This thesis studies the poetry of Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) and explores how this still relatively obscure poet, writing at the turn of the last century, has a key role in any discussion of poetic tradition and ideas of gender and female identity as these are configured in the early twentieth century. This thesis examines why Mew's work has been condemned to obscurity in spite of her comparative success during her own lifetime and goes on to suggest that the very reasons for her rejection from the literary canon - the critical approbation of her peers, biography and the problem of placement in literary culture - are the methods of exploring her true contribution to it. Chapters two to five study Mew's work from four different but related critical standpoints: the figure of the fallen woman, the Victorian women's poetic tradition, Modernism and impersonality and female Modernisms and ideas of the feminine sublime. One of the major problems in establishing Mew's work in the critical culture has been the difficulty in placing her as either a Victorian or a Modernist. This thesis studies her writing in both critical contexts suggesting that Mew's work challenges the absolute categories of the literary canon. The chapters are divided into a study of the critical arguments surrounding ideas of tradition and gender followed by a detailed textual study of her poems. Her poetry is compared to that of writers as diverse as D.G . Rossetti, Augusta Webster, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, T. S. Eliot and H. D. Through a constant balancing of Mew's individual voice and her place in the literary culture, I suggest that her work is integral to an understanding of literary tradition and that her work is central to discussions of gender poetics and female subjectivity in the twentieth century.

The subject of my research is the female consort and her court. I focus on three Austrian Archduchesses: Giovanna, Barbara and Eleonora Habsburg who came down to Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century and married into the ducal houses of Florence, Ferrara and Mantua respectively. My thesis compares the structures, roles and relationships in these three contemporary female courts, and analyses the consorts’ reliance on personal consumption, gift-giving and patronage activities to assert their power, position and identity. My research is primarily based on the unpublished letters and accounts preserved in the three state archives of Florence, Modena (which contains the Este archive) and Mantua. My thesis starts with a background chapter on the history of the three Duchesses, and then turns to address each Duchess’s financial situation, the organisation of her court, her attitude to her husband and her new family and the particular circumstances of her life. This chapter sheds new light on the position of the consort, and sets the stage for the exploration of her patronage and consumption. My first case-study focuses on clothing. I examine the Duchesses’ choices in dressing themselves and their courts and analyse their treatment of clothing as a valuable visual language. My second case-study focuses on the gifts of food that were sent to and from the Duchesses. I discuss their function as items of relatively small economic value in the creation of patronage relationships and in the process of social and political mediation. The central tenet in my case-studies is that objects could act as coded messages, with multiple meanings which can be dissected by studying owner, receiver, means of transmission and the type of object itself. My approach employs material culture as a means for enriching current knowledge of a particularly under-researched subject: the female consort.

When Robert Southey published his second epic, Madoc, in 1805, he had already been working on the poem in various stages for a decade. His first complete draft of the poem was composed between February 1797 and July 1799, and this version differs substantially from that which Southey was to publish six years later. In this thesis I have published, for the first time, what I call MS.2A in full, complete with all its deletions and emendations, transcribed from the original in the Keswick Museum in Cumbria. In my Appendix I have also provided detailed explanatory notes to each of the fifteen books. These not only elucidate textual references but trace many of Southey's ideas, descriptions, etc. to the numerous sources that he had consulted for the composition of MS.2A, several of which he was never to acknowledge in the notes to the published poem. My introductory chapter examines the critical problem which commentators have encountered (and in many ways exacerbated) by paradoxically recognising Madoc's accretive compositional process while refusing to engage with any of the earlier manuscripts. The chapters which follow recontextualise Southey's long-held interest in the Madoc legend, from his latter years at Westminster School to the publication of the poem in 1805, within the wider Southeyan biographical framework. Particular attention has been paid to that period when he was composing MS.2A - a period which he himself was to recollect as being the happiest and most productive of his life, and during which he produced many of his most enduring shorter poems. My penultimate chapter examines some of the political and religious issues arising out of MS.2A, while arguing that a true critical understanding of these issues can only be achieved by our willingness to engage with, rather than - as has traditionally been the case hitherto - merely dismissing Southey's selection (and even rejection) of source material. My final chapter explores in depth ten of Southey's major sources for the writing of MS.2A, and provides the reader with information relating to their origin and make-up, details concerning the editions which Southey might have used, and a feeling for their author's wider aims and ideological tenor. A number of minor sources are also discussed, so that this chapter paves the way for a fuller understanding of Southey's borrowings.

Chapter 1 examines the grammar school curriculum in the early seventeenth century, paying special attention to the classical texts usually taught and to the normal pedagogic methods used. It also gives an account of the courses of study at Trinity College, Cambridge in the period. Chapter 2 discusses Marvell's Latin poetry, and includes a detailed analysis of those poems which have a close relation to the English lyrics. Chapter 3 considers 'To His Coy Mistress' in the context of the carpe diem tradition, suggesting that a particular affinity exists between Marvell's poem and the Greek amatory epigram, and also traces Lucretian influence on its metaphors and language. Chapter k discusses 'The Nymph complaining' as a pet lament which is in the tradition of the Greek Anthology, Book VII, and of neo-Latin pet poetry, but which also echoes the ecphrastic epigram, in its concentration on the aesthetic object. Chapter 5 analyses 'The Garden' as a version of the Horatian retreat poem which is much altered, chiefly by Marvell's use of Ovidian allusion and Neoplatonic metaphors and ideas. Chapter 6 examines the relation of 'Damon the Mower' and 'The Mower's Song'to the pastoral complaint in classical literature, and demonstrates the pervasiveness of the influence of Pliny's Natural History on 'The Mower against Gardens'. Chapter 7 argues that the 'Horatian Ode' is a meditation on fate and human motivation in the manner of Lucan, and that Horatian influence is slighter than has usually been thought.

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The thesis considers the construction of cultural identity in the writings of Tom Morrison, Annie Proulx, and Amy Tan. It consists of three chapters, one dedicated to each of the writers. In the examination of these writers the focus is upon the construction of the "bicultural" subject in the contemporary United States. The paradigm of analysis is constructed through discourses of space, landscape and physical geography. The first chapter is devoted to Toni Morrison and is divided into two sections dealing with the novels Beloved and Jazz. The first section examines how spatial discourses disrupt binaries that marginalise the black community. It concentrates upon the location of the "porch" in the novel and parallels it with the "porch" as a black spatial icon. The Jazz section examines the idealised space of the City. It focuses on the material layout of American Cities and discusses its relationship to constructions of American cultural identity. The debate is used to highlight how the geographical marginalisation of communities parallels their cultural alienation. The second chapter is split into two sections, the first focuses upon The Joy Luck Club, the second concerns The Kitchen God's Wife. Tan's work is discussed in relation to cultural geographic debates about mythic geography. It deals with the different ways in which Tan's texts try to palliate cultural anxieties about "belonging" by constructing a culturally soothing mythic location. An idealised version of the Chinese-American community is sustained through her constructions of both San Francisco and China, which she employs and negotiates in different ways in the two texts. The third chapter examines three Proulx texts, Postcards, Accordion Crimes, and Close Range Wyoming Stories. The chapter explores the different ways these texts negotiate cultural belonging in relation to geographic migration. Postcards is considered in relation to the literary discourse of migration. In Accordion Crimes the employment of similarly positivist conceptions of the construction of a "home" in North America is examined. The final section examines the problematic nature of "location" as both geographically and textually soothing. The Epilogue suggests the possible extension of the thesis and foregrounds the importance of the materiality of spatial construction to the cultural anxieties the thesis examines.

This study explores representations of the adorned female body in sentimental literature. In particular, it addresses the intersection of the discourses of dress, fashion and sensibility and the political anxieties such intersections expose. These concerns are located within current critical debate upon the implications of the feminine sentimental ideal for women readers and writers. Building upon recent scholarship, the introduction argues that sensibility was predicated upon a concept of the body as an index of feeling. This argument is subsequently complicated, through a reading of More's `Sensibility' (1782), which points to the potential of dress to function as both an extension of the corporeal index and metaphor for sensibility's propensity to lapse into affectation. Dress, as More implies, not only exposed but embodied the paradox status of sensibility as a symbol of selfhood externally expressed, and possibly affected mode of display. The opening chapters explore, in greater depth, the perceived antagonism between dress and the sentimental body. Chapter One centres on Pamela (1740) and the heroine's contentious appearance in her homespun gown and petticoat. Chapter Two explores textual representations of dressmakers and milliners, whose damning association with fashion ensured that they became personifications of and further justifications for critiques of dress as a form of social and moral encryption. Subsequent chapters on ladies' magazines and Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765) discuss how writers, across various genres, responded to this antagonism by suggesting ways in which the adorned female body might become a synecdoche of sentimental virtue. Such texts, however, reveal the fault line upon which they and, by extension, sensibility rest. In analogising appearance and worth, writers had to uncomfortably acknowledge that, once outlined in print, such ideals became accessible to readers, potentially rendering virtue as easy to put on as a gown or petticoat. The final chapter addresses the escalating synonymy of fashion and sentiment in the 1790s, as critics argued that the distinction between genuine feeling and its performance had blurred to obscurity. Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) is read, in this context, as a counter-sentimental novel, which attempts to divorce the two through the rehabilitation of the woman of fashion as a woman of `true' sensibility: a wife and mother.

This thesis explores the interconnecting themes of time, death and the subjective in relation to performance, the performative and the critical act of writing. It is structured as a heterogenous series of case studies of a range of performed and petformative events, each offering a focus for an investigation of how the key terms of time and death operate in and around that event, and of how those terms lead to other areas of investigation. It deploys analytical and conceptual frameworks from, amongst others, the disciplines of psychoanalysis, queer theory, cultural studies, the visual arts, literary theory and performance studies to develop a series of interdisciplinary readings of subjects including the perfonnative construction of subjectivity, the temporality of photography, the temporal and spatial aspects of domestic architecture in relation to performance and installation, and the epistolary exchange as performance event. The thesis also addresses the problematics of how to engage in the process of critical writing in response to the ephemerality of performance, and theorises "performative writing" in relation to the broader themes of time and death. A range of textual forms are deployed in the text, including fictional autobiography, love letters, instructions for scientific experiments, prose poems and fragmented essays in multiple voices. By repeatedly reinventing the form through which the writing is presented, the thesis also implicitly explores the limits of textuality in the context of the creation and presentation of the doctoral thesis itself.

The subject of this thesis is a figure that might provisionally be called the *modemist angel'. Focusing on modernist literature, and more particularly on the work of D. H. Lawrence, H. D. and Mina Loy, it aims to isolate from the many angels found in all periods and all types of art a historically specific and intellectually coherent paradigm: an angel of and for its modernist times. A figure of precisely this type could be said to exist in the form of Walter Benjamin's 'angel of history'. Critics who address the question of the modern angel in texts by Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke often do so in conjunction with the problem posed by the angel of history. Beginning with a chapter on Benjamin, this thesis nevertheless follows a different trajectory. Over five chapters, it explores a modernist landscape formed not only by Lawrence, H. D. and Loy, but also by European and American writers such as A. R. Orage, Allen Upward, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Although the angel that emerges from this investigation might, in some respects, be said to anticipate Benjamin's later version, this figure is also very different, standing for a project that is distinctively, and recognisably, modernist in nature. He/she (the sex of the modernist angel is often open to question) represents an attempt to reconcile the divine responsibilities of the artist with the material and gendered conditions of being, specifically of being human, in the modem world. This thesis looks again at the clash of intellectual paradigms in the early-twentieth century - notably, the confrontation of the Romantic view of art as a superhuman or sacred undertaking with the psychoanalytical or evolutionary idea that all human endeavour is underpinned by sub-human motives - and suggests the angel as a new and instructive figure through which to think the perilous limits between the human and the divine in modernist literature.

My dissertation looks critically at Grace Aguilar’s historical romance novels and short stories, and investigates English writers’ uses of history in early- to mid-nineteenth century fiction. Shifting the current critical emphasis on Aguilar’s Jewish texts, I have analyzed the ways in which Aguilar revises the genres of the national tale, the gothic romance, and the medieval romance in order to demonstrate her participation in the construction of nineteenth-century domestic values. In Chapter One, I introduce to critical debate Aguilar’s juvenilia, relying on unpublished manuscripts and novels published only in the twentieth century to establish the origins of Aguilar’s interest in history and historical writing. Locating Aguilar’s narrative style in the early nineteenth-century national tale, I show that as a child Aguilar envisioned the English and Scottish nations as a family, making domesticity both a private and a public—a female and a male—value. Chapter Two focuses on Aguilar’s use of history to express nineteenth-century domestic ideals in her version of the gothic romance. Deploying the setting of the Catholic Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, Aguilar writes gothic tales that unite Jewish and Protestant gender values. She makes heroic the Jewish female martyr to suggest not only that nineteenth-century Protestants and Jews share similar domestic principles, but also that Jewish women could be seen as ideal models for Protestant women. Finally, in Chapter Three I explore Aguilar’s participation in the nineteenth-century medievalist tradition by reflecting on her revision of nineteenth-century literary idealizations of the Middle Ages. In these short stories, Aguilar fictionalizes the sixteenth-century European chivalric ethos, looking critically at the role of women in court society at the end of the Middle Ages. Deploying the tropes prevalent in popular nineteenth-century anti-medievalist fiction, Aguilar debunks celebrations of the Middle Ages by showing how chivalry is antagonistic to nineteenth-century domesticity.