In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which mothers and motherhood are represented in relationship to daughters in the three late Middle English romances, Sir Degrevant, Floris and Blancheflour, and Lay le Freine. Throughout my dissertation, I seek to shed light on the revisionary or utopian inclination that romances as a genre embody through their marginal characters, including mothers and daughters, and their transgressive desires. And I conceptualize mothers in the three medieval romances as agentic subjects who not only enact but also reshape the established power that is most often represented as patriarchal authority and patrilineal inheritance system. As I construct mothers as subjects who assume ambivalent agency, Judith Butler's theories on the relationship between subjects and the power have been very useful. As a way to think about the socio-cultural context where medieval mothers may experience their individuality and motherhood and exert their agency, I look into historical accounts, including the Paston letters, that register particular aspects of realities in late medieval England that are important to my argument but romances do not illumine extensively. Then, in order to investigate the psychological and affective dimension of mothers in relation to daughters, I make use of some feminist psychoanalytical and socialist approaches. These concepts help me to perceive how the overdetermined circumstances make impacts on the psyche of maternal subjects. Keywords. Mothers, Motherhood, the Middle Ages, Romances, Agency, Subjects, Affect, Daughters, Family/Household.

The fear of plague was inherent in Renaissance English society. On average, at least two periods of extensive mortality occurred within each reign of a monarch from 1500–1700. All kings and queens knew that plague might in any year visit and force them to abandon their thrones in flight. A court page or cook breaking out in a fever was enough to shake the national foundation, as John Davies of Hereford records in his poem, “The Picture of the Plague According to the Life as it was in Anno Domini 1603”: The King himself (O wretched Times the while!) From place to place, to save himselfe did flie, Which from himselfe himselfe did seeke t'exile, Who (as amaz'd) know not where safe to lie. Its hard with Subjects when the Soveraigne Hath no place free from plagues, his head to hide; And hardly can we say the King doth raigne, That no where, for just feare, can well abide. For, no where comes He but Death followes him Hard at the Heeles, and reacheth at his head. (1.45) This was no way to keep a monarchy intact or a society stable. In their new worlds, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish each constructed a “no-place” for the king “his head to hide”; however, containing the plague was not simply a matter of dreaming up a panacea. Rather than easily eliminate plague from their worlds, they grappled with the very presence of plague, both releasing and controlling it within their borders. This dissertation examines the specific religious, scientific, and literary regimens each writer utilized and depicted. The last chapter analyzes the less optimistic response to plague and utopia, assessing the failed utopian world presented by Shakespeare in Timon of Athens and by Jonson in The Alchemist.

In real life, virtuous women have no stories. Or, at least, their brief stories always end in marriage. But in the novel, heroines must have stories for the novel to even exist. This helps explain the omnipresence of the fallen woman as a secondary character in the novel from roughly 1740 to 1850. The threat of “ruin” to the heroine, which the fallen woman represents, compels narrative, and the fallen woman's story “breaks” into the virtuous woman's narrative. Thus, although the history of the fallen woman in the novel could easily be extended backwards to include the sexually transgressive women in Behn's or Defoe's fiction, the association of the ruined body with ruined narrative, which is central to my argument, only finds its first expression during a literary shift towards respectability for the novel, occurring roughly around the mid-eighteenth century. As it became more important for central heroines in novels to be pure (unlike those earlier heroines), the fallen woman becomes a necessary secondary character. My study links the formal and the cultural by using narrative theory, close reading, feminist approaches, and cultural history in order to explain a phenomenon that, despite its cultural roots, must grow out of formal necessity, as well, in order to last over one hundred years. The narrative “breaks” I discuss can be categorized into three major types: embedded texts framed by and breaking into the larger text of the novel, gaps in narrative time, or the momentary freezing of narrative into a sort of tableau, a highly visual representation that seems to exit narrative mode and imitate a painting rather than a story. I trace these breaks through the narratives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors including Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Sheridan, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

This dissertation is an examination of nineteenth-century British elegiac poetry. It focuses on poems written by both Romantic and Victorian poets—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Clare, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Emily Brontë, James Thomson (B. V.), Thomas Hardy—and argues that much of nineteenth-century British poetry is elegiac, even when the poems are not strictly elegies by form. The last four decades of critical discussions of the elegy and elegiac writing have tended to focus almost exclusively on the psychological interpretations of the written word within the confines of the conventions of the genre. Throughout this period of stagnation, students and scholars of the elegiac vein have by and large been spoon-fed with this mainly Freudian theoretical bent which has been spearheaded by the psychoanalytic critic Peter M. Sacks. In an attempt to construct an alternative critical perspective that detracts from this psychoanalytic methodology, I explore varying attitudes to loss that elicit elegiac responses in the form of elegiac impulses. My dissertation also works to bridge the conventional divide between the Romantic and Victorian eras which too often results in oversimplifications. I believe it is essential to see not only the ruptures, but also the continuities of the elegiac traditions throughout the nineteenth century. The unique differences between the two eras are certain and well documented. However, little has been said about the textual, thematic, and stylistic value of elegiac poems written throughout the century in question. I argue further that there is a long-neglected need for a distinct delineation of the intrinsic characteristics of nineteenth-century elegiac poetry through a number of specific paradigms. At this juncture, I divide nineteenth-century elegiac poetry into two main conceptual categories: sense of loss and elegiac response, where the former derives from and operates upon the paradigms of either physical death or the idea of death (i.e. perceptual death), while the latter works through the paradigm of either silence or tautology and circularity. In the final analysis, the nineteenth-century poet's inherent preoccupation with absence and the void and his/her response to loss becomes manifest in the form of elegiac impulses, and ultimately creates its distinctive watermark that is visible to the discerning eye by virtue of its tautological and circuitous pattern.

In Irish nineteenth-century novels, allegorical romances employ a love story between an Irish and Anglo character to enact Ireland's fraught position within Great Britain. While the overall arch of the plot with its message of love and compatibility emphasizes the incorporation of Ireland into Great Britain, writers articulate ambivalent messages that often expose or question the colonial project in Ireland. Such narrative ambiguity, which allows the allegorical romance simultaneously to suture and open the wounds of empire, makes the trope productive in a colonial situation. This dissertation examines such inconsistencies by exploring not only the narrative trajectory of the romance but also the generic modes and cultural forms that conceal or expose the workings of power in the novels. These stories of cross-cultural romance evolve throughout the nineteenth-century Irish and British novel. Romantic allegory's most important predecessor, the native Irish aisling, a type of Irish political poetry that reached its zenith in the eighteenth century, gives the allegory an important valence in Irish literature and creates an audience receptive to specific literary patterns. Sydney Owenson's novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) incorporates Gothic and epistolary forms to articulate anxiety regarding the proposed union between England and Ireland. Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812), Charles Maturin's The Milesian Chief (1812), and John Banim's The Boyne Water (1826) all deploy pairs of characters to demonstrate the internal divisions as well as the complex allegiances within Irish society. In Castle Richmond (1860), Anthony Trollope uses an allegorical romance to support Ireland's union with England, yet the emotional register of the love story frequently contradicts the pro-British arguments that he embeds in the novel. The dissertation concludes by discussing the reasons for the popularity of the allegorical romance in Ireland and sketching out its development in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish literature.

Hollywood productions of Shakespeare often strive for accessibility by extensively reducing the complexities of the plays. The characters are turned into familiar types and ambiguities are erased. Postmodern productions attempt to problematise the supposed ideological assumptions behind the plays as well as Shakespeare's iconic status in our culture. The result is often irreverent, shocking, “subversive.” Characters and situations lose their original complexity and irony by being subjected to a metatheatrical irony imposed by the production. Both the Hollywood and the postmodern performances are attractive to adolescents, who are typically reassured by the familiar types and revel in rebellion against perceived “authority.” While many are tempted to praise this attractiveness as a service in rendering Shakespeare “accessible” to adolescents, what is rendered accessible is not Shakespeare. This is deeply unfortunate, as a rich understanding of Shakespeare—one which allows for his multifaceted vision of the human condition, his endless perspectivising on problems of morality and character, his skepticism of values and ideologies—is of great value precisely at this stage of life, when the jumbled world invites simple solutions. Evidence of the ability of adolescents with a wide range of backgrounds and intelligences (as conventionally measured) is provided by firsthand accounts of student productions of Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale, and Romeo and Juliet. The reactions of a group of adolescents to Baz Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) before and after they themselves had worked on a production of the play demonstrate a sea change in attitude toward the film. Luhrmann's movie, which has elements both of Hollywood reduction and postmodern irony, is subjected to a thoroughgoing critique in an attempt to explain this shift in attitude. Ultimately it is the demoting of the language of the play which condemns the audience of such “accessible” productions to a superficial and misleading encounter with Shakespeare.

Renaissance drama, viewed against the new, fame-obsessed restlessness of Petrarch, Cardan, and Montaigne, engenders an imperial selfhood that fashions itself with narcissistic aggression and simultaneously undermines itself by becoming an agent in its own destruction. Selfhood issues in a restless self-overcoming in which the individual struggles to outdo himself in dizzying jousts of self-rivalry. "Victims" often follow a self-destructive career; self-fashioning and self-cancellation are not really that far apart. Doctor Faustus examines the Reformation impulse toward self-fashioning in relation to an "other." It signals not the fullness but the dissolution of identity through pride, despair, and death. Faustus internalizes Mephastophilis, the great "other" of Marlowe's age; this results in satanic parody. His quest for self-knowledge mimics the Protestant's journey toward God. But in parody, selfhood and self-cancellation become interchangeable. In King Lear, Lear's actions are almost death-driven. His libido moriendi is connected to his quest for self-knowledge; finally, it is death alone that teaches self-knowledge. Aided by thumos, Plato's "high rage," Lear acknowledges his mortality, and knows himself through rage and madness. Awakening to find Cordelia, he repossesses everything that makes life worthwhile. In The Revenger's Tragedy, Vindice takes Renaissance self-fashioning to a sinister extreme, enacting several roles in a revenge drama written, directed, and performed by himself. He transforms his dead mistress into his grisly doppelganger whose charms rival those of Petrarchan beauties. He usurps the divine function and metes perfect poetic justice, initiating his own death, and laying claim to a perverse fame. In 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Giovanni perverts the laws of kinship and social exchange through incest. Unable to give the "gift" of his sister to another, he loses his place in the kinship structure. Her repentance indicates that her heart has been "stolen" by a higher deity, and she becomes a defiled object in his eyes. To purify her and to recover his lost heart, Giovanni offers a violent sacrifice where he is both an enraged god and a sacrificer seeking to placate that god with the "gift" of Annabella's heart.

The stories of Medea and of Proserpina had a profound influence, hitherto unrecognized, on the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. Medea's story, as it appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses (and in Golding's translation) and in Gower's Confessio Amantis, reappears throughout Shakespeare's canon. The age-old struggle of the young girl caught between her duty to her father and her love for a stranger is exemplified by Medea's situation, and it is played out at least three times in Shakespeare's drama, beginning as a subplot in The Merchant of Venice, moving into the opening act of Othello, and finally directing much of the action in The Tempest. In King Lear, both Shakespeare and Hecate, Medea's patron, punish the father for betraying the good daughter. For Spenser, the ambiguity of Medea's character is tempered by William Caxton's portrayal of her in The History of Jason, a previously unremarked source of The Faerie Queene. Here, Spenser finds a witch, Medea, her benign counterpart, Mirro, and a Jason who is torn between two women rather than between the "good" Medea who helped him to win the Golden Fleece and the "bad" Medea who arranged his uncle's murder. Spenser reincarnates Caxton's versions of Jason and Medea in the forms of Red Crosse and Duessa, thereby converting the pagan sinner Jason into a Christian hero. Proserpina's story serves as an antidote to Medea's in that the latter foregrounds infidelity while the former highlights the unbreakable bond between mother and daughter. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser improves on Ovid by transferring this bond from same-sex kinship to same-sex friendship, a higher type of love: Ceres and Proserpina find new life as Britomart and Amoret while Amoret's suitors embody various characteristics of Pluto/Death. In "The Cantos of Mutabilitie," Spenser rewrites Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, replacing endless repetition with unchanging eternity. In Shakespeare's works, Proserpina's rape is reenacted in the death of Ophelia in Hamlet while the reunion of Proserpina and Ceres and the resurrection of Ophelia are enacted in The Winter's Tale.

The work subjects The Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser to an archetypal mode of analysis that through its consistent application is intended to prove a reasonably reliable instrument for extracting a coherent meaning from that text. The approach selected, one that invokes a motif-driven, patterned analysis of the text, establishes the monomythic model of Joseph Campbell as a context for evaluating the heroic dimensions of the questing knights Redcrosse, Guyon, Britomart, and Calidore. The methodology further proposes to liberate Spenser from allegory--here defined as the assignment of abstract values to the figures of art in order to validate and facilitate ideological interpretations of that art. The study promotes the quest paradigm as a valid measure of characterization capable of generating interpretation across a wide spectrum of texts. The view of the study is that however much Spenser may have intended a particular, allegorical, reading, the text frequently invites a different response. The application of the monomythic model is undertaken with a revisionist's toleration for a received tradition of interpretation but a toleration seasoned with the determination to permit the quests to unfold in language not in spite of it. Accordingly, neither Redcrosse nor Guyon is viewed as partaking in a successful quest as such is defined by the extent to which the Knights' respective adventures conduct to the integration of disparate psychical impulses. Britomart and Calidore are seen as attaining a more certain psychological integration. Finally, the study suggests that Spenser--himself subjected to analysis following the model--abandons his ambitious self-appointed quest to complete The Faerie Queene in favor of a modestly successful completion of a surrogate quest to achieve personal and literary renown, a quest embodied in the Amoretti.

My dissertation considers the influence of nineteenth-century science and culture on the representations of women in Thomas Hardy's popular fiction. My research builds on recent Hardy scholarship on gender relations to examine the cultural and scientific developments of the period both that inform Hardy's experimental style of narration and that explain how his representations of women in some cases fascinated and offended his sophisticated reading public. My opening chapter studies the responses of nineteenth-century literary journalists to Hardy's early novels as a critical influence on the formation of his experience narrative practices. This specialized audience developed divergent codes of realism, based on their own understandings of Victorian science and religion, in order to evaluate Hardy's first commercially successful work, Far from the Madding Crowd. In response to the criticisms of this audience, Hardy sought to complicate the experimental treatment of heroine in his later fiction. My second chapter probes into the contribution of Hardy's first career as a Gothic architect to the style of representation in The Return of the Native. I study a little noticed allusion in Hardy's novel to the diorama. I argue that Hardy most likely gained an awareness of Gothic architecture, and I examine carefully the relation between his allusion to the diorama and a broad thematic interest with the science of reading her story. My third chapter gives attention to the role of his architectural and professional backgrounds in informing his engagement with the developments of nineteenth-century sciences in Two on a Tower. I depart from other readings of the novel, by identifying not only allusions to Victorian astronomy but also references in the novel to the works of nineteenth-century scientists including Darwin and Cuvier. In my fourth chapter, I observe closely the heroine's idiosyncratic speech patterns in Tess of the d'Urbervilles as indicative of Hardy's scientifically influenced preoccupation with the development of linguistic practices and literary traditions. At the close of my dissertation, I broaden my analysis to the relation between Hardy's seductive treatment of his heroine and those of other writers in the fin de siècle.