This thesis examines Korea's reception of Shakespeare from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, paying specific attention to the significant extent to which this reception has been influenced by the nation's political circumstances. The thesis focuses on Korea's political upheavals, including Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, the division of the country, dictatorship and rapid modernisation and Westernisation, which affected attitudes towards accepting, understanding and adapting Shakespeare and his works. My introduction explores how Korea has made Shakespeare its own, along with a theory of adaptation and appropriation. Chapter 1 considers Korea's first encounter with Shakespeare in the early twentieth century via his biography, excerpted quotations in magazines and newspapers and translated Victorian-era presentations of his works, all of which focused on moral didacticism. Chapter 2 analyses two Shakespeare-inspired novels written under the political hardships of Japanese colonial rule and dictatorial governance. Chapter 3 addresses political renditions of Hamlet on the stage under the dictatorial regime. Chapter 4 investigates North Korea's socialist reception of Shakespeare since the division of the country to today. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 discuss culturally-invested adaptations of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century that put Shakespeare's characters and stories in Korean locales. This thesis concludes by arguing that even though Shakespearean adaptations today focus mostly on creating culturally localised versions so that they can become less political, Korea's reception of Shakespeare over the past century has been informed by many political motifs arising from artists' concerns about the fate of their country.

New technologies have long been considered important to the development of modernism – especially theories of efficient form in Vorticism and Italian Futurism This thesis rethinks the relation between modernism and technology in the inter-war years. It uses the work of theorists of technology including Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Sigfried Gideon and Marshall McLuhan picking up a strand in inter-war modernism highlighting concerns about mechanicity and technologisation as overwhelming and somewhat malign forces. Ezra Pound’s ‘Machine Art’ is influenced by the work of Francis Picabia but demonstrates crucial differences between their conceptions of technology. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is an early example of machine antipathy articulating fears about war and mechanistic mental processes. Henry Green’s factory novel, Living, demonstrates the malign effects of organisational techniques on working-class lives, whilst Wyndham Lewis’s novels Snooty Baronet and The Revenge for Love’s protagonists with prosthetic legs satirise the systematic techniques used in warfare to control individuals, turning them into mechanised grotesques. Finally, Henry Green’s Back enacts Marshall McLuhan’s notion of man as servo-mechanism to the machine. The thesis concludes that some inter-war modernisms display an antipathy towards machine culture which transcends the simple machine, and critiques mechanistic systems which control human bodies and minds.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the reception of John Milton’s writings in the Arab-Muslim world. It examines the responses of contemporary Arab-Muslim readers to Milton’s works, and in particular, to his epic poem: Paradise Lost. It contributes to knowledge of the history, development, and ways in which Milton’s writings are read and understood by Muslims, mapping the literary and more broadly cultural consequences of the censure, translation and abridgement of Milton’s works in the Arab-Muslim world. This study examines and compares cultural, theological, linguistic and translational issues, and draws upon primary empirical data from fieldwork carried out at Egyptian universities, libraries and publishers. It finds that Milton occupies a surprisingly significant place in the intellectual life of the Middle East. It also finds that the Arab-Muslim reception of Paradise Lost is coloured by the prevailing socio-political climate, the overarching religious culture of readers, and semantic shifts between Milton’s original English text and Mohamed Enani’s Arabic translation. Overall, the thesis breaks new ground in presenting a rich and multi-faceted picture of the potential attitudes and responses of twenty-first-century Arab-Muslims to the writings of Milton, epitomised by an unexpectedly reciprocal relationship between Paradise Lost and its Muslim reader.

This thesis argues for the innovative potential of an abortion trope, exploring its capacity for conceptual reformulation in both contemporary criticism and the nineteenth-century poetry of Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson. In contemporary deliberations over the ethical and legal legitimacy of abortion, critics will often converge upon aesthetic questions of ‘appropriate analogy’, ‘conceptual errors’ and discursive boundaries. This investigation takes up this point, highlighting its parallel with contemporary anxieties concerning the ‘use’ and ‘autonomy’ of literature. Combining the work of four key critics (Barbara Johnson, Kevin Newmark, Christina Hauck and Maria C. Scott) it will be argued that abortion has already undergone a degree of formulation as a less negative aesthetic, and its manifestation as an aesthetic is presented as governing textual strategies, as well as dynamics between author, reader, and text. The poetry of Hardy and Dickinson offers an invaluable starting-point in which to explore this possibility in practice, clarifying the trope’s characteristics and potential. The abortion trope informing nineteenth-century poetics impacts various aesthetic paradigms during the period, while also shedding light upon conventional perceptions of abortion today. The impetus here is to encourage conceptual expansion and support conceptual change, challenging some of the more debilitating formulations of abortion.

This thesis is the first fully annotated modern-spelling critical edition of Love’s Cure, or The Martial Maid by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. The play, first published in 1647 as part of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio, has been neglected in performance and relatively unappreciated by scholarship. It had not been edited critically since George Walton Williams published his old-spelling edition in 1976, which included little accompanying commentary. This new edition offers a modernised text with annotation and a critical apparatus, generally following the editorial principles of the Arden Early Modern Drama series. It reconsiders the dating of the play, providing evidence to assign its composition to 1615. It traces the origins and processes of transmission of its main narrative source, La fuerza de la costumbre by Guillén de Castro, and also proposes for the first time a source for one of its characters in Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán. Finally, it also reconsiders the staging possibilities of the play based on evidence from a practice-based project developed at the Shakespeare Institute in 2012 during rehearsals for a staged reading, a recording of which is included on DVD as an appendix.

Through her poetry and essays Constance Naden (1858-1889) sought to create an interdisciplinary philosophy predicated upon finding unity in diversity. By providing close-readings of Naden’s poetry, essays, and unpublished notebooks, and thus considering the full breadth of her intellectual pursuits, this thesis demonstrates the extent of her secular world-scheme which attempted to synthesise science, philosophy, and poetry. I begin with an intellectual biography that situates Naden’s scientific education, philosophical ideas, and poetic output in their nineteenth-century contexts. This creates a framework for understanding the trajectory of Naden’s endeavours as scientist, philosopher, and poet. The subsequent chapters demonstrate how these three strands of her life were fundamentally intertwined. Chapter Two focuses upon Naden’s engagement with scientific ideas and the scientific imagination, specifically examining the importance of light as it manifests in the study of botany, astronomy, physics, and physiology. Chapter Three turns to Naden as philosopher, teasing out the details of her childhood faith (newly demonstrated by the notebooks) and analysing the development of her relationship with the freethought movement and wider philosophical discourses. Chapter Four analyses Naden’s equivocal relationship with poetic tradition, focusing on her shifting engagement with Romanticism, and her use of the lyric ‘I’ and the comic mode.

This thesis offers the first full-length investigation into the reception and influence of the dream vision poem in the early modern period. One of the main aims of this research is to challenge the assumption that the dream vision was no longer an attractive, appreciated or effective form beyond the Middle Ages. This research breaks new ground by demonstrating that the dream vision was not only a popular form in the post-Reformation period, but was a major and enduring means of literary and political expression throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. This thesis is therefore part of an ongoing scholarly attempt to reconfigure the former aesthetic judgements that have dominated scholarship since C. S. Lewis dubbed the sixteenth century as the 'drab age' of English verse. The main focus is upon three writers who have been largely ignored or misunderstood by modern scholarship: Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), Richard Robinson (fl. 1570-1589) and Thomas Andrewe (fl. 1600-1604). Through close analysis of their work, this thesis demonstrates that the dream vision could both inform and was greatly informed by contemporary political, cultural and literary developments, as well as the period's relationship with its literary and historical past.

Questions concerning whether Shakespeare wrote for the stage or the page are a perennial issue in Shakespeare studies. Part of the problem rests on expectations of literature and theatre. These expectations are in fact voiced in Shakespearean drama itself, a drama that often articulates ideas concerning audience expectations. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, before Troilus visits Cressida he exclaims “expectation whirls me round”. Of all the plays in the Shakespearean canon, variants of “expect” feature most in this play. Troilus and Cressida itself scrutinises expectation of a story with famous classical, medieval and contemporary precedents, for a play to be performed by the leading theatre company of the day, and of a play by a playwright who was also conscious of his role as a published author. In the play, characters are frequently staged as spectators or audience members, raising issues relating to expectations, taste, value judgements, and viewpoints. Shakespeare responds to the plays of his contemporaries and, arguably, the political scene as well. The thesis reworks Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field to gauge the way that Shakespeare’s play engages with its theatrical and literary environment, and resituates Bourdieu’s work on taste and social distinction to consider how Shakespeare’s Trojan play responds to the contingencies of audience expectation. The first chapter considers critical expectations of the play from 1609 to the present; the second chapter focuses on the way Shakespeare stages patrons, performers and especially audience members; the third chapter reads the language of food and taste in the play in relation to developing early modern distinctions about literature and theatre; the final chapter provides a correction to readings of the play that have relied on the unique 1609 quarto preface to the play for understanding the work; this chapter argues that even the play, as staged, presents literary issues, and characters that show an awareness of print culture. Within its own early modern literary-theatrical field, Shakespeare’s play is far more about elitist tastes than it is elitist itself. Ultimately, the thesis argues that Troilus and Cressida marks Shakespeare’s growing confidence as a literary dramatist, not simply as an author whose plays were published as literature, but as a playwright who was capable of using theatre and audience expectation to re-evaluate literary tastes. Broadly positioned, the thesis provides a case study which revises critical expectations of this play in order to situate better Shakespeare’s contribution to early modern drama and literature.

Starting from David Bevington’s observation that ‘Shakespeare’s disparate ventures into tragic expression in the years prior to 1599 suggest that he had not yet found the model or models he was looking for’,1 the current thesis explores four early tragedies in terms of their experimental nature: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and Julius Caesar. Central to the thesis is how metadrama in these plays point towards an exploration of tragedy that is marked by the intermingling of genres and sources. The thesis argues that each of the four tragedies under discussion is creatively imaginative in the way it involves adding a fresh perspective to tragedy and its mixing of genres. The thesis begins by arguing that in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-the play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare mocks the amateur staging of tragedy which he seeks to revitalize, starting with Titus Andronicus as a bloody revenge tragedy uneasily mixed with poetic language. Chapter Two suggests that Romeo and Juliet explores some of the ways in which comedy collapses into tragedy, while Chapter Three asks questions about Shakespeare’s use of history as a source for tragedy in relation to Richard II. The final chapter concentrates on Julius Caesar as a ‘broken’ play, examining the role of the ‘hero’. Each chapter examines a number of features, including the blending of genre types,the creation of the tragic ‘hero’, unsatisfactory endings as well as metadrama. Finally, Hamlet is seen to incorporate many of these experiments, and thus to lead on to the later tragedies.

This thesis examines the representations of the aristocratic body in Victorian literature. This thesis argues that the authors often wrote, coded, and interpreted an aristocrat’s physical form as a paradoxical object which reflected many of the complex interclass issues and socio-economic transitions seen throughout the Victorian era. By exploring distinct, sequential genres and types of ‘popular’ fiction in this dissertation, I investigate a broad-spectrum literary treatment of aristocratic bodies as cultural paradoxes: for the same usage of the aristocratic body to crop up again and again in disparate, discrete, and hugely popular forms of literature speaks to the nineteenth-century resonance of the aristocratic body as a codeable symbol and textual object. I use what is termed ‘popular fiction’: fiction largely excluded from the canon, yet with a very large contemporary readership and authors or genres which continued to be widely read immediately following the publication of those individual texts. Popular fiction is, by its very nature, the type of literature that can most reasonably be considered to represent the general, broad-spectrum views of large populations, and in doing so these texts can be used to determine wide-scale desires, anxieties, and expectations surrounding the subjects they contain. Body theory and gaze theory serve as the overarching foundation for exploring the portraiture of aristocratic characters by authors from all classes, although individual chapters deal with their own theoretic approaches to the texts examined within them. Chapter 1 on silver fork fiction from the 1820s to the 1840s uses socio-economic theory, including Bourdieu’s idea of habitus to examine the genre’s treatment of aristocratic bodies as consumer goods and luxury products, which in turn reflected contemporary shifts in social and economic class hegemony. Chapter 2 on G.W.M. Reynolds’s radical 1840s to 1850s serial, The Mysteries of the Court of London, uses the medical humanities and masculinity theory to investigate the text’s endemic infertility in aristocratic men; Reynolds uses the biology of aristocratic male bodies as the locus for moralistic discussions about primogeniture and politics. Chapter 3 on the sensation fiction of Mrs Henry (Ellen Price) Wood utilises feminist theory to illustrate Wood’s portrayal of female aristocrats as bodiless, and yet continually gazed upon; Wood uses the aristocratic female body as a magnifying glass to depict the nineteenth-century female experience, in particular the paradoxes of adhering to private, domestic ideologies while at the same time fulfilling the requirements of the public gaze. Chapter 4 explores the influence of evolutionary theory upon two sister-genres of the fin de siècle Medieval Revival: Ruritanian fiction in Part 1 and a genre I have named the Evolutionary Feudal in Part 2. In Part 1, the aristocratic body is represented as outside of evolution; the genre provides escapism from Darwinism and fin de siècle anxieties of history and (d)evolution by whitewashing the feudal era and subscribing to Thomas Carlyle’s theories of divinely- or cosmically-appointed leaders. Part 2 focuses on texts which depict a post-apocalyptic world returning to a feudal Dark Age, and in which aristocratic bodies are seen evolving or devolving; rather than whitewashing history, the Evolutionary Feudal locates history’s darkest origins in the aristocratic body as a way of predicting possible futures and coping with the concerns of degeneration.