Divided into three large chapters, this thesis explores sixteenth-century concepts of history, considers how those concepts appear in Elizabethan history plays on English history, and finally looks at Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays. The aim of the thesis is to consider in some detail the wider context of historical and dramatic traditions in Tudor England to gain a better appreciation of how they influenced possible readings of Shakespeare’s early history plays. Chapter One looks at how medieval approaches were modified in the fifteenth century. St. Augustine’s allegorical method of biblical exegesis made it possible to interpret history from inside the historical moment by allowing historically specific incidents to stand for trans-historical truths. However, the sixteenth-century chronicle tradition shows an increasing awareness of the difficulties of interpreting history. Chapter Two looks at early English history plays outside of the Shakespearean canon. History plays borrowed the conventions of comedy, tragedy and the morality play to provide frameworks for interpretation. Nevertheless, early histories such as Kynge Johan, Edmund Ironside, Famous Victories, Edward III, The True Tragedy, and The Troublesome Reign did not fit comfortably within established dramatic modes, leading to history’s gradual recognition as a separate genre. Chapter Three looks at the contribution Shakespeare’s plays made to the developing genre. The un-unified dramatic structure of the Henry VI plays denies the audience a stable framework within which to interpret events. In Richard III, a clear tragic framework appears, but is undermined by a strong thread of irony that runs through the play. History appears in the tetralogy as a repetitive cycle of violence perpetuated by characters’ attempts to memorialise the past while failing to learn from it. The crisis presented by history is the necessity of acting on partial information, while the promise of fuller understanding is projected into an unknowable future.

Anglophone Pakistani literature has thrived in the country since its inception in 1947, but the past decade has witnessed a momentous development of this corpus and its readership, receiving formal recognition in Granta 112: Pakistan in 2010. Literary criticism on the subject, which was relatively limited when I started my research on Pakistani English writing in 2009, has since grown but there remains considerable scope for further study. My thesis focuses on the major works of four Pakistani writers, namely Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2008), Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009). Using 9/11 as a marker, my thesis purports that Anglophone Pakistani writing counterbalances “post-9/11” discourse in American and British fiction which has tended not only to privilege the 9/11 moment as unique, but also assumed essentialist notions of victimhood, violence and identity in its representations. This literature, when it concerns itself with countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, focuses primarily on their perceived cultural peculiarities, frequently equating them with extremism, violence and female oppression, and thereby reinforcing the dominant non-fictional rhetoric of the international media. As part of this discussion, my study critiques not only Islamophobia but also refutes the erroneous use recent acts terrorism as a justification for rising Islamophobia. My thesis underscores recent Anglophone fiction’s attempts at destabilising the “single story” about Islam and Pakistan. This study examines the contribution of contemporary Anglophone Pakistani writers in providing alternative representational tropes on the subject of Pakistani identity and selfhood, thereby transforming and revitalising the conventional imagining of the country to the international readership. However, I argue that the work of Anglophone Pakistani literature does not stop here. I show that this reimagining of Pakistan operates within the framework of “transnationalism” and aspires to imagine a political state of “togetherness in difference”. Transnationalism is here conceived as attitudinal, covering human collaborations that link people across national boundaries. It is advanced as a progressive and productive alternative to the assumed cultural, political and economic dominations coded into globalization, which is critiqued for its subtexts of cultural and economic domination. Writing from positions of cultural and spatial uncertainty, these writers simultaneously “host” a rigorous interrogation of fundamentalism, violence and oppression in Pakistan but also strive to facilitate a more “hospitable” understanding of Pakistan internationally. Treading the perfidious fault-line between the binaries of home and abroad, native and foreign and extremist and moderate, these writers address two major issues: one, they intervene by exploding the alleged myths of multiculturalism in the so-called “West”; in characterizing this alternative scenario they effectively question the rise of “Islamophobia” and the ill-informed stereotyping of Muslims around the globe, especially after 9/11. Secondly, I argue that the literary resistance offered by these writers constitute a “zone of contact” between the global north and global south. Replacing the discourse of “us and them”, their fictions advocate the phenomenon of what Ien Ang has called “complicated entanglement”. This entanglement envisages a range of transnational narratives—feminist, political, economic and cultural. As border individuals who embody a complex fusion of cultural experiences themselves, these writers are appositely positioned not only to explore the contradictions of human experiences, but also imagine the possibilities of their resolution.

This thesis will locate the fantastic fiction of Lord Dunsany in a tradition of Irish writing, while simultaneously examining representations of Ireland within the texts themselves. Dunsany has been regarded – until now – as a marginal figure in Irish literature, but this study will show that he deserves a place in the canon. My research will demonstrate that, from his early involvement in the Abbey Theatre through to his late introspective novels set in Ireland, Dunsany throughout his life engages with Irish literary and cultural traditions. The first chapter will focus on Lord Dunsany’s theatrical writings which have been rarely staged since his death and have attracted little attention from scholars. By examining performances of the plays in Ireland and beyond, the links between the playwright and the national theatre will become clear. Building on this work on the plays, Chapter Two and moves on to an analysis of Dunsany’s novels – including The King of Elfland’s Daughter, his best known work – and places them within a historical context of conflict both at home in Ireland and throughout Europe. The next chapter looks at Dunsany’s later novels set in Ireland and questions why it is at this point in the 1930s, after decades of writing fantastic fiction, that the author chooses to locate his works in his own land. The same themes and ideas found in the novels are also prominent in Dunsany’s short stories which form the focus of chapters four and five. Chapter Four examines the stories set in Pegāna, the first tales he wrote and those which made Dunsany’s reputation as a writer of high fantasy, and locates their other-worldliness within the real world of twentieth-century Ireland. The last chapter deals with the later short stories, and brings Dunsany’s work up to date by using recent work on Irish postcolonialism and theories of Empire to analyse these narratives. The conclusion will consider Dunsany’s work overall, by way of close readings of texts from the beginning and end of his career which will allow us to trace the development of Ireland as a concept and as a literary influence throughout his writings.

<p> Science fiction, since its earliest inceptions, has been a tool used often by authors to discuss and reveal societal issues. Orson Scott Card, following in the footsteps of the sci-fi giants before him such as Orson Wells, H.G. Wells, and Ray Bradbury, constructed the Ender&rsquo;s Quintet in order to discuss problems of war, religion, and politics that were prevalent at the time of the novels&rsquo; construction. This thesis seeks to determine how Card uses science fiction themes and tropes as rhetorical devices in order to depicts the issues within his society. More specifically I will observe Card&rsquo;s underlying Mormon agenda to determine the effectiveness of his work. The thesis is broken up into three sections: education, politics and religion. I will discuss how each part is dependent on the others and conclude with religion as one of Card&rsquo;s main purposes for writing is based in his Mormon faith. In order to do this, I will analyze the novels using several of Kenneth Burke&rsquo;s ideas including the definition of rhetoric, theory of identification, definition of man, and the pentad. I will apply Burke&rsquo;s theories to Card&rsquo;s work.</p>

This edition presents a fully modernised and annotated text of Samuel Rowley’s 'When You See Me, You Know Me', first performed by Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune playhouse c.1604. The earliest extant playtext to represent King Henry VIII as a character on the early modern stage, When You See Me dramatizes a number of key events in the Tudor king’s reign including, as per the play’s subtitle, ‘the birth and virtuous life of Edward, Prince of Wales’. The play was first printed in 1605, with subsequent editions appearing in 1613, 1621 and 1632. Despite its apparent success on the Fortune stage, however, the play has become increasingly marginalized since the mid-seventeenth century, receiving only cursory critical attention. In addition to making the text of Rowley’s play accessible to a modern readership, this edition aims to rehabilitate When You See Me as an important dramatization of the Henrician Reformation; it also seeks to draw attention to Rowley and his long and influential career in the early modern theatre. The introduction to the edition is divided into two main parts, focusing respectively on the author and the play; the latter is subdivided to include separate critical, bibliographical and editorial introductions. The Critical Introduction provides information on the play’s composition and performance history, including aspects of its performance on the Fortune stage and its position within the extant company repertory; the Bibliographical Introduction considers the play’s entrance in the Stationers’ Register and the manuscript used as printers’ copy, as well as the physical manufacture of its first edition and the text’s treatment in later and modern editions; and the Editorial Introduction provides comment on the specific methodologies employed in the production of the edition, with particular reference to the Arden Early Modern Drama editorial guidelines upon which the text is based. The appendices provide useful supplementary information, including Rowley’s likely source material; doubling charts; current locations of extant copies; bibliographical descriptions; press variants; and photographs of the copy-text.

This thesis argues for a reading of George Eliot s early fiction - Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss - as an exercise in developing what I have termed a poetics of Jesus. This constitutes a poetics that is a space of continual clearing (lichtung) and an ultimate deconstruction of barriers that inhibit the nexus of the subject and the sacred. I reflect on the work of eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-German Higher Criticism and Victorian novelists and situate George Eliot as a writer who seeks to transfigure poetics as that which recovers what John Hick has termed a language of love . This is a language that comes before the systemic formalism found in Christian poetics after Augustine to F.C. Baur, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss. In her fiction George Eliot achieves what I term a transfigurational language that is different from contemporary writers of the Victorian period. In the development of her poetics from Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and through The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot juxtaposes the evoked image of Christ with her fiction in order to let both image and word interact. Eliot s fiction allows the tension between representation and conception of Christ to produce a recovery of a poetics that is similar to the notion of Christ expressed by Thomas Altizer as an apocalyptic totality if only because it embodies such a radical and total transformation . Ultimately, Eliot s fiction offers what I term a poetic cartography of grace that provides a map of meaning which cannot be limited within the space of language. In the act of moving through the sign/signifiers of the sacred, George Eliot exemplifies a poetics that reaches beyond language and outside the limits of theological discourse, evoking an a/christology that actually embodies the figure of Jesus as true fiction.

This thesis explores the autodidactic tradition in Scottish poetry during the nineteenth century. From the late eighteenth century onwards self-taught Scottish poets offered a vigorous alternative to the literary mainstream. Autodidacts explored both oral and literary styles and genres, utilising a wide frame of reference to express their unique experiences and ideas. Diversity of poetic voice characterises autodidactic poets, including Robert Burns, Janet Little, Allan Cunningham, Alexander Anderson and James Young Geddes. However, Scottish autodidacts shared poetic concerns and techniques, and were highly influenced by their compeers. It is suggested that James Hogg, 'the Ettrick Shepherd' is the central and most significant figure in forming a Scottish autodidactic identity. There are three major sections to the thesis. Part One looks at the origins of the 'peasant poet' image in the national context, exploring prototypes such as Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725), Macpherson's Ossian and Burns as 'Heaven-taught ploughman'. The middle section concentrates on Hogg, illustrating the precise ways in which he explored and, at times, resented his peasant poet typecasting. Works considered include Scottish Pastorals (1801), The Mountain Bard (1807 and 1821), The Queen's Wake (1813), The Poetic Mirror (1816), The Royal Jubilee (1822), Queen Hynde (1825), Pilgrims of the Sun (1815 and 1822) and A Queer Book (1832). Part Three discusses Scottish autodidacticism as it developed after Hogg, discerning subgroups within the peasant poet category.

This thesis examines rival intellectual practices in the early nineteenth century through the theoretical framework of the Habermasian public sphere. Comparing the work of post-Scottish Enlightenment critics such as Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Thomas Carlyle, and their English radical plebeian counterparts, William Cobbett, T.J. Wooler and Thomas Spence, the thesis examines the bases of two divergent strategies of cultural resistance to the social crises of industrialism. By highlighting the ways in which a central literary genre like periodical social criticism was materially constructed out of distinctive modes of intellectual sociability, we can rethink the comparative political efficacy of rival idealist and materialist forms of intellectual praxis during a crucial transitional period. The argument serves as a corrective to the canonical studies of the 'big six' of English Romanticism by foregrounding cultural narratives occluded in traditional Romanticist scholarship: the underappreciated contribution made to Romantic period cultural history by marginalized national traditions, generic forms, and intellectual practices. Reflecting the ideological complexity of these competing critical discourses and cultural narratives, and recognizing the value of a multi-perspectival approach, the dissertation is divided into two sections. The first offers a theoretical and historical overview of the British public sphere, while the second engages through a series of discrete readings with the texts of the critics themselves.

This thesis has two primary functions. Firstly, it seeks to challenge the prevailing critical under-rating of Stevenson's fiction during much of the twentieth century. I aim to add fresh impetus to what are relatively recently established changing critical perceptions of the author, elevating Stevenson beyond the marginalised labelling of 'adventure writer', which had perennially pursued his work from his death in 1894. Secondly, it is my intention to consider the role of Stevenson as an early writer of embryonic anti-colonial literary responses to the imperial world, examining fiction which crossed literary as well as geographical boundaries and entered new precincts of a Victorian life which was dominated by the conquest of the globe. Primarily, this thesis considers, almost exclusively, Stevenson's fiction. Some use has been made of two essays, 'The pentland Rising'(1866) and 'Father Damian'(1890), due to their usefulness in illustrating a clear link between Stevenson's early and later writing in terms of his concerns for and sympathetic portrayals of marginalised voices. I am also aware that the concerns of my thesis could have been taken further via a study of Stevenson's non-fiction, particularly via his travel writing. I have, nonetheless, chosen to focus almost exclusively on the thematic concerns of marginalisation in his fiction, given the undervaluing of his work in relation to his status as a major writer who challenged and criticised matters of imperialism. For similar reasons, I have chosen not to examine extensively Stevenson's responses to religion in his fiction. This could easily occupy a complete thesis in its own right, but I have limited my consideration of religious aspects to those of relevance to the treatment of marginalised voices and populations. I argue unambiguously that Stevenson can be regarded as a writer who constantly relates to marginalised populations and individuals, seen in his Scottish fiction, his adventure stories, and that of a writer at a source of imperial life in the South Seas. Stevenson's concerns for the marginalised emerge when he considers the violent past of Scotland, with his strong focus on the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion. I have deliberately chosen not to focus extensively on 'Kidnapped'(1886) in my consideration of the author's responses to Culloden but have instead subjected the sequel 'Catriona'(1893) to close scrutiny, while referring to the earlier texts when required. 'Kidnapped' has already been subjected to much critical discussion elsewhere; 'Catriona' less so. And the study of the later novel takes into account the context of Stevenson's South Seas residency and the impact this had upon his perceptions of Scottish history and the plight of marginalised voices. Of the author's South Seas fiction, as this thesis also considers in detail, Stevenson's sharp critique of the imperial project is written from his own colonial experience. I argue that Stevenson's response to Scotland's post-Culloden landscape was sharpened and enhanced by his experiences when in exile in samoa. But, as demonstrated in chapter three, there is evidence of a colonially critical approach to be found even in his early adventure novel,'Treasure Island'. For the purposes of this thesis the term 'precincts' is selected for its connotations of geographical boundaries and areas, both of which apply to the experiences of Stevenson's career. There are several sharply contrasting precincts identified in this thesis: the precincts of the Scottish past; the island precincts of the author's earliest novel, 'Treasure Island'; the imperial precincts of London, the centre of the imperial project seen in 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'(1886) and the overtly colonial precincts of Stevenson's South Seas fiction. I focus closely on Stevenson's literary responses towards the imperial precincts of his existence and marginalised voices of oppressed cultures and populations, both in the Scotland he left behind and beyond its borders and boundaries. I also aim to prove that these seemingly different elements of Stevenson's life- Scotland and the South Seas- are inextricably linked, with his exile making a profound impact upon concerns about the marginalised already evident in his earliest writings.

This is a cross-disciplinary investigation that seeks to read some of the representative works of Eliot and of Lawrence as viewed through the critical lens of Soren Kierkegaard's authorship, its strategies and preoccupations. The third arrival in the earlier development of my theoretical project of cross-reading, and not an ascertainably direct influence, Kierkegaard soon became the dominant maieutic presence in my thesis, a fact that is deliberately signalled by the explicit reference to his Life Stages that my title makes. Some of SK's major concerns were indeed shared, idiosyncratically, by the two later writers, each in his distinct biographical, cultural and historical context. There is little undisputed and ascertainable evidence for any conscious direct influence of Kierkegaard on Eliot and still less so of Kierkegaard on Lawrence, but there are thematic, literary and, I will argue, significant diagnostic points of contact and mutual illumination. As Michael Bell did with Lawrence and Heidegger, beginning with Cassirer (Bell 1991: 3-4,6-10), in the same manner I read Kierkegaard as an 'explicatory parallel' to Lawrence and Eliot, as an aid to clarify and to 'bring out the internal complexity and cogency of ... [each man's] ... conception.' I believe this to be an academically valid and illuminative approach to themes of continuing significance. Biographical research and speculation, which continues to be intense in the case of each of these publicly enigmatic men, is largely eschewed in this literary-critical dissertation except where pertinent. However the issue of 'existence-statement', under the mutually modifying criteria of aestheticism and apostolicity, is at one and the same time a decisive and an elusive concern and how it may be both is a peculiarly Kierkegaardian kind of 'truth'. 'Lives' may not therefore be totally excluded from the perimeters of my discussion but must be discerningly considered, where this is germane, and with no rush to judgement. In his remarkable but flawed major study of Kierkegaard (1993), the late Dr. Roger Poole addressed this issue, perhaps too boldly in the context of a purportedly aesthetic reading, but I follow him to the extent that I have included some of my own very different and tentative researches in these areas largely in the Appendices to my main arguments. I define the twinned issues of aestheticism and apostolicity here as, respectively, projected modes of artistic/imaginative pattern making, and the self-perceived status of one commissioned with a message to proclaim. Between these them comes a second-level Kierkegaardian Stage of awareness, the Ethical, that is transitional, explicitly purposeful but still fundamentally truncated and incomplete. These categories, themselves in constant transition, are central to my cross-comparison because in his distinctive way each writer occupied this thematically complex terrain or, put differently, his work can be profitably read through this theoretical 'grid'. Even a superficial consideration of pseudonymous Kierkegaard, 'doctrinal' Lawrence and 'invisible' Eliot indicates this. Similarly Kierkegaard's deliberate employment of the indirect as a mode of communication sheds real and variegated light on the related practices of the twentieth century authors. In Chapter One, Kierkegaardian diagnostic preoccupations and authorial strategies are presented and contextualised, with emphases on the 'Individual', the 'Stages' and Indirection of Discourse. In Chapter Two Lawrence and Eliot are introduced in their wider cultural setting and Chapters Three and Four develop a relevant Kierkegaardian methodology-in-practice for reading some of Eliot's poetry. Chapter Five scrutinises passages from Burnt Norton as a text of progression-through retrieval. Chapter Six addresses the task of refining a method to engage with Lawrence through a Kierkegaardian approach to a quite different generic type of writer. Chapter Seven exploits the Kierkegaardian concepts of Repetition and his three Stages to inform a reading of Lawrence's most original novel, Women in Love. Chapter Eight reads late Lawrence, sometimes against Eliot, with a view to establishing the nature of Lawrence's final attempts to forge a religious discourse, paying attention again to Kierkegaardian insights. I conclude that through ingenious and dynamic strategies, within formidable constraints and limitations Lawrence attains a fitfully remarkable and, at best, strikingly original achievement of modern religious discourse. In Chapter Nine I draw my generalised conclusions about the value of Lawrence's and Eliot's work in the wider area of religion, language and meaning.