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.

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.

With the posthumous publication of Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf afforded her readers an intimate view of her childhood in late Victorian England. The signal event in that childhood was the death of Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen. By Woolfs own admission, her lost parent "obsessed" her until the completion of To the Lighthouse. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, which stresses the primacy of mother-child relations, and the more recent "identity theory" of Hans Lichtenstein, which postulates that one's "way of being" is dictated by early maternal experience, this study contends that Woolf's obsession never ends. Indeed, maternal loss, coupled with what Klein calls "the urge towards reparation," are central motivating factors in Woolf's continuing creative process. This reading considers the author's nine novels, in order to highlight Woolf's lifelong, recurrent "vision" of Julia Stephen. Woolf's vision is encoded in several symbolic variations of her "identity theme," including the use of the mother figure as writer, as moral progenitor, and as prognosticator of a twofold philosophy of resignation and melancholy. Virginia Woolf writes to recreate the lost figure of Julia Stephen, and to recapture the love denied by her mother's death.

This dissertation considers as cultural artifacts surviving manuscripts of legendaries (collections of saints' lives) that focus on female saints. By the conventional count, there are only two English legendaries of women from the period 1200–1650, Osbern Bokenham's and Ralph Buckland's. This count obscures the pattern I have discerned in extant manuscripts: throughout the medieval period and into the seventeenth century, multiple female saints' lives often appear together in the same book. These groupings occur in manuscripts exclusive of male saints' lives, indicating a long-term concern with female sanctity. Privileging manuscript-culture standards over those of print culture, I stretch the term “legendary” to accommodate more than just those collections of saints' lives that stand alone, designating any grouping of three or more vitae within the same book even if they appear in a codex alongside other kinds of texts. Along with Bokenham's and Buckland's, I discuss the legendaries found in Bodley 34, Cotton Domitian A xi, Harley 4012, Arundel 168, Douce 114, Brian Anslay's 1521 translation of Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies, Archives Départementales du Nord 20 H 7, and the Life of Elizabeth Cary. My broadening of the term “legendary,” along with an inclusive definition of “English” (to indicate language or geography, rather than both), raises the count from two English legendaries of women to nine: they are not as rare as first scholarly glance suggests, but comprise a previously-unexamined genre. That so many examples are extant, and that the “legendary of women” persists beyond the Reformation (and beyond English borders), suggests the form resonated strongly with multiple audiences. Legendaries represented access to a reader's favorite vitae; stories could be chosen to fit the number of pages a patron could afford. I examine the significance of this selection along two dimensions. First, I consider the reciprocal relationships among the legendaries, female readers, and the larger religious culture. Second, in addition to placing these narratives in their manuscript contexts, I offer literary analyses of the individual vitae to demonstrate how they, and by extension these legendaries, were versatile enough to accommodate readers from vastly different backgrounds.

This analysis is limited to those Ideal Structures found in the 84 lines of text commonly called "Hrothgar's Homily." Essentially, each line is analyzed in the following manner: (1) The two or three words carrying the sound patterning for the line are noted. (2) Each occurrence of the stem-syllables and derived forms (derived forms are considered to be variants of the words) are checked in Klaeber's glossary. Occurrences are double-checked using Bessinger & Smith's Concordance. (3) All lines containing the stem-syllables and derived forms are checked to see whether that particular word participates in the dominant sound-patterning of that verse line. If it does, it is so designated on the master list. (4) The lists of each of the two words in the original line are then compared to find the percentage of simultaneous designated. (5) The lines in which these structures occur are then compared and analyzed to determine a patter of meaning and to see if the Ideal Structure affects that line even when it is negated or contrasted. The Structures commonly appear every three lines except in two portions of the text, lines 1730-1751 and 1769-1783. Twelve Structures were found. The Structures have been classified in three groups based on their information content. Type A, Primal Structures, is the least represented, but perhaps the oldest. It is represented by one Structure: fyr/flod in line 1764. Type B Structures are the Structures that deal with the interrelationships within the society, namely the reciprocal duties of king and people. The five Structures within this classification are: sod secgan (1700), fremman/folc (1701), halep/help (1709), leod/laer (1722), and wuldor/waldend (1752). Type C Structures describe the personal attributes of the Anglo-Saxon warrior. The Structures within this class are: maegen/mod (1706), dead/dom (ll. 1712, 1768), maere/mon (1715), mon/mod (1729), faege/faellan (1755), and wig/weord (1783). The placement of the Structures contributes to the content and significance of the speech. The Structures enable the audience to understand the ritual significance of Hrothgar's speech and they reflect the themes which concern the poet in the speech. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Parody is central both thematically and structurally to Chaucer's works. In this he proves to be firmly within medieval literary tradition. A parody is an incongruous imitation of some exemplary work, proposing another version of that work which is only imperfectly analogous to it. Analogy, developed in St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis and the doctrine of the Antichrist, is fundamental to the culture of the Christian Middle Ages: the imitation of Christ is the basis for the Christian way of life; evil is a parody of the highest good. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin satires, like Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium, the Tractatus Garsiae, the "Apocalypsis Goiliae," and the "Sancti Evangelii Secundum Marcas Argenti," criticize corrupt clergy as parodic inversions of exemplary Christian figures and doctrine. The vernacular parodies of chivalry invert the categories of romance. "Spiritual " pastourelles invert the terms of that genre. Chaucer uses analogy and analogic parody and travesty in Troilus and Criseyde to evaluate and structure the course of the love affair as imperfectly analogous to both pagan and Christian models, to ennoble Troilus, and to emplot Criseyde's behavior as a parody of Troilus', her betrayal as a travesty of their love, and her character as complementary to Diomede's. Sacred parody in the Pardoner's Tale is well-grounded in medieval exemplary parody and the theology of the Holy spirit; chivalric parody in Thopas has precedent in works such as the Audigier; the Merchant's Tale travesties chivalric and Christian values.