The Anatomie of Abuses by Philip Stubbes was printed four times between 1583 and 1595, each new edition undergoing thorough authorial revision. This old-spelling critical edition highlights the complicated textual history of the work and its slow development over a twelve-year period by presenting the text of the final 1595 edition but drawing attention to features of the three earlier versions throughout the critical apparatus. Readers interested in engaging with the work as set out in the original 1595 edition are offered a facsimile of the Huntington copy in an appendix to the thesis. The text of the Abuses has been supplemented with a full and detailed commentary which attempts, in particular, to flesh out the social and economic background in which Stubbes was writing and indicate the extent to which he borrowed material from other contemporary pamphleteers. The introduction includes an examination of the author's supposed Puritan leanings and draws out the fears of excess and social disorder implicit throughout his complaint.

This thesis offers a critical edition of The Plowman's Tale, a poem in the Chaucer apocrypha, which was last edited by W.W. Skeat in 1897. A full collation of all extant editions - both manuscript and printed - has led the present editor to select the text printed by Thomas Godfray in 1535, the earliest printed edition, as the base text for the present edition. The text is accompanied by a commentary and a glossary. The introductory chapters are concerned to relate the poem to its two most meaningful literary contexts. It is argued that almost all of the poem is a characteristic product of the Lollard movement at the end of the fourteenth century, but that by the addition of a Prologue at some time early in the sixteenth century, the anonymous verse tract came to be associated with Chaucer, as it took on its new role as a work of official Henrician propaganda after 1535.

This thesis seeks to re-examine the nature of E.M. Forster’s fiction and its place within the canon of modernist writers, examining criticism of Forster’s fiction and claims that it is transitional in its relation to modernism, founded on a liberal humanist outlook antithetical to modernist innovation. The thesis contends that this is a misreading of turn of the century Liberalism, taking Forster’s friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson as an inspiration for Forster’s political and stylistic beliefs, articulated in the latter’s fiction. Following a survey of New Liberalism, the thesis compares Dickinson’s and Forster’s politics and dialogism, charting how Forster transformed Dickinson’s dialogic method into polyphonic prose. After a survey of other self-reflexive narrative practices in Forster’s prose that might also be considered modernist, the thesis turns to Forster’s dialogic construction of inter-negating discourses at play for dominance throughout his fiction. It uses a model of social intervention derived from New Liberalism as the model for articulating the coercive attempts of discourses to gain dominance as truth over individual subjects, focusing particularly on emerging discourses of homosexual identity and their dialogic relation in Forster’s fiction. The thesis claims that Forster’s fiction is dialogic and liberal in its modernism.

Shakespearian performance scholarship is arguably looking for a methodology that can integrate the study of performative work with critical analysis and theory. As an intervention in this discussion, I propose a poetics of performance, a term intended as a playful appropriation of Stephen Greenblatt's poetics of culture but one that restores the central omission of actual performance to his study of Renaissance subjectivity in dramatic texts. This is a systematic study of four plays, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and Richard II in productions on stage and screen between 1927-1995, arranged diachronically and in dialogic pairings (drawing on 'Bakhtinian thought'). Utilising Greenblatt's discussion of cultural exchange and symbolic acquisition, and restoring Greenblatt's omission of diachronic 'appropriation', I consider the reception of the performative work, drawing attention to interpretative patterns, and enquire into the structuring historical contingency of the Renaissance locus. In considering the 'iteration' of a Shakespearian text (ie: that which enables it to activate transpositions beyond its originating history) I suggest that materialist critics are responding to a valued "art' work and that it is Shakespearian performance scholarship itself that has created the anomalous page/stage debate which it presently seeks to circumvent.

An examination through the creation and curation of a printed poetry collection, together with other practice-based and wider research, of how far digital technology has influenced contemporary poetry and the status of the poetry book. Personal practice is considered and analysed and, from this, and research leading out from this, a more general survey provided of the impact of digital technology on the poet’s persona, the creation of the poems themselves and on their dissemination. These wider issues, and the practice-based research that underlies them, inform the specific consideration of the extent to which digital technology has affected the nature and importance of the single collection poetry book in the early part of the twenty-first century. The conclusion is drawn that, for the poet, and for contemporary poetry more generally, the importance of the printed poetry book is greater than ever and that digital technology has further increased its impact, vitality and relevance.

This thesis analyses the paratexts of Dorothy Richardson’s long modernist novel sequence, \(Pilgrimage\). Peritexts, such as the prefaces to \(Pilgrimage\), and epitexts, such as letters written by Richardson and others about \(Pilgrimage\), are explored alongside other paratextual material such as the front covers of different editions, peritextual blurbs and epitextual reviews. I consider the paratexts of \(Pilgrimage\) to be as worthy of study as the anchoring text itself and seek to explain the recurrence of particular paratextual themes which have served to cast doubt on \(Pilgrimage\)’s status and Richardson’s qualities as a writer. Linguistic markers of tentativeness and reservation circulate in \(Pilgrimage\)’s paratextual space, inscribing a dominant tone that has served, at times, to undermine \(Pilgrimage\) and its author. This thesis, by using a range of interdisciplinary, contextualist approaches from narratology, stylistics and modernist studies, traces the links between \(Pilgrimage\)’s paratexts. In so doing it seeks to explain the prominence and liminality of certain paratexts and analyses the collisions and collusions that have characterised \(Pilgrimage\)’s paratextual space.

This thesis aims to examine the varied notions of space in early modern play-texts as well as to challenge the assumed text-space relationship that has been the foundation of various scholarly approaches towards early modern theatrical practice, including a Shakespeare-centred historiography and theatre reconstruction carried out by scholars such as Andrew Gurr and Richard Hosley and contemporary editorial practices that appear to reconstruct early modern performances scenographically through annotations and editorial interventions. In order to depart from such Shakespeare-centred and London-biased architectural determinism, the thesis will adopt a repertory approach to the Queen’s Men, a methodology that emphasises the materiality of the play books and an author-function approach to the plays associated with Robert Greene in order to explore the alternatives to a conventional architectural and scenographic theatre reconstruction based primarily on the literary analysis of play-texts. In addition to challenging the assumption of an interchangeable relationship between play-texts, performance and space, this thesis aim to demonstrate how the concept of space within a play-text will be ultimately an issue of dramaturgy, determined and defined by the diverse dramatic forces in this period and the idiosyncratic styles of their narrative.

My thesis seeks to conceptualise and explore the relationship between Sensation and New Woman fiction, two popular genres of the mid- to late-Victorian era, to investigate the extent to which Sensation literature is a forerunner to the early development of the New Woman novel; and consequently how the two genres blur, or cross, temporal and conceptual boundaries. Both genres challenged prevailing attitudes to gender, sexuality, morality and domesticity: Sensation fiction more implicitly by making the erstwhile Angel of the House the agent of domestic and marital upheaval and even crime, New Woman fiction explicitly by making the rebel of the house the rebel in society; here, she was more often positioned within the larger socio-economic setting for which her rebellion could have dramatic consequences. While previous comparisons of the two genres (although they are limited in number) have focused solely on the crossovers between the female protagonists, I seek to extend existing scholarship by investigating the relationship between Sensation and New Woman fiction through the two genres' response to contemporary legal and social debates, the characters, both female and male, Gothic literature, a mode both genres revisited, and their subversive endings. I argue that it is in challenging Victorian ideologies that Sensation and New Woman literature obscure and, to a certain extent, redefine genre paradigms.

This thesis examines how concepts and images of nakedness are used to shape literary and theological meaning and experience within the literature and culture of early modern England. It considers how nakedness functions within a number of key literary and spiritual forms, including theological treatises, the spiritual allegory, religious lyrics, and drama. The first three chapters establish the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of nakedness, through an examination of the Bible, the works of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Anglican Church practice and debate, and anatomical texts and practices. The final three chapters offer a close analysis of the meaning and affect of nakedness within three distinct literary forms. This thesis contends that nakedness has a spiritual potency: a spiritual charge recognised and utilised by early modern theologians, preachers and writers, as they debated, defined and expressed their faith. It considers how far the meaning of nakedness is shaped by gender, and how early modern society negotiated the tensions between bodily sanctity and obscenity, naked praise and pornography. The thesis concludes by reflecting how far tropes and experiences of nakedness in our time remain obscurely charged, albeit in non-theological contexts, with something like theological meaning.

The present study considers Brome’s playbooks and his reputation as a dramatist from the perspective of different approaches to ‘the history of the book.’ It examines various methods of critical discourse while it re-evaluates the worth of a dramatist whose work has been underappreciated. The study takes seven unconventional approaches as the Complete Works of Richard Brome Project (forthcoming 2010) will be addressing the theatricality of Brome’s plays; and, because Matthew Steggle’s 2004 monograph, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage, synthesises most discoveries about Brome’s life and career found in recent years. Chapter 1 speculates on how the commercial and political context of play publication can impact the received meaning of plays as texts. It reflects on how bibliographical environments can create meaning. Chapter 2, on the other hand, looks at the effect that delayed publication had on Brome’s late-Caroline revivals. It explores twentieth-century ideas of “decadence” once associated with Brome. Chapter 3 addresses a series of related issues bearing in mind certain print conventions and performance practices. In it, I contend that certain print conventions had yet to become standardised in the 1630s. I do so using a cast list and a pamphlet to suggest community expectation behind the staging of Brome’s Antipodes. Chapter 4 examines Brome’s syncretic texts. This examination is founded upon an understanding that play-writers could act as ‘play patchers’ – Tiffany Stern’s term – and that such ‘patching’ must be acknowledged in the study of printed books. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 show how Brome’s career as an author, which has been studied through his plays, involved theatrical and non-theatrical creativity. Brome’s commendatory verses allow me to address issues of “paratext,” i.e., concerns that have become apparent because of English translations of Seuils. Brome’s non-theatrical publications indicate to me that Brome, as a dramatist, was more than simply aware of print – as Lukas Erne has argued of Shakespeare. Brome’s skills as a literary contributor (c. 1639) provided him with opportunities for employment (c. 1649). My final chapter stresses the significance of playtexts of the 1630s and playtexts of the 1650s by reconsidering the reception of Brome’s plays as playbooks. It also suggests that the Commonwealth period – a period in which the public performance of Brome’s plays was forbidden – became a defining force in his twentieth-century biography.