In order to answer questions about the nature, viability and shape of what would constitute a modernist epic, this thesis explores three very different twentieth century writers, Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. Rather than being a narrowly genre based study, however, I argue that in the twentieth century the ‘epic’ mode has become a malleable form with which to explore troubling legacies of history, empire and, to exhibit a dimension of the sacred in modernity. All three poets penned challenging epic poems (The Bridge, The Anathemata and Omeros respectively) in a condition of modernity. Haunted by the ruptures of history, in various ways, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempted to create an aesthetic which seeks cultural reintegration, recovery and reconciliation with the past. I analyse the formal experimental modernist aesthetic of each poet as they are anxiously and sometimes ambivalently influenced by the increasingly dominant institution of a particular form of metropolitan high modernism. This allows for a critique of modernity whilst contextualising a modernist inscription of imperialism. Finally, I show that the spiritual and religious concerns of these writers are essential in the recuperative or compensatory ideals of the epic. I argue that far from being an obsolete and impossible genre, for poets the epic is the very mode which best captures the transitions and conditions of an uneven and unequal modernity. I seek to show how through the trope of place (bridge, city, ruins, sacred sites and island), journey and the sea and other aesthetic devices, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempt to re-enchant emptied and destroyed cultural heritages.

This thesis explores the genre of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry and its tradition in early modern English literature. In looking at original poems, translations and receptions of Ovid’s Heroides, I argue that female as well as male writers throughout the early modern period engaged with the tradition of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry. By using case studies advancing chronologically throughout the period, I will also show how female-voiced complaint changes and develops in different historical and literary contexts. Nobody as yet has produced a study looking at a large sample of women writing female-voiced complaint. The criticism around complaint is diffuse, with only a small number of book-length studies which focus on complaint in general as a genre or discourse. There are many articles or chapters on individual complaint poems but not many which compare different female-voiced complaints of the same period, especially those written by women. When female poets write in the genre, the rhetorical trope of Ovidian female-voiced complaint (that the sex of the author is discontinuous with that of the speaker) must be renegotiated. This renegotiation by female poets is often the result of close and learned engagement with the traditions of complaint, both the classical precedents and the receptions and re-imaginations of the genre in early modern England. They are choosing a genre which has a productive potential in being female-voiced but which also has a tradition of male manipulation. However, rather than seeing women writers as existing separately from male writers, I argue that they work in parallel, drawing on the same Ovidian complaint traditions.

This thesis explores the lived experience of teaching Shakespeare within English in England’s secondary schools. Using hermeneutic phenomenology as methodology it examines teaching practices in the Shakespeare classroom in terms of influences and variations. Both literature and data suggest three core categories of influence are at play: socio-political, professional and personal contexts. Throughout this research I argue that it is only through analysing all three, and the complex interrelationships between them, that we can begin to understand practice and variations in that practice. Through between one and three semi-structured interviews with nine English teachers, followed by thematic data analysis, I attempted to identify influences that were significant, whether shared or different. Furthermore, I considered both presence and absence of experience, since this emerged within the data as a key consideration. I ultimately concluded that whilst socio-political contexts, through curriculum and assessment, undoubtedly impact on the experience of Shakespeare, they do not of themselves explain the variations in practice reported within the literature and my data. The teaching of Shakespeare is deeply influenced by three further characteristics. Firstly, local cultures appear to have a significant impact on Shakespeare, both in terms of cultural attitudes towards education, and the nature of school cultures and leadership. Secondly, the importance of experiences of high quality training may come as no surprise; however, what is noteworthy is the extent to which absence has such a detrimental effect on experiences of teaching Shakespeare, as illustrated within the data. Finally, and perhaps most noteworthy, highly individualised, frequently random, often (inevitably) subjective personal identities, philosophies and life histories significantly influence how English teachers experience the teaching of Shakespeare. Collectively, the presence or absence of supportive cultures, training and personal experiences and preferences, appear to account for most variations in practice, prompting important considerations for individual teachers, school leaders, training providers and policy makers.

British responses to the French Revolution are characterised by humorous expression in the literature of the 1790s. Yet political humour is often not readily harnessed to an immediate political agenda. ‘Political humour’ as an idea appears to be a contradiction and elicits a contradictory set of epithets, which falls into two distinct categories: ideological commitment and disinterested amusement. This thesis argues that it is this tension that contributes to the redrawing of the ambit of politics. This thesis continues the recent scholarly approach to the British response to the Revolution less as a formal ‘debate’ than as a ‘controversy’, which involves a diversity of cultural practices and experimentation of expression and social organisation. I argue that the employment of humour in the political literature of the 1790s provides extended or alternative means of political engagement. The political humour goes beyond topical political agendas and alludes to the eighteenth-century comic theory, which instructs ethical questions about social relation or ways of life. I demonstrate that the claim to autotelic innocence of humour in the comic discourse of the eighteenth century was predicated on contradictory social tendencies: laughing either reinforces individual boundary or facilitates transmissive and collective conviviality. ‘Common life’, which denotes a social relation in settlement, is the existential horizon that enacts this contradiction. With ‘common life’ in crisis or contestation in the 1790s, and with social organisation under political controversy, humour as political disclaimer is thereby reworked into a particular political language. I read the comic discourses of Burke and the popular radicals, the satire of Peter Pindar, and the comic rhetoric of the anti-Jacobin novels to explore this political language. In doing so, this thesis seeks to suggest ways of reading the literary culture of the 1790s in terms of the circumscription or expansion of the scope of political life, so as to examine how humour contributed and responded to changes in political culture.

James Shirley is a distinctly Caroline playwright: his first play was performed in the year of Charles I’s coronation, 1625, and his last the year of the outbreak of civil war in 1642. Yet his importance extends beyond the era in which he worked as a professional playwright. As one among a handful of dramatists whose work was staged regularly by the new playing companies after the theatres reopened in 1660, he is an important figure in the development of new modes of theatre. Despite having had more of his plays produced on the Restoration stage than Shakespeare did, scholarship on his significance to Restoration drama has been remarkably scant. This thesis investigates the significance of Shirley in the Carolean period, tracing the adaptations of Shirley throughout the reign of Charles II. It uses Shirley as a case study to investigate transitions in theatrical practice before 1642 and after 1660, paying attention also to the continuities. This thesis asks why Shirley’s plays were considered suitable by the managers of the Restoration theatre companies who staged them: the King’s Company under Sir Thomas Killigrew, the Duke’s Company under Sir William Davenant, George Jolly’s ‘Nursery’ group, performing at Hatton Garden, and the Red Bull Players, an illegal, pre-Restoration group. It also explores the ways in which Shirley’s plays were adapted in response to the changed social and political climate after 1660, including textual amendments made and the addition of new prologues. It concludes by asking why Shirley’s reputation declined so sharply in the long eighteenth century while Shakespeare’s came to pre-eminence, by comparing the Restoration treatment of his plays with those of Shakespeare.

This thesis discusses the inter-relations between the theoretical field of postcolonial ecofeminism, women writing fiction in the Indian subcontinent, and to an extent, environmental activism. I argue that it is necessary to disrupt the culture/nature dualism that aligns women ‘naturally’ to nature. The disarticulation and disruption of the culture/nature dualism throws the space in-between as a grey area where multiple positions are possible for the women. Much of the ecofeminist theory and accounts of women-led activism do not allow for this ambivalent relationship to the environment. Women writing Indian fiction in English highlight this ambivalent relationship that women have with the environment, thus providing an important counterpoint to both theory and accounts of activism. The overall thesis engages with three key theoretical frameworks—the representation of women and nature within postcolonial ecofeminist theories as well as accounts of activism; postcolonial fictions that engage with these issues of gender and environment; and a material feminist perspective to weave together the different threads to present an analysis and theory of the deeply interconnected and ambivalent concepts of representation of women, environment and space. I will explore and discuss the ambivalent relationship that women have with the environment through the filter of women writing Indian fiction in English. The novels to be analysed in this study allow me to engage a range of critical perspectives—from early ecofeminism to urban ecofeminism: Nectar in a Sieve (1954) by Kamala Markandya, Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Fire on the Mountain (1977) by Anita Desai, A River Sutra (1993) by Gita Mehta, The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy, The Madwoman of Jogare (1998) by Sohaila Abdulali, An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008) by Anuradha Roy and Monkey-Man (2010) by Usha K.R. The novels analysed in this thesis allow me to explore a range of issues within postcolonial ecofeminism, while ensuring that postcolonial ecofeminism is not just confined to ‘natural’ or ‘rural’ landscapes alone. It is also important to disarticulate the non-urban/urban binary, and include the built environment—cities and other urban spaces and places—into the fold of ecofeminism. The novels themselves span a time from immediate post-independence to contemporary times, allowing me to engage with a range of postcolonial issues along with issues of gender and environment.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the war writings of Patrick MacGill, James Hanley and Liam O’Flaherty, working class, Roman Catholic Irishmen, all of whom fought in the trenches as privates and who, collectively, it is argued here, constitute a distinct trio of war writers. Through considerations of class, camaraderie, violence, religion, trauma and the body, and engaging with scholars such as John Fordham, David Taylor and Sarah Cole, this thesis will consider these Irish soldiers within a cultural, social and historical context. Central to this examination is the idea that the motives for enlistment and the experience of army labour and even combat was such that military service was perceived as work rather than a duty or vocation undertaken in support of any prevailing doctrines of patriotism or sacrifice. For these Irishmen their enlistment was a form of emigration for work and their resulting exploration of national and personal identity encompasses ideas of home as exile, building upon the work of Clair Wills, and a sense of continuity for such working class individuals between peacetime and wartime roles. The men’s Catholicism also shaped their aesthetic and philosophical responses to the war, even while the war conversely troubled their faith or confirmed their religious skepticism. With these ideas in mind, the war writing of these men will be located within both an Irish and a pan-European literary working class tradition, thereby permitting the texts to be viewed within a wider context than literature of the First World War, and from a perspective that goes beyond Ireland and Britain. These characteristics shape a perspective on the conflict very different from that of the canonical officer-writers, men such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves or Edmund Blunden, whose work will be considered alongside those of the three Irish soldier-writers.

This thesis scrutinises the complex ‘afterlife’ of sensation fiction in the wake of the 1860s and ‘70s, after the end of the period that critics have tended to view as the heyday of literary sensationalism. It identifies and explores the consistent framing of sensation fiction as a pathological ‘style of writing’ by middle-class critics in the periodical press, revealing how such responses were moulded by new and emerging medical research into the nervous system, the cellular structure of the body, and the role played by germs in the transmission of diseases. Envisioned as a disease characterised by its new immersive and affective reading process, sensation fiction was believed to be infecting its readers. It infiltrated their nervous systems, instigating a process of metamorphosis that gradually depleted their physical and mental integrity and reduced them to a weakened, ‘flabby’, ‘limp’ state. The physical boundaries of the body, however, were not the only limits that sensation fiction seemed to wilfully disregard. ‘[S]preading in all directions’, it contaminated other modes, other media, and other kinds of recreational entertainment, making them equally sensational and pathological. One of these modes was Gothic monster fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, which was repeatedly labelled ‘sensational’ and described as generating the same cardiovascular responses as works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry Wood. This infection of fin de siècle Gothic fiction by literary sensationalism can be gauged in the plots and monsters that those texts portray. Gothic monster narratives at the end of the nineteenth century are shaped by the concerns at the heart of middle-class commentators’ responses to sensation fiction, and by the medical lexicon employed to vocalise these anxieties. Monstrosity is linked to contagion and stimulation, as the monster seems to pollute all those with whom it comes into contact. It triggers a process of degeneration and debilitation akin to that associated with the reading of sensation fiction, producing a host of ‘shocked’, nervous, or hysterical characters. Encounters with the monster are linked to recreational reading or other kinds of behaviour that such reading became associated with, such as thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and illicit sexual desire. The result is a group of texts in which the monster embodies the same threat to boundaries, as well as individual, and, at times, national health that middle-class reviewers associated with literary sensationalism.

This thesis examines characterization in Ælfric’s Old English version of the biblical book of Esther, from the perspective of cognitive stylistics. This area of study uses concepts and methods from linguistics in order to better understand both how literature works and how language works. The study investigates explicit characterization cues, discourse presentation, semantic fields, and deixis to illuminate how Ælfric’s careful linguistic choices construct characters that remain true to their biblical exempla, make sense to his Anglo-Saxon audience, and underscore the doctrinal themes of the narrative. Chapter 1 describes the textual history of Esther, from its origins to its reception in the early Middle Ages. This is followed by a discussion of the history of Ælfric’s version of the story and its treatment by scholars in the modern era. Chapter 2 outlines my methodology, based in cognitive stylistics, which draws on concepts from cognitive science and related fields to understand what happens in the reader’s mind during reading. In addition, I occasionally draw on corpus stylistics methods, and this is also described. The results and discussion of this analysis form the bulk of Chapters 3 through 6. Chapter 3 focuses on explicit cues, those things that directly describe a character’s personality traits. Speech, thought, and writing presentation are the focus of Chapter 4, which examines how these modes of discourse are presented and how this presentation contributes to the characterization. In Chapter 5 I examine two semantic fields of particular importance in this text: emotions and food. Finally, Chapter 6 addresses two aspects of deixis: relational deixis and Deictic Shift Theory. Although, in all chapters, the analysis primarily focuses on the five main characters (Ahasuerus, Esther, Vashti, Mordecai, and Haman), other apposite characters are also discussed, including the Jews, the Persians, God, and even Ælfric. This kind of cognitive stylistic analysis of Old English and other historical literature is doubly useful. First, it offers new and valuable insights into this literature. The present study, for example, notes minute linguistic details that offer significant characterization cues and also explains the peculiar sense of many Anglo-Saxonists (and other historians) that they know very well people whom they have never met. Second, such examination demonstrates that the chosen methods are robust enough to cope with literature much older than that normally engaged in modern stylistic studies. This not only verifies the utility of the methods, but also attests to the universal nature of their underlying principles.

This thesis presents the first critical edition of the Lay Folks’ Catechism using the previously unpublished Oxford, Bodleian MS Don.c.13 as the base text. The list of extant witnesses is revised and includes the newly discovered Chetham Library fragment. The edition presents detailed manuscript descriptions, variants from all 26 witnesses, notes on the text and a comprehensive glossary. The introduction considers the roles of Archbishop Thoresby and the Benedictine John de Gaitrik in commissioning and composing the Catechism, and its sources and orthodoxy are confirmed. Scribal presentation of the text as verse or prose is re-examined in conjunction with Gaitrik’s use of punctuation and various literary devices, and a new conclusion reached concerning the text’s construction. The Catechism’s distribution and circulation, its effectiveness as a didactic text, and the transition from northern clergy to non-secular ownership are discussed. The edition establishes the importance of the Catechism in late medieval vernacular pastoralia aimed at a pious lay audience.