Inter-textual relationships between James Joyce's works have long-since been noted, but the monographic studies that illuminate his works from different positions and theoretical bases tend toward specificity. The challenge of understanding the role the Wake plays in the structural cohesiveness of his corpus yet remains; it is this challenge that I address, and I suggest that Joyce provides us the key in Finnegans Wake and expects us to recognize it. The Wake is not only a unique instance of metafiction, but it refers to the earlier works in a provectional (to use Fritz Senn's word) fashion that provides the ultimate level of what I call a "gyre," a structural basis that offers a cohesive frame for Joyce's works; furthermore, Joyce points to this gyre in a number of self-conscious instances. A provection is a recasting with expansion, and as it relates to Joyce's corpus, it becomes expanded redefinition, reiteration, and/or recombination, as well. What I am suggesting, then, is that each work leads into a subsequent work which is both a product of the previous one(s) and simultaneously an expansion into an even broader level, forming a "cone" or "spiral"--or what I shall call a "gyre." As the final gyration, Finnegans Wake encompasses Dubliners, Hero, Portrait, and Ulysses, just as each of them recapitulates aspects of the work(s) that has/have preceded it. But because the Wake has no closure, the reiteration and recirculation of the people, city, and themes show that not only does each of his works grow out of its predecessor, but it prepares the way for a succeeding work. If the Wake is, indeed, the final swoop of a gyre, then Joyce is presenting us with a "container" (the siglum $\square\square,$ which is the title) of all his works, is telling us that he is doing so, and is challenging us to see both the gyre (the key) and the explicit statements concerning it, to see that in this final work are all his works recapitulated, reiterated, recast.

This dissertation analyzes three Renaissance texts vis-a-vis critiques of the theories that enable some readings of those three texts. The Introduction to the dissertation offers a critique of Stephen Greenblatt's "cultural poetics" through a close reading of a passage from his Renaissance Self-Fashioning. His "cultural poetics" is instigated as much by his anxiety about the text as by his concern with cultural patterns. The opening chapter deals with the problem of the narrative voice in the first episode of The Faerie Queene. Patricia Parker resolves the problem of reading this episode by treating the narrator's reading of the landscape as a vantage point above and beyond the text. This chapter, however, explores the way in which the text resists his reading and the way in which his reading becomes a kind of self-defense mechanism, betraying his anxiety about, and his self-estrangement from, the landscape. The next chapter takes up the question of male selfhood and its relation to female sexuality in Othello. While Marguerite Waller divests the play of its multiple perspective by installing Othello as a reference point and by taking Iago's malice as the answer to Othello's treatment of Desdemona, this chapter treats Othello's selfhood as an object of inquiry and analyzes the tension between his selfhood and Desdemona's sexuality. The last chapter opens with a critique of Stanley Fish's theory about the reading experience of Samson Agonistes. Fish postulates that the play encourages certain responses from the reader only to frustrate him. But this postulation betrays the critic's self-alienation from the text. While his desire for closure leads him to trivialize the reading experience of the play, this chapter proposes a mode of close reading that explores both the way language conveys a complex attitude toward every issue Fish tries to resolve and the way language generates psychological, ethical, and ontological ambiguities which persist throughout the play.

Although most critics of the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" agree that the tale's striking realism and wealth of detail suggest that Chaucer had an extensive knowledge of alchemical lore, they disagree about whether Chaucer condemned alchemy as a heresy or esteemed it as a divine science compatible with Christianity. For, the Canon's Yeoman begins his tale by asserting the impossibility of achieving the Philosopher's Stone, only to end his tale by affirming the Stone's existence, and describing it as a gift from Christ. In the past, most critics have investigated Chaucer's use of alchemical signs in the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" by discussing medieval alchemy as an obscure laboratory procedure in which Chaucer did or did not have any faith. This study, however, proposes not only to reexamine the significance of Chaucer's references to alchemical apparati, procedures, and philosophy in the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" but also to show that Chaucer was primarily interested in alchemy as a symbolic language, and that he utilized alchemical signs in both the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" and the "Second Nun's Tale," which are linked by the prologue of the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale," to explore how discourse itself is a kind of alchemy which mediates between man and God, or physical reality and spiritual reality, to communicate truth and enable the individual to convert from the "old man of Adam" to the "new man in Christ." Both tales begin with references to the baseness of matter, and end with alchemical allusions to the perfection of matter. Since Chaucer presented the alchemical allusions in the "Second Nun's Tale" and the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" within a penitential framework, he also implied that both alchemy and Christianity seek salvation, which may be understood as the reconciliation of spiritual and physical nature. Chaucer's Parson defines salvation in these terms when he explains, "Than shal men understonde what is the fruyt of penaunce, dots ther as the body of man that whilom was foul and derk is moore cleer than the sonne" (ParsT 1. 1078).

Lucius Cary, second viscount Falkland, has claimed the regard of historians. His poetry, however, has had little currency since his lifetime. While only eight poems have been collected previously in one edition, fifteen poems are included here. Four of these are unascribed in early witnesses. Two have been shown by Professor Murdock to be Falkland's. The physical settings and close stylistic analyses show the other two to belong in the canon. Each poem is presented in a careful old-spelling version of a copy-text chosen for demonstrable authority and/or scribal care. The apparatus displays substantive variants from the chosen copy-text. A commentary explaining the choice of copy-text and editorial decisions followed by informational notes appears for each poem. The reader of Falkland's poems may see the viscount's growth as a poet, a growth which epitomizes the achievement of English poets in general in the first half of the seventeenth century, from writing in a style almost as tangled as Donne's in the Satires to one that rivals Dryden's in its clarity and force.

This thesis is an attempt to redefine the concept of imagery in the ayres of Thomas Campion's first published work, A Booke of Ayres (1601). Though Walter Davis and others have commented on the auditory imagery of Campion's poetry, no one has carried out a systematic analysis of the visual elements which are present. The five groups discussed here are night and darkness, fire, the heart, the eyes, and music. After a survey of the solo ayre in England as Campion knew and understood it, there is a discussion of the verbal connection between ayres which relate them to one another and to the five groups of images already mentioned. Analysis of individual songs within each of these five categories demonstrates that Campion's images are conceptualized more then they are visualized, and musical examples point out places where Campion uses text painting to clarify and highlight these image groups.

Catherine, Man and Wife, and Dombey and Son will be compared with respect to their treatment of women characters. Each novel is either sympathetic to feminism and the treatment of women as equals, or constraining in its attitudes toward women. This assessment will be based on the fate of the rebellious woman character, the degree of conventionality found in its women characters and whether the attitudes toward women expressed generally in the novel are enlightened, or conventional. Also discussed will be how novels by nineteenth-century British novelists such as Thackeray and Collins and nineteenth-century British marriage laws were interrelated. In each of the three novels, there is one unconventional independent woman character whose presence encourages the reader to be sympathetic to women's concerns. However, if the novel views the rebellious woman character negatively and punishes her, then the novel did not accept this new woman.

John Donne's amorous poetry, from his most rapt paeans to mutual love to his crassest, most misogynous elegies, displays a pervasive desire for recognition. Much recent criticism of Donne's work has interpreted this desire as a masculine will-to-power which seeks to fashion or preserve an identity by staging verbal mastery over women and by soliciting the homosocial adulation of men. The love poetry, in this view, derives from a narcissistic drive for omnipotence and prestige which has been foiled and redirected by the stratified structure and historicity of Donne's social world. Shaping this analysis is an implicit assumption that the desire for recognition is the same as a will-to-power which finds its gratification only through the incessant imposition of hierarchical relations between the self and the other. As in the first stage of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, the self achieves recognition solely through domination. Donne's desire for recognition, however, is not founded on such a need for domination. Rather, it is the source of what I call a dream of symmetry. This dream, rooted in the intersubjective dynamics of early childhood, stems from the desire to engage with a powerful other who is attuned to and mirrors the desires of the self. In Donne's work, the dream of symmetry surfaces explicitly in Donne's great poems of mutual love where the twinning of eyes and tropes of mirroring suggest metonymically a more fundamental twinning of desires. This dream also drives Donne's rhetoric of seduction where the poet-seducer's primary wish is to induce a recalcitrant other to mimic his (or her) desires. Only when this dream of symmetry is troubled by the very subjectivity of the other which the dream itself requires or when the pleasures of mirroring yield to sexual anxieties does the desire for recognition begin to produce a misogynous rhetoric of power. It is in such moments, and only in such moments, that Donne descends into a poetics of domination and death in which the dream of symmetry slides beneath assertions of power and the desire for recognition loses its intersubjective savor.

The increasing invisibility of servants in the novels of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Jane Austen corresponds to the gradual transition of the master/servant relationship from a paternalistic to a contractual model in mid to late eighteenth-century England. Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1741) and Tom Jones (1749) illustrate the destabilizing effects of capitalism, individualism, and the formation of the middling class on the paternalistic model, a model in which Fielding was deeply invested. In the paternalistic model the master's authority to govern and the servant's duty to submit are absolute and unquestioned. Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747) first critique and then rearm the paternalistic model. Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753), on the other hand, articulates the contractual model of master/servant relations, which recognizes servants as autonomous wage laborers. Grandison also introduces a new paradigm of domesticity. This new paradigm transfers the management of the household to a housekeeper, an arrangement that frees the master to pursue political and economic interests in the public sphere and allows the mistress to engage in leisure and philanthropic service. Grandison thus redefines the roles and responsibilities of the master, mistress, and servants in order to validate emerging bourgeois assumptions about gender roles, family, and class distinctions. Austen adopts Richardson's new domestic paradigm, but she moves even further in the direction of servant as paid commodity rather than as protected member of the household. In Mansfield Park, for example, she revisits Pamela in order to show the dangers of blurring class boundaries. Even more noteworthy, however, is Austen's use of rhetorical strategies that are designed to push servants to the social periphery. Austen exploits servants as visible, class-bound commodities that signal their superiors' social status, but she renders servants invisible as subjects in order to legitimize the emerging and vulnerable middling class as it strives to establish itself as a new source of social and moral order.

In the last decade, literary studies has been dominated by an examination of race, class, and gender as major categories of subjectivity. Recently, however, this almost holy trinity has been challenged and complicated by new considerations---the concept of "nation" in post-colonial studies and "place" in environmental literature. This dissertation argues for the usefulness of another aspect of being, age, as a determiner of identity that does significant cultural work. The project focuses specifically on midlife in nineteenth-century Britain. In contrast to twentieth-century midlife which some theorists argue is dominated by ideologies of decline, Victorian middle age operates as a protean construction that maintains an unresolved competition between gain and loss. I examine ways in which these two conceptions of midlife vie for cultural authority as they are heavily complicated by gender. In the introduction, I discuss age as a construct largely determined by cultural forces but also subject to certain biological constraints, and I provide a brief history of midlife as well as outlining the major characteristics of middle age in the Victorian era. In chapter one, I identify disputes in beauty and conduct books surrounding the performance of youth versus age in regard to midlife markers such as baldness, gray hair, wrinkles, weight gain, and use of cosmetics. Chapter two explores fictive age anxiety, showing that though women are most at risk for aging, portrayals of middle-age angst occur in marriage plots for both men and women. In chapter three, I consider Victorian brides who are middle aged by comparing Frances Trollope's Widow Barnaby with widows in three of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels. I show notions of decline giving way to increasingly progress-oriented narratives for midlife women. Chapter four examines discourse surrounding "the change of life" for both men and women. The dissertation employs archival materials from beauty and conduct books, as well as medical and longevity texts. Many novels are included that feature midlife, including texts by Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Grant Allen, and Margaret Oliphant.

This dissertation investigates the spatial proximity between the criminal and nineteenth-century British society and the concomitant desire to produce a separation between the two. It focuses on two central events in English penal history, the formation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 and the phasing out of criminal transportation in the 1860s, in order to examine the interaction between criminal law, cultural attitudes about crime, and fictional representations of criminals and the police. Chapter one explains the development of a unified police force as one of several efforts to organize the vast and confusing spaces that comprised London. It examines urban sketches by John Wight, Pierce Egan, and Charles Dickens and underscores each author's attempt to provide a safe but accurate urban experience for his readers. Chapter two reads Newgate Novels alongside police manuals from the 1820s and 30s in order to demonstrate that the novels' project is the same as the police's: to read faces and bodies and identify criminals based on physical features. Chapters three and four examine the interaction between the end of criminal transportation and mid-century narratives that feature returned convicts. As the reintegration of reformed prisoners becomes a social imperative, fictional texts explore the possibility of representing reform and reintegrating characters back into the homes from which they were previously expelled. Close readings of Tom Taylor's stage melodrama, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, and Dickens's Great Expectations appear in these chapters. Chapter five examines two narratives about scandal: newspaper accounts of the 1877 Turf Frauds, in which four Scotland Yard detectives were indicted, and Lady Audley's Secret, an 1862 sensation novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. By reading the two sensational narratives alongside Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, the chapter details the very fine line between self-improvement and scandalous fraud. The chapter demonstrates that fraudulent behavior activated the production of perhaps equally fraudulent police figures that were perceived as solutions.