"True and Home-Born" intervenes in critical debates about early modern domestic tragedy, arguing that--far from being a form concerned exclusively with moral admonition or the domestic sphere--it is a centrally important site for dramatic experimentation and theorization at a key moment in England's evolving theatrical culture. Encompassing texts such as Arden of Faversham (1592), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), the term groups plays that share an interest in "ordinary," nonaristocratic life, dramatize domestic events of a sensational and violent nature, and stage detailed and accurate representations of household settings and domestic ideology. While domestic tragedy has a significant forty-year theatrical history--comparable to the early modern revenge tragedy--and is associated with prominent dramatists such as Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and William Shakespeare, these plays continue to be regarded as marginal dramatic texts, mainly of interest as archives of early modern domestic ideology and experience. I argue, in contrast, that domestic tragedies represent a key strand in the development of English tragic drama. Their heightened reflexivity about their dramatic and tragic form suggests a deep and abiding interest in dramatic and theatrical matters: in how drama creates verisimilitude, how it represents "truth," and how it imagines and participates in a new, native, and national theatrical culture. The first half of "True and Home-Born" focuses on a number of plays traditionally identified as domestic tragedies, showing that their interests are not confined to the household, but extend to the dramatic and theatrical implications of faithfully recreating the reality of domestic experience on stage. Heywood and Shakespeare, I suggest, are particularly attuned to these implications, and develop and critique a form of theatrical verisimilitude in their respective engagements with the form. In the second half, I suggest that the subgenre's boundaries are more permeable than previous criticism has allowed. By considering both the revenge tragedy and history play subgenres in terms of the domestic, I show the extent to which domestic tragedy was fully imbricated in the period's dramatic traditions and theatrical culture. The revenge tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare, I argue, turn to the household as a site in which to imagine a new form of revenge drama that differs from its classical forebears and is thus suited to the English stage. Finally, I contend that in a group of historical dramas that I call the "British history plays," focused on historical events set in ancient Britain, the domestic sphere becomes central to the staging of history, offering early modern historical dramatists a means of bridging the gap between ancient past and early modern present.

When Geoffrey Chaucer depicts characters debating the flaws of his works in The Legend of Good Women, or when Marie de France tells histories of literary transmission to frame her Lais, these authors are writing what I describe as metapoetic narratives. By "metapoetic" I mean that their works are in part about the making of poetry, commenting on the authors' poetic activity and creative processes from within. My dissertation, "Revisionary Retelling: The Metapoetics of Authorship in Medieval England," examines how this self-conscious mode of writing enables certain vernacular authors to reflect on their positions as retellers of well-known narratives and established literary traditions. I argue that such self-reflection is central to the efflorescence of vernacular literatures in medieval England. In the last few decades, scholars have called into question the idea that the Middle Ages valued only established literary authority and had no interest in originality, with recent critics noting how medieval authors do make conscious use of the interpretive and distorting possibilities of translation and retelling. Although this line of criticism has been revolutionary, it still tends to view literary authority as inherently limited, so that newer authors must remain entirely subordinate to their sources or seek to replace them. This dynamic of limited authority would seem to be intensified for Anglo-Norman or Middle English retellers; long-standing scholarly narratives have similarly cast the English vernacular languages as competing for linguistic authority with Latin and French. "Revisionary Retelling" challenges these understandings of vernacular creativity by bringing to light the alternative conceptions of authorship and literary authority being invented and explored by writers working in both Anglo-Norman and Middle English. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting a subordinate status, authors such as Marie de France, the Orfeo poet, Thomas Chestre, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate take a revisionary view of the challenges inherent to translation and retelling: challenges such as intertextual dependencies, interpretive distortions, and the recombination of traditions. In their metapoetic narratives, these writers theorize authorship and literary authority by dramatizing those types of literary challenges, as well as their processes of revision more broadly. As these authors tell stories about the possibilities and problems of vernacular retelling, they simultaneously imagine and enact a type of authorship--and a type of authority--based in creative revision. The first chapter traces this metapoetic mode back to Marie de France's Anglo-Norman Lais, arguing that Marie offers a vision of authorship as an ongoing, trans-historic process of collaborative interpretation. Chapter Two examines how later Middle English lay authors consciously use their second-class status in relation to the French lays to leverage themselves into a position of critical distance from the traditions on which they draw. The third chapter argues that Chaucer willfully depicts his own canon as dependent and unstable in his catalogues of his works, and thereby takes ownership of the challenges of vernacular authorship and invents himself as an authoritative Middle English writer. In my fourth chapter, I suggest that the proliferation of literary authorities in John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, which might seem to constrain and subjectify the text, counter-intuitively asserts the equal value of writing across languages, time, and retellings. Together, these four chapters demonstrate the rich complexity of medieval critical retelling and the power of retold narratives to creatively revise not just their sources, but also literary history itself.

A lonely damsel's imprisonment within a castle or convent cell; the eavesdropping of a prisoner next door; the framed image of a woman with a mysterious past. These are familiar themes from 1790s gothic novels, which exploded onto the scene with milestone works like Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis' The Monk. They are also key features, however, of canonical nineteenth-century poems, from Tennyson's "Mariana" to Browning's "My Last Duchess." In this dissertation, I argue that tropes of the gothic novel became disseminated in poetry of the Victorian era, manifesting as formal features that have not heretofore been recognized by scholars as essentially gothic. While most scholars recognize gothic poetry only in a small subset of poems that include ghosts, graveyards or superstition, I contend that gothic tropes became definitive of what we now regard as quintessentially "Victorian" poetic forms: the dramatic monologue, women's sonnets, and Pre-Raphaelite picture poems. "Framed, Imprisoned, Overheard" explores feminist arguments and interdisciplinary crossings between painting and poetry, focusing on both canonical and lesser-known poems of major Victorian poets. Close reading fiction by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft, and poems by Charlotte Smith, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti and G. M. Hopkins, I offer a revisionist history that looks beyond the small subset of poems about ghosts or other "gothic" themes, demonstrating how innovations in 1790s sensation fiction contributed to the evolution of major Victorian verse forms.

In the Mind's Eye: Associationism and Style in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel argues that the British novel, in its syntactic, grammatical, and rhetorical strategies, incorporated associationist premises about reading comprehension. Associationism, as a term, encapsulates a series of theories during the period that attempted to explain the ways in which external stimuli were "represented" in the mind and linked with other ideas. Inquiries into the association of ideas spanned numerous fields but shared a core belief: everything an individual touched, saw, smelled, or read, was translated into a secondary representation in the mind. Since all objects--whether a phrase, a misty moor, or a character's face--were thought to be experienced through mental "miniatures," the association of ideas was the mechanism of the reading experience and of phenomenal experience. Associationist theories delineated how words evoked images, and the ways in which these images became linked to form holistic ideas in the course of a sentence, a paragraph, and throughout a work of fiction. In this project, I show how four canonical nineteenth-century authors--Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot--created prose styles intended to evoke, enhance, or even resist the spontaneous associative mechanisms considered essential to the comprehension of language. In order to trace the contours of an associative stylistics during the period, I pair each author with associationist theories contemporary with their fiction. In Chapter One, I demonstrate how Jane Austen's techniques in Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility incorporated the tenets of the dominant model of associationism in Austen's day: those of David Hartley. Austen's mode of representation is highly metonymic, capitalizing on of principles of language comprehension proposed in Hartley's work. The great degree of stylistic control so often attributed to Austen's prose is inextricably rooted with the Hartleyan paradigm: a strategy of representation to depict a social world and its objects according to an associationist epistemology. In Chapter Two, I read Sir Walter Scott's Waverley with the theories of his teacher Dugald Stewart. Walter Scott studied with Dugald Stewart at the University of Edinburgh and in Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Stewart develops literary-aesthetic guidelines based on the mental models posited in his work. Stewart recommends that a writer delineate in the form of an "outline," a "minimum" required for the reader to comprehend a represented object. Stewart's theories about language cognition and literary technique, I argue, provide guidelines for Scott's development of his own style of literary outline. In Chapter Three, I unfold how Charles Dickens's style in David Copperfield draws on the associative principles in Lindley Murray's English Grammar. In Murray's Grammar, the sentence is a unit of cognition: a precise capsule in which our thoughts are both formed and transmitted. Grammar is an external representation of links between thoughts: the association of ideas in its most tangible form. In Chapter Four, I show that George Eliot integrates a number of discourses about the human mind into her style, with the goal of developing a technique to manage the spontaneous actions of mental associations. The work of James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain influenced Eliot's view of associationist psychology, and Eliot, in turn, develops her own associative theories of language in her essays and journals. Eliot's associative model of reading incorporates principles of chemistry. Elaboration, a term important to both literary and scientific discourse, provided Eliot with a syntactic style closely aligned with the structure of associative links. More importantly, elaboration afforded Eliot a strategy of cognitive delay; a stylistics intended to subvert the spontaneous action of the mind. By providing "raw materials" for the reader in the form of concrete nouns, and elaborating with a series of extended prepositional phrases, Eliot demands that the reader slow down the automatic action of association and redraw the mental picture.

This dissertation analyzes the legacy of Protestant allegory in eighteenth-century fictions. In doing so, the dissertation shows that personifications and allegorically inflected characters became increasingly opaque and vulnerable to charges of impersonation as the novel developed in the early and middle eighteenth century. I attribute the distortion of allegorical representation to the conflicting yet intermeshed interpretive frameworks that allegory and the novel demand of their readers. For evidence, I primarily analyze John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild.

This dissertation reorients the study of British modernism towards the ocean by uncovering modernism’s engagement with a set of ideas about the historical significance of the sea that I term “maritime foundationalism.” A key component of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British nationalism and imperialism, maritime foundationalism held that British history and identity were fundamentally maritime and that the sea, in turn, propelled Britain’s historical development and the course of history in general. Reading works by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot alongside contemporary historical, geographical, and scientific texts, I trace how British modernism developed by incorporating, modifying, and contesting this pervasive maritime-historical ideology. Even as modernist works build on notions of the sea as the foundation of the empire and conveyer of its history, they also disrupt these notions by representing the sea in more unsettling ways, as a testament to the dark sides of maritime-imperial history or an element that threatens to engulf history altogether. Each of my chapters details the literary effects of this interaction of maritime foundationalism and more melancholy conceptions of the sea’s historicity at key points in the intertwined histories of modernism and empire between the 1890s and the 1940s. “The Sea Has Many Voices” thus shows how competing constructions of the sea shape modernism’s historical imagination—the way it defines its present and situates it in relationship to the past.

This thesis provides a Marxist analysis of the effect of class on historical alienation in Dermot Bolger’s fiction. Therefore, this study examines the influence of Irish history on Bolger’s choice of content, form and technique in order to argue that historical interpretation and literary technique are mediated through class stratifications. Chapter One investigates how The Journey Home challenges received ideas of what constitutes ‘reality’ which has, consequently, led to elements of critical dismissal used to maintain antiquated gaps, silences and notions of ‘reality’. In Chapter Two I look at A Second Life in order to examine how historical ruptures cannot just be seen in the nonlinear structure of Bolger’s novels, but can also be used to expose the silences and gaps that comprise the previously censored personal histories of Bolger’s characters. In Chapter Three I identify structural confines such as definitions, family roles and nationalism as instigating factors that lead to the alienation of those who do not conform to prescribed frameworks and are therefore oppressed by them. I further investigate how oppression also provides the pressure to rupture the linear trajectory of such approved frameworks and produce the nonlinear structure that can be recognised in The Family on Paradise Pier.

Thesis--Utrecht. / "Stellingen" inserted at end.

This dissertation examines the role of modal verbs and rhetoric in the creation of Shakespeare's comic action. I argue that by focusing on the characters' uses of language in these plays, we can recover a sense of subjectivity and agency for Shakespeare's comic characters, instead of treating them as mere "types" swept along by the force of comic convention. Modal verbs--"can," "may," "must," "ought," and "will"--encode and enact subjectivity at the linguistic level, demonstrating a speaker's perceptions about the action of the main verb: whether a speaker thinks an action is possible or impossible, likely or unlikely, necessary or merely beneficial. Modal verbs therefore indicate an entirely different category of comic action: not just the oversized action of mistaken identity or farce, but the more subtle mental activity that underpins all subsequent action. Likewise, an examination of Shakespeare's comic rhetoric reveals that, far from being inconsequential or merely decorative, it is a force in its own right; I argue that the characters' insistence on the overt use of rhetorical devices, wordplay, and logical debate is a form of action that creates the comic world. Characters use strategies derived from logic and rhetoric in order to persuade themselves and others into positive action, achieving comic endings by verbal means.

Using the "Great Chain of Being" -- which was integral to the Elizabethan understanding of the world -- as a starting point, this dissertation examines the sometimes startling ways in which Shakespeare's plays invert this all-encompassing hierarchy. At times, plants come to the forefront as the essential life form that others should emulate to achieve a kind of utopian ideal. Still other times, the soil and rocks themselves become the logical extension of a desire to remove man from the pinnacle of earthly creation. Over the course of this project, I explore plays that emphasize a) alternative, non-mammalian modes of propagation, b) the desire to sink the human body into the earth (or, at a minimum, man's closeness to the ground), and c) the imagined lives of flora and fauna, while underscoring man's kinship with myriad organisms. In many of the works explored, a modern vision of materiality comes to the forefront, presenting a stark contrast to the deeply held religious views of the day. In flipping the ladder upside down, Shakespeare entices his reader to confront inherent weaknesses in human and animal biology, and ultimately to question why man cannot seek a better model from the lowly ground upon which he treads.