My dissertation is a compilation, contextualization, and analysis of thirty-five Stuart women's diaries. My introduction clarifies differences between Puritan and Anglican diaries, provides an overview of the roles of women in the diarist movement, and considers the benefits and consequences of participation in this movement. I also review central issues and texts in relevant scholarship. Chapter one, "The Early Stuart Period," chronicles generic origins of Stuart diaries and examines three lifewriters. "The Civil War and Interregnum" focuses on texts that foreground the horrors of that era, such as aggression by soldiers, spousal arrest, and forced marriage. War diarists deployed God and religion in an attempt to make sense of the chaos and perceived injustice that characterized their wartime experience. "Contexts, Conventions, and Communities" explores the cultural agendas which fueled the diarist movement. I engage with Mary Rich as a model diarist whose self-representation is shaped by clerical mandates and models. During Cromwell's reign, Puritans published diary manuals designed to teach the received method of spiritual journal-keeping, and Rich follows the directions therein. Her texts adhere to sectarian conventions, and she writes in the context of a diary community consisting of clerics, friends, and relatives. "Youth, Marriage, and Motherhood" surveys themes central to diarists writing in the Restoration era. Diarists are outspoken on the topic of marriage, and they are extremely emotive on the subject of their children's deaths. I examine the narrative strategies available to mothers attempting to negotiate their grief within culturally prescribed boundaries. "The Diary Elegy" considers the phenomenon whereby clerics published excerpts from the diaries of deceased Protestants as a means of establishing the piety of these elegized subjects. "Reflections on the Sacred: A Study of Mystical Diaries" situates the journals of the nonconformist Jane Lead and her disciple Ann Bathurst in a mystical tradition. In "The Late Stuart Period," a more secular style of diary gained popularity. However, religious persecution ensured that the spiritual diary--a relatively private form of worship--remained important. My annotated index of diarists includes manuscript and publication details, biographical information, and sample diary entries for each diarist in this study.

Composers Libby Larsen and Dominick Argento have each written song cycles based on the texts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Larsen's Sonnets from the Portuguese, for soprano and chamber orchestra, is a setting of six of the forty-four poems from Browning's amatory sequence of the same name. Argento's Casa Guidi, for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, is a setting of excerpts from letters written by Browning, primarily to her sister Henrietta, during her years in Florence. This study examines the two composers' images of Browning, and how those images are portrayed through choice of text and musical setting. The image of Browning depicted in Larsen's cycle is that of a woman who moves from a fear of love to an acceptance and embracing of it. The love that she comes to know is a love that recognizes the necessity of moving on in spite of unresolved issues. This image was gleaned from Browning's sonnets by Larsen and soprano Arleen Auger, who worked closely together to create a cycle that would speak of mature love, in contrast to the youthful love in Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben. Three of the six sonnets in the cycle are analyzed for Larsen's use of compositional devices that reinforce the themes of the recognition and acceptance of love and of trust in non-resolution. The texts chosen by Argento were based on his desire to depict the feminine and vulnerable aspects of Browning during her years in Florence. Although the letter excerpts are not arranged in chronological order, they accurately reveal a woman who delighted in her home and family. The last three of the five songs are examined to show how Argento's careful text setting and use of orchestral color and motives enhance Browning's words and the overall mood of the letters.

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<p>The poem <i>B&emacr;owulf</i> has been translated hundreds of times, in part or in whole. In past decades translators such as Howell Chickering and E. Talbot Donaldson firmly adhered to formal equivalency, following the original text line-by-line if not word-by-word. Such translations are useful for Anglo-Saxon students but cannot reach a larger audience because they are unwieldy and often incomprehensible. In the past fifty years, though, a group of translators with different philosophies has taken up the task of translating the poem with greater success. Translators such as Marc Hudson, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney used dynamic equivalency for their versions, eschewing strict grammatical accuracy and literal diction in order to recreate the sense and experience of the poem for a modern audience. How two translators, E. Talbot Donaldson and Seamus Heaney, treat the queens in the poem as revealed by a close textual analysis proves to be an excellent example of the two methodologies; formal equivalence translators do not endow their female characters with the agency and respect present in the original text, while dynamic equivalence translators take liberties with the language to give their readers a strong sense of the powerful but tragic queen figures. Harold Bloom&rsquo;s theory of the development of poets in <i>The Anxiety of Influence</i> can help explain this shift from formal equivalency to dynamic equivalency. Translators of <i>B&emacr;owulf</i> necessarily react against their predecessors, and since translators usually explain their process and philosophy in forwards or introductions, their motivations for &ldquo;swerving away&rdquo; are clear. Formal equivalence translators misrepresented the original text by devaluing the literary merit of the original poem and dynamic equivalence translators seek to remedy the misrepresentation by elaborating and expanding the language of the original to reach a wider audience. Each generation must continue to translate against the grain of its predecessors in order to keep the poem alive for a larger audience so that the poem will continue to be enjoyed by future audiences. </p>

<p> As a struggling single mother separated from her dissolute husband, the poet Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) began writing novels as a way to make money for her family. The exploding book market of late eighteenth-century Britain teemed with booksellers and publishers&mdash;some anxious to hustle works to press, some seeking quality works to build their reputation&mdash;and Smith entered this male-centric realm with na&iuml;vet&eacute;, shaky confidence, and growing desperation. Guided by a literary mentor to the reputable London publishing firm of Thomas Cadell, Sr., Smith entered a business relationship that would see her through the publication and later editions of two translated novels, three original novels, the two-volume poem <i>The Emigrants, </i> and a subscription and an expanded edition of her celebrated poetry and essay collection, <i>Elegiac Sonnets.</i> Most of the letters Smith wrote to Cadell have never been published; the majority of them were discovered just as Judith Phillips Stanton was taking her <i>Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith</i> (2003) to press. This scholarly edition includes every known letter that Smith wrote to Cadell before his retirement, when his son and assistant redubbed it Cadell &amp; Davies. Compiled from university, public, and private libraries in Britain, the U.S., and New Zealand, these annotated letters offer an intimate portrait of Smith as entrepreneurial author, desperate businesswoman, and careworn single mother of nine children in an era of revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) fervor, Empire building.</p>

<p> My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. "Sounding" implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. "Otherness" in this study refers to a foreign presence outside of the listening body, as well as to an otherness that is already inherent within. Sounding otherness enacts a bi-directional exchange between a culturally different other and an embodied self; this exchange generates what I term the sonic uncanny, whereby the otherness interior to the self vibrates with sounds of otherness exterior to the body. The sonic uncanny describes how sounds that are perceived as foreign become familiar through the vibratory touch of the soundwave that attunes a body to its sonic environment or soundscape. Sounds of foreign Eastern and New World Indian otherness become part of English and European travelers; at the same time, these travelers sound their own otherness in Indian spaces. Sounding otherness occurs in the travel narratives of Jean de L&egrave;ry, Thomas Dallam, Thomas Coryate, and John Smith. Cultural otherness is also sounded by the English through their theatrical representations of New World and Oriental otherness in masques including <i>The Masque of Flowers,</i> and plays like Robert Greene's <i>Alphonsus,</i> respectively; Shakespeare's <i> The Tempest</i> combines elements of East and West into a new sound&mdash;"something rich and strange." These dramatic entertainments suggest that the theater, as much as a foreign land, can function as a sonic contact zone.</p>

<p> Science fiction critics have dueled over definitions of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century science fiction, often classifying early science fiction as mere prototype. Chapter One of this thesis examines the myriad definitions of the term &ldquo;science fiction&rdquo; allowing a distinguishable set of literary characteristics for science fiction, fantasy, and science fantasy. Early science fiction authors such as Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac, Margaret Cavendish, and Jonathan Swift refashioned the familiar fantasy genre with scientific ideas, establishing a science fantasy genre to frame dangerous and rebellious ideas in a conventional and innocuous structure, the fiction novel. Chapter Two analyzes the science fiction elements present in early science fantasy of Kepler, Godwin, De Bergerac, Cavendish, and Swift as well as the scientific, religious, and political ramifications of science fantasy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Chapter Three briefly highlights elements of early science fantasy that influenced twentieth- and twenty-first century science fiction. Early science fantasy not only influenced generations of science fiction writers and scientists, but it also was one of the main forces that legitimized the sciences.</p>

There has been no single study of the travel writings of Henry James; indeed there has been only scant mention of these significant literary works. Marie-Reine Garnier has made effective use of them in discussing James's attitude toward France in Henry James et La France (1927), and, of course, critics often refer to James's best-known travel books, Portraits of Places, A Little Tour in France, and English Hours. Transatlantic Sketches and Foreign Parts (a revised issue of the former) are considered less often, and the most beautiful---in content and style---volume of all, Italian Hours, has been sadly neglected. There have been two recent partial studies of James as a traveller. In his doctoral dissertation, Three American Travellers in England: James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, Henry James (1945), Robert Charles Le Clair traces the influence of travel upon James's life and works up to the year 1883, but the does not discuss the travel sketches in detail. His emphasis is upon the English sketches, and he does not consider the sketches of America. Nor does he analyze the revisions of the European sketches. George Alvin Finch in his essay "James as a Traveller," which serves as an introduction to a 1948 edition of Portraits of Places, calls attention to the significance of the travel sketches in relation to James's fiction. He points out that James's travel writings are "a personal record through which the reader may traverse a middle ground lying between his letters and his fiction." Mr. Finch, however, does not discuss James's habits as a tourist, nor does he analyze the content and composition of the numerous travel essays which James wrote between 1872 and 1909. Since Mr. Finch's study concerns only Portraits of Places, he has not considered James's revisions of these sketches, nor has he discussed the traveller in America. Supplementing what Mr. Le Clair and Mr. Finch have contributed, this study proposes to consider in some detail James's repeated visits to England and the continent, as well as his last visit to America, his habits as a tourist, the significance of his letters as embryo travel essays, the content and style of the seven travel books, and finally, the revisions of the European sketches in 1909. This study will later be extended to include the relation between James's travel writings and his fiction and non-fiction works.

This dissertation looks at Protestant individualism and the degree to which it was potentially empowering to Victorian women. By Protestant individualism, I mean a way of thinking about and speaking about the self that arises from and is closely associated with Protestant theology. As I argue, this newfound emphasis on Protestant individualism placed Victorian women in a promising position. Unlike philosophy and political theory, which have traditionally based a person's claim to be an individual on his or her reason---something that women have often been believed to lack, Protestantism has generally made a person's individual status the product of a far more universal condition: each person's ultimate accountability to God. People are all primarily individuals, Protestant individualism asserts, because each of them---whether male or female---must stand individually before God on Judgment Day. Since Western political thought has generally predicated a person's claim to rights on his status as an individual, Victorian women's improved claims to individual status gave them, in turn, improved cases for arguing for their personal and political rights. Included among these rights would have been their right to consent (to marriage, sex, etc.) and their right to follow their own consciences (in moral, religious, and political matters). The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on Protestant individualism as it appears in Evangelical Anglican and Broad Church Anglican religious writings, chapter one examining the individualistic and anti-individualistic currents within such theological texts and chapter two exploring the degree to which such works make Protestant available to women. Chapters three and four turn to Victorian women novelists Charlotte Bronte and Mary Augusta Ward and how their novels dramatize the promises and perils of female Protestant individualism. Bronte, who, as I argue, depicts a fairly religiously orthodox Protestant individualism, presents such orthodox Protestant individualism as generally available and empowering to women. In contrast, Ward, who portrays a much less orthodox Protestant individualism, presents such heterodox Protestant individualism as difficult, if not impossible, for women to realize.

The Victorian dinner party mirrors the era's middle- and upper-class societies. Against a backdrop of rapid change, the firmly structured ritual brought new opportunities for social advancement, especially for the nouveaux riches. A myriad of advice manuals responded to the newcomers' need to match financial prosperity with social achievement. However, a group of critics that lamented the ritual's de-humanization, excess, and pomposity opposed these writers, public and private, who celebrated the splendor and refinement of the dinner party. The reformers' antidote was simplicity, sincerity, and enjoyment. Critics and advocates continued this debate throughout the period 1830-1885. Writers of fiction joined in the debate as they created pivotal dinner party performances. By 1885, those who argued for simplicity had been routed by champions of more relaxed but still elaborately ritualized "formal feeds."