<p> During the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, writers like William Walwyn produced documents contesting the restriction of their liberties. This thesis is a critical edition of Walwyn&rsquo;s <i>Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie,</i> unedited since its original publication in 1646. In this text Walwyn advocates for man&rsquo;s right to question religious orthodoxy in his search for Truth and urges Parliament not to pass a proposed <i>Bill</i> for the harsh punishment of religious sectarians. </p><p> Prior to a transcription of the text is an introduction to Walwyn and an attempt to situate the reader in the context of his time. Following that is a style and rhetorical analysis, which concludes that despite his rejection of rhetorical practices, Walwyn&rsquo;s own use of them is effective. Perhaps this skill is one of the reasons that Parliament passed a milder, non-punitive version of the <i>Bill</i> Walwyn argued against.</p><p>

This dissertation traces the progress of the personified imagination from the twelfth-century De planctu Naturae to the sixteenth-century Faerie Queene, arguing that the transformability of the personified imagination becomes a locus for questioning personification allegory across the entire period. The dissertation demonstrates how, even while the imagination seems to progress from a position of subordination to a position of dominance, certain features of the imagination's unstable nature reappear repeatedly at every stage in this period's development of the figure. Deep suspicion of the faculty remains a regular part of the imagination's allegorical representation throughout these five centuries. Within the period, we witness the imagination trying to assert its allegorical position in the context of other, more established allegorical figures such as Reason and Nature. In this way, the history of the personification of the imagination is surprisingly continuous from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This "continuity" is not absolute but functions as a consistent recombination of a standard set of features of and attitudes toward imagination that rematerializes regularly. In order to understand this phenomenon at any point in these five centuries, it is essential to examine imagination across the entire period. In particular, the dissertation discovers an alternative, more nuanced view of the personified imagination than has thus far been posited. The imagination is a thoroughly ambivalent character, always on the cusp of transformation, and nearly always locked in a power struggle with other allegorical figures. At the same time, as the allegorical imagination repeatedly attempts to establish itself, it becomes a locus for intense questioning of the meaning and process of personification. The imagination remains transformative, uncertain, and at times terrifying throughout this entire period.

<p>John Milton argued that customs are antithetical to rational judgment. My dissertation, Freedom Under the Law, investigates the conception of rationality that underlies the divorce of tradition and reason in the writings of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642-1660). In this period, republican authors strive to turn English subjects into citizens whose active virtue and rational judgment is unclouded by tradition and habits. This dissertation argues that these writers build their arguments on a paradoxical depiction of the people as both rationally capable of consenting to political association and irrationally bound by custom. In conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of the Aristotelian tradition, Freedom Under the Law exposes the tensions that arise in the writings of both canonical and non-canonical seventeenth-century authors as they attempt to re-imagine and represent the individual, the family, and the commonwealth. As this project demonstrates, writers ranging from John Milton to the millenarian John Rogers to the Parliamentarian Henry Parker reveal a residual understanding of political and social community that owes its vocabulary to medieval and classical modes of thinking. However, while Aristotelian models of political association closely link reason, habit, and justice, the authors considered in my project present an understanding of individuals as capable of rational action independent of tradition and custom. </p><p>This dissertation traces how this revolutionary account of the individual in political association is expressed through a range of often-conflicting formulations of the English nation. Freedom Under the Law begins with Milton's representation of education in the virtues in his early theatrical piece, Comus (1634). This first chapter establishes the guiding question of the project: how is the relationship between individual and community reconfigured in the literature of the seventeenth-century? In chapters two and three, I situate Milton's domestic and political prose of 1643-49 in the context of Puritan marriage manuals and Parliamentarian and royalist tracts. Through these comparisons, I show that Milton's distrust of customary laws produces a representation of the virtuous individual and the ideal nation as independent of their own history and, ironically, driven to constant iconoclastic self-reformation. Chapter four demonstrates how impoverished accounts of natural law lead to a devaluing of the people's legislative authority in Edward Sexby's call for the killing of Oliver Cromwell in Killing No Murder (1657), apologias of the Cromwellian dissolution of the Parliament in 1653, and the Putney Debates in 1647. Chapter five considers Milton's Readie and Easie Way (1660) alongside Fifth Monarchist pamphlets. This chapter questions J.G.A. Pocock's distinction between a medieval custom-based juristic tradition and a republican understanding of rational political life, a distinction adopted widely in Milton studies. I argue that comparison with Aquinas's Aristotelian account of custom and law brings into relief tensions in Milton's model of rational political participation. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the conception of virtue and reason adopted by Milton and his contemporaries allows them to dismiss historically-bound embodiments of justice and reason as enslaving accretions.</p> / Dissertation

<p> This thesis examines Sherlock Holmes texts (1886&ndash;1927) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and their recreations in the television series <i>Sherlock </i> (2010) and <i>Elementary</i> (2012) through a postcolonial lens. Through an in-depth textual analysis of Doyle&rsquo;s mysteries, my thesis will show that his stories were intended to be propaganda discouraging the British Empire from becoming tainted, ill, and dirty through immersing themselves in the &ldquo;Orient&rdquo; or the East. The ideal Imperial body, gender roles, and national landscape are feminized, covered in darkness, and infected when in contact for too long with the &ldquo;Other&rdquo; people of the East and their cultures. Sherlock Holmes cleanses society of the darkness, becoming a hero for the Empire and an example of the perfect British man created out of logic and British law. And yet, Sherlock Holmes&rsquo; very identity relies on the existence of the Other and the mystery he or she creates. The detective&rsquo;s obsession with solving mysteries, drug addiction, depression, and the art of deduction demonstrate that, without the Other, Holmes has no identity. As the body politic, Holmes craves more mystery to unravel, examine, and know. Without it, he feels useless and dissatisfied with life. The satisfaction with pinpointing every detail, in order to solve a mystery continues today in all media versions. Bringing Sherlock Holmes to life for television and updating him to appeal to today's culture only make sense. Though society has the insight offered by postcolonial theory, evidence of an imperial mindset is still present in the most popular reproductions of Sherlock Holmes <i> Sherlock</i> and <i>Elementary</i>.</p><p>

<p> Literary study has long been concerned with the construction of meaning and identity through language. In the realm of postcolonialism, for instance, it is necessary to consider the ways that racism and sexism are hegemonic constructs that are transmitted and solidified through language. Furthermore, literary texts such as <i>Heart of Darkness</i> by Joseph Conrad and <i>Season of Migration to the North</i> by Tayeb Salih engage themselves with revealing the ways that racism, sexism, and colonial discourse function through determinacy or certainty. Moreover, Conrad and Salih are engaged in undermining these enterprises of authoritative discourse by revealing the underlying indeterminacy of language and meaning-making. In other words, they show that meaning exists as humanity constructs it. Thus, it is necessary to consider the ways that they question racism, sexism, and colonialism as movements of thought, discourse, and action that have no rational foundations; and it is necessary to consider the ways that they seek to frame the resistance of these forces in their characters.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation advances Gothic studies by 1) arguing that Gothic is an imperial discourse and tracing back its origins to imperial activity, 2) by establishing a Hinterland Gothics discourse framework within the Gothic Imagination, 3) and by defining three particular discourses of Hinterland Gothics: the Gotach (Irish), G&oacute;tico (Mexican-American Mestizx), and the Ethnogothix (African Diaspora), and subsequently, revealing how these Hinterland Gothics undermine, expose, and thwart imperial poltergeists. The primary texts that I analyze and reference were published in the past thirty years and are either of the Young Adult or New Adult persuasion, highlighting imperative moments of identity construction in bildungsroman plots and focusing on the more neglected yet more dynamic hyper-contemporary era of Gothic scholarship, namely: Siobhan Dowd&rsquo;s <i>Bog Child </i> (2008), Celine Kiernan&rsquo;s <i>Into the Grey</i> (2011), Marina Carr&rsquo;s <i>Woman and Scarecrow</i> (2006), Emma P&eacute;rez&rsquo;s <i> Forgetting the Alamo</i> (2009), Virginia Grise&rsquo;s <i>blu</i> (2011), Emil Ferris&rsquo;s graphic novel <i>My Favorite Thing is Monsters </i> (2017), Gloria Naylor&rsquo;s <i>Mama Day</i> (1988), Helen Oyeyemi&rsquo;s <i>White is for Witching</i> (2009), Nnedi Okorafor&rsquo;s <i>Binti</i> (2015) and <i>Binti: Home</i> (2017), and Nicki Minaj&rsquo;s 54^th Annual Grammy Awards performance of &ldquo;Roman Holiday&rdquo; (2012). The cold spots in the white Eurocentric canon where Other presences have been ghosted will be filled, specters will be given flesh, and the repressed will return, indict, and haunt, demanding recognition and justice.</p><p>

<p> In recent years, having evolved beyond solely play-based interactions, it is now possible to analyze video games alongside other narrative forms, such as novels and films. Video games now involve rich stories that require input and interaction on behalf of the player. This level of agency likens video games to a kind of modern hypertext, networking and weaving various narrative threads together, something which traditional modes of media lack. When examined from the lens of reader-response criticism, this interaction deepens even further, acknowledging the player&rsquo;s experience as a valid interpretation of a video game&rsquo;s plot. The wide freedom of choice available to players, in terms of both play and story, in 2007&rsquo;s <i>Mass Effect,</i> along with its critical reception, represents a turning point in the study of video games as literature, exemplifying the necessity for player input in undergoing a narrative-filled journey. Active participation and non-linear storytelling, typified through gaming, are major steps in the next the evolution of narrative techniques, which requires the broadening of literary criticism to incorporate this new development.</p><p>

In the period 1890-1914, such playwrights as G. B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Henry Arthur Jones, and Elizabeth Robins led a movement to revive the drama as an intellectual art: these playwrights sought to create a theater that could treat social and political issues and themes hitherto banned from (or limited in treatment on) the public stage while at the same time retaining the theater's hold over a popular audience. In the case of Jones, Wilde, and Shaw, each playwright would revise his early style to create plays that had strong ties to more traditional popular dramas but which nonetheless offered a critique of those older, expected forms. Despite the severe limitations in the theater, dramatists had room for experimentation in the relation of genre to the mise en scene. The nineteenth-century theater had been notable for its preference for "fantasy" genres, such as melodrama and farcical comedy; at the same time, however, the audience maintained an appetite for realism in the staging of plays. It is in this seeming opposition of dramatic form and theatrical realization, the mechanistic and fantastic versus the hyper-real, that the innovators of this period could find a way to change the older drama while working within it. Victorian stage "realism" was in fact carefully contained within generic structures that artificially "solved" social problems depicted in the plays. Wilde, Jones, and Shaw would all manipulate conventions of genre and scenic effect in order to make overt the problem of defining the "real" in the theater. On another front, their critical and theoretical writings analyzed this troublesome connection between the worlds on-and off-stage, and were intended to change the way audiences viewed plays by providing a critical "frame." The Edwardian playwrights also faced the problem of enforced generic continuity, and some of them, particularly St. John Hankin, Harley Granville Barker, and John Galsworthy, would use the continuing popularity of realism to undermine melodramatic structure. Often the settings of their plays, in their mannered distortion of traditional representative scenes, alter the desires of the audience for generic conformity.

Put simply, magical thinking is the belief that one may affect reality by thought alone. Where Freud classifies such a concept as neurotic delusion, Winnicott embraces the idea as a memory from infancy and argues that "omnipotence of thoughts" is the origin of creativity. Both viewpoints are represented in Shakespeare's universe, their positions sometimes at war in the playing out of the hero's dilemma. This dissertation traces the idea of magical thinking through psychoanalysis, anthropology, and art, then explores the battle of thoughts in Shakespeare's tragedies. Freud's viewpoint is well-founded in Hamlet: for thoughts in Denmark are not tools with which to control reality, but a reality that cannot be controlled. The hero drowns in thoughts. He cannot escape them, particularly the thought of Gertrude's infidelity, which resurfaces in dagger words and pregnant metaphors, to the point that sometimes Hamlet forgets his revenge. His search to find a plan to kill the king thus parallels his search to find a way to kill his thoughts. Hamlet tries to bury them in the actor, who can control his thoughts long enough to "act." Both Othello and Macbeth likewise flounder in thoughts they can't control. Othello's thought echoes Hamlet's thought of a woman's infidelity. Othello cannot live with this thought, forget or disprove it. Indeed the thought is like virginity itself: once thought, he can never reclaim his ignorance or his wife's innocence. So he buries the thought in Desdemona's body--then kills it. The thoughts that plague Macbeth, however, are the result, not the cause, of his killing. He murders Duncan and Banquo only to be buried alive with "those thoughts that should indeed have died/With them they think on." Hamlet tries to escape thoughts. Othello's thoughts betray him. Macbeth defies them. Cleopatra embraces them--wholeheartedly, She is the mistress of magical thinking, Winnicott's "good-enough mother," nursing Antony on desire. Though the lovers' dream to be legends, god and goddess, may be delusional, their wish is transformed into a beautiful illusion for the audience as they birth death as Elysium, tragedy as romance, through the magic of poetry.

Today Andrew Marvell's poetry is thought to offer a window onto mid-seventeenth-century English literature and culture, yet scholars find the poet's richly allusive early works puzzling: we often do not know what prompted these compositions, or how to interpret them. Marvell probably wrote much of his early verse in 1651-1652 while working as a tutor at the Fairfax family's Yorkshire estate, Nun Appleton. Four approaches to Marvell's major early work, the estate poem Upon Appleton House, help to clarify the poet's methodology, the Yorkshire cultural and landscape milieus of his 1651-1652 poems, the prominent family for which he worked, and the pedagogic content of the poem itself. In the first approach, textual analysis and pattern-tracing reveal that Marvell developed Upon Appleton House from short poetic studies in Latin and English, and reveal too some ways in which Marvell represented his employer, Thomas Fairfax; his student, Mary Fairfax; and himself, as tutor-poet persona. Next, research on central Yorkshire's historical geography and lore and especially on Fairfax family lands helps explicate Upon Appleton House and shows that Marvell himself was a researcher and close observer of the outdoors. Third, information about the career and retirement of Thomas Fairfax--who in 1650 was nominally Interregnum England's highest-ranking leader--partially demystifies both Fairfax's retirement motives and Marvell's poem. A final approach analyzes Upon Appleton House as a poem for the instruction of thirteen-year-old Mary Fairfax. Marvell apparently drew on ideas from advice-to-a-prince poems, education manuals, puritan theology, and other sources to prepare Mary Fairfax for her future roles as Protestant heiress, dynastic perpetuator, and "natural ruler." Moreover, Marvell lyrically transformed the lands she would inherit into a medium for learning. Each approach to Upon Appleton House includes attention to literary and visual arts' traditions and to Marvell's evolution as a poet. Together, the four approaches go far toward explaining Marvell's 1651-1652 compositional chronology and self-presentation, his descriptions of nature and Yorkshire landscapes, his praise and instruction of Fairfax family members, and his evocations of post-civil-war England.