abstract: This research conceptualizes Gothic literature featuring undead characters produced and popularized by Britain in the early nineteenth century as educational texts. As an influx of new ideas at home and abroad disrupted the lives of the Romantics, not to mention the literal uprising of bodies in the French Revolution and the lost war with the North American colonies, British citizens dedicated themselves to preserving the relative safety of their shores from external and internal threats. I expand the definition of the “undead” to include any tangible, corporeal being once technically dead and now reanimated. In doing so, I invite a broader range of texts, and authors, into the conversation of Gothic literature and the genre’s continued legacy. My work reads male and female authors in dialogue with one another, both sexes working within common networks, rather than as creating separate or disparate traditions. The production of instructive undead bodies becomes particularly important to the development of British national identity and reveals a reliance on the maternal to educate and inform future citizens. The texts examined in this dissertation reveal the necessity of contemplating the histories and experiences of the past, of non-white voices, and of the female influence. The texts range in publication date from 1805 to 1863 and thus demonstrate the continued used of the undead in the Gothic genre. An examination of the reanimated corpse in Romantic narrative demonstrates how authors utilized the undead as an educational tool both for the characters inside the text and the actual individuals reading the narrative. The undead offers a lens to look at the Gothic not regarding authorial gender or even a character’s gender, but rather in how the genre portrays bodies, and how those bodies interact with and instruct others. This dissertation’s perception of the undead as a powerful educational force in literature assists in the attempt to complete a more comprehensive analysis of Gothic, and therefore Romantic, literature. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2018

This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter I serves as an introduction to intertextuality; it focuses on John Barth's narrative crisis and discusses structuralist and poststructuralist theories of intertextuality. Chapters II, III and IV discuss the agencies of reader, author and text respectively. Chapter II looks at structuralist and poststructuralist notions of reading and John Barth's parodic play with these notions; it also provides an in-depth analysis of the external and internal readers of LETTERS. Chapter III concentrates on the roles of the reader as re-writer and the author as re-arranger and looks closely at the roles of the different narratorial agents in LETTERS. Chapter IV starts off with a discussion of the discourse of the copy in postmodern culture and moves, via poststructuralist and narrativisit mimesis, to different forms of repetition as developed by Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Chapter V focuses on John Barth's rethinking of notions of authorship and authority. It first gives an historical introduction to authorship, starting off in the Middle Ages, and then moves, via eighteenth-century Samuel Richard, son and nineteenth-century Edgar Allan Poe and Soren Kierkegaard, to twentieth-century· notions of authorship as developed by Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Culler,to end with Jacques Derrida's signature theory. Bibliography: p. 340-356.

Bibliography: pages 366-380. / In the introduction, the writer highlights Fugard's regional artistry, his authentic reflection and recreation of a nation's tormented soul. The first chapter deals with Fugard's early plays, revealing the embryonic playwright and those characteristics of imagery, construction, language and content to be developed and refined in later plays. Briefly examined within this context are No-Good Friday, Nongogo and Tsotsi, the playwright's only novel. A chapter on the Port Elizabeth plays written in Fugard's apprenticeship years, The Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena, focuses on his growing skill as a dramatist, his involvement in his milieu both geographically and emotionally, as well as providing detailed analysis of the plays in terms of major features such as national politics, universal values, existentialism and Calvinism. The period of collaboration in which Fugard responded to the suggestions, imaginative projections and creative stimulus of his actors, forms the content of a chapter devoted to detailed study of the improvised plays: The Coat, Orestes, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and The Island. The later Port Elizabeth plays, A Lesson from Aloes and "Master Harold ' ... and the boys, are explored from political and personal perspectives respectively, with attention paid to the intensely human dramas that dominate even the overtly ideological considerations. A chapter on the television and film scripts - The Occupation, Mille Miglia, The Guest, Marigolds in August - traces Fugard's involvement in these media, his economy of verbal descriptions and his taut control of his material generally. A chapter is devoted to Fugard' s women, the characters who present affirmative points of view, whose courage, compassion and determination infuse a hostile world with a range of possibilities beyond survival and existence. Milly in People are Living There, Frieda in Statements After An Arrest Under The Immorality Act and Miss Helen in The Road to Mecca form a Fugardian sorority of survivors. The final chapter of the thesis is devoted to Dimetos, regarded as an intensely personal artistic statement, an examination of the dramatist's alterego, the playwright's persona.

Bibliography: p. B.1-5. / This thesis takes as its point of departure the analysis of a certain formal element which appears in narrative during the nineteenth century. It concentrates especially on the form this element takes in Dickens's works, particularly in Great Expectations, and in so doing it joins a large group of recent writings in which critics have tried to develop more flexible ideas about the formal structure of Dickens's novels than had been current before. This new focus of attention has been important, because Dickens presents the critic with certain problems which can only be overcome if he develops a fairly complex sense of what might constitute the novel form when Dickens is handling it.

Bibliography: pages 480-513. / This thesis presents an attempt to engage materialist literary analysis in a serious reconsideration of eighteenth-century satire as satire. In the process I see myself as challenging received notions of how the satire of the period is to be contextualized, as well as the way in which the category 'satire' has been constituted. I do not think it is possible to provide any reading of any satire today without initiating a reappraisal of the very form itself. Here I am attempting to integrate an ancient practice with new methodologies. This would seem to demand a perspective which is opposed to, and involves a critique of, not only the accepted institutional views of satire, but of aspects of the academic literary institution itself. Satire is, I believe, a term or category that should not be historicized and relativized out of existence. It has a significance and importance which is lost in attempts to make it a label of convenience: a convenient name that different literary cultures use to differentiate a particular form from the others available to them. In this thesis I will be focusing predominantly on Swift and Pope, who are not only the great satirists of this crucial period, but who are, arguably, the most subtle (Pope) and the most disturbing (Swift) of satirists who ever wrote.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 204-224). / The defence of poetry dates back, in English literature, to Sidney's 'An Apology for Poetry' (1595), and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen an increasing number of writers advancing arguments in support of an art form that seems, more than ever, to be under threat. In this thesis, Seamus Heaney's essays on the purpose of poetry are considered as they constitute a defence of the art form. While Heaney's poetry and prose have, as a result of his popularity and standing as a poet, generated an almost unprecedented body of critical work, his defence of poetry has not been recognised as such, nor has it come under sufficient critical scrutiny. Essentially a defence of a defence, this thesis redresses that omission by examining Heaney's apology as it takes shape in his essays, and in its application to a selection of his own poems.

This dissertation reads David Foster Wallace's literary output against the complicated history of identity politics and multiculturalism in America. Wallace's career coincides with the institutionalisation of second-wave feminism in the 1980s (including at his own university, Amherst College), the turn towards multicultural education and alternative literary canons in the 1990s, and the rising tide of nationalism and right-wing patriotism after 9/11. I depart from the universalist, ahistorical, post-racial framework of traditional Wallace scholarship to consider the literary and rhetorical strategies that Wallace employs as he tries to make a name for himself and remain relevant in a time of rapid social change, shifting reader demand, and growing hostility towards the elite postmodernist style in which he was trained. I argue that Wallace's fiction is marked not so much by an effort to adapt the writing to be more multicultural, race-conscious, feminist, and so on, but rather by an effort to signal that the author is aware of multiculturalism, feminism, and race matters, and that he is on the winning side of the ongoing culture war. Looking at The Broom of the System, I highlight the negotiation that takes place in the book between Wallace's desire to appear as the erudite and masterful postmodernist, versed in the tenets of metafiction and poststructuralism, and his desire to appear as the sensitive white male, attuned to an increasingly politicised female readership. In Infinite Jest, I examine Wallace's attempt to almost "out-traumatise" black women's writing of the 1990s by delivering a sprawling anthology of white hardship and anguish (grounded mainly in upper-middle-class experience). In The Pale King and Wallace's other post-9/11 writing, I show how the author wraps his unmistakably conservative vision of America and American masculinity in socially liberal, progressive-sounding discourse. The postscript offers a brief reflection on the significance of Wallace's work in the age of a Donald Trump presidency, and suggests that Wallace, had he lived to witness the 2016 election, might not have been as unequivocal in his rejection of Trump as his admirers might assume.

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Includes bibliographical references. / The purpose of this thesis is to examine the relationship between Mary Shelley's first novel Frankenstein and her own understanding of Romanticism. The overarching theme is to illustrate how Mary Shelley navigates her criticism of Romanticism through the medium of Victor Frankenstein as a character. With the inspection of Victor Frankenstein some autobiographical similarities are drawn between the protagonist and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Another aim and extension of this autobiographical project is to examine how Percy Shelley's editing of the original manuscript of Frankenstein added or detracted from the plot. Finally, the genre implications of Frankenstein are examined in this thesis. In the first chapter, Romanticism is examined in relation to how the Romantics themselves envisioned their ideology so as to ascertain which aspects Mary Shelley draws particular attention to. The Romantic theorists used in this section specifically, Abercrombie and Schueller, are used to highlight the fact that Romanticism can be defined as a unified system of belief. Certain tenets of this ideology are then shown to be the main points that Mary Shelley criticises. In the second chapter, the autobiographical element of Mary Shelley's relationship with Percy Shelley is examined. The parallels between Victor Frankenstein and Percy Shelley are made apparent through the use of biographers Hoobler and Seymour. From that, the precise changes that Percy Shelley made to the original manuscript of Frankenstein are scrutinised with Mellor's insightful explication of the original that exists in the Bodleian Library. The conclusion of this chapter solidifies the argument of the first chapter, and as close attention is paid throughout both chapters to the novel as a primary source of confirmation, the complex navigations and articulations of Romanticism throughout Frankenstein are made apparent. In the third chapter, attention is given specifically to the genre implications of Frankenstein, and the relationship and consistent oscillation between Romanticism and the Gothic is traced. The theorists used in this part of the thesis vary widely and include Botting, Golinski and Alwes. It is argued that in her destabilisation of Romanticism, Mary Shelley invariably incorporates the Gothic into her text. It is this complex weaving of genres which is particularly interesting in relation to how Mary Shelley's disillusionment with Romanticism produces a text that has such a vast array of genre possibilities. Finally, this thesis looks at the negative interpretation of Romanticism specifically in relation to Mary Shelley's critical expressions of its ideology in Frankenstein. As a cautionary tale, the consequences of Romantic principles unchecked by a societal conscience, Mary Shelley seems to have used Frankenstein as a way of expressing her disillusionment. The repercussions of what ultimately is an original story of a scientist who unleashes his creation without concern for its welfare are still present in the common consciousness of modern society.

This dissertation will investigate how Conrad's "purely artistic purpose" comes under ethical review as reader, character and author renegotiate the terms of the story's telling - specifically (to pursue the novel's haunting reference to Othello) with regard to "the pity of it".