In this dissertation, I explore the connections between three post-colonial epics: James Joyce's Ulysses, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Each work focuses on the disruption and loss that has occurred respectively in Ireland, India, and the Caribbean because of each country's encounter with the colonizing force of England. Out of this experience are born narrators who must contend with the fact of a hybridized and contentious inheritance as they struggle to articulate their experiences as members of nations gaining their political freedom. Using a blend of both European and indigenous theorists, I argue that by actively cultivating a stance of hybridity, these works use what Homi Bhabha has termed “border terrain” to locate new nations, along the lines of Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities,” that attempt to evade the prescriptiveness of both colonialism and emergent nationalism. Rather than continuing the Manichean Dichotomy used by English colonizers to subdue and divide indigenous populations, Joyce, Rushdie, and Walcott offer narratives that encompass elements from both colonial and indigenous inheritances in a volatile mixture. Having inherited a fractured and contentious world of narrative exclusion, the characters of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Saleem Sinai, Achille, and Major Plunkett actively transgress the boundaries between narratives, looking for dialogue and connection. Ultimately, the endings of the three texts provide clues toward a future where Edward Said's notion of reading and hearing “contrapuntally” will reflect both the multiplicity and the contentiousness of the post-colonial inheritance.

The literatures emerging from the postcolonial world bring new dimensions of linguistic heterogeneity to English literature, opening up rich possibilities for the heteroglossia and interanimation of languages celebrated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Two case studies illustrate the “breaking” and remaking of the English language in postcolonial literatures. Pidgins, oral vernaculars born in the colonial contact zone and developed outside institutional channels, compel our interest as linguistic realizations of a subaltern hybridity and as the most markedly “broken” varieties of English. Within Nigerian literature, representations of pidgin English play a variety of transgressive roles. In two specimens of Onitsha market literature, pidgin is spoken only by clownish chiefs, but in one of these, Ogali A. Ogali's 1956 Veronica My Daughter, pidgin also functions as an anti-language providing a critical perspective on the “big grammar” of standard English. In Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960) pidgin is often associated with the seamy underside of life, while in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965) it is the vehicle for a resistant counterknowledge. Finally, in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), “rotten English,” a mixed language strongly colored by pidgin, escapes the confines of quotation marks to become the language of narration. The second case study is of the work of Salman Rushdie, arguably the paradigmatic postcolonial author—a writer positioned between East and West, between the English language and the polylingualism of South Asia, and renowned for his inventive linguistic experimentation. Chapter 7 explores his short story “The Courter,” a story of linguistic and personal dislocation and transformation in which a mispronounced word brings about a new reality. Chapter 8 is an extended exploration of the languages in Midnight's Children and the translational magic of Saleem Sinai's “All-India Radio.” Chapter 9 examines ways in which Rushdie unsettles borders, redefining the boundaries of words and bringing languages into new relationships by means of such devices as the translingual pun. The concluding chapter briefly explores the implications of this postcolonial breaking of English for the novel and for the language of English literature.

In this dissertation I investigate resistance to private writing (especially in the form of journals and diaries). My goal is to understand the nature of resistance to writing in general. I choose private writing as my focus for three reasons: (1) Most people equate private writing with freedom and safety, thereby seeing it as the most resistant-free genre; (2) I have always been confused about the distinction between the public and the private when it comes to my own writing practices. I do not feel free, safe, or particularly private when trying to write a journal or diary; (3) If I can understand resistance to private writing, I can apply my findings to the resistance students experience towards all writing. When I speak of diary or journal writing (and I use the terms interchangeably), I am referring to a genre used for private reflection and self-discovery. Throughout the dissertation I make distinctions between the concepts of public and private, especially as they relate to the four major categories of my study: identity, audience, time, and genre. But since the distinctions are by no means universal, I show how and why the boundaries between them need to be acknowledged as flexible, fluid, and dependent on the inventive imagination of each writer. Chapter one focuses on how people's conceptions of identity often interfere or clash with the practice of private diary writing. In a second chapter I examine student experiences of resistance or attraction to private journal writing based on long-held audience expectations and needs. I devote a third chapter to a study of Virginia Woolf's diaries in which she articulates how ideas about time complicate, and sometimes diminish, her ability to continue keeping a diary. In my fourth, autobiographical, chapter I explain how expectations and assumptions about genre (public or private) influence a writer's sense of safety and overall ability to embrace writing in any form. My conclusion examines the implications for pedagogy. In articulating the reasons for people's resistance to private writing, I show how unexamined assumptions about identity, audience, time, and genre provoke resistance to all forms of writing.

This dissertation examines how Victorian fiction accommodated and abetted generosity's shift from a public to a private virtue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapter One contextualizes the mid-nineteenth-century ideology of giving within gender and class relationships shaped by debates leading to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Joseph Townsend's Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786) and the report of two assistant poor law commissioners (1833) frame the public debate concerning government giving and signal a cultural movement that was transforming generosity into a modern, apolitical, private, feminine ideal. I draw on Jacques Derrida and anthropology to define the ideology of the free gift, whose main tenet is an insistence that true gifts exist only outside economies of time and reciprocity. Literary texts, inevitably bound to time and reciprocity, disclose tenuous but persistent maintenance of this ideology. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848) condemned laissez-faire economic doctrines while validating the social divisions that characterized the New Poor Law era. Chapter Two focuses on Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855–57), in which Amy, a middle-class heroine in prison rags, a model of feminine self-sacrifice who expects no reward, occupies the problematic space of perfect giver, receiver, and gift. Structured as a romance of giving, the novel reveals both the gendered terms of the free gift and the contradictory nature of a middle-class construction of itself as generous benefactor of the poor. Chapters Three and Four consider novels that do not directly focus on issues of poverty but are nonetheless shaped by this ideological shift. In George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72), the narrator mediates through rational dissection and generous hermeneutics a bond between the reader and Dorothea intended to, on the one hand, elide the degree to which private acts of kindness have political import, and, on the other, suggest that such acts can lead to a radical way of knowing. In contrast to Dickens and Eliot, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) explicitly fixates on the problems of reception and reveals the violence not only of uncivilized passion but of civilized giving itself.

Even though memory may be implicitly masculinized, a seemingly monolithic entity of the cultural elite, it was also a site of cultural disquiet converging on conflicting discourses. Englishness, the construct of the Victorian upper-and middle-classes, was ambiguous since nativist Americans claimed it through cultural kinship to separate themselves from an increasingly pluralistic society. My study aims to extend the British and American cultural and memorial convergence by juxtaposing it with the struggles of “minority” groups—Celtic races in Britain, “ethnic” whites and African Americans in the United States—as they sought to be included within their respective dominant culture's discourses. In my first chapter, I develop the issue of Englishness as a racial and cultural construct that defined not just British cultural memory but also a separate identity for nativist Americans. Within this discourse African Americans sought to counter the memorial hegemony of Anglo-Saxonism that used blackness to define the superiority of whiteness. The texts will include Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), W. E. B. DuBois' The Negro (1915), and Jean Toomer's “Blood-Burning Moon” in Cane (1923). Although Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) is ironically narrated by a wealthy American seeking to incorporate into himself the identity of Englishness, the novel as a whole memorializes the ideals of service, honor, and duty that privileged as it defined the English gentry class. In spite of sites of memory being in the nostalgic past, the empire becomes a stable reference point for defining “civilized” identity against the exoticized Other. Even though Englishness may be the ideal of Anglo-Saxon whiteness, white Southerners were forced to define themselves in relation to the North even as they struggled to demarcate and segregate African Americans. In William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), race can involve hybrid identities which can make African Americans an absent presence within the dominant culture. By contrast in Zora. Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), African Americans try to achieve a measure of autonomy through self-government in the form of a separate nationhood and agency through their oral-tradition—a unique form of cultural memory.

This dissertation is a study of the early fourteenth-century English manuscript, National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.1 (The Auchinleck Manuscript), and three of the eighteen romances it contains. Commercially produced ca. 1330-40, Auchinleck is the earliest extant English manuscript containing texts exclusively in Middle English rather than Latin or French, and the majority of its 44 surviving texts appear there in their earliest copies. Through an examination first of the manuscript as a whole, then of the romances Amis and Amiloun, Sir Tristrem, and Sir Orfeo, I demonstrate that the physical and literary act of translation from French to English that constitutes the Auchinleck Manuscript had a transformative effect upon its texts, causing their authors and copyists to incorporate in them a direct (though often subtle) reflection of the social and cultural environment of fourteenth-century England. Chapter 1 draws on contemporary manuscript and historical evidence to argue that in this period literacy in English was predicated upon literacy in French and/or Latin, and that Auchinleck's exclusive use of English was thus a matter of choice rather than necessity, constituting an assertion of the value both of the language of its texts and of Englishness itself. That assertion, I argue through my analyses in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Amis and Amiloun, Sir Tristrem and Sir Orfeo, influenced the scribes and poets who selected, adapted and/or translated romances for inclusion in the Auchinleck Manuscript, heightening their sensitivity to the interplay between those texts and the environment in which they lived and worked. Amis and Amiloun makes no secret of its dependence on an Anglo-Norman source; Sir Tristrem is derived from the Anglo-Norman verse Tristan of Thomas; Sir Orfeo has no vernacular forebear but is indebted to Ovid's tale of Orpheus. The Auchinleck versions of all three, however, display a distinctly English character, arguing that the circumstances of their composition and/or inscription prompted these scribes and poets, consciously or unconsciously, to modify these works so as to create English translations of their sources that function not only linguistically, but in the social, cultural and political sense as well.

In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainly-positioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.

This dissertation is a study of the work of John Milton, most especially of his late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The early poetry, the prose tracts, and Christian Doctrine are considered in their developmental relation to those late poems. The question my study addresses is this: What does Milton mean by obedience? The critical approach used to address the question is as much philosophical-theological as it is literary. My project seeks to understand the shaping role of Milton’s theology on his poetry: that is, to attempt to recreate and understand Milton’s thinking on obedience from Milton’s perspective. To this end, I focus on providing contextualized, attentive readings of key poetic moments. The contexts I provide are those derived from the two great heritages Milton had at his disposal—the Classical and Christian traditions. The poetic moments I attend to are most usually theologically and conceptually difficult moments, moments in which Milton is working out (as much as reflecting on or demonstrating or poeticizing) his key theological concerns, chief among them, obedience. Milton’s concept of obedience is not just an idea developed within given interpretive frameworks, Classical, Christian, and a specific historic context, England in the seventeenth century. It is a strangely practical structure of being intended by Milton to recollect something of the disposition of Adam and Even before the fall. In other words, Miltonic obedience is multifaceted and complex. To address the complexity and nuance of what Milton means by obedience, I suggest that Milton’s idea of obedience may be understood as a concept. The definitional source of Milton’s concept of obedience is the Bible, and various texts of the Classical tradition. The necessary mechanism of the concept is Milton’s idea of right timing, derived from the Greek idea of kairos. The necessary condition of Miltonic obedience is unknowing. With Milton’s concept of obedience fully established, the dissertation concludes by suggesting connections between Milton’s religious imagination and his political engagements. If Milton’s paramount value was obedience, it was so because his paramount concern was liberty, for himself and for his nation.

This thesis addresses the volatile body as a historiographical and literary category in selected works of Renaissance English literature. Through readings of poems by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton, and of plays by Ben Jonson, John Webster, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, and Sir William Berkeley, I investigate how Renaissance writers trope the idea of transformation in different ways, in different moments, and in different genres. What meanings inhere in the shifting forms they represent, and how do these transformations interplay with both literary and non-literary modalities? Each chapter focuses on metamorphic changes that at times engage with psychological inwardness and at other times manifest social, political, or theological imperatives arising out of the Reformation. My inquiry is not, however, limited to instances of physical transformation: to these writers, shapeshifting is not simply a subject matter or theme but an aesthetic practice preoccupied with molding and remolding literary form itself. Recognizing the formal implications of textualized, topical, and literal transformation helps us understand the complexity of early modern ideas about transformation without losing sight of transformation.s material aspect. Chapter One focuses on Adicia, Spenser.s embodiment of injustice in The Faerie Queene, whose psychosomatic transformation complicates Spenser.s politically topical allegories of justice in Book 5 and opens up new ways to read his approach to Elizabethan historiography. Chapter Two examines Milton.s Satan, whose hardened and altered body manifests his fallen and polluted inner state. Satan's physical volatility and newfound capacity to feel pain is, physiologically and semantically, integral to Milton's phenomenology of evil. Chapter Three considers how Donne.s preoccupation with transformation shapes his sacramental poetics, focusing on Metempsychosis, the Holy Sonnets, and La Corona. This sequence of poems illuminates Donne's sacramental transformation not only conceptually but also formally, manifesting Donne.s turn to poetry as liturgical artifact. Chapter Four explores Stuart dramas that exploit the trope of Aethiopem lavare or "washing the Ethiope white," using washable blackface to enact man-made miracle. The staged transformation of a chaste woman from black to white is in these plays instrumentalized to conform (if not reform) libertine masculinity to patriarchal ideology, especially marriage.

This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater's most celebrated professional, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays evince a theatrical code of conduct that, rather than being an illustration of courtly norms, was sometimes in direct contrast to them and sometimes formed an alternate or lateral code. This code shows a distrust of disguise, a lack of interest in moderation and a belief in the need to eschew wit in favor of a happy ending. The modern theater has retained many of these essential behavioral norms, including the value of community above the self, the need for sympathy and compassion, and the willingness to risk.