Although Barker began in the early 1970s as a Marxist satirical playwright, by 2005 his approach had shifted in focus to such an extent that he felt able to define his theatre as having ‘many of the characteristics of a religion.’ This study investigates the relationship between Barker’s theatre and religious and spiritual ideas, focusing on two key influences: the medieval Christian mystical theologian Meister Eckhart and religious and mythic elements of ancient Greek tragedy. Barker’s dramatic engagement with Abrahamic monotheism reveals his interest in early biblical portrayals of God and his appropriation of dominant Christian tropes, notably apocalypse and rebirth. The specific influence of Eckhart’s apophatic theology, his Neoplatonic conception of the One and his doctrine of ‘detachment’ are shown to inform aspects of Barker’s work, including his theoretical text Death, The One and the Art of Theatre. Greek tragedy is examined as a religious and ritual event, establishing parallels with Barker’s view of tragedy as a sacred art that challenges rational and moral ideals by generating ecstatic emotions through an imagined proximity to death. Greek narratives that centre on an encounter with the dead, nekyia and katabasis, are explored in connection with Barker’s drama, along with ritual initiation in Greek mystery cult. Finally there is an investigation into the immoral, ecstatic, erotic, and thanatic aspects of the female protagonist in Greek tragedy and how these aspects of the tragic female continue and are appropriated in Barker’s contemporary tragedy. Eckhartian mystical theology and elements of classical tragic spirituality help to give Barker’s theatre a unique and mysterious dimension. The recurring antagonistic female archetype of ‘the one’ in Barker’s drama expresses core aspects of this spirituality: sexual ecstasy, proximity to death, and detachment from morality and ideology.

The purpose is to elucidate one of the most important types of play written in rejection of late nineteenth-century secular realism. The theory of the form was most forcefully expressed by T.S. Eliot and G.B. Shaw. Although in many ways antithetical, Shaw and Eliot, in terms often curiously similar and with a crucial model in common, demanded a drama which would reject the secular ethos of realism, its formal amorphousness, and its preoccupation with the portrayal of personalities. Quite independently, in looking for an exemplary play in the whole English tradition, each fixed on the medieval Everyman. In "Four Elizabethan Dramatists" Eliot puts the point with force in a phrase pellucid yet richly suggestive: "In one play, Everyman, and perhaps in that one play only, we have a drama within the limitations of art." Shaw used Everyman as the clearest example in English of the work of the artist-philosophers. In both Shaw's and Eliot's admiration for the medieval play lies a horror of chaos, and a demand for philosophical order. Some plays by Maeterlinck, Yeats, Beckett and Pinter are assessed according to their success or failure as 'drama within the limitations of art', drama that imposes order on actuality in order to elicit a sense of order in actuality Yeats's successful creation of a complex private mythology provided him with what the other three dramatists so cripplingly lacked - what Yeats called his "defense against the chaos of the world".

In China, Jane Austen is today widely acknowledged as one of the greatest English writers. Yet her literary reputation has altered greatly since her works were first introduced to Chinese readers in the early decades of the twentieth century. This thesis will examine and explain the major changes in the Chinese reception of Austen in light of the political, social, and cultural upheavals experienced by the country over the last century. The introduction will provide a historical overview of Chinese translation and criticism of Austen’s novels. During the first half of the twentieth century, Austen was generally disapproved of by Chinese critics for restricting her writing to a limited social sphere and her fame therefore grew slowly. I will discuss the influence of Chinese political history on critical assessments regarding Austen’s conservatism and realism. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Marxism came to dominate the literary and cultural scenes. As a consequence, some Chinese translators attempted to incorporate Austen’s works into a Marxist canon, but failed. I will investigate the profound impact of the Communist Party’s political campaigns on the translation and reception of Western literature in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. However, since the 1980s Austen has enjoyed a rapid rise in critical reputation and popularity in China, with her six major novels all appearing in Chinese. However, there are presently significant differences in the reception of each of these novels. The six main chapters of this thesis will examine the reasons behind the popularity of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma and the relative obscurity of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. In doing so, I will explore Chinese critics’ views of Austen’s connection to feminism, conservatism, and romanticism as well as areas of literary debate in her time. I will demonstrate the radical changes in Chinese approaches to Austen’s works in recent decades. This thesis also aims to compare the reception of Austen in China to that in Britain, and contains questionnaire and interview surveys that were conducted among undergraduate students at the University of Nottingham’s China and UK campuses.

This thesis investigates a spectrum of literary, theological, and mythological allusions to the Fall of Humanity in a representative selection of novels by Anthony Burgess. Burgess's use of allusion is fundamentally affected by his natal Roman Catholicism, his view of himself as an exile, and his Augustinian vision of the human condition. The study seeks to identify how Burgess applies theological concepts of the Fall and Original Sin as a lens through which to read other myths, and how these allusions to myth are then absorbed and manipulated within his fiction. The central argument is that Burgess employs irony to ridicule valorised, idyllic, or supernatural elements from mythology, epic poetry, and romance in a degraded, yet comic, postlapsarian environment. This thesis will begin by outlining Burgess's preoccupation with Original Sin and the Fall, and argue that the presentation of the postlapsarian state is a core theme throughout his writing. The critic Northrop Frye's discussion of the archetypes and central features of myth, romance and irony – and his focus upon the Bible as the bedrock of western literature – provides an ideal framework to analyse the mythical allusions used throughout Burgess's fiction. Though Frye is the basis of the critical approach in this thesis, Mikhail Bakhtin's essay 'Epic and Novel', from The Dialogic Imagination, is also drawn upon. Each chapter involves close textual reading, paying specific attention to mythological, biblical, and literary allusions to the Fall, underpinned by the theories of Frye and Bakhtin. The first chapter examines allusions to the wilderness in The Malayan Trilogy (1956-9) and The Doctor is Sick (1960). These novels parody the katabasis, or hero's descent into the underworld, in order to dramatise the destruction of the modern individual in the face of greater forces of disorder. The second chapter considers A Vision of Battlements (1965) and Any Old Iron (1989), investigating the connection between the descent into a temporal world and the onset of warfare and violence in human society. The third chapter turns to Tremor of Intent (1966) and MF (1971), and argues that these novels present a battle between individuals who acknowledge their Original Sin, opposing sterile, solipsistic, and tyrannical forces. The fourth chapter explores the conflict in Earthly Powers (1980) between the heretical notion that evil stems solely from the devil, and the opposing Augustinian vision of evil at the core of human civilisation. Finally, an analysis of A Clockwork Orange (1962) and The Wanting Seed (1962) proposes that the novel form best expresses the capacity of fallen humans to choose and change in a mutable world. The present study aims to demonstrate that Burgess uses allusion to clarify the nature of the Fall to the modern reader. I conclude that Burgess does not yearn for a lost Eden or Golden Age in his fiction, but instead celebrates the postlapsarian state as an authentic human vision. I eschew a socio-political or biographical approach to Burgess's writing, offering an alternate way of interpreting his novels through close textual analysis of mythological, biblical, and literary references.

Prophecy — that is, the action of foretelling or predicting the future, particularly a future thought to represent the will of God — is an ever-present aspect of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a reading of the dramas of Shakespeare’s English history cycles — from 1 Henry VI to Henry V — that focuses exclusively upon the role played by prophecy in representing and reconstructing the past. It seeks to show how, through close attention to the moments when prophecy emerges in these historical dramas, we might arrive at a different understanding of them, both as dramatic narratives and as meditations on the nature of history itself. As this thesis seeks to demonstrate, moreover, Shakespeare’s treatment of prophecy in any one play can be viewed, in effect, as a key that can take us to the heart of that drama’s wider concerns. The comparatively recent conception of a body of historical plays that are individually distinct and no longer chained to the Tillyardian notion of a ‘Tudor myth’ (or any other ‘grand narrative’) has freed prophecy from effectively fulfilling the rather one-dimensional role of chorus. However, it has also raised as-yet-unanswered questions about the function of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English history cycles, which this thesis aims to consider. One of the key arguments presented here is that Shakespeare utilises prophecy not to emphasise the pervasiveness of divine truth and providential design, but to express the political, narratorial, and interpretative disorder of history itself. It is also argued that any conception of the English history plays that rejects homogeneity and even consistency must also acknowledge that prophecy, as a form of historical narrative in essence, cannot be expected to manifest itself in the same ways in each drama throughout Shakespeare’s career. In this sense, the purpose of this thesis is to show that Shakespeare not only uses ‘prophecy’ to construct ‘history’: as a dramatist, he also thinks through ‘prophecy’, in various ways and from multiple perspectives, in order to intensify and complicate our sense of the complexity and drama of history itself. This thesis treats the English chronicle plays in order of composition and performance. While the Introduction contextualizes concepts of prophecy in the early modern period, and its relationship to history in particular, chapters 1–3 address the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with chapters 4 and 5 examining Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV. Henry V is addressed in the Conclusion. The inclusion of the second cycle of histories, rarely interrogated by critics in relation to prophecy, is crucial to the approach taken by this thesis. Unlike previous studies, this thesis privileges prophecy in both the earlier and the later histories, not least because its perceived absence from the plays of the second cycle is capable of informing our understanding of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy more generally. What is at stake in this reading of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English histories, both locally in the plays themselves and more generally across the cycles, are questions of causality, identity (both personal and national), monarchy, and the art of theatre itself.

This thesis is concerned with exploring different forms of Jacobean drama and performances that span across different sites, from the commercial stages of London, to the civic pageants that took place on the Thames and in the City, and the court entertainments held at Whitehall Palace. My research necessarily casts a wide net over its subject matter in order to illustrate how these different modes of performance engage with representations of the marine through the technologies available to them, whether poetic, material, or both. While the sea had long been a receptacle for literary and poetic attention and can repeatedly be found as the stronghold of adventure, wonder, danger, and exile in the English narrative tradition, it is specifically at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the sea takes a hold of the literary imagination with particular force. The cultural, political, and economic predominance of the marine in early modern England found numerous means of expression in drama, where the different facets of marine identity and occupation create on-stage marine spaces. The thesis elucidates how these modes of performance often invoke and exploit the dramatic potential of the marine and its commercial, political, and iconographical meanings. Commercial drama, written for a pre-proscenial stage, realises the marine through language and metaphor, appealing to a collective imaginary in bodying forth the limitless watery expanses on which the action takes place. This imaginative embodiment finds a very different—and indeed a more material—means of expression in civic drama and the court masque, where the extensive and elaborate pageant devices and stage machinery were largely indebted to and shaped by continental theatrical design. The material means of expressing the marine that are found in the civic performances and the court masques discussed in this study necessitates a consideration of European trends in theatre design and the decorative arts. In looking to visual and material culture this thesis explicates the interdependence between different modes of creating on-stage marine spaces and the ways in which the material presence inflects both language and action in Jacobean drama.

This thesis seeks to analyse how the transcendental as experienced in everyday life is presented and represented in my poetry and in the poetry of four selected contemporary Ulster poets. The thesis argues that many emerging Ulster poets take a secular viewpoint. Nonetheless, religious terminology or, at least, the use of spiritual imagery and symbolism, pervades contemporary Ulster poetry. Clay, is an attempt to reconcile the usual secular Western and Christian-based preconceptions of the spiritual and moral with the Vaisnavist viewpoint through the medium of poetry and examine those themes through reflective writerly-critical engagement with my own work and four selected contemporary Ulster poets. Of the contemporaries selected, some also explore faiths other than the traditional Christianity that has pervaded culture and society here and which influenced, in various ways, predecessors such as William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. Two linked aspects of contemporary society that feature in contemporary Ulster writing are consumerism and hedonism. These have been challenged in various ways by the chosen contemporary writers. In Clay, the negative impact of these aspects is explored. The thesis uses close reading and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact the spiritual has on my writing and how the transcendental impacts on the poetry that I produce. The philosophies of agrarianism and vegetarianism, linked as they are to Eastern transcendentalism and contemporary environmentalism, feature in my writing, and these are compared and contrasted to how they are treated by my chosen contemporaries. Mention is made of poetic influences and recurring concepts such as defamiliarisation and the notion of poetic vocation.

Recent work by scholars including Jed Esty and Alexandra Harris has emphasised a renewed focus among English interwar modernist writers upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions. This thesis builds upon such work in examining that focus in the prose works of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), John Cowper Powys (1872-1963), Mary Butts (1890-1937) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). All of these figures have a profound sense of attachment to place, but an equally powerful desire to engage with the upheavals of interwar modernity – in terms of urbanisation, cosmopolitanism, and developments in technology and transportation – and to participate in contemporary literary experimentation. This dialectic between tradition and change, I argue, is analogous to a literal geographical shuttling between rural and metropolitan environments, and in all four writers I identify imagery and literary techniques which reflect those experiences, and are applied across diverse geographical realms. One central claim is that modernity’s tendency to challenge cultural and geographical boundaries, and its oscillations between disintegration and renewal, are manifested in new ways of depicting and understanding our relationships with place and nonhuman animals. I also emphasise the continuity of particular literary techniques (such as paratactic syntax) and forms of imagery (trees, bodies of water) across metropolitan ‘high’ modernism and the texts of the later interwar period, presenting this as evidence for the consistent influence of a tradition/change dialectic in these writers’ work. Another key claim is that all four writers call for an expansion of our conception of modernism, through their challenge to the urban-central/rural-peripheral dichotomy, their emphasis on the past and tradition (particularly the sense of temporal layering within landscapes), and the unorthodox ways in which their work can be considered experimental (for example, through meandering or non-linear structuring). Chapter One emphasises ambivalence in the work of Lawrence, in terms of the persistence of underlying tensions, and argues that these are inextricably bound up with his intimate, empathic understanding of place. Lawrence longs to return to an idyllic, prelapsarian landscape connected to the Nottinghamshire of his childhood, but recognises the impossibility of doing so, given his exposure to the maelstrom of cosmopolitan and metropolitan experience. These experiences generate the need for a renewed relationship with place, although he struggles to articulate any such vision. In Chapter Two I argue that Powys has a similarly ambivalent relationship with modernity, but defuses this through the deliberate playfulness of his work: his ‘Wessex novels’, written from the USA, reimagine the landscape of home through a fantastical, nostalgic lens that can be described as ‘imaginative realist’. This approach, he suggests, is one way in which the contradictory desires and inclinations of the peripatetic modernist author can be reconciled. Through his complex identity and experience of self-imposed exile, Powys develops a strong sense of the English landscape as layered, expressing a kind of temporal cosmopolitanism. In Chapter Three, I again note a vexed relationship with modernity and place in the work of Butts, whose work often expresses a dismayed sense that her childhood landscape in Dorset is being invaded by urbanites and tourists. Like Powys she attempts to resolve this through a re-enchantment of place, emphasising a sense of an ‘unseen world’ in the region, but such fantasises are both less self-conscious and more ethically problematic than Powys’. Nonetheless I do note a distinctively cosmopolitan reimagining of rural England, as a potential haven for marginalised communities, in works such as Armed with Madness (1928). Finally, Chapter Four posits Woolf as a figure in whom the dialectical tensions between belonging and place are less troubling. I relate this ability to manage tensions to Woolf’s equally strong attachments in childhood (and throughout her life) to both urban and rural environments, reflected in the development of an ‘urban pastoral’ form in Mrs Dalloway (1925). In all four writers there is evidence that modernism’s expansion of perspectives can be fruitfully extended to those of place and nonhuman animals, and Woolf’s work is particularly sustained and successful in this respect. The central stress in my thesis conclusion, accordingly, is on the need to incorporate such perspectives into understandings of modernism as a community-oriented movement.

Romantic Disillusionment in the Later Works of Mary Shelley argues that, despite a growing consensus among modern critics that Mary Shelley’s works, and especially the novels written after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death, are of lesser quality than her earlier novels, especially Frankenstein, the later works deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. The title Romantic Disillusionment, at once establishes my disagreement with those of Shelley’s critics who insist that her work is continuous with her father’s, her mother’s and her husband’s. No doubt, she rehearses various elements that characterise her family’s writings, revisits their favourite themes, but she does so in a way that is distinctively her own. The thesis locates in Shelley’s work a more general sense of disillusionment with Romantic ideas, amongst them a reverence for the sublime, a confident faith in the power of the imagination, and a belief in human perfectibility, ideas current in her father’s writing and discussed in the circles in which he moved, as well as those she joined as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lover and wife. The influence of her parents and husband and other contemporaries is traced with particular attention to the disillusionment that she at first shared with them and later came to feel in them. Shelley often invokes Romantic ideals, but characteristically she invokes them only to ironise or undermine them. The thesis is organized in six chapters: an introduction is followed by four chapters on the four novels Shelley wrote after her husband’s death, and a conclusion. The introduction gives an overview of Shelley’s early novels, Frankenstein and Valperga, as well as the novella Matilda, trying to establish how far Shelley even in her early writings did not simply, as seems to be the consensus, follow her family’s notions. This is followed by a chapter on The Last Man, which discusses the opposition between the public and the private life, between a life devoted to public activity and a life spent in seclusion. This chapter also explores Mary Shelley’s understanding of creativity and in particular her interest in biography. Indeed, all Mary Shelley’s later novels can be understood as disguised biographies, substitutes for the book that she had been forbidden to write, the biography of her husband. This chapter also discusses the function of the plague as, like death itself, a leveller, the destroyer not simply of humanity but of all human ideals. I understand the novel in conclusion as a parodic challenge to Godwin’s and P.B. Shelley’s belief in human perfectibility and the millenarian cast of mind that the two men shared. The following chapter on The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck examines Shelley’s single later experiment in the historical novel. Clearly she is responding to the achievement of Walter Scott, as well as to his extraordinary commercial success, but once again hers is an active response. Unlike Scott, she does not pretend to offer a disinterested description of historical events but instead undertakes a passionate engagement with history. She effects, I will argue a self-conscious feminization of the genre of the historical novel. The chapter on Lodore focuses on education, especially the question of female education that has preoccupied not only Shelley’s mother, but many of the most significant female intellectuals of her mother’s generation. In the penultimate chapter, I argue that Falkner is an appropriate culmination of Shelley’s career as a novelist. It is a novel in which she incorporates disguised the ‘Lives’ of Godwin and Shelley, as well as a novel in which she attempts a vindication of the reputation of her mother. It is a novel in which she is especially concerned with her relationship with her father, but for her it is a literary as much as a personal relationship. The novel is modelled, I shall argue, on Hamlet, the play in which Shakespeare explores most complexly the fraught relationship between the parent and the child, and it can also be understood as a re-writing of her own father’s most successful novel, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University. / The purpose of this study was to examine the criticism of a representative group of nineteenth century American authors (Bryant, Poe, Holmes, Whittier, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Simms, Sigourney, Southworth, Whitman, and Thoreau) in about a dozen representative British and the same number of American periodicals during the years l840-l860, with the intention of presenting through summary, paraphrase, and quotation, a cross section of the criticism and of discovering, if possible, the similarities in and differences between the two bodies of criticism. A number of conclusions emerged. The British criticism was not unduly harsh, unfair, condescendince, or colored in any significant way by a general anti-American feeling or a feeling of superciliousness. There were exceptions, to which I feel the Americans gave the undue attention and currency that exceptions usually receive. The American criticism was not influenced by strong feelings of nationalism to the point of being unduly gentle, exaggerated, or chauvinistic, although, here again, there were outstanding examples of these attitudes, to which the writers of the day gave more notice than they deserved. American criticism did not take its cue from and wait upon the pronouncements of the British before it dared to commit itself. On the contrary, it was almost without exception earlier than the British reactions in the case of specific American works, was sometimes different from the British criticism, and was cited occasionally by the British themselves. This is not to say that American critics were independent of British influence. Given a powerful and ancient tradition and culture, a similar system of education and the same language, the Americans inevitably adhered to many of the same standards and were influenced by the same background. It is therefore difficult to say that there is a distinct and characteristic American criticism. Religious, political, class, geographical, and aesthetic influences affect judgments within each of the two bodies of criticism. As a result, divisions are often more marked on these lines than on strictly national ones. For example, the denominational magazines on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have more in common in their treatment of ethical and didactic issues than they have differences because of their national origins; and the political liberals of England and America have more in common with each other than with their conservative countryman. Sectional differences within the states often seem as great as those between American and Britain. [truncated]