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My dissertation examines a group of seventeenth-century English religious dissenters whose shared millenarian beliefs, despite other theological and political differences, united them in an imagined community of readers. Those within this circle, including Eleanor Davies, John and Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, exerted a profound influence on the political debates of the 1640s to 1680s on both sides of the royalist-dissenter divide. The revival of ancient chiliastic doctrines, which held that certain events foretold in the Bible had not yet come to pass and that Christ soon would return to earth to rule over his saints, opened Holy Writ to history on an unprecedented scale. Millenarians treated the actors and events of the English Civil War as texts to be read and interpreted typologically, their mysteries unlocked through the divine mechanism of a Word unmediated except by human reason and the individual reader's spiritual communion with Christ. Positioned within this schema, and against the traditional agents of religious, state, and other institutional authority, readers arrogated to themselves positions of primacy. Simultaneously bound by the Bible's teleology and liberated by the metaphoric multivalency of its individual semantic units, literate prophets ceaselessly negotiated and renegotiated their personal and national identities using the tools of literary analysis and biblical exegesis. Precisely because their prophecies were rooted in acts of interpretation, they were able to revise their readings and reading protocols to accommodate shifting historical circumstances. As a result, the hermeneutic was able to exert a persistent influence upon narratives and literary representations of English history. Not only did millenarianism continue to win converts among radicals even after 1660, but its epistemological and ontological bases also framed in important, if sometimes refracted, ways royalist enactments of identity, agency, and history as late as the Exclusion Crisis, as I demonstrate in a study of Aphra Behn's Rover plays. Tracing the development of the hermeneutic from 1625-1681 allows me to illustrate the centrality of reading practices generally to historical change and, conversely, the effects of historical change on reading practices. / English

My dissertation explores a turn in British literature back toward naturalism in the late modernist period, a literary move I call unnaturalism to refer to the way it resembles but deviates from the classic naturalist tradition of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, and George Orwell separately play with the form that can best merge literature and politics. The resulting novels—The Years (1937), Murphy (1938), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and Coming Up for Air (1939)—might not all look like naturalism, but they share a concern with determinism and social conditions, a tendency toward extreme external detail, and an engagement with contemporary scientific and medical discourse. Socially and politically engaged, these writers work to expose the mechanics behind the ‘natural’ order and reveal social determinism misrepresented as biological determinism. Rather than work to disprove or deny this way of understanding the world, the novels of my study complicate all singular understandings of human development. In short, these writers recover naturalist conventions in order to expose a functional determinism that is not rooted in biology—is not, in another word, natural—but rather constructed and reconstructed by contemporary discourses. By focusing on the details of the immediate, individual experience of women and economic or national outsiders, unnaturalists seek a more accurate presentation of the deep inequalities of society and the forces that keep them in place. In The Years, Woolf focuses on the way women continue to be limited by social norms despite the women’s rights developments of the early twentieth century (the professions were unbarred in 1919 and the Representation of the People Act of 1928 provided women with the same suffrage terms as men). In Murphy, Beckett gestures toward the growing field of experimental psychology, revealing the determinist assumptions on which the field relies. Rhys reveals similar assumptions in popular male depictions of women in Good Morning, Midnight as she addresses and revises Sigmund Freud’s “Femininity” and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Orwell looks at politics and language itself in Coming Up for Air, turning to sensory description as a way of working within a language tradition that he sees as keeping in place an anachronistic class system. / English

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2003. / Advisers: Linda Bamber; Sheila Emerson. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-206). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, June 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Education, December 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-176).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1938. / Typescript. Includes abstract and vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 433-484).