This thesis examines the various operations of notions of republicanism in the Jonsonian canon, in particular within his dramatic compositions. Taking "republicanism" as a term to refer to groups of often contrasting and conflicting ideologies, it examines the direct influence of Renaissance Humanism's interest in republican history and constitutions upon Ben Jonson's work, looking at the role of Ancient Rome (in its incarnation both as Empire and Republic) and early modern Venice and Florence in a number of his plays. It also considers the influence of republicanism as a linguistic programme, deriving often from a number of European conflicts against the dominant authorities, and disseminated through the potentially democratizing print culture that was emerging in the early seventeenth century. Republicanism is seen to shade into notions of community and the communal, and also to disperse and displace comfortable concepts of the same. This is seen to carry a special valency in Jonson's later plays, although it is an issue that also figures in the texts that precede them. In placing a particular focus on Jonson's less-discussed drama, the thesis seeks to reassess his canon, avoiding any simplistic developmental reading of his career and, in subverting a strictly chronological approach, reclaiming individual texts for more precise and contextualized understandings - on a political, sociological, and gendered level. The interest In the local in Jonsonian drama requests a Similarly localized reading of the play-texts. By concentrating upon Jonson's plays, the thesis also uncovers a registration within them of the inherent republicanism of the dramatic genre. Jonson recognizes this in his continued interest in the role of audiences in the production of meanings. He examines both the operations and the breakdowns of contractual agreements in society at large and in the theatrical situation, confirming that the authority of the author or monarch can never be absolute.

This thesis seeks to study women's poetic response to the First World War a hitherto neglected area of the literature inspired by the war. It attempts to retrieve from oblivion the experience of the muted half of society as rendered in verse and document as far as possible the full range of the poetic impact the war made upon female sensibility. It is thematic in structure and concentrates upon the more recurrent of attitudes and beliefs which surface in women's war writings. The thematic structure was adopted to cover as wide a range as possible of the ways the historical experience could be met and interpreted in literature. This study takes into account the work of the established writers of the period as well as the amateur versifiers who made war their subject. The first chapter discusses verse which defines the nature of war as apprehended by the female consciousness. Chapter Two examines the poets' use of religious concept and image to lend meaning and purpose to an event entirely at variance with the ideals employed to explain it. The third chapter considers the exploitation of the perennial poetic subject of nature to interpret war by accommodating it into the language and thought of an apparently alien literary tradition. War as it impinged upon the consciousness of people on the Home Front is discussed in Chapter Four; it is partly concerned with revising the calumnious images of women in war time as set out by the soldier poets. Chapter Five looks into the writing of those women who wrote out of their experience of working in the various organisations which were an integral part of the machinery of warfare. War as an experience of suffering - suffering peculiar to the female - defines Chapter Six. The purpose of this study has been to suggest the variety of literary responses to the First World War by those who, at great cost, produce the primal munition of war - men - with which their destinies are inextricably ,linked. As part of a response to a particular historical event, the literary interpretation of which has conditioned modern war consciousness, women's war poetry is not without relevance for it adds a new dimension to the established canon of war literature and correspondingly a new vista to understanding the truth of war.

This thesis aims to examine the little-known works by three Anglo-Sicilian women, written at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, as expatriate writing. In particular, this study explores the various mechanisms and strategies at play in the representation of the Other and the Self in these texts, in the light of the events preceding and following Italian Unification. I intend to verify how these texts respond to being analysed as a distinct group, and what are the specific roles and functions of expatriate women's works. I consider these three works through an interdisciplinary, comparative approach. This thesis consists of an introduction, three case studies - structured in terms of generic subdivisions - and a conclusion. The Introduction draws the historical, social and cultural context shared by the three case studies. It looks at women's expatriate writing as a genre, as well as a few women's travel texts about Sicily. Chapter one explores Letters from Sicily: Containing Some Account of the Political Events in that Island during the Spring of 1849 (London, 1850) by Mary Charlton Pasqualino. Within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary writing, this work is read as a text marking the author's transition from a condition as traveller to that as expatriate. Chapter two is devoted to an analysis of Sicilian Ways and Days, by Louise Hamilton Caico (London, 1910). It looks at strategies used by the author to exert her authority as participant-observer in her ethnographic work. This section also analyses Hamilton Caico's photographs of inland Sicily within a selection of iconographic representations of Southern Italy produced by female travellers. Chapter three examines the relationship between history and memory, personal and public account through a close reading of Sicily and England: Political and Social Reminiscences, 1848-1870 (London, 1907) by Tina Scalia Whitaker. It examines the author's search for an Anglo-Italian identity, as well as the issue of the 'authenticity' of Scalia's historical narrative and self-representation. The conclusions briefly look at today's reception of the translation into Italian of the works by Hamilton Caico and Scalia Whitaker. This section also suggests further research on women's expatriate writing about Italy.

This thesis examines the relationship between the fifteenth-century Kingis Quair and the text which it cites as its inspiration, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, finding analogues for the poet's response to this authoritative material in vernacular literature. The Quair is perhaps best known for its association with James I of Scotland, and an analysis of the connection between the king and the poem is employed as a means of demonstrating the extent to which his identity shapes the meaning of the work and is, in turn, reformulated within it. The Quair's treatment of the Consolation is a vital part of this transformation , as the poem establishes a parallel between James and Boethius, articulating the sense that his experience repeats that of the auctor. The medieval craft of memory is considered as a precedent for this treatment of literature and personal history as texts which are subject to revision. Analysis of several texts illuminates the tradition of Boethian adaptation which informs the Quair. The popularity of the Consolation made the image of Boethius as an exemplary politician a commonplace of medieval literary culture, and through association with his experience, exile and imprisonment become trials which confer philosophical wisdom upon their subjects. Against this background, the Quair emerges as a sophisticated engagement with the medieval reception history of the Consolation, which reimagines James I as the model of the perfect prince.

The years between 1815 and 1825 were a period of social and cultural flux. This thesis examines what I take to be the most significant literary genre of that period, the magazine. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the London Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine, along with a host of other, less commercially successful magazines, emerged as a dominant cultural force in these years. I place these magazines in a context of rapid literary and urban expansion, in which distinctions between commercial and aesthetic, literary and non-literary, and high and low cultures became newly anxious. Magazines, I suggest, illuminate a literary culture that was not as clearly divided as either traditional Romantic criticism or New Historicist cultural critiques have suggested. Rather, magazines stand at a midpoint between high and low cultures, neither of which could define itself except in relation to the other. I argue that magazines are significant precisely because their intermediate status offers the best guide to a newly confusing republic of letters. Chapter One discusses the development of the magazine from its eighteenth-century roots, and argues that Leigh Hunt’s Examiner is the most important influence on the new magazines. In Chapter Two I challenge Jon Klancher’s influential model of magazine readerships, and argue for a model of the magazine market dependent not on exclusion, but on connections between magazines and across a culture. In Chapter Three I propose a model of metropolitan culture, defined by its indistinctness, that underlies my conception of the magazine form as a whole. Here I discuss T. G. Wainewright’s art criticism for the London Magazine, arguing that it revels in the cultural indeterminacy that magazines so adeptly theorise. Chapter Four turns from the metropolis to the print market, arguing that magazine writers recognised that it had begun to resemble the London streets. But rather than rejecting the newly expanded “reading public” like many of their contemporaries, magazine writers enjoyed a new sense of freedom, even while they sensed the limits of that freedom. Many writers in the period sought to oppose literature and commerce, and in Chapter Five I again place magazines between these two categories. Thomas De Quincey made himself into a commercial success by claiming a literary identity that was opposed to the marketplace, but Blackwood’s, in a brilliant reversal, made itself into literature by flamboyantly asserting its commercialism.

This study aims to offer a new literary biography of Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632) and demonstrates the ways in which he refashions his principal source, Geoffrey Chaucer. The first chapter considers Dekker in both literary and theatre histories, situating him amongst his collaborators: Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. This chapter also aims to re-evaluate Dekker’s achievement in history, starting from Dekker’s presence in Henslowe’s Diary, his ‘part’ in the War of the Theatres, his theatre writing, followed by his observations of London written during the plague years, his imprisonment, and his posthumous historical reception. The second chapter investigates how Dekker uses Chaucer, whose ‘book’, I argue, is a common theatrical source book that offers the playwrights quick access to stories and plots. To provide evidence of Dekker’s readership of Chaucer, I trace the early modern editions of Chaucer available in Dekker’s time and survey Dekker’s reading of Chaucer from his early career to his late years. The final three chapters concentrate on Dekker’s uniquely creative refashioning of Chaucer in theatrical terms. Chapter Three examines how Dekker turns Chaucer’s serious Clerk’s Tale, a ‘text of loss’, into a comic parody, re-titled as The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil. Chapter Four investigates Chaucer’s legacy of the festive and the carnival, whose ideas of ‘game’ and ‘play’ in The Canterbury Tales directly influence Dekker’s Westward Ho and Northward Ho, wherein I call the Ho plays Dekker’s ‘game’ plays. Chapter Five demonstrates the ways in which Dekker transforms the tropes of Chaucer’s Loathly Lady in The Wife of Bath’s Tale into performative metaphors in The Roaring Girl, a fantasy satire. This is the first attempt to discuss and study, in full, Dekker’s texts alongside their source. Through Dekker’s Chaucerian re-imaginings, we see the playwright’s three-dimensional transformation of his source and the ways he visualises his performances.

The overall argument of this thesis is that Anthony Burgess’s literary journalism enables us to make a nuanced reading of his own Catholic novels. My definition of ‘journalism’ is necessarily wide: it takes in television and radio work, as well as published book reviews and interviews. Although previous commentators have established useful connections between Burgess’s novels, his journalism has been consistently overlooked and undervalued. As a result of this neglect, there is no published study of Burgess’s journalistic writing. This is also the first thesis to make extensive use of Burgess’s manuscripts, letters, diaries and other archival materials. The Worm and the Ring (1961), Tremor of Intent (1966) and Early Powers (1980) offer useful examples of ‘confluence’ between fiction and journalism. These novels pick up and develop a variety of material - often, but not exclusively ‘Catholic’ - which Burgess engages with elsewhere, in essays and reviews. The act of reviewing is seen to be crucial part of the process of fiction-writing, and Burgess’s journalism (on Greene, on spy fiction, and on the idea of the Catholic novel) appears to flow into these blocks in a fairly straightforward way. The ‘conflict’ of my title refers to A Clockwork Orange and Burgess’s subsequent journalistic statements about it. His post factum prefaces and other journalistic articles on the novel’s composition are shown to be at variance and typescript evidence. The theological implications of the variant endings are examined carefully, with reference to Burgess’s writings about the theological dispute between Saint Augustine and Pelagius.

Beckett's female characterization in his later works is, in marked contrast to his earlier work, broadly in sympathy with the notion of 'feminine' style and feminist concerns. Yet in his earlier texts, the female is grotesque, devouring, sexually provocative, and silenced. It can be argued that Beckett's representations of the female and Ireland intersect, and change as his relationship to Ireland and an Anglo-Irish tradition changes. Proposing that Beckett's self-imposed exile has influenced such changes, this thesis, using a psychoanalytic framework, traces discourses of mourning, melancholia and abjection in his works, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often the objects of loss in the psychoanalytic model. By exploring the correlations between the representations of Ireland and the female throughout Beckett's oeuvre, this thesis aims to shed new light on Beckett's literary practice as well as contributing to the fields of Irish and feminist studies.

I identify Coleridge‘s tragic vision as his engagement with catastrophe in search of a redemptive meaning. I examine Coleridge‘s plays, critical lectures, and commentaries on Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, and I reinvestigate some of his most famous works, such as 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel'. Chapters: 1). Introduction: Romantic Tragedy and Tragic Romanticism: I establish my interpretation amidst other theorists. I assess the presence of Classical tragedy in Coleridge‘s education, and the important changes that occurred in scholarship on Greek tragedy in Britain during the Romantic period. I acknowledge the important influences of Greek, English and German tragedians. 2). Transgression and Suffering: I suggest that Coleridge intends his reader to experience suffering vicariously for the purpose of moral benefit, fulfilling the same function that he identifies in Greek tragedy. 3). Real-Life Tragedy: Coleridge interprets events around him as tragic cycles of suffering and catharsis for political purposes, suggesting that the hardships of the French Revolution, and even the deceit of an innkeeper, are exemplary misfortunes. 4). The Tragic ‘Impulse’ and Coleridge’s Forms of Incompletion: Analysing Coleridge‘s use of the excerpts from his rejected play Osorio to form new poems, I argue that this instigates lifelong patterns of reinventing doomed literary projects, with reference to such concepts as synecdoche and the fragment. 5). The Lear Vocation: Coleridge’s Tragic Stage: I challenge a popular notion that Coleridge was prejudiced against theatre by demonstrating that, in his staged dramas, Coleridge exploits as well as criticizing the conventions of the contemporary stage and calls for reform in theatres. 6). The Tragic Sage. I claim that Coleridge made lifelong efforts to establish himself as a sage, dramatizing his own hardships to enhance his authority as an advisor. From youth Coleridge depicts himself as an embattled, prophetic figure, likening himself to Cassandra. Drawing on W.B. Yeats‘s comparison to Oedipus, I examine the various techniques Coleridge employs to establish himself as a survivor of and commentator on catastrophe. 7). Failed Sacrifices and the Un-Tragic Coleridge: Finally I argue that Coleridge, having settled into orthodox Christianity, abandons the tragic philosophy, expressing fears that suffering might be in vain, and therefore that catastrophe should be avoided in reality and as a literary theme. Ironically, this point is clarified in a lecture on Aeschylus.

My Ph.D. is an intervention on three levels: it works on the theoretical level as an investigation into the usefulness of Pascale Casanova’s theory of world literature; it sheds new light on the relation between Welsh and Anglocentric British literary spaces in the twentieth century; and it radically re-positions Edward Thomas, the ‘quintessential English poet’, as a pioneering writer in an Anglophone Welsh literature. This dissertation begins by setting out some revisions to Casanova’s model before investigating whether this modified theory can be applied to dominant and dominated literatures within Britain. Subsequent chapters provide a case-history of how this might be achieved by focusing on Thomas, a figure of division among Welsh and English critics alike. While Welsh critics, for various reasons, have failed to claim Thomas for their literature, other, non-Welsh, critics have placed him in an English tradition. These include Robert Frost and Walter De la Mare, both of whom read his work as a representation of the rural England for which he supposedly died, as well as Edna Longley who, following a critical line initially developed by Philip Larkin, presents Thomas’s poetry as the ‘missing link’ in a native English poetic tradition. By bringing to light Thomas’s literary journalism, mainly out of print since it was written, as well as biographical factors long obscured behind the focus on his death as a British soldier, I am able to show how Casanova’s revised model, when applied to Thomas, reveals a radically different writer to the one who has been critically received. Thomas, I contend, should be read as an English-language Welsh writer who dissimilates from an anglicized British literary space by disseminating Welsh folk material to a wider audience, by promoting writers from other English-language national traditions, by importing French literary models into his work, by defending gay writers in the post-Wilde trial era, and by subverting the Englishness of typical rural locales. Re-positioning the ‘quintessentially English’ Thomas makes more urgent the question that some critics have begun to address: of what will a post-imperial, or even a post-British, English identity consist?