The author's Habilitationsschrift, Universität Bonn. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 373-390).

The importance of manuscript sources for certain types of poetry in the 1580s and 1590s has only slowly become apparent. The subject of this thesis is a group of manuscript poetic miscellanies from this period, which preserve an important collection of poems. Although most of these poems were never published, they circulated in manuscript among minor courtiers and students at the Universities and Inns of Court. Six of these miscellanies share a number of poems in common and have texts which are sometimes related; they provide the main focus of these studies. They are MSS Rawl.Poet.85 (in the Bodleian Library), Harl.7392 (in the British Museum), and certain sections of MSS Dd.5-75 (in the University Library, Cambridge), Z3.5.21 (in Archbishop Marsh's Library, Dublin), V.a.89 (in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington) and the Harington MS at Arundel Castle. These six miscellanies (and others that impinge on them from time to time) have been considered from a number of points of view. The importance of manuscript circulation in the literature of the period is discussed, and problems of dealing with manuscript material are examined. The six miscellanies are described in some detail, the compilers being identified where possible and suggestions made about the dates when the poems were copied. The miscellanies preserve a fairly coherent body of Elizabethan lyrics. These have been indexed by first line, attributed where possible and the whereabouts of other texts noted. Some of these poems present complex problems of text, authorship and literary or social history. One of the most complicated textually is "The French Primero", preserved in four versions of varying length and numerous textual differences, which has been taken as a test case for discussing methods of editing a poem preserved only or mainly in manuscript texts. Another poem, "My mind to me a kingdom is", (perhaps by Sir Edward Dyer) has been examined as an illustration of the effects of popularity on the text of a poem. The bulk of the poems which are ascribed in the miscellanies are the works of courtier poets who had no interest in publication. Eight of these writers are examined in some detail for the light the miscellanies throw on problems of text and canon. These manuscripts are the most important sources of texts and ascriptions of poems by Sir Edward Dyer and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The canons of both these poets have been re-examined, and edited texts of their poems presented. Certain lyrics which appear in the miscellanies by the Queen, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh and Sir Arthur Gorges (all well edited in recent editions) are examined for the information they yield about how courtly lyrics circulated in manuscript. Poems from the miscellanies by Nicholas Breton (better known as a professional writer than a courtly lyrist) and Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby (hitherto barely known as a poet) are presented and discussed. Three of the miscellanies (MSS Cambridge Dd.5.75, Rawl Poet.85 and Harl.7392) preserve a number of poems written by their compilers and their friends or charges, and these imitate current poetic fashions of the court, and provide interesting evidence of poems in English being written by young Elizabethans at various stages of their education. These little-known poems have been transcribed and discussed, and the social backgrounds of their authors examined. In brief, the object of these studies has been to describe the six miscellanies, to examine and compare their contents, and to discuss their textual problems. The texts by courtiers and courtly imitators which they preserve are studied, and the poetry placed in its proper social context. Some conclusions have been reached about Elizabethan taste and popularity, which may suggest the significance of these manuscripts in contributing to a better knowledge of the state of English poetry towards the end of the sixteenth century.

The thesis is based on a first-line catalogue of versions of the Greek Anacreontea in Latin, French and Italian from 1469 to 1605 (55 poets) and in England from 1518 to 1683 (59 poets). Texts are given of the principal versions of the six most popular Anacreontic poems: these are the two recusationes (Poems 1 and 16 in Stephanus), "The Beggar Cupid" (Poem 3), a drinking song (19), "Cupid and the Bee" (40), and the cicada-poem (43). After a review of modern critical theory of the quality, dating and authorship of the Anacreontea, it is shown how the poems became famous as the work of Anacreon in France in the 1550s, through the efforts of Estienne, Dorat and Ronsard: one unpublished poem may have been known earlier by Joannes Secundus. All the versions of the six poems listed above are compared in detail: particular attention is paid to the sources and tone of the English translations. Some account is given of all other English poets and dramatists of the period who made use of the Anacreontea. Included are imitations by Watson, Barnes, and other Elizabethan sonneteers: scholarly versions by A. W. and Thomas Stanley: and the "paraphrastic" translations of Cowley, Willis and Wood. There are detailed discussions of Spenser's "Anacreontics" in Amoretti, of Holyday's play Technogamia, of Lovelace's "The Grasse-hopper", and of emblems by Whitney and Ayres: also included are versions by Berkenhead, Brome, Cotton, Drayton, Thomas Forde, Greene, Greville, Herrick, Richard James, Jonson, Kendall, Leech, Lodge, Oldham, Randolph, Rochester, Shakespeare, Sherburne, Shirley, Sidney, Soowthern, Spelman, Suckling, Thomas Tomkis and Mary Wroth. The conclusion summarises contemporary translation theory, and delineates three main phases of translation in England. There is a special discussion of poems entitled "Anacreontics", and a list of seventeenth-century musical settings.

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published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

During Matthew Arnold's lifetime England was in permanent transition: the emergence of a modern industrial society, the new science and liberalized Christianity, and the democratic and humanitarian movements. To be a writer during this time required a curious and precarious balances an alternation of steadfastness and change. Arnold's moving back and forth between the traditions of romanticism and rationalism does present a challenge to the contemporary reader; no single or systematic approach can be applied to his works. An examination of a selection of Arnold's poems, written predominantly between 1845 and 1857, shows the author's reassessment of man's place in the new cosmology as necessitated by the scientific and technological advances of the century. The poems selected also suggest movement away from the romantic concept of the greatness of the past and yesterday's larger-than-life hero toward an acceptance of the best life as represented by the present generation of men. Arnold's theory, that the best self or right reason manifests itself in heroic men, in leaders, and confirms ordinary men, is found throughout the poems studied.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1950 O4 / Master of Science

My thesis examines social observation in the poetry of John Clare, focusing on his work in the years before he was committed to an asylum in 1837. The project illuminates a plurality of perspectives in his poetry that has not been fully recognized in previous critical studies. It resituates the conventional scholarly approach to Clare, which has been preoccupied by an overly oppositional conception of the ‘two cultures’ that he inhabited: the oral and the literary. My thesis positions him as an intellectually curious seeker whose poetry is invigorated by his experience of different value systems in both the country and the city. Each chapter considers how Clare develops different strategies of social observation in the context of different discourses, and how he unsettles the validity of various attitudes to human behaviour. Chapter One, ‘Naturalizing Perspectives’, offers a new approach to Clare’s interest in natural history, by examining its influence on his portrayal of human behaviour, when he adopts the detailed observational habits of the naturalist. Chapter Two, ‘Refined Perspectives’, shows how he negotiates the influences of poets who represented the social structure of rural life, and poets who were interested in rural subjectivity, in order to identify the distinctiveness of his presentation of customary culture in ‘The Village Minstrel’. Chapter Three, ‘Female Perspectives’, considers his interest in his female readership, and examines how his courtship tales – which have generally been neglected by critics – engage with the concerns about conduct and social elevation that occupied the literature aimed for this audience. Chapter Four, ‘National Perspectives’, examines how he responds to the ferment of political ideas in his time through his representations of the nation – another area that has been little served in critical studies. My Conclusion considers Clare’s later poetry in the asylum and his developing self-consciousness as a social observer.

This dissertation argues that the destabilization of species categories over the course of the nineteenth century generated vital new approaches to animal figuration in British poetry and prose. Taxonomized by the followers of Linnaeus and organized into moral hierarchies by popular zoology, animals entered nineteenth-century British culture as fixed types, differentiated by the hand of God and invested with allegorical significance. By the 1860s, evolutionary theory had dismantled the idea of an ordered, cleanly subdivided “animal kingdom,” leading to an attendant problem of meaning: How could animals work as figures—how could they signify in any coherent way—when their species identities were no longer stable? Examining works in a wide range of genres, I argue that the problem of species produced modes of figuration that grapple with—and in many ways, embrace—the increasing categorical and referential messiness of nonhuman creatures. My first chapter centers on dog poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Michael Field, in which tropes of muteness express the category-crossings of dogs and the erotic ambiguities of the human-pet relationship. Chapter 2 looks at midcentury novels by Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, arguing that the trope of metonymy—a key trope of both novels and pets—expresses the semantic wanderings of animals and their power to subvert the identities of humans. Chapter 3 examines two works of literary nonsense, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, arguing that they invert and critique prior genres that contained and controlled the queerness of creaturely life—including, in Kingsley’s case, aquarium writing, which literally and figuratively domesticated ocean ecologies in the Victorian imaginary. In my fourth and fifth chapters, I turn to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, two late-nineteenth-century works that explore the destabilization of the human species while still fighting against the overwhelming irresistibility of both human exceptionalism and an anthropocentric, category-based worldview. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that these representational approaches achieve three major effects that represent a break from the more indexical, allegorical forms of animal figuration that were standard when the century began. Rather than reducing animals to static types, they foreground the alterity and queerness of individual creatures. At the same time, they challenge the very idea of individuality as such, depicting creatures—including the human—tangled in irreducible webs of ecological enmeshment. Most of all, they call into question their own ability to translate the creaturely world into language, destabilizing the Adamic relationship between names and things and allowing animals to mean in ways that subvert the agency of humans. By figuring animals differently, these texts invite us to see the many compelling possibilities—ontological, relational, ethical—in a world unstructured by the taxonomical gaze.

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