Revivals of the eighteenth century novel and revivals of material culture are closely related. Whether one is mourning the lost bagel of the past or the lost novel, a complex form of nostalgia is at work. Historians of the novel Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Lennard Davis, and many others are participants in the continuous re-invention of an invented tradition. Similarly, a number of novelists, reviving a great deal of eighteenth century discourse on genre, historiography, and aesthetics, partake of a nostalgia for novelty, a lost time when the European novel might truly have been novel. While these invented histories both need and oppose each other, neither are historical. The twin ideologies are revivals of a complex set of ambivalent metaphors and narratives that were parables of loss, regret, and repetition in their original form. The nostalgic fatalism of the past is recycled into the fatalism of the present, transforming that fatalism into a form of optimism. I trace the journey of this metaphor through Pierre Marivaux's Pharsamon , Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Denis Diderot's Salon de 1765 and Jacques le fataliste. Simultaneously, I discuss its revival in Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover, Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist , Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Milan Kundera's Les testaments trahis. I employ both folklore studies—Neil Rosenberg's Transforming Tradition and Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin's “Tradition: Genuine or Spurious”—and the genre theory of Gerard Genette, Philippe Lacoue-Labarth, and Jacques Derrida to extend discussions of nostalgia in Susan Stewart's Crimes of Writing and Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia. Finally, I suggest that many traditional debates and distinctions—novel and romance, realism and self-consciousness—are spurious rather than genuine.

During the past two decades intellectual historians and cultural scholars studying the history of Renaissance medicine have come to different conclusions about the persistence of the classical tradition and the influence of innovation. Where historians see strong continuities in the vocabulary, internal logic, and intellectual culture of Aristotelianism and Galenism into the sixteenth century, new historicists and cultural materialists regard the early modern body as a site where classical and modern medical discourses compete. Their narrative of cultural formation emphasizes discontinuity and instability in the classical synthesis emerging in the seventeenth century, and they argue that this transition underlies a fundamental shift in how literary culture treats the body and the self. This dissertation takes issue with the discontinuity model of Renaissance historiography by arguing that medical humanism sought to recover the medical tradition and establish a progressive medical culture, not by rejecting the scholastic medical synthesis, but by invoking its content and its internal contradictions while maintaining its continued engagement with empirical innovation. The Paracelsian response to Galenism attacked ancient philosophy at its roots in the system of elemental qualities, yet Paracelsian chemical philosophy reproduced features of the analogical philosophy underlying Galenic diagnosis and therapy. In turn, the well-intentioned efforts of English medical humanists to bring about curricular reform in medical education had the unintended effect of promoting vernacular popularizations of medicine used by practitioners lacking access to elite education. Furthermore, in his effort to assert the diversity and particularity of human ability, Juan Huarte revisits a venerable (but still vulnerable) distinction between the doctrine of immortality and the organic powers of the soul. Finally, the instability of Lady Macbeth's sex brings into question the possibility of a regime of self-discipline premised upon the gender assumptions of humoral thought, yet we cannot understand her desire for self-control without also understanding her humoral body. These explorations question the historiographical assumption of discontinuity underlying the early modern period by emphasizing the role of scholastic ideas in the formation of medical culture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

My purpose in this study is to analyze Fowles' existential philosophy and its correlation with his writing technique. Although Fowles places himself within the existentialist tradition--French existentialism, in particular--he also claims differences with it. Fowles' main particularity is that he tackles the major existentialist issue of freedom in a negative, but multi-focal, way by dealing at length with the deterministic forces which negate freedom: metaphysical, socio-political and psychological factors. Indeed, Fowles' fiction is to a large extent a negative reflection on French existentialism. A comparative study of Fowles, Sartre and Camus will clearly bring out the divergences, as well as the similarities, between their philosophies. Comparing Fowles to the French existentialists, one realizes how much more fluid and multi-faceted his philosophy is. However, if Fowles' eclecticism makes his existentialism richer than Sartre's and Camus', it also makes it quite dubious from an ideological point of view. It will be therefore interesting to deconstruct Fowles' progressive political claims from the points of view of race, gender and class before focusing on what Fowles sees as the only real possibility of freedom: the individual's power to transcend the conditioning forces at work in existence and create a personal and flexible mythology by which to live. Finally, a most fascinating aspect of Fowles' thought and fiction to examine is his transposing the philosophical problem of determinism versus freedom onto the literary field. Reflecting on art, Fowles realizes that his position as the inheritor of the realist literary tradition puts him at odds with his own existentialist precept according to which life is a fiction to be written by the individuals themselves. The realist narrative technique remains the only valid one in Fowles' eyes; but because it deprives the characters from the existential freedom and responsibility of becoming their own creators, Fowles feels increasingly forced into post-modernist experimentation. Fowles' attempts to solve this literary dilemma reflects, in fact, his conception of authentic living as being a perpetual quest for a middle truth which lies between extremes. With Fowles, living and writing begin and end in paradox.

What Walt Whitman, his British contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins, and two mid-twentieth-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, have in common is their poetic tendency to approach individual places as if each one revealed a particular truth. When that place is radically altered (by technology, colonization, cultivation, or construction), the sense of disturbance erupts in a poetry that seeks to recover that particular truth. In this dissertation, I examine the poetry of Whitman, Hopkins, Bishop and Lowell, proposing that their meditations on geographic location are key to their poetic explorations of self, culture and other. Balancing a post-structuralist view, which treats nature as culturally inscribed, and a deep ecological view, which views nature as an active subject, I examine how these poets negotiate the relationship between the perceiving self and the autonomous world. Particular places take on the burden of significance in their poems. Thus, “Recovering Ground,” refers both to the sense of a lost paradise, which pervades the work of these poets, and to the way they strive to achieve a figurative ground, a basis for writing. Both Bishop and Lowell were early disciples of Hopkins: Hopkins feared that Whitman was his doppelgänger. Unraveling these complex associations, I trace the attempt to perceive and write nature in the light of a growing alienation from it. Ecocriticism too often simply replaces the subjectivity of the human writer with an imputed subjectivity of nature. My contribution to the discourse is to consider more fully the workings of the human unconscious in relation to space. Psychologists from Freud to Julia Kristeva have articulated a connection between a human sense of an original place with the maternal body. Similarly, associating woman with nature and figuring the land as female has provided justification for the exploitation of both, as Annette Kolodny and others have amply demonstrated. I begin with the insight that the Kristevan chora, a space prior to separate places, where there is no differentiated subject and object, is a memory somewhat less dim in these poets for whom “home” has been problematized. It is a space they attempt, through language, to recreate. This approach then enables me to better understand why, for instance, Hopkins is drawn to the “snug,” Whitman to the “margins,” Lowell to dig below the surface of Boston Commons and Bishop to long to gaze upon an iceberg. My contention is that poetry, by virtue of its struggle to reintroduce the semiotic into the symbolic, which it does when it pays more attention to the sounds and rhythms of words than to logic, is profoundly connected with one's sense of place. The poems that result are bound up with the places that the poets actually experienced.

Vera Brittain (1893-1970), English writer, feminist and pacifist, wrote the story of her life in many forms: diaries, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts. These works, along with unpublished letters and Brittain's voluminous journalism, reveal that her girlhood was dominated by her close relationship with her brother Edward, 18 months her junior, whose masculine privileges aroused envy which whe did not feel free to articulate. Brittain's early religious life was marked by intense idealism and the desire for "service" and "sacrifice," impulses which found realization during her service as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse) in the Great War. Nursing wounded German prisoners in France convinced Brittain that war was folly and that she and the Germans had all been betrayed by religious leaders and politicians. The death of her fiance, Roland Leighton, of two close friends, and then of Edward, threw her into a numb paralysis in which life itself seemed meaningless. These feelings are reflected in Brittain's first two novels, published shortly after her graduation from Oxford in 1921. Vera Brittain's recovery came about in several ways. Her friendship with Winifred Holtby, whom she met at Oxford, gave her a companion who was, unlike Edward, a woman and an equal. Political work for feminist causes during the 1920's was a positive step towards empowerment. And her marriage to political philosopher George Catlin, along with the birth of their two children, reconnected her to the world and the future. Finally, writing her war memoir, Testament of Youth, enabled Brittain to memorialize her dead and to objectify her losses and move beyond them. Brittain's conversion to pacifism in 1936, inspired by her association with Canon H. R. L. Sheppard and his Peace Pledge Union, restored her religious faith and freed her from her association with her dead heroes. Her later work, especially her 1936 novel Honourable Estate, reveals this greater sense of empowerment, presenting feminist women heroes who are scarred by their losses in the Great War but manage, like their creator, to act independently and meaningfully in the world.

This analysis is limited to those Ideal Structures found in the 84 lines of text commonly called "Hrothgar's Homily." Essentially, each line is analyzed in the following manner: (1) The two or three words carrying the sound patterning for the line are noted. (2) Each occurrence of the stem-syllables and derived forms (derived forms are considered to be variants of the words) are checked in Klaeber's glossary. Occurrences are double-checked using Bessinger & Smith's Concordance. (3) All lines containing the stem-syllables and derived forms are checked to see whether that particular word participates in the dominant sound-patterning of that verse line. If it does, it is so designated on the master list. (4) The lists of each of the two words in the original line are then compared to find the percentage of simultaneous designated. (5) The lines in which these structures occur are then compared and analyzed to determine a patter of meaning and to see if the Ideal Structure affects that line even when it is negated or contrasted. The Structures commonly appear every three lines except in two portions of the text, lines 1730-1751 and 1769-1783. Twelve Structures were found. The Structures have been classified in three groups based on their information content. Type A, Primal Structures, is the least represented, but perhaps the oldest. It is represented by one Structure: fyr/flod in line 1764. Type B Structures are the Structures that deal with the interrelationships within the society, namely the reciprocal duties of king and people. The five Structures within this classification are: sod secgan (1700), fremman/folc (1701), halep/help (1709), leod/laer (1722), and wuldor/waldend (1752). Type C Structures describe the personal attributes of the Anglo-Saxon warrior. The Structures within this class are: maegen/mod (1706), dead/dom (ll. 1712, 1768), maere/mon (1715), mon/mod (1729), faege/faellan (1755), and wig/weord (1783). The placement of the Structures contributes to the content and significance of the speech. The Structures enable the audience to understand the ritual significance of Hrothgar's speech and they reflect the themes which concern the poet in the speech. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

The five essays that comprise this text are linked by a central problematic: the relation between erotic desire and its corollary, anxiety, and their role in the construction of gendered subjects in Shakespearean drama. Situated at the nexus of feminist, psychoanalytic, and historical inquiry, the essays together are structured by four relationships: between sexuality and gender, subjectivity, transgression, and critical practice. Four bodily figures are interrogated: the Oedipal male, heterosexual body, the fantasized female reproductive body, the male homoerotic body, and the female homoerotic body. "Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power" argues that the strategies of containment employed in Hamlet and Othello are evident also in The Winter's Tale. Metaphorically and dramatically, erotically threatening women are transformed into jewels, statues, and corpses. "Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body" offers an analysis of the parallel construction of male subjectivity and sexuality in the Henriad and psychoanalytic theory. Both "narratives" perpetrate similar repressions of the fantasized maternal, upon which "normative" male development depends. "Sex, Gender, Desire: What Difference Does it Make?" argues that in much contemporary criticism, gender is misrecognized as a signifier for sexuality in such a way that erotic practice is conveniently forgotten. The conflation of gender and sexuality is historicized by examining Freud's account of homosexuality and the contradictions that existed between gender and eroticism in the early modern experience of homosexuality. "The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy" applies the historical information of Chapter III, arguing that a textual circulation of homoerotic desire transgresses the binary logic upon which patriarchal mandates depend. In As You Like It, Orlando's effusion of desire toward an object simultaneously hetero- and homoerotic prevents the stable reinstitution of heterosexuality. However, in Twelfth Night, fears of erotic exclusivity are conflated with anxiety about generational reproduction, with the result that the male homoerotic position is scapegoated at the same time the female gender is resecured in a patriarchal economy. "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and New Historicism: Subject, Structure, and Agency" places the conclusions of the preceding chapters in the context of contemporary debates about the relation between these critical methods, highlighting their particular affordances and limitations.

This dissertation examines the non-literary and non-aesthetic reasons underlying the bias in favor of realism in the formation of the traditional literary canon of nineteenth-century British fiction. Since English literature first became a recognized academic discipline in Great Britain in the 1870s and '80s, the study of fiction has been (with few exceptions) a study of realistic fiction. College survey courses in the period usually teach W. M. Thackeray through Thomas Hardy, but almost never make excursions into the fantasy fiction of Victorians like George MacDonald or Charles Kingsley. My thesis is that this exclusion can best be explained by examining the role of the Anglican Church as well as that of Non-Conformist or Dissenting evangelical sects in the educational institutions of nineteenth-century Britain in the first half of the century, and by examining the function that the academic study of English literature played in British imperialist ideology in the latter part of the century. Both Church and Empire needed a canon of realism to promote their own brand of conservative ideology, although each tended to define realism differently. Victorian fantasy writers often targeted Church doctrine or imperial dogma for especially satirical treatment, thus insuring their own exclusion from the universities which were run by the Church and operated to supply patriotic administrators to the Empire. My study examines in detail the ecclesiastical and political context of educational philosophy and how this context affected reading curriculum and ultimately, the canon. My study also examines in detail the lives and historical situations of five Victorian fantasy writers: John Ruskin, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Henry Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling. Ruskin, MacDonald and Kingsley used fantasy as a means of attacking various branches of organized Christianity. Haggard and Kipling used fantasy as a means of attacking various aspects of popular imperial rhetoric. Throughout the dissertation, I situate the writers' novels within their historical contexts to show why fantasy fiction has traditionally been ignored or denigrated by academic critics.

The Nobel Prizewinner Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote in Bengali and translated his own poems into English. Rabindranath's work in Bengali revolutionized the indigenous literary tradition, but little or none of his Bengali style is visible in the translations he produced for an English audience. He addressed a different reader when writing for the English, and an audience that he understood in a specific way because of the Anglo-Indian colonial context and the image that it presented of English language and its culture. Rabindranath had two distinct aesthetic and cultural ideologies, and he was aware of the radical split in this understanding of the Other, or of the British colonial presence in India. The present study examines the way that this ambivalence in comprehending the motivations of the colonizers was created and manipulated by colonial policies. Like many others of his generation, Rabindranath Tagore believed in the "ideal" presence of the English as it was represented in English literature. This faith generated a perception of two distinct kinds of English: the "petty" and the "great." While translating, he had in mind the constituency of the "great" English who formed an ideal world of culture. Towards the end of his life, he became disillusioned with the deceptive cultural transactions implied in colonial poetics.

This dissertation examines canonical female figures throughout Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and Contemporary British and American literature who are single mothers. Historical research is combined with Freudian, Jungian and feminist psychoanalytic criticism to provide insight into the mythic and subconscious impetus for the creation of these characters as well as a real life context. The purpose of this discussion is to explore the position in society that these women hold, the range of their power, and, if possible, explore the reaction each character has to her position as single parent. The dissertation works chronologically, beginning in Chapter One with Grendel's Dam in Beowulf, Spenser's Errour in The Faerie Queene, and Milton's Sin in Paradise Lost as examples of monster mothers spawning illegitimate and unnatural children. Are they are monsters first, or monsters because they reproduce without sanction? Chapter Two explores the widow's world during the Renaissance and Jacobean period, with a focus on the dramas All's Well That Ends Well and Coriolanus by William Shakespeare and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. Financial power and unleashed sexuality are in conflict with patriarchal laws of inheritance. Chapter Three promotes Helen Graham of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, as openly choosing their single parent status. The benefit and cost of their uncomfortable choice is outlined. Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth provides a "moral" balance to the rebellion advocated in the previous works. Chapter Four examines the preoedipal mother and the double bind of the Victorian "angel in the house." Abandonment, murder and baptism appear in George Eliot's Adam Bede, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Chapter Five analyzes the voice and power of contemporary single mothers. Works include, Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing", Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The seeming dysfunction of single mother homes and the intrusion of patriarchal institutions are explored.