The stories of Medea and of Proserpina had a profound influence, hitherto unrecognized, on the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. Medea's story, as it appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses (and in Golding's translation) and in Gower's Confessio Amantis, reappears throughout Shakespeare's canon. The age-old struggle of the young girl caught between her duty to her father and her love for a stranger is exemplified by Medea's situation, and it is played out at least three times in Shakespeare's drama, beginning as a subplot in The Merchant of Venice, moving into the opening act of Othello, and finally directing much of the action in The Tempest. In King Lear, both Shakespeare and Hecate, Medea's patron, punish the father for betraying the good daughter. For Spenser, the ambiguity of Medea's character is tempered by William Caxton's portrayal of her in The History of Jason, a previously unremarked source of The Faerie Queene. Here, Spenser finds a witch, Medea, her benign counterpart, Mirro, and a Jason who is torn between two women rather than between the "good" Medea who helped him to win the Golden Fleece and the "bad" Medea who arranged his uncle's murder. Spenser reincarnates Caxton's versions of Jason and Medea in the forms of Red Crosse and Duessa, thereby converting the pagan sinner Jason into a Christian hero. Proserpina's story serves as an antidote to Medea's in that the latter foregrounds infidelity while the former highlights the unbreakable bond between mother and daughter. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser improves on Ovid by transferring this bond from same-sex kinship to same-sex friendship, a higher type of love: Ceres and Proserpina find new life as Britomart and Amoret while Amoret's suitors embody various characteristics of Pluto/Death. In "The Cantos of Mutabilitie," Spenser rewrites Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, replacing endless repetition with unchanging eternity. In Shakespeare's works, Proserpina's rape is reenacted in the death of Ophelia in Hamlet while the reunion of Proserpina and Ceres and the resurrection of Ophelia are enacted in The Winter's Tale.

The work subjects The Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser to an archetypal mode of analysis that through its consistent application is intended to prove a reasonably reliable instrument for extracting a coherent meaning from that text. The approach selected, one that invokes a motif-driven, patterned analysis of the text, establishes the monomythic model of Joseph Campbell as a context for evaluating the heroic dimensions of the questing knights Redcrosse, Guyon, Britomart, and Calidore. The methodology further proposes to liberate Spenser from allegory--here defined as the assignment of abstract values to the figures of art in order to validate and facilitate ideological interpretations of that art. The study promotes the quest paradigm as a valid measure of characterization capable of generating interpretation across a wide spectrum of texts. The view of the study is that however much Spenser may have intended a particular, allegorical, reading, the text frequently invites a different response. The application of the monomythic model is undertaken with a revisionist's toleration for a received tradition of interpretation but a toleration seasoned with the determination to permit the quests to unfold in language not in spite of it. Accordingly, neither Redcrosse nor Guyon is viewed as partaking in a successful quest as such is defined by the extent to which the Knights' respective adventures conduct to the integration of disparate psychical impulses. Britomart and Calidore are seen as attaining a more certain psychological integration. Finally, the study suggests that Spenser--himself subjected to analysis following the model--abandons his ambitious self-appointed quest to complete The Faerie Queene in favor of a modestly successful completion of a surrogate quest to achieve personal and literary renown, a quest embodied in the Amoretti.

My dissertation considers the influence of nineteenth-century science and culture on the representations of women in Thomas Hardy's popular fiction. My research builds on recent Hardy scholarship on gender relations to examine the cultural and scientific developments of the period both that inform Hardy's experimental style of narration and that explain how his representations of women in some cases fascinated and offended his sophisticated reading public. My opening chapter studies the responses of nineteenth-century literary journalists to Hardy's early novels as a critical influence on the formation of his experience narrative practices. This specialized audience developed divergent codes of realism, based on their own understandings of Victorian science and religion, in order to evaluate Hardy's first commercially successful work, Far from the Madding Crowd. In response to the criticisms of this audience, Hardy sought to complicate the experimental treatment of heroine in his later fiction. My second chapter probes into the contribution of Hardy's first career as a Gothic architect to the style of representation in The Return of the Native. I study a little noticed allusion in Hardy's novel to the diorama. I argue that Hardy most likely gained an awareness of Gothic architecture, and I examine carefully the relation between his allusion to the diorama and a broad thematic interest with the science of reading her story. My third chapter gives attention to the role of his architectural and professional backgrounds in informing his engagement with the developments of nineteenth-century sciences in Two on a Tower. I depart from other readings of the novel, by identifying not only allusions to Victorian astronomy but also references in the novel to the works of nineteenth-century scientists including Darwin and Cuvier. In my fourth chapter, I observe closely the heroine's idiosyncratic speech patterns in Tess of the d'Urbervilles as indicative of Hardy's scientifically influenced preoccupation with the development of linguistic practices and literary traditions. At the close of my dissertation, I broaden my analysis to the relation between Hardy's seductive treatment of his heroine and those of other writers in the fin de siècle.

Abstract not available

Supernatural women were important in Irish literature from earliest times to the present, but their literary portrayal altered with changing societal values and literary taste. Society shaped the roles of goddess, fairy mistress, and Sovereignty both in early Irish literature and in the Irish Literary Renaissance. The Morr(')igan, goddess of war and fertility, originally had a central role in the literature. She acted as an agent of fate, bringing order and prosperity in Cath Maige Tuired, and chaos and destruction in the Ulster cycle. During the Irish Renaissance she was relegated to a less central role. She remained the tutelary goddess of the hero CuChulainn, but lost her role as arbitrator of life and death, order and chaos, regaining it only partially in Yeats's The Death of Cuchulain. The fairy mistress was never influential in the mortal world. Her power was over the souls of men. She tempted the hero away to an Otherworld dangerous to the psyche, and to a socially unacceptable love. The fairy mistress was easily adopted by the Anglo-Irish writers because they, like the early Irish, came from a society with strict rules about the governing of emotions and the repression of asocial love. The fairy mistress's occult and psychological powers increased in the Irish Renaissance. The fairy maiden in Echtra Connla Cha(')im took Connla to the Otherworld in her crystal boat; Yeats's Fand could draw CuChulainn into a whole new phase of existence with a kiss. By her union with the king, the Sovereignty bestowed fertility, victory, and political stability on the people. Her power was destroyed in the colonial period, when there was no longer a kingship for her to bestow. Instead she took on the psychic powers of the fairy mistress, gaining power over the souls of the poets who adored her. Later, in the Irish Renaissance, she used these powers to lure, not poets to the Otherworld, but patriots to death. In the twentieth century Cathleen N(')i Houlihan the aspects of war goddess, fairy mistress, and Sovereignty were combined, but the destructive powers of the war goddess had become dominant.

Beowulf and Judith need to be examined not within the context of scholarly or religious polemic but with a desire to learn how these poems reveal the worlds of the poets and the vital concerns of their fellow human beings as well. The Beowulf poet, in the process of defining the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition, portrays the world of Germanic heroic values by tracing the career of Beowulf, limning a life which, though valorous, results not only in death but in social disintegration. The Judith poet, an artist of stunning traditional fluency, re-defines the values of the Germanic heroic code in such a way as to make all but vengeance acceptable guidelines for human behavior. Significant, essential thematic resonance may well have been responsible for Beowulf and Judith being included in the same manuscript.

The female heroes in late eighteenth-century and in nineteenth-century English novels by women are strikingly motherless, lacking both a constructive model of adult female subjectivity and sexuality, and a matrilineal emotional and linguistic legacy with which to define themselves in a hostile patriarchal culture. Like Persephone in the Underworld, these heroes are captives in the wor(l)d of the father, experiencing heterosexuality as both seductive and coercive, desiring an impossible return to maternal oneness. Two narrative patterns emerge as female authors--themselves artistically motherless--trace the (socially impermissible) maturation of their heroes. In one, the representational tradition exemplified by the works of Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and early George Eliot, female heroes initially resist patriarchal definition--cultural and psychological inscription expressed primarily in linguistic metaphors. Yet they are equally terrified by the subversive, semiotic, marginal, and declassee jouissance of maternal surrogates. Eventually, these heroes succumb to the Word of the Father and its model of feminine renunciation and silence, rather than risk the dangers of maternal reconciliation (rematriation), depicted as dirty, classless, promiscuous, and violent. By contrast, a surreal, Gothic, and fantasy narrative pattern, exemplified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Bronte, later George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, permits that dangerous, semiotic, maternal energy to disrupt and redefine the world of the novel. The patriarchal domination which threatens these heroes is heterosexual as well as linguistic, while the symbolic representatives of maternal origins they confront--often in the guise of irrational, life-saving forces--empower and renew them. Employing non-representational gestures--a species of l'ecriture feminine--to suggest such rematriation, these novels suggest a tentative, uneasy, and covert return to lost/repressed pre-Oedipal material. Employing elements of archetypal criticism, feminist psychoanalytical theory, and French feminism to examine these novels, we find a remarkable consistency of motifs: enforced silence and desire for voice/education; fear of invisibility and yearning for transcendence; profound dis-ease with (masculine) models of autonomous identity; fearless assertion on behalf of others; implicit homoerotic solace in female friendship; and a deep fear of maternal eroticism coupled with an intense desire for rematriation.

This dissertation explores dramatic music as it refers to the Elizabethan world. It discusses works by Marlowe, Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marston, Webster, and Middleton. Chapter I views Elizabethan society and music. Chapter II finds the trumpet is an emblem of identification in Tamburlaine. Shakespeare emphasizes themes of order and responsibility with the aid of music in his history plays. The primary musical technique of King Richard II is analogy, but song, also, is integral to King Henry IV and King Henry V. The following two chapters consider music in comedy. Contrasting music helps convey the self-indulgence of Orsino and the revelers in Twelfth Night; Feste's epilogue song summarizes human joy and human weakness. Jonson satirizes courtiers' vanities in Cynthia's Revels and the English taste for ballads in Bartholomew Fair through song. In Volpone "Come, my Celia" epitomizes self-deception and coalesces the audience's attention. Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle satirizes middle-class musical pretensions and the affectation of melancholy. Chapter V discusses affective music and masques in tragedy. Musical dissonance and irony in The Malcontent contribute to the sense of a disordered world. The affective music of "O, let us howl" in The Duchess of Malfi conveys horror and foreshadows Ferdinand's madness; consonant music in the last section foreshadows the Duchess' acceptance of death. In The Maid's Tragedy straightforward masque is ironic; in Women Beware Women a masque covers murder. Chapter VI deals with the fragmented mind and world of King Lear. Bits of song increase the sense of fragmentation, link the Fool with Lear, and unite Lear's condition with conditions of humankind. The final chapter discusses The Tempest, in which music is critical to the portrayal of honor and dishonor. Ariel sings a lyric to lead Ferdinand to Miranda, but plays the lowly pipe and tabor to lead Caliban and his companions into the mire. Heavenly music implies restoration of order; "Where the Bee sucks" implies the freedom of the virtuous human spirit. Music in drama thus contributes to expressions of human proclivities and dilemmas and the timeless concerns of order and redemption.

This dissertation stages an unprecedented dialogue between the maritime, the literary, and the legal within the context of the English Renaissance. It positions the ocean as an essentially legal space and argues that law mediates all human-ocean interactions. Additionally, it contends that an understanding of legal conceptions of the sea is essential to developing a cultural awareness of maritime space. Therefore, my project resituates early modern literary engagements with the ocean within a complex body of legal and political discourses and argues that in an island nation such as England, knowledge of the sea was widespread. Consequently, the ubiquitous maritime references in the period’s literature were founded on real legal knowledge that literary scholars can consider in their readings of these texts. Through its synthesis of canonical literary works such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) and legal texts such as William Welwood’s An Abridgement of all Sea-Lawes (1613), Alberico Gentili’s Hispanicae advocationis libri duo (1613), and John Selden’s Mare clausum (1635), this dissertation offers four case studies that illuminate the rich possibilities when maritime law inhabits the same scholarly space as English Renaissance literature.

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