence.

Hybridity is typically formulated in post-colonial theory as a means of resistance, subversion, or liberatory strategy in the hands of the present-day post-colonial subject or theorist. This project, however, demonstrates hybridity as a means of securing dominance and maintaining control when wielded by the imperialist in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), Kipling's Kim (1901), and Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1914). The strategic deployment of hybridity in these texts also serves as an opportunity to negotiate the ambivalence and desire for the native that slips out of that hybrid space-- not necessarily sexual desire that flows between two polarized bodies, but rather, triangulated through other mediating terms such as class, nationality or manliness. Across these novels, the location of the native shifts, until it settles within the white body itself in Tarzan. Desire for the native, then, is returned to the white body in a narcissistic circle of self-glorification.

This thesis examines the function of specific garden features in Jane Austen’s novels, particularly in the seminal texts Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. Male power, politics and land ownership dominated eighteenth-century society. Despite this, Austen’s woman protagonists utilize the tree avenues feature of landscape parks, voicing a need to redefine moral responsibility associated with land ownership. This thesis draws on the literary theories of gender studies and ecocriticism to examine garden spaces in Austen’s texts, though the primary focus of the investigation relies on exploring the primary texts themselves with a historical approach. In addition to this secondary critical scholarship, this thesis utilizes resources such as eighteenth century garden histories and guides, background information on specific gardeners of the period, and typical landscape garden features as evidence.

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