The revenge- and poison- filled tragedies of seventeenth century England astound audiences with their language of contagion and disease. Understanding poison as the force behind epidemic disease, this dissertation considers the often-overlooked connections between stage revenge and poison. Poison was not only a material substance bought from a foreign market. It was the subject of countless revisions and debates in early modern England. Above all, writers argued about poison’s role in the most harrowing epidemic disease of the period, the pestilence, as both the cause and possible cure of this seemingly contagious disease. As such a transformative and ambivalent power, poison was called upon precisely as stage revengers turned to vengeance, as revenge was, at its core, concerned with the breaking and making of boundaries. As such, playwrights turned to both literal and metaphorical poisons in their plays of vengeance to stage the excesses of contagion. I contend that all of the plays under consideration in my dissertation uniquely represent the bounded alongside the boundless. In the process, they dramatize the surprising paradoxes of revenge. By staging, often uneasily, the potential for revenge to “have no bounds,” dramatists more radically explored the perverse appeal and power of their own art. / English

Cognitive Boundaries: Perception and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Britain considers the relationship between form and ethics in nineteenth-century literature through investigating representations of cognitive restraint. Using theories of cognitive limitation from neurobiology, psychology, philosophy, and economics, I argue that the Victorian interest in self-control goes beyond a simple ingestion of larger forms of authority, but instead represents a complex process of self-actualization that arises when the chaos of consciousness meets the ethical demands of the world at large. This interest in cognitive restraint coincides with a nineteenth-century distrust in unmitigated stream of consciousness; by managing one’s perceptions, rather than capitulating to the momentary nature of individual sensation, it was possible to develop an idea of selfhood that was meaningfully and volitionally connected to long-term goals. Looking at the works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, I identify specific strategies that characters and authors use to manage their perceptions, charting the effects such limitations have on plot and action. Ultimately, controlling one’s access to perceptual experience is revealed as theoretically connected with solving problems of deliberation, action, and ethics. / English

This dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists envisioned thinking, judging, and acting in conditions of imperfect knowledge. I place novels against historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence to argue that William Thackeray, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy generated distinctive aesthetic and affective responses to uncertainty. I anchor these novelists in nineteenth-century intellectual contexts with which they were familiar, including the transition from associationism to an embodied picture of psychology and motivation; the rise of statistical thinking and calculative rationality; the renewal of inductive methods in the sciences; and approaches to probability as a concept whose various senses converge. I spotlight how novels interact with cultural domains of uncertain knowledge, from gambling to weather forecasting to legal decision. Articulating a phenomenology of uncertainty that is shaped by, yet often resistant to, the nascent sciences of prediction and calculation in the period, novels attend to the felt effects, aesthetic repercussions, and emotional tonality of judging and acting without certain knowledge. I argue that they refract their environing contexts with striking consequences for narrative form, aesthetic theory, and generic commitment. And I claim that they deepen their approaches to scientific knowledge and social concern with a focus on what uncertainty looks and feels like as a subjective experience: on speculations that run against the grain of fact (Thackeray); hesitations that almost entirely usurp action (Eliot); legal judgments and verdicts that lack finality and proof (Collins); and forms of repetition and aggregation that we use in everyday inference (Hardy). Affective dimensions of uncertainty mediate between the scales of concept and experience: Thackeray’s counterfactual imaginary probes the emotional tone of speculations about alternative realities; Eliot’s interest in theories of decision meets with hesitation as a practical attitude and bodily experience; Collins’ exploration of legal uncertainty is shadowed by the psychology of suspicion; and Hardy’s deployment of logical and statistical models consorts with sensation and intuition. Throughout I draw connections between these styles of uncertain thinking and literary reading, offering updated accounts of inference, evidence, and especially probability—as numerical concept, epistemic conundrum, legal tool, and rhetorical protocol. / English

This dissertation addresses the historical, political, and literary-rhetorical framing of counsel in selected works of Sir Philip Sidney: his Letter to Queen Elizabeth (1579), The Old Arcadia (1580), the first two books of The New Arcadia (1585), and the strikingly different final book of The New Arcadia. In these works, Sidney makes resourceful and varying use of the topos of the mirror. First, I show in what ways Sidney serves as the Queen’s mirror in advising her against the marriage to the Duke of Alençon. In the Letter, Sidney gathers, shatters, and distorts aspects of Elizabeth’s image; he multiplies reflections to discredit arguments of his political opponents and reconstitutes Elizabeth in an imperial, Protestant image. Turning to The Old Arcadia, I argue that, through the presentation of Gynecia, Sidney broadens the conventions of the genre familiarly known as the mirror for princes. Gynecia’s complexity and moral ambiguity complicate the traditional generic categories of virtue to be emulated and vice to be avoided. She serves as both an object in, and a reader of, the mirror for princes text and becomes a means for Sidney’s commentary on the genre and the moral questions it raises. By inviting the reader into an active experience of the mirror’s pedagogical enterprise, Sidney tests and refines the reader’s assumptions and moral judgments. In Books I and II of The New Arcadia, Sidney presents and interrogates poetry as a strategy for overcoming limited human agency and imperfect knowledge, limitations that appear in deployments of the mirror that show stasis and in images of the maze to indicate blocked access and thwarted mobility. By questioning poetry’s capacity to uncover and represent truth, Sidney holds the mirror up to himself. Book III of The New Arcadia restores the mirror as the productive mode of counsel in a mirror for princes text that instructs on a central theme of the Renaissance debate on counsel: discerning the flatterer. Sidney’s New Arcadia in its entirety offers an exemplary mirror of the self-scrutiny that leads to self-knowledge and the consequent authority to offer counsel of worth. / English

Romanticism is the only literary-historical period defined by its privileged relation to a single genre: romance. This dissertation reorients our understanding of Romanticism’s posture toward the problem of origins, which the recursive movement of romance rendered indispensible for modern philosophies of history, by examining Sir Walter Scott’s treatment of chivalry in Ivanhoe, the Tales of the Crusaders, Tales of My Landlord (Fourth Series), and The Siege of Malta. I argue that Scott seized on the Crusades to work through moments of artistic and cultural crisis, and to carry the ordeal of romance into the crucible of the Orient, where the extravagant origins of chivalry and the decadent ends of empire converged. The perspective of orientalism, I argue, yielded unique insights into the prehistory of both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, provoking Scott to revise the sentimental historicism that he had perfected in his domestic fictions and that still figures prominently in recent accounts of the genealogy of modernity. By reading Scott’s chivalric romances through the lens of late style, we recover the ambivalence that was always present in his dialectical approach to sovereignty and subjectivity, nation and empire, culture and capitalism, and that led to the creative dissolution of the literary form that his prior achievements had popularized. In Ivanhoe, I argue, Scott’s critique of political economy and national historicism indicted the logic of requital and redemption by which Christian chivalry ushered in the era of modern civility; it also exposed the foundations of a culture predicated on the denial of the universal claims of nature as much as the exclusion of difference, both exemplified by the novel’s Jewish characters. In The Betrothed and The Talisman, Scott’s deconstruction of sovereignty took on new cosmopolitan dimensions as he explored alternative paradigms for the construction of subjectivity and the governance of the imperial state through the absolute, universal imperatives of hospitality and sacrifice. In his final novels, Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous, the collapse of the aesthetic spelled the end of empire, but also promised new opportunities for the extravagant renovation of romance and the revitalization of the late romancer. The version of Scott I present is not the writer the canon recognizes, but a restless innovator who ranks among the foremost poets, philosophers, and prophets of the age, from Blake and Shelley to Southey and Byron: a radical thinker who engaged profoundly with questions of ethical responsibility and the conditions of political action, as well as with the limits of historical representation in a world exposed to the contradictions of global life. The new form of romance Scott fashioned to confront these challenges reveals an ironic, even baroque countercurrent in Romanticism that interrogates the shifting grounds of radicalism and resists the closed economies of conservatism without necessarily calling for political revolution. Drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou, I argue that the method of archaeological regression Scott developed in his chivalric romances offers prescient lessons for contemporary political theory and historical ontology, and that his vision of global change helps us reimagine the ruins of the past as a horizon for the unlimited potential of the future to be otherwise. / English

This dissertation shows how the management of the land is both a material precondition for and an obsession of medieval British reading and writing. In medieval Britain, the people who read and wrote were the people with power over land, and ecological management was a major imaginative project of these text-producing elites. The years between 1000 and 1400 saw major changes and crises—including the climatic transition from the medieval warm period to the little ice age—and each century saw different literary efforts to sustain the fiction that the land’s productivity as well as its social meanings were constant and manageable. Land management is an imaginative, affective, and literary activity as well as a social, ecological, and material one, and the history of who manages the land and how is the history of who reads, who writes, and how. Texts from Domesday Book to husbandry manuals to Piers Plowman not only engage with the social meanings of physical environments; they demonstrate how power over the land intersects with power over language. Written across four centuries and in Latin, Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle Welsh, these texts are all invested in managing their environments. Each chapter is a case study of a different genre of land management text: Domesday Book, estate management treatises and guides for managers, language pedagogy texts, romance, and Piers Plowman. In addition to these fundamentally elite, literate forms, the final chapter explores a reading event in the fourteenth century during which over forty groups of servile peasants, whose relationships to land and to texts were always mediated through the aristocracy, took possession of and read extracts of Domesday Book that described the land they lived on and worked but could not own. / English

The Imaginary Encyclopedia explores the relationship between aesthetics and epistemology in the eighteenth century by positing a formal analogy between the early novel and the reference work (e.g., Johnson’s Dictionary, Diderot’s Encyclopédie). The dissertation considers that analogy from two reciprocal vantages: first, by conceptualizing the early novel as a particularly elastic type of reference work and, second, by studying the reference work as a cohesive, imagined literary world. The book frames that mirror effect between two theoretical axes: on one hand, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, which describes the rational structuration that occurs within all imaginative or creative thought and, on the other hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s work on the influence of folklore and ritual on the development of Enlightenment rationality. The project therefore uses the dynamic between the novel and the reference work as a symbolic gateway to this question: what if we took the processes of imaginative writing to be structurally similar or identical to the processes of rational or scientific inquiry? In answering that troublesome question, The Imaginary Encyclopedia surveys four eighteenth-century writers who experimented with aesthetic form for the purpose of conveying abnormally dense amounts of information. First, it looks at Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year as a narrative that embraces encyclopedism, using scientific or referential description to position itself as a contribution to the nascent social sciences. It then moves on to two novelists – Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne – who are expressly skeptical of the utility of the reference work but unable to escape its powerful allure as an organizational framework for their fiction. Finally, it concludes with a chapter on James Boswell’s journals, which give contemporary readers a vivid sense of how the interaction between literary writing and encyclopedic writing inhered in the everyday consciousness of eighteenth-century authors. These four readings suggest that the early English novel’s form revolutionized the organization of Enlightenment information, providing an aesthetic medium for syncretic compilation and the means to index subjective experience as though it were a scientific object. In other words, the novel was not merely capable of encyclopedism – as Edward Mendleson famously argued in defending various “epic novels” – but encyclopedic in its very structure. / English

Over the course of Shakespeare’s career, plays written for the commercial theatre were increasingly being published and read as literary works. This dissertation argues that Shakespeare’s own complex response to the changing status of dramatic texts can best be discerned in his engagements with the figure who represented vernacular literary authority itself, Geoffrey Chaucer. Renaissance readers venerated Chaucer as a prodigious polymath, a proto-Protestant, and, above all, the authoritative founding father of English literature. Whereas ambitious early modern poets like Edmund Spenser were eager to claim their own place in a Chaucerian tradition, Shakespeare’s adaptations and appropriations of Chaucer’s works reveal not only an acute awareness of the precarious position of plays within this literary tradition but also a deep ambivalence about the incommensurability of stage and page as media of dramatic representation. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the most explicitly Chaucerian play of the period, Shakespeare and Fletcher treat The Knight’s Tale with a mixture of reverence and hostility, thematizing the challenge of adapting a culturally authoritative poem for the commercial stage. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the two parts of Henry IV, Shakespeare adopts framing techniques from Chaucer’s works in order to explore the literary possibilities of drama, even as the deployment of these techniques on stage reveals a tension between poetic ambition and theatrical pragmatism. The iconoclastic Troilus and Cressida, by emphasizing an antagonism between auctor and actor, vandalizes the poetic authority of its Chaucerian and Homeric sources; yet, in doing so, the play posits its own vision of a distinctly theatrical longevity. This dissertation argues that Shakespeare throughout his career found Chaucer most valuable not as a model to be imitated, but as an interlocutor to think with (and against) at a critical cultural moment when theatrical scripts were becoming “literature.” / English

This dissertation examines the role of several types of counterfactual plots in both defining and challenging the borders of nineteenth-century realist fiction. Using texts by Dickens, James, Gaskell and Hardy, I argue for the narrative significance of “active” plot possibilities that, while finally jettisoned by the ascendancy of a triumphant rival, exert an enduring influence on the novels that evoke and discard them. / English

Although the twentieth-century lyric poem might seem to intensify a genre of sentiment into a genre of meditative or tumultuous solipsism, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Terrance Hayes write lyrics that are funny, on several planes. Each of these poets enacts a self-revealing comedy of the mind and its often labored, blinkered, or illogical cognitive processes; each also creates a comedy of style, where language and form exceed and confound paraphrase. This thesis brings out such comedies, arguing that lyric is a livelier, more paradoxical, and certainly less solipsistic genre than is yet recognized. While most theories of the comic emphasize superiority, incongruity, or subversion, lyric poetry suggests that comedy originates in something miraculously apt and failed, at once: the comedy of lyric springs from deflected, or misdirected, perfection, and from the miraculous achievement of a less-than-sublime end. Berryman, who sets formal wildness in a fixed stanza, provides an opening instance of how comedy balances between the decidedly flawed and the marvelous. Lowell’s incongruities, which undermine every quality that threatens to dominate a poem, surprise by the unlooked-for harmonies they produce. Ammons turns his concerns about inarticulate failing into a comedy of ineptness, enacting the workings of an inconsistent mind with precision. Brock-Broido’s humor appears as utter doubleness, requiring that we see the beautiful and the ludicrous together; her comedy does not extinguish her Romantic postures, but suffuses them. Hayes enacts the luck of the erratic, associative mind, as it takes in, is altered by and transforms its surroundings: disparate styles, tones, devices, and allusions come together to convey something beyond their semantic point. / English