This dissertation explores the theme of suffering in In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), the two book-length works by David Jones. In In Parenthesis Jones uses the pain of soldiers in the trenches of World War I to represent the spiritual suffering of those who, like Jones, experience modernity as an affliction. While Jones writes tenderly of the soldiers' physical and emotional ordeal, his chief concern is with the metaphysical suffering the men experience as they witness the collapse of their familiar world into a landscape neither recognizable, lovable, nor meaningful. Out of their dismayed sense of dislocation the soldiers create an affectionate brotherhood which extends to the enemy soldiers and to all soldiers of every time and place. This community offers an analogy for the connection over time that Jones urges his readers to cultivate--the connection of English speakers with worlds of experience evoked in Welsh, German, and Latin words, and in dense clusters of cultural allusion. At the center of The Anathemata are the cross, through which God enters time and joins humans in their suffering, and the eucharist, through which Christ makes the fruits of his sacrifice available to his fellow sufferers, signifying and effecting a community among believers. Through language which describes and embodies the cultural variety of Britain, The Anathemata explores the regenerative meaning of Christ's cross through multiple allusions to sexuality and fertility, and provides through the eucharist a metaphor for the community Jones seeks. Both of Jones' major works, then, suggest the possibility of community grounded in shared history and generated by shared suffering. My dissertation unfolds this interpretation of David Jones through close reading, fresh examination of some of Jones' sources, and the introduction of perspectives lent by cultural critics and theologians. I aim to show that Jones offers original contributions to our sense of the possibilities within modernism, and, more crucially, our understanding of the place of the imagination in responding to the catastrophes of this age.

Shakespearean mourners display aggression in lieu of grief, they rely upon introjection and substitution, and they manifestly deny their loss. Denial of death runs throughout the canon; however, it is best epitomized in Antony and Cleopatra and the romances. Shakespeare's most famous mourner, Hamlet, introjects his dead Hyperion father to deny death and contain mourning. Nevertheless, the comedies argue that introjection of a lost object is no substitute for mourning, and in Pericles, introjection even threatens the life of the mourner. If denial represents the final strategy for the containment of grief for Shakespeare, then the conversion of grief into revenge is probably his first. Beginning with the English histories, Shakespeare genders mourning, prescribing socially constructed “masculine” and “feminine” modes of behavior. Men convert their grief into martial revenge; therefore, the first tetralogy is dominated by avenging sons, culminating in the unexpected bereavement of Richard III. The famous lamentation scene of Richard III, part of a tradition of communal and powerful women's mourning, stages a locus of female resistance to male revenge. The comedies star women who mourn: Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in All's Well pursue the love-object with difficulty after the death of their fathers. Helena's denial of grief and her substitution of Bertram for her dead father have been so successful they produce guilt. A central issue for me is Helena's inability to mourn: remembering rather than forgetting the dead. In Hamlet, a father's ghost returns insisting, “Remember me.” This Trauerspiel or “mourning play” struggles to construct male identity by mastering grief and exhausting revenge. Fearing he too will not be remembered when the rest is silence, Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story. And by telling stories, we remember—and mourn—the dead. Cleopatra's dolor, like Hamlet's, leads to and ultimately transcends thanatos. This late tragedy prefigures the romances where women who grieve, like Marina, will be given unprecedented power of rejuvenation. What Shakespeare's art finally arrives at is the suggestion that Freud was wrong: mourning never ends. Raise the dead, and no one need ever mourn again.

Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot satisfied specific goals in deploying female characters without hearts, accomplishing satirical needs within their texts. Trollope's anti-heroic female characters also fulfill satirical needs within their texts: Lizzie Eustace of The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Winifred Hurtle of The Way We Live Now (1875), Glencora Palliser of The Prime Minister (1876), and Arabella Trefoil of The American Senator (1877) provide, through their struggles, a rich context for cultural critique of the status of women in nineteenth-century Britain. These characters stand at a distance from those female moral paragons of earlier non-comic Trollope novels. I want to argue that these four characters are the culmination of a mainstream consciousness in conflict with its own creative imagination. They are affronts to the usual dicta, yet resisted discussion as a group for various reasons. Narratorial ambiguity reveals, then hides their feminist agendas. Furthermore, rather than make a point with his characters, Trollope preferred to “drive with loose reins” and let the character make a point through him. This concept will be carefully documented. By looking critically at this ambiguity one can see these characters as forming a group rather than remaining anomalies, which encourages a new perspective on Anthony Trollope's subject, his range of tolerance, and his vision. This study accentuates the ironic relation, currently undiscussed, which Trollope had with conventional thought on the binary opposition of the genders. It looks at ways these later characters put pressure on the implied reader's prejudices. There is some disagreement over whether Trollope simply advertised conventional values or questioned them. My study introduces a new way of answering the question. My strategy involves historicizing the characters in their contexts. Each character's predicament will be seen as a criticism of an institution, and will be studied with the help of a framing text. I will examine how Trollope creates in his characters' situations a cultural/ethical dissonance that cannot be resolved by conventional prescriptions for women's lives. Trollope's narrator and implied reader make daring points without producing the sort of texts that were rejected, like those of suffragism, by the public.

Focusing on the work of Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, and John Dryden, this dissertation argues that the modern critic's identity was constructed in seventeenth-century England. It supplements contemporary scholarly accounts of the origin of modern criticism by looking at the topic from a fresh perspective. Many contemporary studies assume that the modern critic's cultural identity was formed prior to or simultaneously with the concepts of literature, the author, and the canon. While the critic's identity was constructed during the same period as these concepts, why it emerged has not yet been fully explored. This dissertation treats the origin, construction, and development of this identity. Beginning at least as early as the last decade of the sixteenth century, significant debates about vernacular “criticism” took the form of battles between ancients and moderns. By tracing these battles, scholars can observe the construction of the modern critic's identity. Such an analysis amends traditional chronologies of criticism's development, for it suggests that some of the cultural forces that scholarship associates with the formation of criticism in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were already in evidence by the last decade of the sixteenth. At this time, the critic's identity was being constructed to perform a dual function: to address the effects of nascent print-capitalism and to aid in the formation of England's national literary tradition. The critic's identity was then continually reconstructed throughout the seventeenth century in response to these same cultural forces. Most notably, critics, responding to the changing conditions of textual production, dissemination, and consumption, attempted to form and regulate the tastes of readers so that the “best” texts would survive in the expanding print marketplace. Thus, modern criticism emerges earlier than has previously been argued. This dissertation concludes that John Dryden does not usher in modern criticism, but is the heir of Renaissance humanist concerns about the effects of print-capitalism, and that Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism is thoroughly anticipated by Ben Jonson's commonplace book, Discoveries.

This study uses the Struldbrugg episode in Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a focal point in an investigation of important shifts in perceptions of aging in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While modernity brought many benefits for the elderly, it also delivered more equivocal changes: the loss of a narrative of comfort and meaning for aging in a society increasingly telling itself a story of progress, perfectibility, and novelty; the slide from an ontological to a pathological view of the manifestations of aging; a mounting belief in self-efficacy that extended to economic and medical issues related to age; the growth of "political arithmetick" and the consequent categorization and enumeration of the human population which often both defined and marginalized the elderly; the growing conviction that the life span could be extended indefinitely; the related increase in economic gerontophobia (the fear of the old depleting the resources of the young); and the shift in both the very language of aging and the locus of control of that language. Finally, while memory became more important in theories of personal identity, the memories of the long-lived lost value in an increasingly documentary society. I contend neither that these phenomena were entirely new in the early eighteenth century nor that losses outweighed the benefits of the new age; however, in the early modern era these attitudes became incrementally more institutionalized and collective, while the rhetoric of progress—then and now—has consistently privileged positive changes and minimized losses. Reading back and forth between historical documents and the Travels and between the words Swift puts in the mouth of the aging Gulliver and the words of the aging Dean himself (both are fifty-nine when Gulliver concludes his adventures), this work traces developments in such issues as economic gerontophobia and ageism. The Struldbruggs' linguistic isolation makes them "Foreigners in their Own Country"; Swift—through the Struldbruggs and documentation of his own old age—gives us the foreign world of senescence in his time and offers us a chance to juxtapose the place of aging as modernity begins with the situation of senescence as, perhaps, modernity ends.

Nineteenth-century underread novels are unmoored narratives. Published during an era that still, in large part, belongs to the major Romantic poets, the novels in this study are often attached to the work of Jane Austen but left out of histories of the novel. My work with the fiction of Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Opie, Susan Ferrier, and Mary Shelley anchors them in what is often called the Age of Revolution. These texts, I argue, concerned themselves with challenging the underpinning notions of England's establishment, specifically as it manifests itself in domestic spheres, by offering alternative portraits of women's conduct, class mobility, and England's contrary projects of empire and abolition. I read them within the ideological discourse of Rousseau, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin and consider how they both reflect and reject the model of womanhood proposed by conduct literature of the period. Reading them as courtship novels organized around the tensions and conflicts of the period, I consider how the men and women in these texts attempt to overcome moral, ideological, and class difference in order to form imperfect unions. Paying careful attention to the different roles of the narrative and the narrator, I argue for a reading of these novels that questions what is at work in the stories they tell. Juxtaposing their stories with the canonical novels we associate with the period, I suggest that they allow for the complexities within Britain's elite classes at a time when its boundaries were being redefined by ideological shifts and the socio-historical transitions they set into motion.

This dissertation is an edition of the complete known surviving poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678), found in a manuscript at the Brotherton Library at Leeds in Yorkshire, England, Ms Lt q 32. Hester Pulter, daughter of James Ley, first Earl of Marlborough (1552–1629), lived at the estate of Broadfields in Hertfordshire most of her life; her poems, including a series of emblem-poems, reflect her sympathy for King Charles I and her religious and personal concerns, as well as her curiosity about science, during the period of the English Commonwealth. This edition maintains the spelling and punctuation of the original manuscript, probably created by a scribe and Lady Hester Pulter herself, and has been extensively annotated to explain mythological, Biblical, literary, political, and historical references. A scholarly introduction describes Pulter’s life, reading, social setting, and place in literature.

Abstract not available

Prostitution, an occupation once tolerated in English society, became known as "the great social evil" by the middle of the nineteenth century. This study will examine the way in which three major nineteenth-century novelists--Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot--deployed the figure of the fallen woman to comment on various aspects of Victorian society. My critical stance is eclectic, drawing from Michel Foucault's theories of power and discourse, new historicism, feminism, and autobiographical criticism. Newspaper articles, medical journals, and diaries of the period will support my argument that society's ideas about what constituted a "fallen woman" was intimately related to society's ideas about what constituted the Angel in the House as well as what constituted the gentleman. I will argue in my chapter on Dickens that his intense involvement in overseeing Urania Cottage, a prostitute reclamation house, had a major impact on his attitude toward the fallen woman. Dickens moves from a position of the prostitute as victim in Oliver Twist to a more jaundiced view of sexually transgressive women in Dombey and Son and David Copperfield. I will suggest that in Dombey and Son, Dickens's treatment of Polly Toodles, the wet-nurse, was an effort to relieve his own guilt and anxiety about his own family's dependence on wet-nurses, a profession often associated with fallen women. In my analysis of Gaskell, I will suggest that in Mary Barton Gaskell, far from offering a simplistic solution to life's problems, as most critics have posited, actually allies herself with radical thinkers of the period. I read Mary Barton as Gaskell's attempt to wrest the prostitution debate from the confines of right-wing religious thinkers by redefining it as a political problem. In her short story "Lizzie Leigh" and in her novel Ruth, she continues to voice concern about the plight of unwed mothers but retreats from her criticism of industrialization offering instead maternal love as a panacea for social ills. Finally, I will argue that George Eliot's own position as the mistress of a married man provided a spur for her genius, for not until she moved in with G. H. Lewes did she start to write fiction. Eliot's work displays a trajectory, ranging from self-condemnation in her first novel Adam Bede, to an author willing to criticize society for its refusal to let women aspire beyond a domestic role in The Mill on the Floss, to an outright attack in Daniel Deronda on a society she views as patriarchal venal and materialistic. I will suggest that by the time Eliot was writing this final novel, she had finally made peace with her own transgressive self.

Lawrence was familiar with the Demeter-Persephone-Hades triangle from his extensive reading in literature and other disciplines that study myth. He was perhaps too familiar with it from enacting and observing the roles of the three principals in his parents' marriage and his own. Because his fiction followed from his life, the Persephone myth threads through his oeuvre from The White Peacock to The Man Who Died. In this dissertation, I examine the four New World stories, written in 1922–1925 in New Mexico and Mexico, for narrative details of the myth. I first discuss the most authentic version of the myth, Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter . Then, for each story, I point out which version(s) of the myth and which Great Mother figure(s)—Demeter, Persephone, or Hecate—predominate. Because Lawrence read and responded to Freud and Jung, I use psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists for clarification. Critics accuse Lawrence of misogyny in these works because the myth seems an excuse to visit travails upon women: murder of the Woman in “The Woman Who Rode Away,” a direly rundown ranch for Lou and a nervous breakdown for Mrs. Witt in St. Mawr. multiple rapes for Dollie in The Princess and, for Kate in Ouetzalcoatl and The Plumed Serpent, coarsening of sensibility and danger of assassination. Therefore, I end the interpretation of each story with an explanation of why it's inappropriate to apply “misogynist” to Lawrence. In all of them, Lawrence believes that women need rescue (as do men) from a patriarchal matrix of organized religion', industrialization, and various “isms.” Once sprung, as he and Frieda are, they too can struggle towards individuation, an integration of the four levels of life: intrapsychic, interpersonal, socio-political, and cosmic. What appears to be misogyny I see as an attempt to resolve the isolation/assimilation dilemma and an example of Freud's “feminine repudiation” in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”: hostility to men who were his real-life competitors and empathy verging on self-masochism towards women which forced him to battle those closest to him for breathing space.