Edna O'Brien is a prolific and highly successful contemporary Irish novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Her first six novels were banned in 1960s Ireland and since then, her subversive writing about Irish women's lives has often sparked controversy and debate in and even beyond her Irish homeland. This thesis explores O'Brien's portrayal of rural Irish girlhood in post-Independence, twentieth-century Ireland in the novels The Country Girls (1960), A Pagan Place (1970), the short story collection Returning (1982), as well as the later novel Down by the River (1997). Chapter One delves into the mother-daughter bond in O'Brien's fiction. Chapter Two, in turn, examines the often painful father-daughter relationship Finally, Chapter Three discusses O'Brien's complex portrayal of female sexuality. This study argues that O'Brien constructs powerful and haunting fictional voices of "Irish girlhood" and through them, makes a unique contribution to the Irish Bildungsroman tradition. Her fiction points to some of the immense challenges confronted by young adolescent girls in mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland, not only in their homes but also within their relationships, schools, and rural communities.

This thesis investigates Nicholas Love's negotiation of the social and religious tensions of early fifteenth-century England---caused by increasing lay literacy, the ongoing Wycliffite controversy, and the aftermath of the Lancastrian takeover---in the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, his translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi. It demonstrates that although Love's Middle English translation extended the Meditationes to a broad lay readership, manuscripts of the Mirror circulating ever more widely as the fifteenth century progressed, the work was early associated with figures in positions of power, ranging from Archbishop Arundel, the leader of the orthodox suppression of Lollardy, to Thomas Beaufort, an extender of Lancastrian military power abroad, to Sibyl de Felton, the abbess of a prosperous and somewhat worldly convent, who might have used the Mirror to stir up orthodox zeal among her nuns. It is argued that despite these connections, the intentional conservatism with which Love condescends to his lay readers, and even the aggressive orthodoxy of the Treatise on the Sacrament, which is original to Love, this work is more than a piece of Church propaganda, for, retaining the Meditationes's emphasis on Christ's human relationships, it invites its readers to an intimate and emotionally charged encounter with Jesus, the divine human being who is both the instigator and the object of their devotion. Finally, it notes the paradox that in the Treatise on the Sacrament, which closes the work, Love incorporates material that is dramatically powerful but theologically problematic.

Muriel Spark's detached, and often dark, sense of humour has brought her prolific body of work both popular and critical acclaim. However, some critics lament that she treats the events and characters of her novels too lightly; that her deliberately cultivated sense of distance prevents her works from dealing with truly important issues. This thesis argues that Spark's sense of purpose lies within her comic and satirical tone, as opposed to existing in spite of it. In her interviews and speeches, Spark reveals a preoccupation with the idea of ridicule as a method of confronting evil. Her 1971 speech, "The Desegregation of Art," states that "Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left" (35), and urges her audience to abandon more sentimental styles of art in favour of satire. To Spark, self-knowledge is tied to a sense of the absurd, and it is the writer who must both recognize the ridiculous and share that recognition with her audience, all the while delivering pleasure and entertainment. Spark's detached writing style provides a necessary distance for seeing absurdity and avoiding sentimentality. Spark's attitude of detached ridicule mirrors Henri Bergson's social theory, where ridicule is seen as a disciplinary element and becomes a crucial tool for social control. She employs ridicule on two separate and distinct levels: an authorial level, in which she chooses the content she will expose to mockery, and a level within the narrative, where characters use ridicule and laughter to influence events. In The Ballad of Peckham Rye [1960], The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [1960] and The Abbess of Crewe [1974], Spark's powerful characters are those who wield and control satirical insight, an insight which usually accompanies the role of "writer," as they act against oppressive, and often fascist, authority.

In their writings on London's East End slums at the end of the nineteenth century, contemporary urban planners, social reformers, and novelists often attributed many of the slum's social "evils" to the deeper problem of overcrowding. This thesis explores how overcrowding functions as an import ant narrative device in each of Arthur Morrison's own East End novels, A Child of the Jago, To London Town, and The Hole in the Wall. I argue that overcrowding contributes not only to violence and depravity among his characters, but also to their violation of the slum's topographical borders: the pressures of overcrowding ultimately disperse populations into outlying territories. This phenomenon is taken up paradigmatically in Morrison's later novels, yet in relation to London's larger metropolitan expansion. Attention to Morrison's progressive approaches to the city's shifting urban environment extends the critical application of his works from a distinctively "Victorian" one, to include a much broader history of representing London and the East End.

<p> Transgression and identity are intertwined for the modern Arab American in a way where being offensive to one culture at any given moment is impossible to avoid. In this study of <i>Sitt Marie Rose</i> by Etel Adnan, I focus on the various contributing factors to the Arab American&rsquo;s journey to self-discovery. These factors include colonialism and post-colonialism, religion, modern Western influence, and constructed gender roles.</p>

The young John Milton grew up in a musical household, and there is biographical evidence that his youthful passion for music only deepened over the years. My dissertation is not, however, concerned with biography. Instead, what I explore here are the ways in which thinking and writing about music stimulated Milton towards some of his most characteristically radical intellectual and aesthetic positions, and the ways in which Milton, in turn, impelled musical composers to create some of their most characteristic and challenging works. The first two chapters explore, respectively, how Milton’s poetry about music interacts with his distinctive brand of materialist philosophy; and how Milton constructs a poetic model of music that is deployed consistently throughout his poetic œuvre. The second two chapters take up an interdisciplinary mode of analysis to examine, respectively, the problem of cacophony in Handel’s Samson, an oratorio based on Milton’s Samson Agonistes; and the musical representation of fallenness in Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera of Paradise Lost. / English

Children’s Literature Grows Up proposes that there is a revolution occurring in contemporary children’s fiction that challenges the divide that has long existed between literature for children and literature for adults. Children’s literature, though it has long been considered worthy of critical inquiry, has never enjoyed the same kind of extensive intellectual attention as adult literature because children’s literature has not been considered to be serious literature or “high art.” Children’s Literature Grows Up draws upon recent scholarship about the thematic transformations occurring in the category, but demonstrates that there is also an emerging aesthetic and stylistic sophistication in recent works for children that confirms the existence of children’s narratives that are equally complex, multifaceted, and worthy of the same kind of academic inquiry that is afforded to adult literature. This project investigates the history of children’s literature in order to demonstrate the way that children’s literature and adult literature have, at different points in history, grown closer or farther apart, explores the reasons for this ebb and flow, and explains why contemporary children’s literature marks a reunification of the two categories. Employing J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels as a its primary example, Children’s Literature Grows Up demonstrates that this new kind of contemporary children’s fiction is a culmination of two traditions: the tradition of the readerly children’s book and the tradition of the writerly adult novel. With the fairy tales, mythologies, legends, and histories that contemporary writers weave into their texts, contemporary fictions for children incorporate previous defining characteristics of children’s fantasy literature and tap into our cultural memory; with their sophisticated style, complex narrative strategies, and focus on characterization, these new fictions display the realism and seriousness of purpose which have become the adult novel’s defining features. Children’s Literature Grows Up thus concludes that contemporary children’s fiction’s power comes from the way in which it combines story and art by bringing together both the children’s literature tradition and the tradition of the adult novel, as well as the values to which they are allied. Contemporary writers for children therefore raise the stakes of their narratives and change the tradition by moving beyond the expected conventions of their category. / Comparative Literature

This study traces the cultural interplay between Irish and Old English literary landscapes. Combining an ecocritical approach to reading representations of the landscape with a comparatist perspective, each chapter shows that the landscape and the natural world were not only static motifs, but that they allow for the observation of literary influence. The first chapter investigates the political use of the landscape in Irish and Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives. I argue that the anonymous author of the Life of Cuthbert was following a common Irish hagiographic practice of using place-names to claim churches, monasteries, or lands for the writer’s monastic foundation. Furthermore, Bede was aware of this agenda when he rewrote the Life of Cuthbert some twenty years later and consciously removed many of the place-names that localize Cuthbert’s miracles and ministrations from the text. The second chapter compares the use of the natural world in the Old English Boethius to early Irish cosmological treatises. The Old English translator diverges from Boethius in the amplification of cosmological details (e.g., information about the universe and the elements) that have distinct analogues in early Irish sources. The third chapter examines Grendel’s mere in Beowulf as a reflex of the bog of Germanic pre-Christian worship and as a place which draws on imagery common to insular sources pertaining to hell. Reading the mere as an overlay landscape that places pagan past and Christian present in apposition, I argue that this layered landscape is analogous to landscapes in early Irish poetry and saga. In my final chapter, I explore the paradisiacal landscapes presented in Guthlac A and The Phoenix. These descriptions closely parallel representations of paradise in Irish tradition, especially in contemporaneous Irish poetry. Additionally, like early Irish writers, the Old English poets appropriate the landscape of Eden to reflect and emphasize the spiritual state of the monastic. While scholars have often noted connections between early Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature—though few concerning the representation of the landscape or the natural world—this project is the first study to address the influence of early Irish literary landscapes in Old English works. As such, my dissertation holds the potential to redefine ways of thinking about the transmission of influence between these two early medieval cultures. I show that the landscape and the natural world loomed large in early insular literature in ways that have gone unrecognized, while also providing a model to track the paths of literary influence. My investigations revise the received wisdom about Anglo-Saxon literary landscapes, while contributing to a body of scholarship concerned with connections between early Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. / Celtic Languages and Literatures

We usually encounter objects as instances: a pen, a tree, a stream. We approach them as logically subsumed. But George Eliot's Saint Theresa or Charles Dickens’s Mr. Turveydrop is not an instance of something but rather has instances: the uncounted “Theresas” or the “many Mr. Turveydrops.” The individual functions itself as a concept. It becomes a mental representation of a whole class of things. Logically, it is not enclosed but rather encloses. Referentially, it picks out a domain within the world and opens a new space in the mind. The character becomes many. He is everywhere in the way that maple tree or red is. As concepts, these characters become the constituents of thought; we think with persons. Such types are where investigation of the nature of ideas touches that on the possibilities of artistic representation and the risks of social being. But they are also where art itself feels its surround, referentially and methodologically. Through its shared preoccupation with the concept and shared language of the type, the novel became fully alive to concurrent work in other fields and tried its implications; it assimilated, rebuffed, and creatively misprized contemporary theories of the type in philosophical logic, statistics, sociology, medicine, psychology, comparative anatomy, biological taxonomy, and evolutionary theory. Drawing from the outer edge of the novel and beyond it, the type defined the work of the writers studied here—Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy—from its core. / English

The Victorian period is famously characterized by its massiveness, with the vast extent of the British Empire, the enormous size of the nineteenth-century city and the massive scale of the three-volume novel. Yet the Victorians were fascinated with miniature objects, which seemed in their small scale to belong to another world. Each miniature object prompted a unique imaginative fantasy of intimacy (the miniature painting), control (the toy), wonder (the microscope and the fairy) or knowledge (the miniature book). In each case, the miniature posited the possibility of reality with a difference, posing the implicit question: What if? This dissertation traces the miniature across a range of disciplines, from aesthetics and art history to science and technology, and from children’s culture to book history. In so doing, it shows how the miniature points beyond the limits of scientific knowledge and technical capabilities to the outer limits of the visual and speculative imagination. In novels, the miniature introduces elements of fantasy into the framework of realism, puncturing the fabric of the narrative with the internal reveries and longings of often-silent women and children. Miniature objects thus function less as realist details than as challenges to realism. In charting the effect of the miniature, both as a portal into the Victorian imagination and as a challenge to narrative realism, this dissertation puts the techniques of material history to new use. It aims not to describe the world of the Victorians but to show how the Victorians imagined other worlds. / English