Current studies of T. S. Eliot explore his social poetic, his religion, his sexuality, and his place in the history of modernism and contemporary poetics. "T. S. Eliot's Civilized Savage" links these interests, beginning with Eliot's controversial masculinity. Eliot constructs an impotent poet who engages in celibate heterosexual relationships; he uses comparative religious studies (such as Frazer's Golden Bough and Harrison's Themis) to transform these relationships into a social imperative. "The Death of Saint Narcissus," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Hysteria" compare Eliot's poet to Frazer's self-sacrificing god, pitting him against a voracious mother goddess who demands the poet's self-sacrifice. Eliot's lady poses as an alibi for his own hysteria and as a spiritual catalyst; the poet is reborn in the Father. By Ash Wednesday, Eliot rewrites heterosexuality using Christian iconography. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" exposes Eliot's ambivalent relationship to masculinity and maternity: though Eliot describes a purely scientific poetic reproduction, the essay bears traces of his maternal fascinations, though these images are sterilized by the rhetoric of Immaculate Conception. By 1927, Eliot converts to the Church of England, abandons Vivienne, rekindles a chaste romance with Emily Hale, develops his poetry of confession, and refashions the Lady. Now she acts as the perfect vessel for God's Word, and her "torn and most whole" body eliminates the threat of sexual intercourse. Subsumed in her, Eliot's poet becomes God's womb. Eliot's contemporary fall from grace seems to stem from repeated exposures of his erotic and religious masquerades. Christopher Ricks's publication of Eliot's notebooks foregrounds Eliot's racist, sexist and classicist ideology and Michael Hastings's Tom and Viv suggests that Eliot blamed his hysteria on Vivienne while profiting from the marriage. Eliot's mysticism appears to be an impotent attempt to escape domestic horrors, but a re-examination of this diagnosis may reveal our own construction of sexuality, poetics, politics and spirituality. As we recoil from Eliot's corrosive "conservatism" perhaps we safeguard our own.

<p> 'Cornered' interrogates woman's relationship to the domestic space, themes of the gothic, and the haunting dependence that some women have with the home, historically and even in the present. To articulate this idea, Kat used her own writing combined with language from the diaries of the Bront&euml; sisters, as a lens through which to explore the woman whose home and most intimate surroundings are the very instruments of the imprisonment of her mind, body and personhood.</p><p> The Bront&euml; sisters wrote wildly imaginative stories, while their real lives were restricted and controlled by their father. How is this struggle towards duality represented in the secret spaces of the home, in the language of the walls, corners, doorways and other charged locations? By interrogating this relationship, Kat can use it as a metaphor to explore the line between public and private, where that line is, and when it is blurred. The Bront&euml;s frequently turned towards their intimate surroundings as a metaphor for emotions and feelings that they were forbidden to express outright in the home. Many aspects of the self are buried in this landscape. Kat is interested in excavating these sites, to uncover what is obstructed behind the fa&ccedil;ade, to remove the myth of an idealized home, and examine what lingers.</p>

<p> This dissertation explores the possibility of an early modern cultural materialism in selected dramatic works of Thomas Middleton in which fasting plays a prominent thematic role. The once venerable Christian practice of fasting was compartmentalized into secular and religious components in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in England even as its overall practical contour was preserved largely intact. It was subjected to conflicting representations and programs for reform, and appropriated by differing political and ecclesiastical factions. The vicissitudes that beset fasting offered a fertile ground for cultivating an understanding about the nature of the material basis of cultural formations and the historical dynamic governing their fates. It is this indigenous cultural materialist understanding, I argue, that Middleton's treatment of fasting in his dramatic works exemplifies. </p><p> The first chapter offers a history of fasting from the early church to its secularization under Queen Elizabeth as Protestant <i>status quo ante</i> in reference to which later departures and appropriations took place. One such departure by King James is the subject of the next chapter on <i>A Chaste Maid in Cheapside</i> in which the king's attempt to re-sacralize fasting is subjected to a materialist satire and made into a springboard for imagining a utopia of a specifically materialist kind. The next chapter on <i>The Puritan</i> contextualizes the play in terms of the puritan attempts to incorporate fasting as part of the Protestant prayer regime in the place of cunning folk's witchcraft and Catholic ecclesiastical magic. <i>Masque of Heroes</i> and Christmas keeping at the Jacobean Inner Temple are the subjects of the last chapter. I discuss the prominence in the masque of the anthropomorphized Fasting Day in connection with inter-generational and inter-constituency struggle for the custodianship of the valued custom of Christmas keeping. </p><p> These studies represent a series of historicist contributions to Middleton scholarship on the individual works. More broadly, they constitute an attempt to exploit insights from cultural history and material culture studies to broaden the scope of the study of religion in early modern English drama. </p>

This dissertation began as a colloquium paper on "Hebraism and Hellenism in Milton's Samson Agonistes." The question was raised, "Well, just how much Hellenism and how much Hebraism did you find in Samson Agonistes?" The question for Milton, when he wished to write a drama about Samson as one of the Saints of the Holiest of Holies, were first, What form of drama would best realize his great idea, and then, How far was it possible to adapt Greek structure to Christian theme and spirit. Milton found, as Ker has observed, "in the form of Greek tragedy exactly the right measure and mode for something not yet accomplished in his epic poems." Yet the assertion that Milton used primarily Hellenic form for the Hebraic (or Judaic-Christian) spirit, is not sufficient. For the reader, other questions arise. How far did Milton use the Greek form, and what did he create that was analogous to it? What artistic effect resulted? Is the spirit predominantly Christian or predominantly tragic? How are spirit and form, Christianity and tragedy, Hebraism and Hellenism, modified by one another and reconciled? Thus it is the purpose of the dissertation to analyze the quality and manner of Milton's synthesis of the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions in Samson Agonistes. Although in many respects Coleridge is right in saying that Samson Agonistes is "the finest imitation of the ancient Greek drama that ever had been or," he characteristically adds, "ever would be written," it must be remembered that "the pattern or example of everything is the perfectest in that kind, whereof we still come short, though we transcend or go beyond it...For even in things alike there is diversity; and those that do seem to accord do manifestly disagree." Milton wrote the finest imitation of Greek tragedy for the very reason that he transcended more imitation by vitally re-creating the Greek form to express those elements of the Hebraic spirit most analogous to the Hellenic spirit and compatible with a modified Hellenic form.

In this study of Mallett's dramatic work, I have relied heavily on four collections of letters: the correspondence found in the first two volumes of Aaron Hill's Works (1753), George Sherburn's Correspondence of Alexander Pope, Alan D. McKillop's Letters and Documents of James Thomson, and David Mason Little's unpublished Letters of David Mallet. Unless otherwise indicated, references to these collections cite letters, not introductory material or annotations. But the summary of Mallet's life given in the first chapter is based mainly upon the introductory essays in Little's Letters and Frederick Dinsdale's edition of Mallet's Ballads and Songs (1857). Other sources used in the summary are specifically noted. The biographical material elaborated upon in succeeding chapters is built of information drawn from the correspondence indicated above.

For a true understanding of many of the early sixteenth century interludes it is essential to know the religious doctrine that prompted their composition. This doctrine, based on Martin Luther's teachings, the reformers called the "new learning." It was popularized in England by Luther's books and by William Tyndale's translations and treatises. Just as the early morality plays of the fifteenth century show a close connection with the popular moral treatises of the time, so these early sixteenth century religious interludes reflect the teachings of the moral treatises of the "new learning." It will be the object of this dissertation to analyze from the popular treatises the two systems of salvation behind the morality plays of the late fifteenth century and the interludes and dialogues of the early sixteenth and to demonstrate the relationship of play to treatise.

This study investigates stage props as alternate stage representations of female characters. Since the 1970s, a great deal has been written independently about both stage props and about women on the early modern stage, but the two are seldom discussed together. Recent theater criticism has sought to establish a link between stage props and their broader social utility outside the theater, while gender criticism has investigated the paradoxical position of early modern women as both subject and object, particularly in regard to women as consumers and commodities. This work draws together these two lines of investigation in order to highlight the substitution that often occurs between female characters and "female" stage props. The traditional relationship between character and prop, in which the prop is firmly situated as an extension of character, exists as a specifically masculine relationship seldom available to female characters. I focus on the way in which the frequent disappearance of female characters within plays allows women to be represented by one or another of a small group of "female" props like rings, necklaces and other trinkets. The readings of the plays of Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur suggest that in order to witness female identity in its fullness, attention must be paid not only to interpersonal relationships between gendered subjects, but to the relationships visualized between female subject and object as well. "Female" stage props function as a means of furthering the understanding of how female subjectivity differs from that of male subjectivity on the early modern stage.

Book 3 of Jonathan Swift's Travels into the Remote Nations of the World offers a thorough critique of the eighteenth-century scientific world--a world marked by systematization, theoretical speculation, stories of "progress," and innovation, which people have commonly embraced and into which the "modern" mind had unresistingly and perhaps unconsciously placed itself. Because Book 3 appears to indulge in a transparent attack on some specific eighteenth-century events, ridicule seems to be the primary device used to undermine the practices of the scientific community. However closer inspection reveals that Swift's satire is not grounded in the topical particulars of the Eighteenth Century, but addresses such general problems, such as moral deficiency, intellectual arrogance, tyranny, which are common to human experience. Moreover, his attack, not dependent upon ridicule, involves complex rhetorical strategies, including some subversive reader-indicting techniques that challenge and ultimately compel readers to take an active role in resolving the dilemma (intellectual, philosophical, moral, etc.) into which he has placed them. Thus the process of reading Book 3 makes the reader both an active supporter and sympathetic critic of scientific practices. The resulting tension is a primary contributor to the textual problems that have troubled the critics of Book 3 since the Travels first came out, but it is also what makes scrupulous attention to the text worthwhile.

In The Music of Time, Anthony Powell examines the tension between the internal reality of memory and the external social world in which the self is defined. The twelve volumes are presented as the fictional memoirs of Nicholas Jenkins; Powell's interest is in depicting voluntary memory and the stories we tell to explain who we are. Since Nick is both character and narrator, two philosophies of time are developed. On the one hand, internalized time is depicted; the memories Nick the narrator records are present simultaneously in his mind, and thus Nick remembers the past in terms of the future. But Nick the character functions in external, sequential time. Representing both internal and external concepts of time demands stylistic innovations; the effort is that the work's style is distinguished by its maintenance of chronology and accommodation of interruptions. Furthermore, since he functions as both narrator and protagonist, Nick must be defined socially. The voices of other characters are heard, and a bridge is thus formed between Nick's internal world, his memories, and an external, objective world; and the pleasure of shared experience, the basic impulse for narration, is reaffirmed. Finally, what makes narrative possible is order, seeing patterns in experience, and it is through the agency of memory that we detect patterns in external reality. Patterns are found to be at once imposed by the mind to order information and revealed in experience. These patterns are found on three levels: in language, plot, and characterization. But that patterns are discernible in experience does not mean that Powell is depicting a deterministic world; his characters seem to act as free agents, and the final cause of any episode in a pattern is indeterminable. Those causes that are discerned are those which fit the future effect. There is thus throughout The Music of Time a dynamic quality to Nick's narration: a stress between the power of the past to determine the future and the power of the future to determine the past; and it is through the depiction of individual memory and the patterns of social life that this tension is realized.

The fiction of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf is situated, as are the writers themselves, in the late-Victorian middle-class ideology of individualism, defining the self as autonomous and self-determining and positioning women with domesticity, defining them as relational and self-denying. Although their representations of women and strategies of point of view indicate construction within these dominant discourses, their narratives also refute, sometimes inadvertently, these same discourses. Richardson's fiction suggests an image of identity rooted in individualism, in notions of an autonomous, unified individuality, associated in her culture with the masculine, whereas Woolf's suggests a basis in individualism's denial of an autonomous, unified feminine identity. The fiction of both assumes a transcendental self, a notion key to individualism, in the image of a "true" self that avoids situation within material and social circumstances. This image appears in Richardson's fiction in the perception of an untouched self and in Woolf's, in the perception of a dispersed self. In their representations of women, both also rely on notions of feminine identity that reiterate the cultural definitions of gender. In Pilgrimage, Richardson's central character, Miriam imagines her self as autonomous, essential, and transcendental. This notion also appears to govern the narrative focused through Miriam's perspective and related through a voice sometimes indistinguishable from hers. But the narrative provides a dual perspective on Miriam that refutes the notions of individualism grounding it and her imagined self. In contrast to Richardson's, Woolf's female characters, in particular in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, are not unified, autonomous individuals, but instead are fragmented and dispersed, and in their dispersal, they recapitulate both relational, self-denying femininity and transcendental individuality. Woolf's narrative techniques also seem to valorize the culturally constructed feminine by incorporating multiple perspectives and voices. However, Woolf's narrative strategy, like Richardson's, exposes the ideology that grounds it by granting the female narrators an authority ordinarily denied women and by exposing the failure of the relational ego to create a community of characters.