Feminist criticism offers a re-visioning of literary analysis by studying the influence of gender identity on author, character, audience, and critic. While feminist critics have focused on the novel and contemporary poetry, they are just beginning to examine women poets of the Victorian era, the first literary period to accept women as poets. Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own offers a theory of women writers as a subculture within a dominant male tradition: their work evolves from a Feminine "imitation" and "internalization" of the dominant standards into first, a Feminist "protest" and search for "autonomy" and finally, a Female literature of "self-discovery" and identity. Adapting this matrix to a study of three poets--Mary Coleridge, Alice Meynell, and Charlotte Mew--the dissertation seeks to redefine the stereotypical Victorian Poetess by discovering the feminist poetics which inspired and guided her. Although she wrote with the burden of the Romantic priest of the imagination or the Victorian priest of social reform as her male models, she could not escape, in fact often turned to, her female identity to define herself as a poet. After a close examination of three individual poets, the dissertation will conclude with an overview of how their processes are echoed in a larger collection of Victorian women's poetry.

This dissertation analyzes the findings of a ten year study of the 1568–70 Geneva Bible originally owned and annotated by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), and now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (Folger shelf mark 1427). This is the first and—presently—only dissertation in literary studies which pursues with open respect the heretical and thesis of John Thomas Looney (1920), B. M. Ward (1928), Charlton Ogburn Jr. (1984) and other “amateur” scholars, which postulates de Vere as the literary mind behind the popular nom de plume “William Shakespeare.” The dissertation reviews a selection of the many credible supports for this theory and then considers confirmatory evidence from the annotations of the de Vere Bible, demonstrating the coherence of life, literary preceden, and art, which is the inevitable consequence of the theory. Appendices offer detailed paleographical analysis, review the history of the authorship question, consider the chronology of the Shakespearean canon, and refute the claim of some critics that the alleged connections between the de Vere Bible and “Shakespeare” are “random.”

This dissertation addresses an intensely contested issue in the Romantic and postmodern imaginations: the relation of literary aesthetics to political critique. Examining the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Schiller, William Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as four theorists of the twentieth century, I devise a theory of "Romantic aesthetic politics," an aesthetic interpretation of politics for reformist critique. While critics of "Romantic ideology" have interpreted Romantic theory as an obstacle to political action, I contend that Romanticism extends the possibilities for political action by refusing a narrow field of empiricism. The political force of Romanticism, I argue, is the extent to which it forces a rethinking of the terms of the political. The diverse set of writers gathered in my dissertation converge on one point: not only is all literature necessarily political, they argue, but all politics is necessarily literary. Part One of my dissertation investigates a Romantic theory that champions aesthetic formalism as revolutionary politics. Schiller, Wordsworth, Williams, and Shelley shift the field of the political from its common institutional manifestations--government, war, law--to a field of the symbolic--beauty, metaphor, verse. Each author finds in the aesthetic a model for an anti-absolutist, democratic state. Schiller states this position most succinctly in claiming that "it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to freedom." Similarly, Williams reads the early years of the Revolution as an aesthetic-political landscape where symbolism serves as a discursive means to political dispersal and plurality. Part Two of my dissertation examines the resonances of Romantic aesthetic politics in four aesthetic theories of the twentieth century. Romanticism, I contend, informs the aesthetic theories of the Frankfurt School represented by Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, who draw on the radical potential of aesthetic subjectivity and irony in opposition to Lukacsian realism. Against the interpretation of deconstruction as politically quietist, de Man presents the aesthetic nature of politics as the very engine of political change, while Carl Schmitt--denouncer of "political Romanticism" and a supporter of Nazism--exposes a continuum between absolutist politics and an anti-aesthetic political critique.

Her letters have been neglected somewhat in Emily Dickinson scholarship, as have nineteenth-century British writers despite the fact they are mentioned more in her letters than their American contemporaries. Led by these references, I examined the copies of the family books held at the Frost Library, Amherst College and in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. The examination of the texts and close readings of Dickinson's letters and poems shows that she formed a literary coterie made up of books to which she turned for inspiration. Written as a study to complement Karl Keller's The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty (1979), this study reinforces Dickinson's place within canon of 19th Century American writing. Keller reads Dickinson through American authors from Anne Bradstreet to Ralph Waldo Emerson. He succeeds in explicating Dickinson's relationships with these authors to show their importance in her evolution as a "vernacular poet." Because Dickinson's poetry seems to be unconventional at times, readers and critics have begrudgingly placed her within the canon of the nineteenth century; I will show in the following chapters that she belongs there firmly. Chapter I introduces Dickinson's affinities to women writers of her time and states the thesis of the study. In Chapter II, Wordsworth's contribution to Dickinson's poetic development is seen through his early poems and The Prelude. Chapter III discusses Dickinson's reading of Byron's "The Prisoner of Chillon" and demonstrates that once she read it, she never forgot it. Keats's poetry may have influenced Dickinson as well, although presently no evidence exists showing that she owned any of his books. Chapter IV adds new information to previous critics' discussions of Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot through careful examination of Dickinson's copies of their works. In Chapter V, I show Dickinson's debt to Tennyson and demonstrate that her fondness for Robert Browning was based on his own artistic merit rather than his marriage. Finally, Chapter VI concludes by tracing the centrality and commonality of these seven writers and how, by appropriating them as her mentors, Dickinson produced work that belongs alongside theirs.

This study is an examination of how gendered characters in eighteenth-century British women's fiction are constructed and challenged. The novels under study are Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph (1761), Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House (1793). Chapter one, "Theory, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century British Women Writers," discusses how eighteenth-century scholars often substitute a focus on women writers and their female characters for a more thorough examination of gender and gender issues. Using post-structuralist and feminist-materialist theory, I maintain that it is important to consider a process-oriented conception of male and female identity, and to understand that each sex is continually in dialogue with the other, and with society at large. My subsequent chapters apply this supposition on a practical level. "Negotiating Female Identity in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" argues that Trueworth constructs his masculine identity by associating with "virtuous" women and by avoiding any examination into his own sexual or moral conduct. He and society repeatedly and incorrectly judge the benevolent and high-spirited Betsy to be morally deficient and sexually permissive, and she comes to believe what everyone tells her: that she is a coquette and that it is her fault men sexually harass her. Consequently, Haywood offers no alternative way of perceiving women's gendered identity than by polarizing sexuality and ethics and by collapsing sexuality into gender. "Gender and Disguise in the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph" also focuses on the social indoctrination of women into accepting conservative notions of womanhood. More specifically, it explores the manifestation of heterosexual desire during a time when women were taught to venerate their parents and keep a tight rein over their desires while men were allowed more latitude in expressing their sexuality. The two remaining novels are more progressive in their construction of gendered characters. "A Simple Story: The Complexity of Gender Realized" argues that in Inchbald's novel gendered identity is indeterminate and in flux. Gender is consciously foregrounded with the construction and dismantling of gendered stereotypes, and the repetition and extension of their intergenerational stories. Characters' identities (same sex and different-sex) merge and plotlines (romance, incest, and adultery) are fluid. Finally, "Domestic Ideology and the Delusion of Gendered Stability in The Old Manor House" contends that Orlando and Monimia are deluded about the makeup of their gendered identities and the relationship they have with each other. While they work hard to maintain that separation between the public and private upon which their identities are based, Smith shows us that these spheres are always already intertwined and that it is impossible for heterosexual romance to remain immune from societal forces.

Literary modernism created a radical break from nineteenth-century forms. This dissertation focuses on how we might perceive a different kind of “break” in novelists of the modernist era who use traditional forms associated with women: the marriage plot and the sentimental romance. By reading writers at the margins of modernism—Mourning Dove and Jessie Redmon Fauset—this study pushes modernism itself to the margins. Similar to canonical modernists such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, form is the substance of these marginalized writers' novels. And, in this sense, their novelistic critiques of modernity in form are experimental and yet remain different than exclusive understandings of formal experimentation in canonical modernism. I read Woolf and Stein alongside Mourning Dove and Fauset to explore the resonances amongst all four writers' linguistic and phenomenological experiments and their de-formations and re-formations of sentimental subjectivity. As inheritors of the sentimental tradition, Woolf and Stein belonged to the literary family they rebelled against. How do writers positioned outside that tradition, by virtue of its construction of race and class difference, join modernism's departure from nineteenth-century forms? As cultural outsiders, Mourning Dove and Fauset must first enable their heroines to inhabit the sentimental tradition in order to critique and dismantle modernity's interwoven legacy of colonialism and gendered subjectivity. Reading Woolf and Stein from the perspective of Mourning Dove and Fauset, we see afresh not only the project all these authors share but also the way the latter explore geographical and ontological shadows left untouched by the former. Though Woolf s and Stein's writings more fundamentally rearrange the phenomenological landscape of language, they have more in common with the other two writers than at first glance. All of them create disorientation for readers who don't relinquish conventional modes of reading. They respond to modernity's understanding of the subject by questioning the conventional boundaries of the self, and they re-envision the temporal and spatial dimensions of intersubjectivity as these overlap with social categories. An understanding of the legacy of modernity in the long view enables us to see where these authors meet in the short view of early twentieth-century fiction.

From the earliest draft of her first novel through her last published work, Virginia Woolf treated science--particularly evolutionary theory--as a powerful discourse that claimed the authority to explain reality and which legitimized the patriarchal social structure. While appreciating the richness of Darwin and later evolutionary writers, Woolf consistently criticized science in general and evolutionary discourse in particular as expressions of patriarchal values. In turn-of-the-century Britain, biology, medicine and the theories that directed social policies were imbued with various interpretations of evolution, most of which considered white northern European men the apex of evolution. Belief in the possibility of devolution prompted evolutionary minded social thinkers to warn that global societal degeneration would ensue if "lesser races" followed their own paths without European guidance and if women of any race or class turned their limited energies to educating themselves and entering professional work rather than bearing and rearing children. Woolf grew up in an intellectual Victorian circle involved in evolutionary fervor and the reification of the sciences that both objectified her as a female and provided her imagination with new realms of experience. Woolf read Darwin and the science and social theory of the late nineteenth century, and as scientific writing itself became more specialized, she continued to read about science throughout her life. Through extensive and usually ironic revisionist readings of evolutionary concepts, Woolf anticipated the feminist critiques of science of the late twentieth century. The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, along with their published drafts, are the works in which Woolf most clearly involves science in her social criticism and evolutionary discourse in her treatment of science. In those three sets of works, Woolf critically examines the cultural values that made evolutionary theory such a compelling social force. In these same works, she also creatively appropriates evolutionary writing, particularly Darwin's, to evoke connections among eons of time, vast reaches of the earth and relationships among different types of beings.

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