In the period 1890-1914, such playwrights as G. B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Henry Arthur Jones, and Elizabeth Robins led a movement to revive the drama as an intellectual art: these playwrights sought to create a theater that could treat social and political issues and themes hitherto banned from (or limited in treatment on) the public stage while at the same time retaining the theater's hold over a popular audience. In the case of Jones, Wilde, and Shaw, each playwright would revise his early style to create plays that had strong ties to more traditional popular dramas but which nonetheless offered a critique of those older, expected forms. Despite the severe limitations in the theater, dramatists had room for experimentation in the relation of genre to the mise en scene. The nineteenth-century theater had been notable for its preference for "fantasy" genres, such as melodrama and farcical comedy; at the same time, however, the audience maintained an appetite for realism in the staging of plays. It is in this seeming opposition of dramatic form and theatrical realization, the mechanistic and fantastic versus the hyper-real, that the innovators of this period could find a way to change the older drama while working within it. Victorian stage "realism" was in fact carefully contained within generic structures that artificially "solved" social problems depicted in the plays. Wilde, Jones, and Shaw would all manipulate conventions of genre and scenic effect in order to make overt the problem of defining the "real" in the theater. On another front, their critical and theoretical writings analyzed this troublesome connection between the worlds on-and off-stage, and were intended to change the way audiences viewed plays by providing a critical "frame." The Edwardian playwrights also faced the problem of enforced generic continuity, and some of them, particularly St. John Hankin, Harley Granville Barker, and John Galsworthy, would use the continuing popularity of realism to undermine melodramatic structure. Often the settings of their plays, in their mannered distortion of traditional representative scenes, alter the desires of the audience for generic conformity.

Put simply, magical thinking is the belief that one may affect reality by thought alone. Where Freud classifies such a concept as neurotic delusion, Winnicott embraces the idea as a memory from infancy and argues that "omnipotence of thoughts" is the origin of creativity. Both viewpoints are represented in Shakespeare's universe, their positions sometimes at war in the playing out of the hero's dilemma. This dissertation traces the idea of magical thinking through psychoanalysis, anthropology, and art, then explores the battle of thoughts in Shakespeare's tragedies. Freud's viewpoint is well-founded in Hamlet: for thoughts in Denmark are not tools with which to control reality, but a reality that cannot be controlled. The hero drowns in thoughts. He cannot escape them, particularly the thought of Gertrude's infidelity, which resurfaces in dagger words and pregnant metaphors, to the point that sometimes Hamlet forgets his revenge. His search to find a plan to kill the king thus parallels his search to find a way to kill his thoughts. Hamlet tries to bury them in the actor, who can control his thoughts long enough to "act." Both Othello and Macbeth likewise flounder in thoughts they can't control. Othello's thought echoes Hamlet's thought of a woman's infidelity. Othello cannot live with this thought, forget or disprove it. Indeed the thought is like virginity itself: once thought, he can never reclaim his ignorance or his wife's innocence. So he buries the thought in Desdemona's body--then kills it. The thoughts that plague Macbeth, however, are the result, not the cause, of his killing. He murders Duncan and Banquo only to be buried alive with "those thoughts that should indeed have died/With them they think on." Hamlet tries to escape thoughts. Othello's thoughts betray him. Macbeth defies them. Cleopatra embraces them--wholeheartedly, She is the mistress of magical thinking, Winnicott's "good-enough mother," nursing Antony on desire. Though the lovers' dream to be legends, god and goddess, may be delusional, their wish is transformed into a beautiful illusion for the audience as they birth death as Elysium, tragedy as romance, through the magic of poetry.

Today Andrew Marvell's poetry is thought to offer a window onto mid-seventeenth-century English literature and culture, yet scholars find the poet's richly allusive early works puzzling: we often do not know what prompted these compositions, or how to interpret them. Marvell probably wrote much of his early verse in 1651-1652 while working as a tutor at the Fairfax family's Yorkshire estate, Nun Appleton. Four approaches to Marvell's major early work, the estate poem Upon Appleton House, help to clarify the poet's methodology, the Yorkshire cultural and landscape milieus of his 1651-1652 poems, the prominent family for which he worked, and the pedagogic content of the poem itself. In the first approach, textual analysis and pattern-tracing reveal that Marvell developed Upon Appleton House from short poetic studies in Latin and English, and reveal too some ways in which Marvell represented his employer, Thomas Fairfax; his student, Mary Fairfax; and himself, as tutor-poet persona. Next, research on central Yorkshire's historical geography and lore and especially on Fairfax family lands helps explicate Upon Appleton House and shows that Marvell himself was a researcher and close observer of the outdoors. Third, information about the career and retirement of Thomas Fairfax--who in 1650 was nominally Interregnum England's highest-ranking leader--partially demystifies both Fairfax's retirement motives and Marvell's poem. A final approach analyzes Upon Appleton House as a poem for the instruction of thirteen-year-old Mary Fairfax. Marvell apparently drew on ideas from advice-to-a-prince poems, education manuals, puritan theology, and other sources to prepare Mary Fairfax for her future roles as Protestant heiress, dynastic perpetuator, and "natural ruler." Moreover, Marvell lyrically transformed the lands she would inherit into a medium for learning. Each approach to Upon Appleton House includes attention to literary and visual arts' traditions and to Marvell's evolution as a poet. Together, the four approaches go far toward explaining Marvell's 1651-1652 compositional chronology and self-presentation, his descriptions of nature and Yorkshire landscapes, his praise and instruction of Fairfax family members, and his evocations of post-civil-war England.

This dissertation explores the theme of suffering in In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), the two book-length works by David Jones. In In Parenthesis Jones uses the pain of soldiers in the trenches of World War I to represent the spiritual suffering of those who, like Jones, experience modernity as an affliction. While Jones writes tenderly of the soldiers' physical and emotional ordeal, his chief concern is with the metaphysical suffering the men experience as they witness the collapse of their familiar world into a landscape neither recognizable, lovable, nor meaningful. Out of their dismayed sense of dislocation the soldiers create an affectionate brotherhood which extends to the enemy soldiers and to all soldiers of every time and place. This community offers an analogy for the connection over time that Jones urges his readers to cultivate--the connection of English speakers with worlds of experience evoked in Welsh, German, and Latin words, and in dense clusters of cultural allusion. At the center of The Anathemata are the cross, through which God enters time and joins humans in their suffering, and the eucharist, through which Christ makes the fruits of his sacrifice available to his fellow sufferers, signifying and effecting a community among believers. Through language which describes and embodies the cultural variety of Britain, The Anathemata explores the regenerative meaning of Christ's cross through multiple allusions to sexuality and fertility, and provides through the eucharist a metaphor for the community Jones seeks. Both of Jones' major works, then, suggest the possibility of community grounded in shared history and generated by shared suffering. My dissertation unfolds this interpretation of David Jones through close reading, fresh examination of some of Jones' sources, and the introduction of perspectives lent by cultural critics and theologians. I aim to show that Jones offers original contributions to our sense of the possibilities within modernism, and, more crucially, our understanding of the place of the imagination in responding to the catastrophes of this age.

Shakespearean mourners display aggression in lieu of grief, they rely upon introjection and substitution, and they manifestly deny their loss. Denial of death runs throughout the canon; however, it is best epitomized in Antony and Cleopatra and the romances. Shakespeare's most famous mourner, Hamlet, introjects his dead Hyperion father to deny death and contain mourning. Nevertheless, the comedies argue that introjection of a lost object is no substitute for mourning, and in Pericles, introjection even threatens the life of the mourner. If denial represents the final strategy for the containment of grief for Shakespeare, then the conversion of grief into revenge is probably his first. Beginning with the English histories, Shakespeare genders mourning, prescribing socially constructed “masculine” and “feminine” modes of behavior. Men convert their grief into martial revenge; therefore, the first tetralogy is dominated by avenging sons, culminating in the unexpected bereavement of Richard III. The famous lamentation scene of Richard III, part of a tradition of communal and powerful women's mourning, stages a locus of female resistance to male revenge. The comedies star women who mourn: Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in All's Well pursue the love-object with difficulty after the death of their fathers. Helena's denial of grief and her substitution of Bertram for her dead father have been so successful they produce guilt. A central issue for me is Helena's inability to mourn: remembering rather than forgetting the dead. In Hamlet, a father's ghost returns insisting, “Remember me.” This Trauerspiel or “mourning play” struggles to construct male identity by mastering grief and exhausting revenge. Fearing he too will not be remembered when the rest is silence, Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story. And by telling stories, we remember—and mourn—the dead. Cleopatra's dolor, like Hamlet's, leads to and ultimately transcends thanatos. This late tragedy prefigures the romances where women who grieve, like Marina, will be given unprecedented power of rejuvenation. What Shakespeare's art finally arrives at is the suggestion that Freud was wrong: mourning never ends. Raise the dead, and no one need ever mourn again.

Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot satisfied specific goals in deploying female characters without hearts, accomplishing satirical needs within their texts. Trollope's anti-heroic female characters also fulfill satirical needs within their texts: Lizzie Eustace of The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Winifred Hurtle of The Way We Live Now (1875), Glencora Palliser of The Prime Minister (1876), and Arabella Trefoil of The American Senator (1877) provide, through their struggles, a rich context for cultural critique of the status of women in nineteenth-century Britain. These characters stand at a distance from those female moral paragons of earlier non-comic Trollope novels. I want to argue that these four characters are the culmination of a mainstream consciousness in conflict with its own creative imagination. They are affronts to the usual dicta, yet resisted discussion as a group for various reasons. Narratorial ambiguity reveals, then hides their feminist agendas. Furthermore, rather than make a point with his characters, Trollope preferred to “drive with loose reins” and let the character make a point through him. This concept will be carefully documented. By looking critically at this ambiguity one can see these characters as forming a group rather than remaining anomalies, which encourages a new perspective on Anthony Trollope's subject, his range of tolerance, and his vision. This study accentuates the ironic relation, currently undiscussed, which Trollope had with conventional thought on the binary opposition of the genders. It looks at ways these later characters put pressure on the implied reader's prejudices. There is some disagreement over whether Trollope simply advertised conventional values or questioned them. My study introduces a new way of answering the question. My strategy involves historicizing the characters in their contexts. Each character's predicament will be seen as a criticism of an institution, and will be studied with the help of a framing text. I will examine how Trollope creates in his characters' situations a cultural/ethical dissonance that cannot be resolved by conventional prescriptions for women's lives. Trollope's narrator and implied reader make daring points without producing the sort of texts that were rejected, like those of suffragism, by the public.

Focusing on the work of Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, and John Dryden, this dissertation argues that the modern critic's identity was constructed in seventeenth-century England. It supplements contemporary scholarly accounts of the origin of modern criticism by looking at the topic from a fresh perspective. Many contemporary studies assume that the modern critic's cultural identity was formed prior to or simultaneously with the concepts of literature, the author, and the canon. While the critic's identity was constructed during the same period as these concepts, why it emerged has not yet been fully explored. This dissertation treats the origin, construction, and development of this identity. Beginning at least as early as the last decade of the sixteenth century, significant debates about vernacular “criticism” took the form of battles between ancients and moderns. By tracing these battles, scholars can observe the construction of the modern critic's identity. Such an analysis amends traditional chronologies of criticism's development, for it suggests that some of the cultural forces that scholarship associates with the formation of criticism in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were already in evidence by the last decade of the sixteenth. At this time, the critic's identity was being constructed to perform a dual function: to address the effects of nascent print-capitalism and to aid in the formation of England's national literary tradition. The critic's identity was then continually reconstructed throughout the seventeenth century in response to these same cultural forces. Most notably, critics, responding to the changing conditions of textual production, dissemination, and consumption, attempted to form and regulate the tastes of readers so that the “best” texts would survive in the expanding print marketplace. Thus, modern criticism emerges earlier than has previously been argued. This dissertation concludes that John Dryden does not usher in modern criticism, but is the heir of Renaissance humanist concerns about the effects of print-capitalism, and that Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism is thoroughly anticipated by Ben Jonson's commonplace book, Discoveries.

This study uses the Struldbrugg episode in Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a focal point in an investigation of important shifts in perceptions of aging in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While modernity brought many benefits for the elderly, it also delivered more equivocal changes: the loss of a narrative of comfort and meaning for aging in a society increasingly telling itself a story of progress, perfectibility, and novelty; the slide from an ontological to a pathological view of the manifestations of aging; a mounting belief in self-efficacy that extended to economic and medical issues related to age; the growth of "political arithmetick" and the consequent categorization and enumeration of the human population which often both defined and marginalized the elderly; the growing conviction that the life span could be extended indefinitely; the related increase in economic gerontophobia (the fear of the old depleting the resources of the young); and the shift in both the very language of aging and the locus of control of that language. Finally, while memory became more important in theories of personal identity, the memories of the long-lived lost value in an increasingly documentary society. I contend neither that these phenomena were entirely new in the early eighteenth century nor that losses outweighed the benefits of the new age; however, in the early modern era these attitudes became incrementally more institutionalized and collective, while the rhetoric of progress—then and now—has consistently privileged positive changes and minimized losses. Reading back and forth between historical documents and the Travels and between the words Swift puts in the mouth of the aging Gulliver and the words of the aging Dean himself (both are fifty-nine when Gulliver concludes his adventures), this work traces developments in such issues as economic gerontophobia and ageism. The Struldbruggs' linguistic isolation makes them "Foreigners in their Own Country"; Swift—through the Struldbruggs and documentation of his own old age—gives us the foreign world of senescence in his time and offers us a chance to juxtapose the place of aging as modernity begins with the situation of senescence as, perhaps, modernity ends.

Nineteenth-century underread novels are unmoored narratives. Published during an era that still, in large part, belongs to the major Romantic poets, the novels in this study are often attached to the work of Jane Austen but left out of histories of the novel. My work with the fiction of Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Opie, Susan Ferrier, and Mary Shelley anchors them in what is often called the Age of Revolution. These texts, I argue, concerned themselves with challenging the underpinning notions of England's establishment, specifically as it manifests itself in domestic spheres, by offering alternative portraits of women's conduct, class mobility, and England's contrary projects of empire and abolition. I read them within the ideological discourse of Rousseau, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin and consider how they both reflect and reject the model of womanhood proposed by conduct literature of the period. Reading them as courtship novels organized around the tensions and conflicts of the period, I consider how the men and women in these texts attempt to overcome moral, ideological, and class difference in order to form imperfect unions. Paying careful attention to the different roles of the narrative and the narrator, I argue for a reading of these novels that questions what is at work in the stories they tell. Juxtaposing their stories with the canonical novels we associate with the period, I suggest that they allow for the complexities within Britain's elite classes at a time when its boundaries were being redefined by ideological shifts and the socio-historical transitions they set into motion.

This dissertation is an edition of the complete known surviving poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678), found in a manuscript at the Brotherton Library at Leeds in Yorkshire, England, Ms Lt q 32. Hester Pulter, daughter of James Ley, first Earl of Marlborough (1552–1629), lived at the estate of Broadfields in Hertfordshire most of her life; her poems, including a series of emblem-poems, reflect her sympathy for King Charles I and her religious and personal concerns, as well as her curiosity about science, during the period of the English Commonwealth. This edition maintains the spelling and punctuation of the original manuscript, probably created by a scribe and Lady Hester Pulter herself, and has been extensively annotated to explain mythological, Biblical, literary, political, and historical references. A scholarly introduction describes Pulter’s life, reading, social setting, and place in literature.