Both legal and literary discourses register the conflicts and issues current in a culture. However, while law is written to order society, literary narratives, especially drama, are often disruptive, offering subversive alternatives to the dominant hegemony. English Land Law prescribed all land tenures, inheritance practices, and distribution of marriage property provisions in England throughout the Renaissance and early modern years. William Shakespeare used England's "most native law" to structure plot, to represent character, to redefine genre, and to orient his earliest audiences to their own milieu within the world of the play. For Shakespeare's contemporary playgoers Land Law functioned as a signifying system, grounding these audiences in familiar territory while the play transported them to other cultures, other times. For example, Shakespeare's use of Land Law in Antony and Cleopatra--a play of forty-seven scenes that move from Egypt to Rome and back--directed his seventeenth-century playgoers to identify their own fierce land market in the barter of countries and continents by the triumvirate. Using Land Law as an integral discourse in his texts, Shakespeare was able to make all politics--from the marriage market of Padua to Caesar's world conquests--local politics for his contemporary audience. Land Law functions clearly in Shakespeare's construction of female characters, defining them according to the legal material laws that restricted actual early modern English women. Some female Shakespearean characters, such as Isabella in Measure for Measure, conform to the economically passive role that Land Law prescribed. Others do not. Early in the pastoral As You Like It, Rosalind recognizes the legal alternatives she must act on to regain her inheritance and direct it to her line of descent. Understanding Land Law, the discourse so integral to the legal material culture that produced Shakespeare's plays, culminates in this study's fresh readings of five Shakespearean texts: As You Like It, Measure for Measure, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and Antony and Cleopatra.

The language of idealism and skepticism in Shakespearean moments of disillusionment provides terms for understanding features of the late plays—their self-conscious artificiality, their blend of wonder and irony, pathos and moral indignation. The psychology of disillusionment illuminates the relationship of tragedy to romance. In Timon of Athens, perhaps the last tragedy, Shakespeare skeptically exposes the psychology of idealism but reveals the consequence of such skepticism, a world drained of wonder. Subsequent plays rejuvenate idealism, protecting it from its own tendencies toward punishment and revenge. Moving toward heroic assertion and death, tragedy often colludes with the idealist in his time-foreclosing and self-destructive acts of revenge, but the new genre gives him more time to return to reality without sacrificing the psychological benefits of idealism. Pericles escapes the anxiety brought by awareness of evil by flight and delay. The unifying principle of his play is not the tragic closure of heroic integrity, but a life extended in time. Cymbeline returns to the truth impulses of love-idealism. Posthumous' disillusioned misogyny carries these impulses into a punishing mode, but his reacceptance of Imogen represents an irrational but redeeming subordination of epistemological truth to interpersonal truth. The Winter's Tale rejuvenates idealism after displaying its destructive potentials in jealousy. Married love embodies idealism in an image of the good of life. In the statue scene, the wish for an atemporal ideal gives way to faith in the temporal world. In The Tempest wonder arises from seeing a world as if for the first time, and is thus exposed to the irony of perspectivism. Marriage returns as love at first sight, but shares the stage with tropes of ambition, usurpation, subjugation, murder. Prospero identifies with reason over fury but remains perplexed by irony and anxiety. Taking bearings from within the Shakespearean ethos rather than from a specific theory of genre allows this study to register the distinctive tonalities of the individual plays. The development illuminated is not that of a sustained progression toward a preexisting genre but that of a vital intelligence probing a specific set of problems in an intellectually coherent way.

In this paper I examine the nature of the relationship between art and reality, arguing for the centrality of the role of art in the creation and cognition of the shared reality which is the human world. I support this argument through reference to the developing discipline of psychoanalysis, specifically considering three “stages” of psychoanalysis: classic Freudian psychoanalysis, ego psychology, and object relations theory. I take the position that if we are to reap the full benefit of the explanatory power of psychoanalysis as it may be applied to an understanding of aesthetics, we must treat psychoanalysis as we do any other growing body of theory, recognizing that initial formulations may be transformed, superceded, or restricted to a circumscribed area of applicability by advances based on new evidence. To this end, I examine classic Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of concepts such as conscious/unconscious, repression, instinctual derivatives, primary and secondary process functioning, condensation and displacement, phantasy, symptom, and dream. I also consider the development of the psychoanalytic techniques of free association, transference analysis, and interpretation. I look at ego psychology in terms of the mechanisms of defense, the formation of the superego, adaptation, the “conflict free sphere of ego functioning,” and “regression in service of the ego.” And I examine object relations theory in terms of Melanie Klein's inner and outer reality, D. W. Winnicott's transitional space, and the elaboration of world and self through mechanisms of identification, introjection, projection, and regression to dependence. I tie each of the psychoanalytic theories to a theory of aesthetics developed from the psychoanalytic premises, and I provide concrete examples through interpretations of Hamlet based on each of the three aesthetic theories. I conclude that Winnicott's object relations theory grounds the most robust theory of aesthetics, one which supports the centrality of the role of art in our constitution of our selves and our world.

My dissertation investigates the “museum” as a site of cultural politics intersecting with the spectacle of the female body. My study aims to extend the cultural and historical readings of museums and exhibitions and focuses on female encounters with the display, collection, and civic education functions of nineteenth-century exhibition phenomena. I identify the exhibition logic in an emerging national museum culture as a triangular dynamic of the host, the exhibit, and the viewer. In this triangle, the host is figured in different roles—as an exhibitor, as a representative of the patriarchal/imperialistic culture, and as an observer of the female body. Posing the female body as a locus of discipline and resistance, women writers in that period borrow this triangulated model to destabilize patriarchal power relations: Their heroines confront the host in a variety of exhibitions to gain a measure of agency and selfhood. My first chapter traces the host-exhibit-viewer relations in the increasing popular mass visual market beginning in the eighteenth-century and culminating in Great Exhibition of 1851. With the images of power, I give an overview of the uses of “exhibition” as a metaphor in both male- and female-authored fiction. Chapter Two explores the “freak show” as a metaphor, in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a metaphor for women's marginalization and re-imaging of a self in a patriarchal society but also a metaphor that reinforces imperialist dominance. Chapter Three investigates the female spectatorship of visual art in Brontë's Villette as an act of subversion and a critique of the patriarchal constraints on women's visibility. Chapter Four examines, in George Eliot's treatment of her heroines' relations with men in the museum space in “Mr. Gilfil's Love Story” and Middlemarch, how the museum as a cultural classroom can become problematic when “culture” as field of knowledge is defined as exclusively masculine. In my readings, I seek to open new understanding of these authors and explore the dialogical complexity of museology, literature, and societal tensions.

My dissertation examines moments of Arabic linguistic and formal importation and cultural translation in colonial and postcolonial texts and offers ways of engaging these often misunderstood or overlooked moments. Sparse and seemingly ineffective, importations do indeed play a significant dialogic role between Arabic and the texts in English. Implicit within the term importation are the issues of exchange and value. Manifesting predominantly in transliteration, importation wears an English letter-form but yields an opaque Arabic content. The rubbing of form and content within an importation produces many possibilities concerning that importation and its role within an English linguistic sphere. The dissertation's principal goal, then, is to demonstrate how Arabic and Islam participate in these texts' discourses and how these texts represent and participate in cross-cultural and cross-religious moments of importation. I engage four main issues of importation and translation: (1) importation, where transliterated Arabic or Qur'anic phrases find their way into these texts without being translated; (2) contextually defined importation, where the transliterated words or phrases are interpreted intratextually; (3) formal importation, where imported Arabic forms (poetic meters and rhetorical devices) become the underlying cause of opaque content; (4) cultural translation, which shows the often painful identity and physical negotiations between languages and the cultures they carry across rigid divides. I examine nineteenth-century works including George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Locksley Hall. I also engage twentieth-century and twenty-first century works including Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, and Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz and Crescent. These seemingly disparate texts across time and space all participate in importations of Arabic and Qur'anic words and forms. The idea of the oriental other, specifically the Arabic and Muslim other, is interwoven deeply into the texture of these works in English. The ways these texts engage representations of the Arab/Muslim reveal much about the cultures within which they operate.

It would be overstatement to claim that all of South African literature is characterized by its attention to Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's theoretical interregnum, the temporal period during which “the old is dying, and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci 276). Nonetheless, South African author Nadine Gordimer in her now famous essay, “Living in the Interregnum” (1982), situated the term—as the space between the end of apartheid and the beginning of a new and unforeseeable political paradigm—firmly within South African political consciousness. South African author J. M. Coetzee, on the other hand, evasive of overt politics and political representation in his fiction, writes about a different kind of interregnum, one not situated between two orders but instead located outside of all binary relationships. In this dissertation, I read Coetzee's works as political acts of performative displacement that attempt imagined identification with the other, in the form of not only the black characters who are often silent in his texts and white women who often narrate, but also in the form of animals, especially the dogs that populate almost all of his opus. These various entities—black, female, and animal—represent multiple ethnographic subjectivities, none of which belongs to the author who must imagine them. In order to represent this diversity of others, therefore, Coetzee's narrative strategies destabilize expectations and alienate the reader from the willing suspension of disbelief that generally accompanies readings of fiction. Such narrative strategies include free indirect discourse in many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians). Such destabilization opens up a space for the audience to examine Coetzee's fiction as texts that allow for interplay between character, audience, and author; the texts function dialogically in the Bahktinian sense, performing various positions rather than presenting one controlling subjectivity.

This dissertation asks to what end were so many Ovidian poems written during the last fifteen years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Arguing that the poems have a distinct political subtext, this study situates the poetry within the context of Elizabeth's unsettled succession. The fraught question of who would succeed the Virgin Queen was further complicated with Elizabeth's ban on any discussion of the subject. I argue Tudor historiography ironically helped construct a sense of an ending with its projection of genealogical stability, which linked the Tudor family to England's ancient roots, and its emphasis on paradigmatic structures. Sixteenth-century historians claimed that to know the past was to know the future. At the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, precedent predicted an unsettled succession would precipitate violence and ruin. In the face of rupture, the poets used Ovidian resources to construct an alternative epistemology. They developed a poetic that truncated the exemplar's paradigmatic status to emphasize the constituent role of the material present. In doing so, the Ovidian poem emphasized the role of perspective, contingency, and revision; their response to the dead end Elizabeth came to represent insisted on the gap between the past and any recovery of that past to qualify the providential claims of Tudor genealogy. Following a discussion of Tudor genealogy and historiography, which I organize around the appropriated biblical iconography of the Tree of Jesse, and evidence of English frustration and anxiety over the succession, I turn to case studies of Ovidian poems. Using the examples of Edmund Spenser's Muiopotmos, William Shakespeare's Lucrece, and George Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence, I demonstrate how late-century Ovidian poetry challenged recoveries of exemplars and paradigms to disperse sites of authority. The poems collectively underscored the instability of the past and how meaning manifests in collaboration rather than recovery. Reading from a generic rather than biographical point of view, I argue the Ovidian poems written during the 1590s provided a significant method to imagine alternatives beyond the grounds of political crisis.

The critical discussion of metatheatre has historically connected a series of reflexive dramatic strategies—like soliloquy, chorus, dumb show, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue—and assumed that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. This dissertation, by contrast, shows that the efficacy derived from metatheatrical moments that overtly reference theatrical production is better understood in the context of restaged non-theatrical cultural performances. Restaged moments of both theatrical and non-theatrical social ritual produce layers of performance that allow the play to create representational space capable of circumventing traditional power structures. The Reflexive Scaffold argues that this relationship between metatheatricality and restaged moments of culture is central to interrogating the complexities of dramatic genre on the English Renaissance stage. This project asserts that a great deal of early modern English drama begins to experiment with staged moments of cultural performance: social, cultural, and religious events, which have distinct ramifications and efficacy both for the audience and in the world of the play. However, while these restaged social rituals become focal points within a given narrative, their function is determined by the genre of the play in which they appear. A play or a feast inserted into a comic narrative creates a very different sort of efficacy within the world of the play from that which is created when the same moment appears in a tragic narrative. These various types of performance give us a glimpse into the ways that early modern English dramatists understood the relationship between their works and the audiences who viewed them. I argue that the presentation and reinterpretation of early modern social ritual is utilized by many of the major playwrights of the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and Philip Massinger to redefine genre. These moments of reflexivity construct efficacy that, depending on the genre in which they appear, runs the gambit from reinforcing social order to directly critiquing the dominant cultural discourse.

Between 1580 and 1660 the English travel book emerged as a site of rich literary innovation. To supplement practical features long associated with the genre, writers called upon an array of poetic devices, satirical modes, and mixed prose and verse forms to represent the early modern traveled world. The World Inscribed: Literary Form, Travel, and the Book in England, 1580-1660 historicizes such literary experimentation by examining how travel narratives moved through the transmission circuits of early modern book culture, and how, in turn, modes of textual production shaped the genre's formal characteristics. Reading canonical poets and dramatists (Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Jonson, Herbert) together with a number of contemporary printed and manuscript travel books, this project argues that the aesthetics and literary aims of prose travel writing developed rapidly alongside developments in the travel book as a circulating text technology. The project's five case studies articulate not only how the form and style of early modern English travel writing could be altered or suppressed across different versions of a given narrative (within print or manuscript networks), but also how the travel book itself could serve as a vehicle for literary texts, especially verse, related to the writer's travel experience but not necessarily offering direct descriptions of travel. By engaging with the understudied intersection of literary form, textual transmission, and early modern English travel writing, this project traces how new ways of representing the traveled world through material texts reveal the formal mechanics of a genre in the making.

As a genre, fantasy seeks to validate the unconscious world of dreams, to insist not merely on its existence in the human psyche, but on its essential, vital presence. A work of fantasy begins, typically, with the implicit or explicit suggestion of "preferable modes of reality" (Spivack 1987, x) and moves toward the hero's integration of previously unconscious elements of the self. The narrative structure mirrors that movement: at the heart of fantasy is the journey toward a goal and the subsequent return home. This circular journey is an apt metaphor for the quest for identity, which is the focus of my dissertation. To be "at home"--spiritually and soulfully with our deepest selves, one guide in the fantasy realm insists--is the ultimate goal of mortal life. The introductory chapter contains an overview of relevant Jungian concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious and Eriksonian life-cycle psychology which help illuminate the universal elements of the hero's quest. The choice of works for my study reflects my premise that the quest for identity takes shape according to the hero's place in the life cycle. The pragmatic values, goals, and struggles of persona-crafting, for example, differ greatly from those of mid-life reckoning with mortality. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and John Ruskin's tale, "The King of the Golden River", are the focus of the second chapter, which concerns the individuation of child heroes. The third chapter treats works with heroes in the transformative stage between adolescence and adulthood: Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I, Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and George MacDonald's Phantastes. In the fourth chapter, the quest for a renewed sense of identity takes the form of a dialectic between past and present selves in C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces and Le Guin's Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea. The concluding chapter examines MacDonald's Lilith and H. Rider Haggard's She, two works which give imaginative treatment to concepts of afterlife and the unnatural prolongation of mortal life, respectively.