Most studies of Oldham have been limited to examination of specific historical influences on a given poem, or group of poems. The two essays by Weldon Williams, for example, while they are interesting for their demonstration of the strong influence on the Satyrs upon the Jesuits of Jonson's Catiline (partially admitted by Oldham in his preface), do not deduce any real significance from this influence, either for Oldham, Jonson, or the poetic transition from the Renaissance to the Augustan period. Clark's comments are even less acceptable, for in his desire to make Oldham a whipping boy for Boileau, he is often led to questionable conclusions. Akin to Clark's injudicious remarks are such unsupported generalizations as K. M. P. Burton's, that "Oldham...made the mistake of thinking that ingenious invective was enough for satire. He had a great deal of vigor, but he lacked imagination and constructive power." The work of these two critics represents the state of Oldham scholarship in this century: on the one hand, there is the narrow study concerned with only a very limited part of Oldham's work, and on the other, there is the off-handed and often unfair generalization about his "vigor" or his "force" or his "vituperation." Neither answers what seems needed in our criticism of Restoration poetry---a thorough examination of the bulk of the Oldham canon, with the objective to illuminate his ability and, on occasion, his excellence as a poet.

The following chapters attempt full scale studies of four of Churchill's important satires. Chapter one surveys Churchill scholarship and criticism of the past twelve years, with emphasis upon those studies and editions which were most helpful to me. Much attention is given to the unpublished doctoral dissertations. Churchill scholarship, scholarship on formal satire as a literary genre, and studies of other satirists are already numerous and multiplying, and I have attempted to understand that close study of Churchill must take other studies into account. Chapter two is a study of Night , Churchill's first political poem. The personality of the speaker, and the central paradoxical moral contrast between day and night, are described as governing the structure of the poem. Chapter three concentrates mostly on Famine's prophecy. Her appearance, personality, and motives are discussed, with considerable background offered for illustration, and the techniques of political persuasion, both those ascribed to Famine and those used by Churchill's speaker, are analyzed in the light of modern studies of the subject. Chapter four describes the motif of the ruin piece which Churchill turns to satiric use in the Duellist, Book II. This ruin piece is an outstanding example of Churchill's accommodation of a personal and reflective poetic motif into his satire, and it indicates that the critics are right who say that Church censures the false and frigid in poetry, not the emotional and introspective as such. I also argue that the Duellist is one of Churchill's finest poems, and that its tetrameter couplets have not been given their due. In Chapter five the Dedication to the Sermons is read as an attack on Warburton, under a cover of irony, delivered to an imagined audience gathered to hear formal praises, or panegyric; the speech is organized according to formulas of classical oratory, with pauses, summaries, recollections, arguments, and rhetorical questions. The first appendix describes the Essay on Woman incident in Parliament, a political persecution which, along with the charges against the North Briton 45, forced Wilkes into exile and later into prison. A privately issued facsimile reprint of the Essay is described. The political battles of Wilkes of course inspired most of Churchill's poetry after the Ghost. Appendix two is a list of poems relating to Churchill which should indicate the range of his influence and popularity in the eighteenth century. The conclusion to the dissertation is somewhat tentative, because not enough close studies have been made for one to be able to revaluate or readjust his reputation. Several reasons, though, are given why Churchill will probably continue to be studied, and why he may be esteemed as a formal satirist.

The rise of sentiment and the man of feeling in the second half of the eighteenth century is usually held responsible for the decline of the satiric spirit that held sway in the first half of the century under such famous names as Swift and Pope. The spirit of satire never really dies, however; when it is denied its usual literary expression in such shapes as the formal verse satire and the prose anatomy, it will ally itself with other forms of literature, even with such forms which, on the surface, are completely opposed to satire. Such an alliance actually occurred between sentiment and satire in the latter half of the age. Its seeds, however, can be found very early in the eighteenth century, so that in reality the alliance was a progression rather than a sudden innovation. One of the chief, and certainly one of the most interesting, forms of this union was the development of the character which I have called the good-natured misanthrope. This sentimental misanthrope represents a blending of the man of feeling and the traditional literary satiric persona, an unusual reconciliation of satiric railing and benevolent action, of speculative misanthropy and actual good deeds. The first two chapters attempt to explain the dilemma of the man of feeling which encouraged such a reconciliation and to relate traditional misanthropy and satire to the change in viewpoint that took place in the eighteenth century. In Chapter II I deal exclusively with the eighteenth century critics of misanthropy and satire, although often they wrote chronologically in the middle of or after the actual literary development of the good-natured misanthrope. Chapters III through V explore the literary use of the character and its implications in the literature of sentiment, particularly of the man of feeling.

As Spenser said of Sir Calidore's quest for the Blatant Beast, the conclusion of this dissertation must remind the reader that the course of the discussion "is often stayd, yet never is astray." This study of Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained against the background of the Elizabethan theory of Christian learning has been focused upon a few pertinent texts which are concerned with ideas which Milton propounds in his epic poems. It has therefore been necessary first to review Milton's statement of those ideas, chiefly the ones which have to do with learning, in the first section of the dissertation, and then in the remaining sections to consider earlier treatments of similar ideas and problems. Analysis of these selected texts indicates that Milton's humanism was indeed a continuation of the Reformation humanism of Ascham, Sidney, and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, though Milton often expanded, deepened, clarified, and disciplined the ideas and modes of expression of his precursors. This study also shows that Milton's interpretation of history, for all his superior knowledge and more accurate scholarship, was essentially a continuation of the Elizabethan seeking for moral causes as a means of defining both moral and practical effects. Finally, this dissertation also has made clear that Milton's epics and his formal theology are rooted in the same soil which produced Spenser's Faerie Queene. Each of the chapters has summarized the specific conclusions and listed the qualifications of the general statement of similarity in the traditions, both popular and intellectual, within which the Elizabethan humanists and Milton wrote. This dissertation consistently recognizes the fact that Milton drew upon an astonishing quantity and variety of learning, that he was perhaps more universal and more erudite than any of the other authors treated. Milton's erudition was seldom of the documented or pinpointed variety, however, for Milton had so thoroughly absorbed and made his own the many related sources and analogues for every element of his epics that he seems to have used his erudition to clarify the basic message of the epics and to make those messages more widely understandable and more universally convincing by showing how Christian truth contains and makes unable all other learning. In Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton has repeated in epic form the Christian paradox, "He who would save his life must lose it."

Milton's observation of the visual arts, as implied in his poetry, is far more considerable than has heretofore been thought. The close relationship of literature and art in his age and his extensive reading argue that he would have reacted sensitively to the Gothic art of his London and the Renaissance art of Italy.

The prosody of Sir Thomas Wyatt has, according to undisputed scholarly opinion, lately become a controversial subject. Since any addition to the controversy would be impertinent and a total resolution impossible, this study is restricted to an objective description of Wyatt's prosodical practices in an attempt to formulate the rules he used in composition.

Virginia Woolf's novels, as Frank Kermode indicates, were not immediately received into the canon. In fact, some critics still consider her a minor author. Many of the negative judgments of Woolf, however, reveal prejudice, prejudice stemming from fear. Critics deny her importance rather than face the implications of her work. This study, focusing on the characters of Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Septimus Smith, and Sir William Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway, Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, Louis, Neville, and Bernard in The Waves, and Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts, shows that Woolf uses distance against the patriarchal control of women, death, and character to reveal a dualistic reality under hierarchical appearances. This feminist perspective frightens readers accustomed to a patriarchal perspective. Woolf establishes distance between her novels and her readers by using distance in her work. Her female characters use distance to resist patriarchal definitions of themselves and thus reveal their complexity. Her artists use distance to contradict the patriarchal denial of death and thus affirm the presence of death within life. Woolf herself creates distance by breaking four conventions of character. Unlike traditional characters that express patriarchal attitudes about women and death, Woolf's characters express her feminist and dualistic attitudes, thereby resisting the reader's urge to control them. Woolf's distance, then, affirms both the presence and the value of women and death in reality, suggests that patriarchal hierarchies do not describe reality but attempt to control it, exposes the damage such control does to individual lives, and makes her readers aware of their own attempts to control both reality and fiction. Because Woolf's novels resist control, they threaten the reader's usual way of dealing with the world and make him or her uneasy. Woolf risks her reader's fear, however, and uses the distance of her characters and her characterization to communicate her own vision of an obdurate reality, a reality in which women cannot be defined as inherently inferior, death cannot be denied, and "life itself" cannot be controlled.

Donne, Herbert, and Milton share a persistent concern to excavate self-other dynamics. Despite differences of theology and ideology, these poets pursue others with similar complexity: longing for and seeking out, quarrelling with and striving to understand their primary "objects"--whether a woman or God, a spouse or "parent." Each poet seems preoccupied with testing the quality, and interpreting the meaning, of the self's relatedness to the other; speakers are in conversation with others, approaching the other with alternating delight, mistrust, and anxiety about the risks of contact. The prevalence of such moments throughout Songs and Sonets, The Temple, and Paradise Lost not only suggests the primacy of relational issues for these poets, but also testifies to the nuanced, idiosyncratic conflictedness of self-other engagement. Donne, Herbert, and Milton write from deep with a realm of intersubjective experience--a "relational matrix"--that requires an often precarious balancing act of contradictory imperatives. Such a dialectical process can be richly explored through the paradigms of object-relations psychoanalytic theory, which holds self and other to be inseparable and is broadly focused on inter- and intrapersonal conflict as the primary environmental determinant of "self." In particular, the work of D. W. Winnicott provides a unique set of terms with which to unwrap and sustain the liminality of object relating in these poets' work. Committed to "paradox," Winnicott believed that self and other, interior and exterior, reality and fantasy, autonomy and attachment all paradoxically coincide; this fundamental notion of the overlap of relatedness is especially suited for unpacking the ways in which relationality in these three poets seems strained and ambiguous, challenging and revisionary. My argument attempts to push this body of poetry past traditional characterization--to suggest that while the interdependence of self and other may require a constant negotiation of opposing claims, it also opens a space where revisions, exchanges, renegotiations of gender and ideology transpire. By attending to the dialectical characteristics of these poets, one discovers how consistently they test boundaries, challenge hierarchies, and contrive to revise the terms by which "self" can be defined and experienced.

My thesis challenges the influential theory that the formation of a nation is conditional on its ability to marshal normative sexual/gendered citizens: I argue that nation-formation (and the end of the British rule) in India was contingent to a large degree upon mobilizing and resignifying non-normative sexual/gender subjectivity. I begin by suggesting that accusations of "going native" and of having interracial homoerotic intimacies were related concerns, both seen as perversions of upright British masculinity. Further, I suggest that the anxiety about racial purity and miscegenation that fed into the heterosexual narrative of rape is also attendant upon the unease surrounding same-sex intimacy between an English and a native male. With this critical lens in mind, I provide a new reading of two canonical texts, A Passage to India and Burmese Days. Next, I navigate the link between Indian independence and queerness, rereading key colonial moments (like the incorporation of the anti-sodomy statute in the Indian penal code, the bowdlerization of native literature, the Hindu reformist movement), texts (such as Anandamath and Gora) and personages (M. K. Gandhi) within this new interpretive schema. I seek to fill a critical interstice in the work on Gandhi: there is, I suggest, an enormous potential for a new queer perspective in understanding Gandhi, and---because his politics and life informed each other---also Gandhian nationalism. In arguing the importance of homoerotic narratives as sites where powerful directing influences on native social reform movements, political mobilizations, and nationalist ideologies are located, I also emphasize the need to understand India's colonial history in order to fully comprehend literary, political, and religious discourses in contemporary India. I thus demonstrate how negotiations staged around definitions of gender and sexuality continue to inform current socio-political practices (such as the rise of masculine Hindu nationalism) and literary (con)texts (I examine Nine Hours to Rama and Midnight's Children) in India.

Charles Dickens's early novels are engendered by what David Copperfield calls an "old unhappy want or loss of something," and the "something" wanted is the paradigmatic mother, providing perfect love, plenitude, and unity, while avoiding the female threats of desire and domination. Dickens's almost obsessive need to construct nurturing mothers from wives, sisters, daughters, and aunts, combined with his refusal to acknowledge his heroes' passivity, creates photographic double exposures in which a "happy family" overlays an isolated young mother/madonna and her adult male child, a domestic text half hides subtextual layers, and incestuous desires are disguised by returns to childhood innocence. When we read each narrative as if it were a palimpsest, using a three-layered psychoanalytic model, his representations of family and gender roles are startlingly different from accepted Victorian paradigms. The topmost layer of meaning, the manifest content, is that in which the realistic world of the novel is represented: family structures are created here, and family roles and relationships form the patterns of meaning. The second layer is comprised of primitive fantasies, wherein male fantasies of need for the nurturing breast, desire for the erotic breast, and fear of the smothering bad breast, pull the surface meanings into new designs. Here, gender roles and relationships form the crucial patterns. The third layer may be likened to dream work: meaning is encoded in representations of the body, its illnesses, and its metonymies. Each of the layers glosses and subverts the others, creating stories of crippled, ill bodies, mythic female roles, and narratival ambivalence. Oliver Twist constructs the paradigmatic hero who finds a mother after the mutilation of both male and female bodies. Nicholas Nickleby's hero avoids adult sexual stains by a return to his childhood and his sister. The Old Curiosity Shop offers serial primal fantasies wherein the heroine's body becomes increasingly dangerous and must be constrained. Finally, Dombey and Son constructs a heroine who becomes a mythic madonna and a hero who returns to passive infancy. The early novels thus enact a meta-narrative in which both male and female bodies are controlled by illness and disfigurement.