In his choice of biblical material, in his attitude towards biblical matter in poetry, in his efforts to supplant secular poetry with divine poetry, and in his style and metre, Francis Quarles is in an established tradition of religious poetry which dates from the mid-sixteenth century. He used this poetry to support the Established Church and a Monarchy based on Divine Right when these institutions were being attacked. He criticized particularly Roman Catholics, Arminians, Puritans, and Separatists. However, his poetry is not purely propagandist. He shared a contemporary interest in the vocabulary of the language and made many additions to it, and in his syncretizing of classical mythology with Christianity he followed contemporary practice. He favoured the Authorized Version of the Bible, and he satisfied demands for moralistic and didactic literature in his poetic renderings of biblical material, which is developed through the use of long speeches, long similes, descriptive action, and exegesis. In Emblemes, where the poems are but extended paraphrases of biblical text, the same techniques of development are used.In his invocations Quarles follows prevailing practices in addressing the Holy Spirit, God, or Christ. There was contemporary confusion concerning the muse Urania, but she retains her primary classical associations and is never more than the Christian poet's tutelary spirit or a personification of his poetic genius. The high esteem in which Quarles' works were held is shown in the comments of many of his contemporaries. In Cowley's criticism his lack of artistry in handling biblical material is pointed out. Quarles shows more poetic powers in his occasional lyrics and his satirical ability is at times suggested. Had be concentrated on these powers, quite possibly he would today hold a higher place as a poet in English literature.

The unpublished letters of William Herle, diplomat and intelligencer to the court of Elizabeth I reveal startling insights into the role of such agents in political affairs. As well as their more obvious content of sensitive information, Herle's letters expose his primary impetus behind the pursuit of intelligence; of the construction and maintenance of a patronage alliance based upon the judicious exchange and release of knowledge at politically sensitive moments. This epistolary aspect of intelligence letters - overlooked by much scholarship - reveals the complex strategies Herle implements to circumvent the disruption of social hierarchy at the moment of counsel, the private transfer of knowledge in a medium often subject to broadcast, and the uncomfortable union of potent intelligence and familiar affect. This dissertation investigates the world of Elizabethan intelligence operations as experienced by William Herle, focusing on the topics of religion, early modern diplomacy, imprisonment, secret communication and patronage relationships based upon intelligence-exchange. The letters are an invaluable resource for scholars of early modern history and sixteenth-century letter writing, documenting the lengths to which a client would go to secure and maintain patronage in this period, encompassing the giving of gifts, the transmitting of books, and the strategic deployment of potent information. Scrutinizing intelligence operations from a social and textual standpoint offers the scholar a wider picture of the agent's position and relation to the political landscape. This dissertation examines Herle's evolving status of common informant, prison spy, diplomatic envoy, and special ambassador, surmounting obstacles of social hierarchy whilst maintaining a marginal, secret status. By identifying the epistolary and social minutiae of Herle's letters, this study relocates the position of the Elizabethan intelligencer, departing from the typical notion of skulking spy and instead positioning the agent directly in contact, both textual and physical, with the political power-base.

Robert Buchanan was widely regarded during his lifetime as a poet of distinction, a capable and powerful novelist, and a critic of some perception, yet his name is now associated only with one regrettable episode, while those of lesser men and women continue to be remembered for work inferior to his. A man possessing large reserves of energy, and pressed to write for a living at an early age, he produced much work that deserves the oblivion it has found; but his early verse, expressing his profound compassion for the sufferings of the unfortunate in the simplest language, some of his ballads, and not a little of his later more vatic verse, is still worthy of study. As a novelist his work is provocative and readable, but too often descends to the level of the sentimental melodrama which earned him, for a while, a very good income from the stage. As a critic he was not profound, but was quick to detect and praise expression of his own sympathy for humanity that came to represent for him art's highest aspiration; Dickens, Browning and Whitman were his heroes, and for the last two he did sterling work in helping them to gain widespread recognition. As a polemist he rushed into several arenas, for some of which his talents were not especially suited; but he publicly supported C. S. Parnell and Oscar Wilde when few found the courage to do so. An interesting man of impressive variety and undoubted talent has found an undeserved neglect, and a full-scale critical biography of Robert Buchanan is long overdue.

This thesis uses print and manuscript sources to analyse and interpret women's life writing at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I explore printed works by Catharine Phillips, Mary Dudley, Priscilla Hannah Gurney, Ann Freeman, Elizabeth Steele, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, and Charlotte West and discuss the manuscripts of Mary Fletcher, Mary Tooth, Sarah Ryan, and Elizabeth Fox. Of these sources, five have never been analysed in the critical literature and six have received little attention. Considered as a group, this large corpus of texts offers new insights into the personal and political implications of different models of female selfhood and social being. In chapter one, I compare the religious identities presented in the spiritual autobiographies of Quakers and Methodists. For these women, religious identification provides a powerful sense of social belonging and enables public participation. However, it may also lead to a loss of self in the demand for religious conformity and self-abnegation. In chapter two, I consider the life writing of late eighteenth-century courtesans. These women adapt available models of femininity and female authorship in order to establish themselves as socially connected subjects. However, their narratives also reveal that dependence on the sexual and literary marketplace puts female selfhood under pressure. In chapter three, I explore the eyewitness accounts of British women in the French Revolution. I argue that, for these writers, connecting personal identity to political history is an enabling source of self-definition but it also exposes them to the risks of self-fragmentation. In my focus on the social function of women's life writing, I present an alternative to the traditional alignment of the eighteenth-century autobiographical subject with the autonomous self of individualism. These narratives allow us to reconsider the productive and problematic dialectic between personal expression and representative selfhood, self-authorship and collective narratives, and individualism and social being. They suggest that women's life writing has the potential to be both the self-expression of a unique heroine and the self-inscription of a politicised subject.

This thesis examines the dramatic implications of the grotesque in Romantic aesthetics, particularly in relation to its poetics of plurality. There have been few studies exploring the drama of the Romantic grotesque, a category that accentuates the multiplicity of the self, while permitting diverse ways of seeing. The post-Kantian philosophy backing Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic irony provides the most decisive rationalisation of this plurality of identity and aesthetic expression through theatrical play, and forms the theoretical framework for my study. Poetry and philosophy are merged in Schlegel’s attempt to create Romantic modernity out of this self-conscious blurring of inherited perspectives and genres—a mixing and transgressing of past demarcations that simultaneously create the condition of the Romantic grotesque. The other writers examined in this thesis include A. W. Schlegel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and Charles Baudelaire. The primary research question that this thesis investigates is: how is the grotesque used to re-evaluate notions of aesthetic beauty? And my answer emerges from a study of those thinkers in Schlegel’s tradition who evolve a modern, ironic regard for conventional literary proprieties. Furthermore, how does the grotesque rewrite ideas of poetic subjectivity and expression? Here, my answer foregrounds the enormous importance of Shakespeare as the literary example supporting the new theories. Shakespearean drama legitimises the grotesque as ontology and literary mode. Consequently, in reviewing unique, critically hybrid texts like the Schlegelian fragments, Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare (Racine and Shakespeare), Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell (Preface to Cromwell), and Baudelaire’s De L’Essence du Rire (On the Essence of Laughter), this thesis will use theories of continental Romanticism to reposition the significance of an English aesthetic. Through this, I claim that the Romantic revisioning of the Shakespearean grotesque helps create the ideas of post-Revolutionary modernity that are crucial to the larger projects of European Romanticism, and the ideas of modernity emerging from them.

This thesis explores the critical aesthetics of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget 1856-1935) and the ways in which her theory of aesthetic harmony informed these studies. Arguing for a more inclusive view of her interest in aesthetics, this thesis takes as its focus the ways in which Lee applied her aesthetic methodologies to the questions of aesthetics with which she was concerned – What is the relationship between the artist and his or her art, and between the artist and the aesthetic critic? How do the various art forms differ and how do these differences impact on the aesthetic experience? How does the mind, the body, and the emotions work together in the aesthetic experience? And ultimately, what is the relationship between art and life, and between beauty and the ideal? This study argues that these questions are evident in essays that are not usually associated with aesthetics. Whilst studies on Lee tend to divide her varied interests into phases in her career, such as her fiction, literary criticism, historical writings, travel writings, and psychological aesthetics, the current study argues that an investigation into the ways in which these studies can be seen to interact leads to a more thorough and fulfilling engagement with her impressive body of work. This thesis fills a critical gap in Lee studies by approaching her writings through the lens of her interest in aesthetics and by suggesting a way of reading her work that takes into consideration the ways in which her aesthetic theories influenced the writing style through which she experimented with, expressed, and in some cases, performed her aesthetic theories.

This thesis traces Huxley’s abiding preoccupation with mysticism, from his first collection of poetry to his final novel Island (1962). The function of mystics, Huxley argues in Grey Eminence (1941), is to dispel the ignorance of our benighted world by letting in the light of ultimate Reality. A world without mystics, he writes, would be ‘totally blind and insane’, and he laments that at present ‘[w]e are dangerously far advanced into the darkness’. Chapter 1 examines the influence of mysticism on Huxley’s early work. Several of his poems betray a mystical yearning; Gumbril is tantalised by intimations of the divine Ground; however, it was not until Those Barren Leaves (1925) that Huxley created a character who actively investigates ultimate Reality. Huxley’s disenchantment with mysticism has traditionally been ascribed to the influence of D.H. Lawrence, but the supposedly Lawrentian doctrine of life-worship that Huxley advocated was essentially humanist, whereas for Lawrence life was a metaphysical force. Chapter 2 analyses what it was that Huxley responded to in Lawrence, and the extent to which life-worship actually conforms to Lawrence’s ideas. Chapter 3 examines Huxley’s transition from intellectual elitism in the 1920s to his re-engagement with mysticism in the mid thirties. As a result of his friendship with Gerald Heard, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union, and it was a pacifist lecture tour that catalysed Huxley’s emigration to America in 1937. In California, Huxley grew exasperated with Heard and increasingly turned to Jiddu Krishnamurti for spiritual advice. Chapter 4 assesses the influence of these ‘problematic gurus’. The final chapter examines the treatment of sex in Huxley’s work, from the disillusioned romantics of his early fiction, to the reformed libertines who embrace celibacy in an attempt to lead a more spiritual life, to the inhabitants of Pala, for whom sex is a sacrament.

This dissertation is a history of Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s productions of Verdi’s Macbeth. The first three chapters document each of the three productions, which are directed by Carl Ebert (1938), Franco Enriquez (1964), and Richard Jones (2007). The final chapter is an analysis – focusing on the score’s staging potential – of the opera itself. The analysis is used to draw together and clarify the various staging interpretations discussed in the previous three chapters. The Glyndebourne Archives form the main source for the first two chapters, and my observation of rehearsals and performances informs the third. Historical context is particularly important in the first chapter, while dramaturgical analysis comes to the fore in the second and third. In all cases, the individual production as art work is the main subject of my research. The interaction of music and stage is of particular importance. The methodological challenges presented by exploring something as ephemeral as live performance are discussed in the introduction, and kept in mind throughout. This dissertation is the first major study of Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s creative work. As such, it takes a first step towards the scholarly investigation of the history of opera production in Britain.

This thesis is concerned with the trope of surviving the specially constituted social group. It considers how a loosely connected set of writers addressed this theme in works published between 1798 and 1878. The works – primarily biography and fiction, but also poetry and drama – respond to the era 1790 to 1832, demarcating what we usually term the Romantic period. The thesis begins by focusing on memoirs by William Godwin and Amelia Opie. These texts are read as responses to surviving personal and political relationships associated with radical London in the 1790s. The thesis goes on to consider some of William Godwin and Mary Shelley's novels in terms of their use of the sole survival motif, and the relationship between the idea of being last and the demands of moral and political reform. This brings the thesis into the 1830s, and a new association that arises between the survival of Romantic social networks and authorial self-interest. Texts by survivors of the Shelley circle are shown to exploit this connection, and are read against alternative responses to lastness that use comic and satirical methods to reject it. Finally, the thesis investigates the theme of surviving the coterie as it is treated in a melodrama first performed at the Surrey Theatre in 1833, and argues that this generic departure lends the idea a radically new significance. The changes that the idea of being last of the coterie undergoes, as it is passed between generations, genders, and genres, are seen in the context of wider cultural phenomena, including changing conceptions of reform and individualism. This thesis observes the shifting relationship that the idea of surviving sociability has to these matters.

This thesis examines a range of poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Modernist period to the present day, who take the relationship between humans, poetry and the natural world as a primary point of concern. Through precise, materially attentive engagements with the coastal, littoral, and oceanic dimensions of place, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Jen Hadfield, respectively turn towards the vibrant space of the Atlantic archipelago in order to contemplate new modes of relation that are able to contend with the ecological and political questions engendered by environmental crises. Across their works, the archipelago emerges as a physical and critical site of poetic relation through which poets consider new pluralised, devolved, and ‘entangled’ relationships with place. Derived from the geographic term for ‘[a]ny sea, or sheet of water, in which there are numerous islands’, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ has recently gained critical attention within Scottish and Irish studies due to its ability to re-orientate the critical axis away from purely Anglocentric discourses. Encompassing a range of spatial frames from bioregion to biosphere, islands to oceans, and temporal scales from deep pasts to deep futures, the poets considered here turn to the archipelago as a means of reckoning with the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene poses about the relationships between humans and the environment. Crucially, through a series of comparative readings, the project presents fresh advancements in ecocritical scholarship, with regards to the rise of material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the ‘Blue Humanities’.