This dissertation is an examination of the complex problem of narrative voice in three novels of E. M. Forster. Much of the recent critical commentary on Forster's narrative voice either discusses narrative voice as an extension of character, or discusses narrative voice as a biographical and psychological extension of Forster. Despite these approaches to Forster's narrative voice, Forster's narrative voice continues to "irritate" us, as it did Lionel Trilling in 1944, in its "refusal to be great." I examine Forster's narrative voice as an autonomous element disconnected from the trappings of characterological, biographical and psychological criticism. I discuss how the narrative voice develops a moral and philosophical view that begins with a pessimism about the possibility of human relationships in Where Angels Fear To Tread, continues with a fantasy of perfectly unified relationships in A Room With A View, and culminates in A Passage To India in which the narrative voice promises unity and continuance through an implied acceptance of metaphysical and metaphorical assumptions. The protagonists in the three novels that I discuss all have an experience which they cannot define in words. The characters' inability to define experience parallels the narrative voice's detachment from the reader, and it also foreshadows the narrative voice's ultimate refusal to provide a definition, or an interpretation of itself. The characters' inability to define experience makes them appear to be characters who are limited, or "flat" stereotypes; and in all three cases, the protagonist requires another figure to act as an intermediary between it and the totalizing experience of "the other." This intermediary figure provides character with a circumlocutory interpretation of experience; and it therefore evokes the characters' simultaneous desire and inability to describe the subject of its experience. This circumlocutory figure becomes a figure that exposes and exists within the implied space between character and narrative voice, and the narrative voice and the reader. When the narrative voice describes a character's use of a circumlocutory figure, it points to both the character's, and its own elision.

This thesis examines ways in which the re-presentation of the city in literature can serve as a model for the re-presentation of the city in architecture. The vehicle for this investigation is the memory theater, a theater in which the "play" is enacted by the spectator. The "play" is the play of the memory/imagination as it confronts a series of seemingly meaningless abstractions. The experience of reading the city as a text simulates the dynamic of the memory theater. In Ulysses, Joyce employs the memory theater's strategy of role reversal to reconstruct Dublin in the text by forcing the reader into a position of co-authorship. In order to re-present the city, architecture must effect a similar suspension of meaning in formal and spatial terms. I have attempted to create the memory theater as a means of demonstrating through architecture that the city is written by whomever reads it.

In the Legend, Chaucer manipulates the language of the narrator and the women, turning analytic attention toward the problem of gender categories, thereby undermining proscribed behavior and the language that represents that behavior. Nominalism, with its emphasis on singularity, is particularly suited to the problem of gender categories because it forces attention to the particulars of the man or woman, eventually draining the category of that which gives it substance. Examining the legends closely with the nominalist principle of the particularity of language firmly in mind reveals women who are radically different from one another, who are not faceless victims. Cleopatra, Hypermnestra and Thisbe, for example, are imprisoned in a patriarchial system which rewards passivity and punishes independent thought and action. However, Chaucer allows these three characters to use their bodies and linguistic license to reach beyond the bars of the hierarchical prison, thereby disgendering the text in complex ways. Again, the legends of Lucrece and Dido are connected to Troilus and Criseyde through the exploration of the tension between public and private experiences and the imagery of seeing and invisibility. Finally, Philomela's story is the most anomalous story in the poem, and thus it reveals Chaucer's attempt to reassert a particularized view of experience. These surprisingly clear-cut distinctions between characters, behavior, and reader expectations grow out of attention to the particulars of experience and language. The demand for universals made by Alceste and the God of Love provides a contrast for the close attention to language and experience in the legends themselves.

"Spatializing Alice, en passant," uses Lewis Carroll's texts, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass, as a resource for developing a speculative theory for reading architecture. Such a reading, called architecture, en passant, investigates the way perception of measurement systems impacts the social construction of identity. It looks for evidence of these interactions by analyzing the occupation of space. An en passant reading assumes that architecture is generally conceived and perceived as pertaining to an ideal, objective measurement system that has the power to act on the people who occupy it, but can not itself be manipulated by them. Architecture, en passant, on the other hand, reveals relative measurement systems that are embedded in architectural forms. It proposes that these traditionally ignored methods of measurement significantly influence the way the built environment is occupied and the cultural impact that architecture has on its occupants.

This dissertation examines the unprecedented, and previously unanalyzed, proliferation of miniature men in male-authored literature of the eighteenth century. Through readings of canonical and lesser-known texts---ranging from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays and Joseph Boruwlaski's Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf---I analyze "little men" literature of the 1700s as representing a network of interrelated male identity crises that emerged in the nascent modern era. I argue that these various examples of diminutive men---typically featured alongside enormous women---encode anxieties about the emasculation of the "Englishman" in the arenas of marriage, science, and sensibility, as redefined by the rise of the middle class and the emergence of women as consumers in the new marketplace. By reading the explosion of little-men literature in the eighteenth century as a response to these defining aspects of the new British culture, I make a case for this strange trend as a key factor in the formation of modern masculinity.

The ballads examined here are from F. J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, the authoritative collection of ballads. Though definitions of the ballad vary, most agree that the ballad is an orally transmitted folksong that tells a story. The Child ballad collection has stood a solitary monument from its publication (1882-1894). In it Child brought together from manuscripts and printed sources all of the extant English and Scottish ballads that he regarded as authentic. Though Child's work itself was groundbreaking, exploring territory marginal to the sort of academic study making up his official duties as professor of English at Harvard, his collection soon became canonical, subjected to critical study as a sub-genre. Perhaps because Child himself died before he could write his essay on what the ballads were and what they meant, since Child's death, much of the critical work has been an attempt to fill in what was left undone by Child, that is, defining the ballad and analyzing the criteria by which Child made his choices. In more recent times, critical studies of Child's works have applied psychoanalytic and feminist critiques to selected ballads. Yet, no previous work has examined the relationship of Child himself to his collection. This work sets out to view the Child collection in terms of literary critical theory, showing that Child's collecting is an act of Lacanian paternity whereby the collector, attracted especially by the bodies of the female characters, is moved to bring all the ballads under his dominion yet is subverted in his desire for dominion as female characters present themselves in terms of "bodytalk." Chapter one shows Child's collecting as Lacanian paternity. Chapter two focuses on the presentation of women's bodies in the ballads, The final chapter shows that the women characters in selected ballads speak according to what critic Jane Burns terms "bodytalk."

Food and eating have attracted the attention of scholars in different disciplines, but no one has yet attempted a systematic study of their social and cultural significance in early modern England. This dissertation undertakes such a study of a period in which the traditional social hierarchy was loosening and economic resources were changing hands in an unprecedented pace. Analyzing contemporary drama along with medical treatises, self-help manuals, and popular literatures, I demonstrate the way in which cultural beliefs and practices accompanying preparation and consumption of food contribute to the process of social formation and, more specifically, to the making of a class and gendered body. I argue that, though women's involvement in food service and provision is indispensable in the maintenance of the social order, they are usually identified with the unruly forces from below, threatening to become not just the medium but the agent of pollution and destruction.

While an early modern queen was expected to act as a stabilizing presence by giving birth to heirs and thus securing the line of succession, an examination of the early modern drama reveals that queens who were mothers were, on the contrary, perceived as threats to both domestic and political stability. Dramatic representations of queen mothers illuminate the historical and political contexts in which Queen Elizabeth, in particular, had to negotiate her roles as both a queen and mother. Gorboduc and Jocasta were produced in the midst of the succession debate as part of the widespread attempt to persuade Elizabeth to become a wife and mother. Yet paradoxically, these plays, with their monstrously (self-)destructive mothers, could only have reinforced Elizabeth's notion that biological maternity and queenship were incompatible. Despite Elizabeth's ultimate cultivation of a metaphoric maternity, prevailing fears of a queen mother's power remained, as evinced by two plays produced during the third decade of Elizabeth's reign. Shakespeare's King John demonstrates the ability of savvy political women such as Constance and Eleanor, who mirror the battling cousins Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, to exploit prevailing fears about maternity in their quests for political power. But they are killed off, just as Zenocrate, in Marlowe's Tamburlaine , falls prey to Tamburlaine's anxieties about her vast influence as both a queen and mother. Queen Anna, the wife of James I, provides an historical example of a young queen mother who capitalized on the power that maternity afforded her before she was marginalized in the Jacobean court. In the last years of her life, she attempted through masque productions, specifically Tethys' Festival, to recover her position as the Jacobean matriarch. Anna, like the other figures of this study, met a premature death. These portraits of maternity suggest that Elizabeth's decision to forego biological motherhood, rather than ending her legacy, instead may well have preserved it. In a culture in which a queen's maternal power was both feared and resisted, Elizabeth, understandably, elected to cultivate a maternity that threatened neither the patriarchy nor her own physical well-being.

In response to economic and social transformations of the period, early modern authors obsessively investigated the significance of upward and downward social mobility. Identification, in the sense of determining someone's identity, is a crucial measure of the permeability of class and gender boundaries: when it becomes impossible to tell who someone is, the mechanisms that keep individuals in their proper place have broken down. This dissertation examines Shakespearean scenes of misidentification. and recognition to uncover the ramifications of a dramatic situation that draws on an early modern fear of encountering the unknown other in a rapidly changing world. The Comedy of Errors and The Winter's Tale feature thematically central examples of (mis)identification in the city and at court, which I consider in relation to representations of social identity and identification in cony-catching pamphlets and courtesy literature of the period. Women and socially mobile characters are central to Shakespeare's scenes of identification. Their presence poses unsettling questions about the possibility of a secure social order and a stable subjectivity within that order. Shakespeare's plays set up a parallel between misidentification and suspicion of female sexuality, so that ultimately questions of social instability and class are resolved through the reinstatement of the family. Recognition scenes attempt to fix, or, to use an early modern term, "decipher," the unreliable other. Misidentification and recognition in Shakespeare's plays represent the social order in opposing ways. While misidentification entertains the possibility that performative acts produce identity, recognition puts forward a natural order that is merely reflected by identification. Performance is central to both, but whereas in one it is fundamental to identification and destructive of certainties, in the other it is presented as secondary and conducive to harmony. Such contradictions are marked by deliberate generic shifts that show the difficulty of resolving the questions posed in scenes of misidentification. Shakespeare's ambiguous endings point to resolution, but fail to eliminate the instability of social position, caused by a lasting problem with interpretation of the other.

Shakespeare creates a Rome in which he brings together and reinvents Rome's political and military brilliance and the work of its greatest poets and historians. As Shakespeare's Romans have become to a great extent "our" Romans, the critical tendency has been to ignore his manipulations and read these plays as promulgating and continuing a unified tradition of "classical" values. But the line of descent is not so clear, and Shakespeare's Roman individuals are, in fact, diminished by this tradition. His Rome often seems to function less as a place name than as an incantation of history and ideology, while his individual Romans struggle to escape this cultural determination. They speak and act as though defining individual identity were simply a matter of defining this cultural entity, this "Rome," but reveal (in soliloquy, by juxtaposition with alternate social constructions, and through class conflict) their inability to construct cohesive private states of being. Shakespeare's Roman plays thus become tacit investigations into the core ethical foundations upon which Rome built its classical legacy. Romanness in Shakespeare connotes a divided quality of being; the cultural legacy shared by all Romans makes every Roman an avatar of the state, but individual Romans cannot fully translate their shared history into present action. The conflict is one between the passive acceptance of a generic and glorious past, and the implementation of this past at the expedient level demanded by the action of the plays: determining reasons to kill Caesar in Julius Caesar, transferring martial prowess into bureaucratic efficiency in Coriolanus, and interpreting masculine glamor through the critical perceptions of a feminine culture in Antony and Cleopatra . The plays are linked by the gap between Rome as a cultural entity and its citizens, who are searching for a practical and individual ethic. The chapters are organized as they illuminate this division. I introduce the major Roman plays with a general discussion of Rome's paradoxical status: as a system or culture it continually disappoints the citizens who turn to it for ethical instruction, while at the same time it produces individuals who identify completely with it. Next I discuss the stoicism of Julius Caesar as it is an emblematic philosophy of Rome's ethical failure. In Coriolanus, the nascent republic of Rome tries and fails to carve out a sphere of self-containment and self-renewal, a failure paralleled by Coriolanus' failure to adequately represent it. Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes Rome at its most powerful and most fragile. It is at the peak of its imperial efficiency, yet vulnerable to Cleopatra, and Shakespeare draws an imaginative and potential correlation between the apparently dissimilar states of Rome and Egypt. The final chapter looks briefly at Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, as plays bracketing the major works (and Shakespeare's career) but sharing an ethical viewpoint that looks ahead to later seventeenth-century depictions of Rome.