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<p> During the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, writers like William Walwyn produced documents contesting the restriction of their liberties. This thesis is a critical edition of Walwyn&rsquo;s <i>Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie,</i> unedited since its original publication in 1646. In this text Walwyn advocates for man&rsquo;s right to question religious orthodoxy in his search for Truth and urges Parliament not to pass a proposed <i>Bill</i> for the harsh punishment of religious sectarians. </p><p> Prior to a transcription of the text is an introduction to Walwyn and an attempt to situate the reader in the context of his time. Following that is a style and rhetorical analysis, which concludes that despite his rejection of rhetorical practices, Walwyn&rsquo;s own use of them is effective. Perhaps this skill is one of the reasons that Parliament passed a milder, non-punitive version of the <i>Bill</i> Walwyn argued against.</p><p>

Unhappy Consciousness is a study of recognition scenes in the Victorian novel and their relation to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Victorian recognition scenes often show a hero's self-discovery as a retrospective identification with things. When, for example, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer learns the truth about her marriage: "She saw, in the crude light of that revelation... the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron." The retrospective discovery of identity in Victorian novels is often figured as a catastrophic falling-apart of a stable self that is also an economic object or instrument: a bank check, a debt, a forgery, an inheritance, or an accumulated principal. Recognition scenes cannot be considered in the light of a timeless "master plot" or the classical poetics of Aristotelian anagnorisis, but need to be interpreted in terms of historical forms of social misrecognition (such as Marx's analysis of fetishism). Unhappy Consciousness contends that, if we are going to talk about nineteenth century things, we will have to take into account the novelistic misrecognition of the self, insofar as the heroes misrecognize themselves in forms of commodity fetishism. The thing is so often the subject herself insofar as "barred," dispersed among retrospective or delayed object identifications. I respond to the historical contextualization in Victorian cultural studies of "commodity culture," insisting that the economic structure of the commodity is not only a topic for realist notation, but makes up the inner logic of the novel form. Unhappy Consciousness urges a return to questions of novel theory which were perhaps set aside during New Historicism, arguing for a particularly novelistic mode of "objectification" (the form of the hero's activity) seen in interaction with the historical mode of objectification found in the capitalist value-form. I advance this argument through studies of several canonical Victorian works. Chapter One looks at the tension in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit between the ideological closure attained in the "family romance" plot of buried wills and restored parents, and the dead-end of interpretation and retrospection found in the plot of financial crisis and stock swindles. Chapter Two argues that, in Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset, the tautological nature of interest rate is not confined to the urban financial plot but is displaced and affectively diffused over the provincial mystery plot. Chapter Three is a study of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which I read the detective as an exaggerated portrait of the subjective effects of capitalist alienation, a monad whose only intervention in the world is to link predictive results with opaque processes, to "produce" recognition scenes (the solutions to each case) as a salable commodity. He is a machine for retrospection who has no personal past. In Chapter Four, I read Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady as a critique of the fetishizing of autonomous consciousness, using Marx's definition of fetishism as the misrecognition of a social form as the content of a thing. Isabel's mistake is to misconstrue the structure of the male gaze that constitutes her "freedom" as the inherent property of her individuality--until it is unmasked as a trap. As so often in the Victorian novel, fetishism is a mode of self-knowledge.

Invoked as the novel's generic other, poetry is simultaneously central and marginal in our understanding of the Victorian novel. Poetry is the idealism to the novel's realism, the elevated verse to the novel's prosaic prose, entering into our theories of the novel only so that it can be expelled. Even when we define the novel as the genre of complete inclusion, poetry is singled out as the ultimate expression of monoglossia, which the novel subsumes without altering its own generic identity. In my dissertation, Losing the Margin: Poetry and Poetic Form in the Victorian Novel, I argue that Victorian novelists engage poetry not as a simple foil against which to defend the borders of their genre, but as a shifting collection of representational techniques that highlight the limitations of the novel and attempt to transgress them.

This dissertation identifies wifely counsel as a major theme in The Canterbury Tales. My analysis of The Tale of Melibee, The Clerk's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, and The Wife of Bath's Tale reveals a pattern of women instructing, transforming, and collaborating with their husbands to accomplish important work for both the household and the public sphere. Wife-counselors in the Tales do not merely provide advice; in moments that modern critics too often overlook, these women also supersede their husbands in leadership roles to mediate conflicts and dispense justice. By reading the tales in my study as narratives of wifely counsel, I show how greater critical attention to plots and characters illuminates underexplored arguments about gender, marriage, and women as political agents in the Tales.

This dissertation explores the ideological functions of the National Family Allegory in post-Independence novels and film created by male authors and film directors. Ideology functions as a lingering force in service of the status quo, the current power structure, and these works recreate the same family structures as those established during colonization and through national myth. The roles of Mother Ireland, savior sons, and failing fathers repeat, sometimes through creative means. Although the texts attempt to subvert the allegory, many post-Independence works eventually show the traditional and conservative family structure of the National Family Allegory. The first chapter, “Importantly Motherless: Spontaneous Child Creation and Male Maternity,” analyzes the connection between the missing Mother figure and male fantasies of pregnancy and child creation. Because of the lack of stable family structure, usually connected to early childhood abandonment or mistreatment, the novels discussed in this chapter show the absolute necessity of family in creating a personal and national identity. In the second chapter, “’You Can’t Protect Your Women’”: Male Irish Terrorists as Protector in Popular American and Irish Films, 1984-1998,” the young man/son protagonist in his role as protector of the woman/Mother figure is analyzed in six different films. In the third chapter, “Articulation and Stasis: The Son as Haunted Echo of the Father in McCann’s Songdogs,” discusses the father and son dynamic in relation to the missing mother in this diasporic novel to indicate that the Irish National Family Allegory holds true even during the dispersion of post-Famine Irish identity. The last chapter, “Failing Fathers,” examines the father figure in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, and John McGahern’s Amongst Women. A father’s traditional role is to function in the public sphere and also to control the family, yet each of these father’s fail in their roles, which is typical of the National Family Allegory role established within the literature.

This dissertation traces the progress of the personified imagination from the twelfth-century De planctu Naturae to the sixteenth-century Faerie Queene, arguing that the transformability of the personified imagination becomes a locus for questioning personification allegory across the entire period. The dissertation demonstrates how, even while the imagination seems to progress from a position of subordination to a position of dominance, certain features of the imagination's unstable nature reappear repeatedly at every stage in this period's development of the figure. Deep suspicion of the faculty remains a regular part of the imagination's allegorical representation throughout these five centuries. Within the period, we witness the imagination trying to assert its allegorical position in the context of other, more established allegorical figures such as Reason and Nature. In this way, the history of the personification of the imagination is surprisingly continuous from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This "continuity" is not absolute but functions as a consistent recombination of a standard set of features of and attitudes toward imagination that rematerializes regularly. In order to understand this phenomenon at any point in these five centuries, it is essential to examine imagination across the entire period. In particular, the dissertation discovers an alternative, more nuanced view of the personified imagination than has thus far been posited. The imagination is a thoroughly ambivalent character, always on the cusp of transformation, and nearly always locked in a power struggle with other allegorical figures. At the same time, as the allegorical imagination repeatedly attempts to establish itself, it becomes a locus for intense questioning of the meaning and process of personification. The imagination remains transformative, uncertain, and at times terrifying throughout this entire period.

<p>John Milton argued that customs are antithetical to rational judgment. My dissertation, Freedom Under the Law, investigates the conception of rationality that underlies the divorce of tradition and reason in the writings of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642-1660). In this period, republican authors strive to turn English subjects into citizens whose active virtue and rational judgment is unclouded by tradition and habits. This dissertation argues that these writers build their arguments on a paradoxical depiction of the people as both rationally capable of consenting to political association and irrationally bound by custom. In conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of the Aristotelian tradition, Freedom Under the Law exposes the tensions that arise in the writings of both canonical and non-canonical seventeenth-century authors as they attempt to re-imagine and represent the individual, the family, and the commonwealth. As this project demonstrates, writers ranging from John Milton to the millenarian John Rogers to the Parliamentarian Henry Parker reveal a residual understanding of political and social community that owes its vocabulary to medieval and classical modes of thinking. However, while Aristotelian models of political association closely link reason, habit, and justice, the authors considered in my project present an understanding of individuals as capable of rational action independent of tradition and custom. </p><p>This dissertation traces how this revolutionary account of the individual in political association is expressed through a range of often-conflicting formulations of the English nation. Freedom Under the Law begins with Milton's representation of education in the virtues in his early theatrical piece, Comus (1634). This first chapter establishes the guiding question of the project: how is the relationship between individual and community reconfigured in the literature of the seventeenth-century? In chapters two and three, I situate Milton's domestic and political prose of 1643-49 in the context of Puritan marriage manuals and Parliamentarian and royalist tracts. Through these comparisons, I show that Milton's distrust of customary laws produces a representation of the virtuous individual and the ideal nation as independent of their own history and, ironically, driven to constant iconoclastic self-reformation. Chapter four demonstrates how impoverished accounts of natural law lead to a devaluing of the people's legislative authority in Edward Sexby's call for the killing of Oliver Cromwell in Killing No Murder (1657), apologias of the Cromwellian dissolution of the Parliament in 1653, and the Putney Debates in 1647. Chapter five considers Milton's Readie and Easie Way (1660) alongside Fifth Monarchist pamphlets. This chapter questions J.G.A. Pocock's distinction between a medieval custom-based juristic tradition and a republican understanding of rational political life, a distinction adopted widely in Milton studies. I argue that comparison with Aquinas's Aristotelian account of custom and law brings into relief tensions in Milton's model of rational political participation. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the conception of virtue and reason adopted by Milton and his contemporaries allows them to dismiss historically-bound embodiments of justice and reason as enslaving accretions.</p> / Dissertation