In Reform and Cultural Revolution, James Simpson has argued that the many affiliations of John Lydgate (1370-1449) mitigate against the traditional critical portrayal of the poet as a mere Lancastrian propagandist. My dissertation explores the influence of Lydgate's major affiliation, his Benedictine monasticism, on his political work. I argue that the autonomy of the Benedictine order was already under siege a hundred years before the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries and that the resulting anxieties and remedial strategies of the Benedictine order could not help but have an impact on the work of a fifteenth-century Benedictine poet. I attempt to show that, far from being uniformly "pro-Lancastrian," Lydgate's political poetry (which comprises just about all of his secular work and much of his religious work) is often openly resistant to the main activities of the Lancastrian regime: the usurpation and murder of Richard II; the suppression of the alien priories and the taxation of the church; the invasion of Normandy and the continuation of the war in France after the Treaty of Troyes and the death of Henry V; and the encroachment of the Lancastrian hierarchical church---under the direction of a succession of powerful archbishops of Canterbury---on the autonomy of the religious orders, the monks in particular. I read Lydgate's works as a reflection of Benedictine policy that, more often than not, stands in opposition not only to the Lancastrian dynasty, but to the official hierarchy of the orthodox church in England, and I reconstruct the poet as a Benedictine spokesman very much in control of his own voice.

This PhD thesis, participating in the burgeoning interest in Mailer's prolific achievement in his mature years, examines three ironies attending his career: that his leftist, antiwar writer has recently been described as a literary imperialist and as a proponent of a fascistic aesthetic, that he has been the target of feminists and gender theorists despite the fact that his writings reveal his longstanding engagement with the psychology of gender, and that he is commonly regarded as a Manichean writer, even though some defining components of this near-ancient recasting of Zoroastrianism hardly apply to his religious/existential ideas. Chapter One, a study of Mailer's neglected Egypt novel, offers a Jungian-archetypal reading of Ancient Evenings (1983) while examining allegations that Mailer's brand of masculinity, labeled "rogue" (Faludi, 1999) and "imperialist (Savran 1998), evinces the "frontier psychology" (Olster 1989) that is synonymous with the fascistic attitudes attributed to him by feminists in the 1970s (Millet, 1971; Fetterley, 1978). Chapter Two, arguing that Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) represents Mailer's subtle response to these allegations, claims that the novel gestures exoterically to the hard-boiled tradition---its title and main characters invoke David Madden's Tough Guys Writers of the Thirties (1968)---and esoterically to Reich's and Adorno's ideas about socio-biological constructions of gender. Mailer's achievement in Tough Guys resides in the ways in which he restores to the genre of mystery fiction the psychological elements that are usually lacking in its subgenre, the hard-boiled tradition of detective writing. Chapter Three treats The Gospel According to the Son (1997) as a "gnostic" narrative in which the narrator, in reconciling his Judaic and pagan inheritances, achieves a synthesis between Platonic and Aristotelian principles, embodies the reasons that Mailer referred to himself as a "left-medievalist." This synthesis, implicit in the novel's many dualisms, in Satan's dramatic role and in the fact that Mailer incorporates an esoteric passage deriving from The Gospel of Mary, qualifies the critic's tendency to label the prodigal and iconoclastic Mailer as Manichean---a commonplace in Mailer studies since the 1950s. As I argue in this chapter, Mailer's Gospel , if only because it participates in current debates about the meaning of the term "Gnosticism," warrants greater critical attention.

"Criticism by Genre: The Menippean Tradition in British Dystopian Fiction" investigates the origins of distinctive features of the English dystopian novel in the ancient and longstanding tradition of Menippean satire. The study traces this influence in the two novels that are must influential on the twentieth-century dystopian tradition in England: Butler's Erewhon and Huxley's Brave New World. Starting with a critical survey of the main concepts and terms that animate contemporary approaches to dystopian fiction, the study identifies a lacuna in the present understanding of the nature and function of this genre: no one has yet appreciated its descent from Menippean satire. Recognizing the debt Erewhon and Brave New World owe to the tradition of Menippean satire and to the work of its famous practitioners--Lucian, Thomas More, Voltaire, Diderot, and Swift--the study reassesses the attitudes toward human nature and the human condition that are developed in these novels, especially as these attitudes emerge through the voice of a fallible narrator. Identifying an ironic structure within these novels that prevents identification of the narrator's point of view with that of the author--an ironic structure almost universally ignored in the critical literature on these novels--the study modifies prevailing definitions of the dystopian genre as a whole and corrects prevailing misunderstandings of Butler and Huxley, providing new interpretations of their structural use of irony on the one hand, and of their attitudes toward human nature and the human condition on the other. The study also explores the critically neglected affinities between Erewhon and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's "Voyage" and Brave New World, arguing that the polemics that Butler and Huxley maintain with the work of their famous predecessors allows us to recognize some distinctly dystopian aspects of their novels.

Long considered the literary representatives of the public sphere, British periodicals underwent significant changes throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Improved literacy rates and technological advancements in the production and distribution of print meant that the republic of letters, once a venue for discussions between gentlemen, was now more open to a larger and more diverse audience. This increase in potential readers left periodicals uncertain of the identity of their own readership, forcing them to create discourses that helped to define their readers and form them into distinctive audiences. This thesis examines the role that the editor figure played in the formation of readers for specific periodicals. Its focus is on how, both directly and indirectly, early to mid nineteenth-century literary magazines crafted distinctive figures of the editor through which they managed the pressures attendant on them as publications positioned between the popular, commercial market and the literary sphere. In particular, it examines the different ways that the discursive construction of an editor (an "editor figure") offered readers a personal relationship, which evoked aspects of the eighteenth-century public sphere, as an antidote to the expanding print market. Readers were thus socialized, brought into a relationship with a periodical through the editor figure, who acted as an intermediary between the market and the publication, a friendly face in an otherwise confusing world. The nature of a periodical's society, like the figure of its editor, varied, but the point was to lead readers to consider themselves not simply individual readers but part of a distinctive audience, gathered into a community through the guiding hand or personality of an editorial presence. Divided into four chapters, the thesis focuses on key sites in periodical culture in which an editor figure, constructed through direct commentary and editorial practices and techniques, defined readerly roles and relations in ways that both harnessed and counteracted the impact of the technological powers of print. Beginning with an analysis of the contrasting figures in John Scott's London Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the thesis then moves to the realm of cheap publications in a chapter on Charles Knight's Penny Magazine and the Chambers brothers' Chambers' Edinburgh Magazine. The thesis then concludes with a look at Leigh Hunt, who activated the rhetoric of intimacy he had established over the course of a long career as an editor when he himself ventured into the sphere of cheap publication with his London Journal.

<p> &ldquo;Dispossessed Women&rdquo; examines the status of homeless women in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature, with special attention to both the cultural assumptions and aesthetic power that accrued to these figures. Across the Romantic era, vagrant women were ubiquitous not only in poetry, children&rsquo;s fiction, novels, and non-fiction, but also on the streets of towns and cities as their population outnumbered that of vagrant males. Homeless women became the focus of debates over how to overhaul the nation&rsquo;s Poor Laws, how to police the unhoused, and what the rising middle class owed the destitute in a rapidly industrializing Britain. Writers in the Romantic period began to treat these characters with increasing realism, rather than sentimentalism or satire. This dissertation tracks this understudied story through the writing of Mary Robinson, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Robert Southey, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth.</p>

A collection of poems that are history- and place-infused lyrical songs that that sounds the landscapes and distances of the South, with a critical preface that explores erotic encounters with the divine.

"The Spinning Place" finds its impetus in the intersection of the spiritual and material, and while often dwelling in a domestic milieu, the poems move outward both figuratively and literally. For instance, one poem re-narrates the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, several poems are about divination by various means (frogs, animal behavior), and another performs an erasure of the last supper so that it instead tells a woman's experience in a delivery room. I borrow the title of the collection from a stanza of Dylan Thomas's poem "Fern Hill," and the excerpt (which will become an epigraph to the book) reads: "So it must have been after the birth of the simple light / In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm / Out of the whinnying green stable / On to the fields of praise." Thomas refers to the newly created earth as the "spinning place," imagining the fleeting idyll and harmony of that scene. In a similar way, my new poems specifically explore moments of creation, birth, and discovery, drawing from a variety of inspirations, including recognizable narratives and myths, as well as personal experience.

Stalking in the nineteenth century was a dangerous, increasingly violent behavior pattern circulating in society. It was as much a criminal act then as now, and one the Victorian novel exposes as a problematic form of unwanted intrusion. The realist novel of this period alongside its more sensational counterparts not only depicts scenes of close surveillance, obsession, and harassment as harmful. It exposes the inability of social laws to regulate such conduct. I argue Charles Dickens is the most pivotal figure in observing how stalking emerged as not only a fictional motif, but as an inescapable, criminal behavior pattern. Throughout his work and its nuanced characters, Dickens reveals underlying truths about stalking and stalkers. Early books like Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop feature Gothic villains and predatory motifs adapted from prior literary genres. The works of his middle period foreground stalking in the context of the modern city and institutional power. In the final decade of his life, problems associated with unrequited love examine the pathological patterns of romantic obsession in modern stalker archetypes. Such an analysis and its transformative insight perceive crucial truths about unwanted intrusion, social attachment, and problem of predatory behavior.

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