Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

This study presents an attempt to understand the political and aesthetic relationship between two of Modernism’s most enigmatic authors, Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford by examining their novelistic practice in light of their writings on politics and social criticism. A close look at the use of ironic distance, a hallmark feature in our understanding of modernist fiction, in Tarr (1918) and The Good Soldier (1915) reveals both authors conscious effort to distance themselves from their novel’s subjects, Fredric Tarr and John Dowell respectively. In light of both novels’ satirical element, a scathing attack on bourgeois narcissism caused by the wealthier class’ persistent attempts to identify with hollow and self serving social roles through the sham-aristocratic prestige created by England’s pre-war commodity culture, and the fact that both Fredric Tarr and John Dowell are artist figures that somehow resemble their creators, this project reinterprets Ford and Lewis’ ironic distance as an instance of self-distanciation. From this we can infer that both Ford and Lewis were invested in the modernist idea of impersonality, not just as a artistic or literary technique, but as the artist’s only means of escaping the narcissistic and slothful trap of modern subjectivity, and that, along with the production of modernist art, they saw a continual self-effacement as the price of authenticity, therefore inspiring in them the conviction to live as “uncelebrated stylists.”

In recent years, deconstruction theory has emerged as a key method for exploring public address, organizational culture, and literary discourse. Deconstruction theory encourages tearing apart hierarchy and established order to gain insights about the artifact being studied. Furthermore, the theory questions surface or superficial messages and encourages the reader to explore signals hidden below the surface. Deconstruction discounts context and places faith in experience. Using the early plays of Samuel Beckett, this research explores deconstruction as a method to create messages. This new perspective transports deconstruction from a set of theoretical concepts into basic assumptions that enhance communication. This study suggests that deconstructive inventors use processes previously associated with deconstructive criticism to reveal their own beliefs. Furthermore, this study correlates deconstructive invention with rhetorical tropes – metonomy, synecdoche, metaphor, and irony – to create depiction-based persuasion, which asks the rhetor to suspend logic and evoke emotional response.

To scholars of Victorian literature, Samuel Butler has always been a rebel who strikes out at society with wide-ranging criticism. After years of studying subjects as varied as music, art, biology, literature, and theology, Butler felt (like many Victorian writers) that he could make valuable social comments with his satires, travelogues, biological studies and one novel. Critical studies of Butler have tended to treat in broad outline all facets of his life and work. This study, however, examines in depth Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh, as the focal point of his critical analysis of Victorian society. It treats the work as a sociological novel showing the main character Ernest Pontifex manipulated by harsh societal forces and presents the thesis that man needs to be freed from restrictive social determinism. It is thus the purpose of this study to suggest that Samuel Butler wrote The Way of All Flesh to summarize his criticism of Victorian society and to set forth his plea for a society governed by the principle rational moderation in human affairs. To demonstrate this thesis, the present study will begin with Butler’s life, emphasizing his study with schoolmasters, exposure to the clergy, and life with his parents in an attempt to show the development of his unconventional attitude toward contemporary society. A short introduction to Butler’s life is particularly important to study of The Way of All Flesh because this novel contains a great deal of pure autobiography. Following this introduction, the three strongest areas of sociological comment will be examined as they appear in The Way of All Flesh. Victorian schoolmasters, clergymen, and parents all force Ernest Pontifex to suffer a repressive existence. An inquiry into Butler’s criticism of these three social types and their influence Victorian society will form the main body of this study. The next chapter of this thesis will be devoted to explaining how Butler proposes to solve the problems that he has introduced with his social criticism. Following this chapter, the conclusion will summarize the main ideas of this study and will deal with Butler’s critical reputation. Also the conclusion will show the debt our freer society owes to Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh by examining some similarities between his novel’s social criticism and other targets of social criticism found in four influential twentieth century novels of rebellion. It will finally be seen that Samuel Butler was not a flawless novelist (or for that matter, a flawless philosopher), but the critical message of his Way of All Flesh far outweighed the strengths or weaknesses of its artistic form for a whole generation of anti-Victorians.

This thesis is a three part examination of the role of perceptions of gender in the developing category of mental illness and disability during the inter-war period in England using Virginia Woolf's literature and essays, most prominently Mrs. Dalloway and her personal essay, "A Sketch of the Past." These texts provide a foundation for analyzing how disability can be represented in literature in a way that gives disabled characters a voice and simultaneously criticizes the ways in which perceptions of normalcy are defined and reinforced through literary forms. The thesis also responds to contemporary feminist scholarship that has evaluated Woolf's disabled characters in problematic methods that discount the significance of disability.

This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are solemn, serious texts written by British or Irish men, and the stories they tell concern young British or Irish men struggling, often alone, in pain, and under the threat of impending age, through a brutal, violent, and amoral world.

This paper investigates how Aphra Behn's The Rover and Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside complicate understandings of femininity and masculine dominance over female sexuality. The paper looks specifically at the "rake," and how he instigates questions about female identity and sexual assault. The paper also looks at the rake in regards to adulterous relationships. Finally, the paper analyzes the use of the female perspective in The Rover to highlight the importance of framing discussions about femininity and female sexuality outside of male discourse.

In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare anatomizes Lucrece's body-fragments the whole, splits apart the parts. He does so not only to expose the otherwise concealed act of rape-which is hidden within the mysterious and "invisible" female genitalia-but to indicate that Lucrece's parts, through analogy with Pagan and Christian figures and theories, are powerful, even combative, but always pure. In the first section, individual body parts connect Lucrece with so-called "wild women," including the Amazons, Medusa, and Philomela. In the second section, body parts either link Lucrece, or sever Tarquin, from the Divine. In the final section, Classical Mythology and Protestantism conflate in the dis-embodied figure of Helen of Troy. The body-Lucrece's, Tarquin's and the figures on the tapestry-is explored in metaphorical parts, dismembered, or apotheosized/de-corporealized in an attempt to prove that a raped woman may retain her subjectivity along with her innocence.

Hybridity is typically formulated in post-colonial theory as a means of resistance, subversion, or liberatory strategy in the hands of the present-day post-colonial subject or theorist. This project, however, demonstrates hybridity as a means of securing dominance and maintaining control when wielded by the imperialist in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826), Kipling's Kim (1901), and Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1914). The strategic deployment of hybridity in these texts also serves as an opportunity to negotiate the ambivalence and desire for the native that slips out of that hybrid space-- not necessarily sexual desire that flows between two polarized bodies, but rather, triangulated through other mediating terms such as class, nationality or manliness. Across these novels, the location of the native shifts, until it settles within the white body itself in Tarzan. Desire for the native, then, is returned to the white body in a narcissistic circle of self-glorification.

This thesis examines the function of specific garden features in Jane Austen’s novels, particularly in the seminal texts Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. Male power, politics and land ownership dominated eighteenth-century society. Despite this, Austen’s woman protagonists utilize the tree avenues feature of landscape parks, voicing a need to redefine moral responsibility associated with land ownership. This thesis draws on the literary theories of gender studies and ecocriticism to examine garden spaces in Austen’s texts, though the primary focus of the investigation relies on exploring the primary texts themselves with a historical approach. In addition to this secondary critical scholarship, this thesis utilizes resources such as eighteenth century garden histories and guides, background information on specific gardeners of the period, and typical landscape garden features as evidence.