This thesis explores the afterlife and literary presence of the Anglo-Saxons in three literary works from the Middle English period. Middle English writers appropriated classical and French traditions for decidedly English purposes, but relatively few scholars have noted the way in which individuals in the Middle English period (particularly in the fourteenth century) drew upon and (re)constructed an organic English identity or essence emblematized by the Anglo-Saxons. Post-Conquest English men and women did not relate to their Anglo-Saxon forebears in an unproblematic manner; changes in language and culture, precipitated by the Norman Invasion, placed a vast, unwieldy gap between Middle English culture and Anglo-Saxon traditions. The uneasy relationship between the Middle English period and the Anglo-Saxon period marks Middle English literature's relationship with Anglo-Saxon precedents as one of negotiation and contestation. Through an examination of Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale, and the anonymous Athelston and St. Erkenwald, I consider the ways in which Middle English writers conceived of their notions of "the past," and how such associations affected and generated new modes of thought in a relational and, at times, oppositional manner. This thesis explores the anxiety of relating to a past tradition that was recognizably "English" yet profoundly "other," and I analyze discourses on several distinct (occasionally conflated) "others," including Jews, Muslims, and "easterners" in order to suggest the trepidation of relating to a past tradition that was uncanny due to a familiarity that was quite unfamiliar. Middle English literature encounters, and, at times, recoils from this difference, and the works which I consider domesticate and make known/knowable the "primitive" Anglo-Saxon past.

Na presente dissertação averigua-se a percepção do lugar em Trajectórias e Clima de Orlando Mendes bem como nos poemas em O Diabo, Mundo literário e Seara nova. Se na enunciação poética se conformam redes de relações, então estamos perante uma poética da relação. Através dos temas, confrontamos sua poesia com O amanuense Belmiro Cyro dos Anjos; Mensagem Fernando Pessoa e Sangue Negro Noémia de Sousa. / This dissertation aims at showing how the perception of place manifests itself in Trajectórias e Clima, as well as in the poems O Diabo, Seara Nova and Mundo literário. If networks are established in the poetic enunciation, we are therefore in the presence of a poetics of relation. Through the themes, we compare and contrast Mendes poetry with O amanuense Belmiro - Cyro dos Anjos; Mensagem - Fernando Pessoa and Sangue Negro - Noémia de Sousa.

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. Desmet and Williams, 2009), both of which base their analyses of the Shakespeare-Gothic intersection on the premise that Shakespearean quotations, characters and events are valuable objects in their own right which mediate on behalf of the 'present' concerns of the agents of textual appropriation. In light of this scholarship, this thesis argues the case for the presence of 'Gothic Shakespeare' in Gothic writing during the latter half of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, it acknowledges the conceptual gap whereby literary borrowings were often denounced as acts of plagiarism. Despite this conceptual problem, it is possible to trace distinct 'Gothic' Shakespeares that dismantle the concept of Shakespeare as a singular ineffable genius by virtue of a textual practice that challenges the concept of the 'genius' Shakespeare as the figurehead of genuine emotion and textual authenticity. This thesis begins by acknowledging the eighteenth-century provenance of Shakespeare's 'Genius', thereby distinguishing between the malevolent barbarian Gothic of Shakespeare's own time and the eighteenth-century Gothic Shakespeares discussed under the term 'appropriation'. It proceeds to examine the Shakespeares of canonical Gothic writers (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) as well as their lesser-known contemporaries (T.J. Horsley Curties and W.H. Ireland). For instance, Walpole conscripts Hamlet in order to mediate his experience of living in England after the death of his father, the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The thesis then argues for the centrality of Shakespeare in the Gothic romance's undercutting of the emergent discourses of emotion (or 'passion'), as represented by the fictions of Radcliffe and Lewis, before moving on to consider Curties's attempted recuperation - in Ethelwina; or, the House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) - of authentic passion, which is mediated through the authenticity apparatus of Edmond Malone's 1790 editions of Shakespeare's plays. It concludes with W.H. Ireland's dismantling of Malone's ceoncept of the 'authentic' Shakespeare through the contemporary transgressions of literary forgery and the evocation of an illicit Shakespeare in his first Gothic romance, The Abbess, also published in 1799.

Na presente dissertação averigua-se a percepção do lugar em Trajectórias e Clima de Orlando Mendes bem como nos poemas em O Diabo, Mundo literário e Seara nova. Se na enunciação poética se conformam redes de relações, então estamos perante uma poética da relação. Através dos temas, confrontamos sua poesia com O amanuense Belmiro Cyro dos Anjos; Mensagem Fernando Pessoa e Sangue Negro Noémia de Sousa. / This dissertation aims at showing how the perception of place manifests itself in Trajectórias e Clima, as well as in the poems O Diabo, Seara Nova and Mundo literário. If networks are established in the poetic enunciation, we are therefore in the presence of a poetics of relation. Through the themes, we compare and contrast Mendes poetry with O amanuense Belmiro - Cyro dos Anjos; Mensagem - Fernando Pessoa and Sangue Negro - Noémia de Sousa.