Since little critical attention has been given to the dramas of this period, it would seem that further examination of them would be of value. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to investigate the dramas of the major Romantic poets in order to provide a new critical perspective on their plays specifically and Romantic drama generally. From this it is hoped useful conclusions can be drawn. The study will be limited to the plays of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. John Keats has been omitted from this group because his only drama was written in conjunction with Armitage Brown, a minor writer. The dramas chosen for this investigation are those which either have been produced on the stage or ware submitted for production. If the author submitted more than one play, the play which the critics consider marks the summit of dramatic achievement of the author has been selected. Included in this study are The Borderers by Wordsworth, Remorse by Coleridge, The Cenci by Shelley, and Cain by Byron. The dramas are presented for discussion according to the chronological order in which they were written. The study will include an examination of the background against which the tragedies were written - the state of the contemporary drama, the stage, the plays and the audiences. Those factors which may have affected the work - the author's thoughts, the facts of composition, and elements of Romanticism - will also be considered. In addition, both contemporary and modern criticism will be included. (The criticism beginning with that of George Bernard Shaw in 1886 will be classified as modern.) These criticisms will form the bases for evaluations of the plays.

Many critics have discovered striking similarities between Samuel Johnson's Rasselas and Voltaire's Candide. Yet, most have failed to describe the links that exist between the works which indicate that similar forces may have spurred the authors to write so similar tales, one quickly following the other into publication. Source studies of the two tales indicate that very little, if any, evidence is available to prove that the works were inspired by the same written sources that Johnson and Voltaire may have relied upon. While source studies of the tales do not reveal any shocking information, they do inform the reader that both men used great effort in writing their tales. Nevertheless, the similarities of Rasselas and Candide are so great that one must turn elsewhere to find explanations. One possible explanation is that both men vehemently hated the popular philosophy of their day, a philosophy advocated by Gottfried von Liebniz under the name of optimism. This philosophy and the concept of the Chain of Being play an important role in the two works since each tale ridicules the ideas. Eighteenth -century optimism allows for no hope. Rasselas and Candide try to answer this dilemma the philosophy proposes. The joint attack on optimism and the Chain of Being cannot be the only reason that the two tales are similar. By examining certain aspects of each man's life, one finds that contrary to popular belief Johnson and Voltaire shared many resemblances. Both were very bright as children, as they were as adults. Both writers had powerful emotions and a strong sexuality. Both were gentle and caring people. These human characteristics can be seen in their works, helping explain some of the mystery surrounding the novels' similarities.

To define the scope of this study, therefore, Harrowing of Hell imagery will be thought of as those symbols peculiar to the pseudo-biblical story, with redemptive activity and triumph as distinguishing criteria. The hero is a Christ figure who has already achieved a degree of self-mastery. His descent into hell represents an act of redemption for others, with victory as the outcome. This delimitation, it will be seen, is not impossibly restrictive. A survey of contemporary literature indicates that Wasserman's use of the descent motif with redemptive implications is far from an isolated instance. Edward Albee in The Zoo Story and Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot employ the imagery as a tentative suggestion of redemption, hoped for if unachieved. The same wistful negation accompanies its appearance in Kazantzakis' Greek Passion and Mauriac's The Lamb.

Love and growing old are thematically inseparable in W.B. Yeats' poetry, yet it is the former with which this great Irish poet is often associated. The poet's attitudes toward aging are made clear through his symbolism, complicated Irish allusions, and a sometimes jarring treatment of women. As it turns out, these devices have as much to do with Yeats' concern over aging as they have to do with the infamous Maud Gonne. This thesis attempts to not only expose and analyze these intricacies, but also challenge the way the literary canon typically isolates Yeats’ more famous poems without the context of his other work.

By using adaptation theory and Linda Hutcheon’s depiction of adapters in the process of adaptation as “first interpreters and then creators” (18), this article argues how the original Sherlock Holmes illustrations, penciled most notably by Sidney Paget, are both a canonical element of the Holmes legacy and themselves an adaptation. This creates a means of exploring why and how the television show Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994), developed by Granada Television, uses the original Holmes illustrations as a source of adaptation to create the appearance of fidelity to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Being faithful to the Holmes stories is not a common adaptation practice. Granada’s Holmes chooses to be faithful to the original illustrations and to the Victorian era, not so much to be unique among Holmes adaptations but to be similar to the 1980s heritage cinema trend of faithfully adapting English literature. Heritage cinema, as Andrew Higson states, is a “potent marketing of the past” (1), and through its propensity to adapt literature faithfully to a past time period, heritage cinema reflects a cultural desire for national nostalgia in 1980s Britain. In the case of Granada’s Holmes, this tactic turns Sherlock Holmes into both financial and cultural capital. By being seemingly faithful to the original illustrations, Granada’s Holmes is left vulnerable to the kinds of fidelity or comparative criticisms that adaptation scholars often denounce. Adaptation studies criticizes efforts to compare the source text to the adaptation, saying it will inevitably lead to privileging the source text. Through my investigation, however, I argue that there is a need to use forms of fidelity criticism in order to more fully explore the reasons why Granada’s Holmes hinges its success around fidelity to the original Holmes illustrations.

This dissertation examines the technique of archaism as it has been practiced in the historical novel since that genre’s origins. By “archaism,” I refer to a variation of the strategy that Jerome McGann calls textual “literalism,” whereby literary texts use “thickly materialized” language and bibliographic forms to foreground their own “textuality as such” (Black Riders 74). Archaism is distinguished from Blake’s, Pound’s, or Robert Carlton Brown’s literalism by its imitation of older literary idioms, yet the specifically historical quality of its intertextuality also seems different from primarily formal imitations such as pastiche and parody. Although archaism appears to have originated as part of the special language of romance, this study focuses on the technique as a representational strategy within historical fiction. Thus I begin by interpreting Thomas Chatterton’s faux-medieval forgeries (ca. 1770) as a kind of poetic antiquarianism, after which I trace the legacy of Chattertonian archaism in nineteenth-century historical novels including Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852). The last two chapters address the twentieth-century return to archaism in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy (1980-1989), and William T. Vollmann’s Argall (2001). Throughout, I rely extensively upon Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937), approaching the latter novels as historical fiction rather than as specimens of such post-1960s genres as Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” or Amy J. Elias’s “metahistorical romance.” Lukács is especially useful because of his sense that historical fictions are animated by the mimetic imperative to represent historical “reality.” Furthermore, the historical novel frame of these novels often serves to historicize literary form, disciplining both the simulation and the metafictionality that exemplify postmodern cultural praxis. Ultimately, I argue that archaism within the historical novel models a historical “real” that is always constructed in a manner analogous to the construction of literary texts, positing a historicity in which imaginative literature offers a key figuration of social experience. Unlike Hutcheon, who advances similar claims for historiographic metafiction, I contend that these novels often use archaism to represent their historical referents as reality—a practice that recalls the “classical” historical fiction of the nineteenth century. By drawing equally on historical novel theory and on Hutcheon, Elias, and Fredric Jameson’s analyses of post-1960s historical fiction as a representative form of aesthetic postmodernism, I synthesize two theoretical discussions which have typically been seen as incompatible. Similarly, this study emphasizes the continuity between old and new forms of historical fiction, expanding on Elias’s salient observation that “postmodern historical fiction stands in the refracted light of nineteenth-century historical novels” (Sublime Desire 6). Concepts of theoretical and aesthetic continuity, therefore, shape both the argument and the organization of this dissertation.

This project considers ways mid-Victorian fictional autobiographies created new models for women's spiritual formation, testing Nancy Armstrong's theory that novels are antecedent to the cultural conditions they describe. I pair three mid-Victorian fictional texts Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, and The Mill on the Floss with three later non-fictional autobiographies written by women near the end of the Victorian Era: Annie Besant (1847- 1933), Mary Anne Hearn (1834-1909) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). These women came to spiritual maturity during the same time period in which the fictional heroines Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh and Maggie Tulliver became prominent in the popular imagination and informed the cultural dialogue about women's roles and spirituality. With the advantage of hindsight, Besant, Hearn and Cobbe are able to offer perspective on cultural and religious trends that these novelists predicted, and they are also able to show how the models presented in novels did or did not correspond with the realities of women's spiritual lives in Victorian England. To draw attention to ways that both the fictional and non-fictional autobiographies use the genre to convert readers to new beliefs about how and what women believe, I focus on the persuasive elements of the conversion narrative and read these texts through the lens of classical rhetorical appeals. By identifying the conversion experience as the common denominator in these diverse texts, I bring these examples of fictional and non-fictional autobiographies onto a level playing and demonstrate both the flexibility of the conversion narrative and the artistry of the non-fictional autobiographers in revising it. I find that the fictional autobiographers employ models of private introspection and substitute scenes of domestic reconciliation for traditional reconciliation with God; however, the three real-life autobiographers must reconcile their personal spiritual transformations with their public personae. Hence they replace the novels' domestic allegories of reconciliation with accounts appropriate to their own new spiritual identities, ranging from Evangelical Christian, to Theist, to Theosophist.

This thesis is an examination of reader or audience response to Shakespeare’s tragedies. Primarily, it identifies key pleasures that Shakespeare’s King Lear and Othello offer. The complementary nature of these two plays is such that the analysis of their various pleasures allows for an in-depth treatment of the topic and also reflects the diversity of emotional response elicited by Shakespeare’s tragedies. The kinds of pleasure addressed in this study are catharsis as explained by Aristotle, the delight of violent passion as advocated by DuBos, pleasure from details in the work, satisfaction from the coherence of the tragedy, and pleasure in the idealization of tragedy.

One of the most discussed archaeological subjects is the neolitisation, and the start of a neolithic lifestyle which is characterized by several significant events. The traditional view has been that settled people were cultivating and breeding, but this picture has been questioned and changed in later years. The development is principally based on two models; that already neolithic people immigrated and took over, or that the new lifestyle gradually developed out of the existing cultures. Southern Scandinavia was characterized by a settlement pattern with permanent settlements which were complemented by temporary special settlements, but in time more domestic settlements originated. On the British Isles the settlements didn´t consist of permanent agricultural settlements but instead did the people here move freely between several short term settlements.

Seeing Subjects plots a literary history of modern Britain that begins with Dorian Gray obsessively inspecting his portrait’s changes and ends in Virginia Woolf’s visit to the cinema where she found audiences to be “savages watching the pictures.” Focusing on how literature in the late-19th and 20th centuries regarded images as possessing a shaping force over how identities are understood and performed, I argue that modernists in Britain felt mediated images were altering, rather than merely representing, British identity. As Britain’s economy expanded to unprecedented imperial reach and global influence, new visual technologies also made it possible to render images culled from across the British world—from its furthest colonies to darkest London—to the small island nation, deeply and irrevocably complicating British identity. In response, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and others sought to better understand how identity was recognized, particularly visually. By exploring how painting, photography, colonial exhibitions, and cinema sought to manage visual representations of identity, these modernists found that recognition began by acknowledging the familiar but also went further to acknowledge what was strange and new as well. Reading recognition and misrecognition as crucial features of modernist texts, Seeing Subjects argues for a new understanding of how modernism’s formal experimentation came to be and for how it calls for responses from readers today.