The purpose of this thesis is to determine how guilt and shame act as engines of social control in two Gothic narratives of the 1790s, how they tie into the terror and horror modes of the genre, and how they give rise to two distinct narrative models, one centered on punishment and the other on rehabilitation. The premise of the paper is that both Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian harness radically different emotional responses, one that demands the punishment of the aberrant individual and the other that reveres the reformative power of domestic felicity. The purposes of both responses are to civilize readers and their respective representations of the Holy Office of the Inquisition are central to this process. I examine the role of the Inquisition in The Monk and contrast it with the depiction of the same institution in The Italian. Lewis's book subordinates the ecclesiastical world to the authority of the aristocracy and uses graphic scenes of torture to support conservative forms of social control based on shame. The Italian, on the other hand, depicted the Inquisition as a conspiratorial body that causes Radcliffe's protagonists, and by extension her readers, to question their complicity in oppressive systems of social control and look for alternative means to punishment. The result is a push toward rehabilitation that is socially progressive but questions the English Enlightenment's promotion of the carceral.

In a study of the tragic elements in Shakespeare's comedies, it is necessary to distinguish between the tragic and the comic and to note their relationship, before considering the subject proper.

Much has been written in the past fifty years about John Donne and his work. His troubled life and enigmatic writings have made him seem a kindred spirit to a confused age. To our day the dissonant, abrupt, and calculatedly reckless style and the concern with the harsh realities of love and death have relevance which heretofore had been misunderstood or ignored.

Scéla Muicce Meicc Da Thó (SMMD; The Tale of Mac Da Thó's Pig) is a humorous Old Irish myth that takes its cues from its Ulster Cycle cousins, notably, An Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). The connective tissue is its cast, plot structure, and the author's mastery of cultural and storytelling traditions. SMMD is brief and rapid, which aids its near-absurdist representation of masculinity, kingship, and honor in heroic saga culture. This thesis uses postcolonial and medieval literary scholarship to analyze medieval and modern depictions of the Ulster Cycle. Contemporarily, the Irish Republicans and Loyalists evoke the image of Ulster boy-hero Cú Chulainn to express their sense of cultural ownership. Chapter One contextualizes the Ulster Cycle, SMMD, and its issue of hyper-masculinity to expand traditional scholarship and interpretation by analyzing how SMMD's humor operates culturally while demonstrating Bourdieu's social capital. This study also considers modern Ireland's murals, some of which draw on medieval themes and contribute to a global understanding of its colonial struggle. There is a spatial quality to these representations that reinforce border sensibilities à la intimidation via images of masculinity that resemble bragging contests in the Ulster Cycle. Chapter Two further interprets medievalism in modern Ireland using the onomastic dindshenchas toward a spatial reading of SMMD relative to public representations of Ulster's boy hero. Overall, this work calls attention to the ongoing issue of medievalism as propaganda. Ireland and the children of its diaspora maintain complicated relationships with its colonial history. Thus, this work's secondary goal is to provide a deeper context to this rather fragmented issue in a way that advocates for the nuance necessary when studying three postcolonial communities on one island.

The Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel was popular in his day, producing lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems. Contemporary anthologies, however, memorialize him primarily as a lyric poet, one that usually gets few entries. My thesis shows how Daniel had a minor reputation as a lyric poet by the 1960’s, despite having high-profile admirers. These well-known poet-critics who engaged with his work are essential to analyzing his lyric reputation: owing to the Romantic emphasis on the lyric, I begin with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reception of his lyrics in the 19th century. I then analyze the turn of the century poet A.E. Housman’s glowing praise and end with the lukewarm reception of two 20th century Modernists, T.S. Eliot and Yvor Winters. I argue that, despite the enthusiasm of Coleridge and Housman, his lyrics failed to attract enough admirers, in part contributing to the current status of these poems.

<p>This study examines the reputation and influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Augustan England in order to show the persistence of the allegorical reading of the poem. Although the ultimate purpose of the study is to shed light on the interpretation of Restoration and eighteenth--century poetry, such a direct application of the metamorphic tradition to the reading of the verse cannot be undertaken before the critical position of the Metamorphoses in the intellectual and artistic milieu of the period has been determined. Because it is my contention that Ovid's poem continued to be read in the Augustan age in much the same way that it had been in the Renaissance, the study begins with an analysis of the relationship between classicism and Renaissance humanism and the way in which this relationship affected Restoration and early eighteenth century thought and writing. From there, the study briefly reviews the sixteenth and seventeenth century thought on the Metamorphoses and, then branches into Augustan criticism, prefaces, translations, editions and handbooks which discuss Ovid's poem and which are written by British authors and continental writers who influenced British thought. It has sometimes been assumed that the Metamorphoses died an early death in the Augustan age because of the travesties of the poem and because of Addison's seeming disavowal of allegorization; therefore, I have tried to correct this assessment by a comprehensive analysis of the materials of the period.</p> <p>The study shows that while the critics have been correct in their belief that science and antiquarianism, along with a certain hatred of heathenism and narrowly defined sexual mores, caused the popularity of the Metamorphoses to wane in the eighteenth century, the poem still held a considerable prestige among writers and artists until 1750. Garth's 1717 Preface to the Metamorphoses, from which authors borrow freely until Boyse's New Pantheon (1753), is the seminal essay on Ovid's poem for the early eighteenth century, and his allegorical reading of the poem and appreciation of Ovid's wit are representative attitudes toward the poem. By 1750, however, Ovid's classic began to be questioned by men like Spence because it deviated from the true picture of the heathen mythology, and, consequently, the Metamorphoses in the later eighteenth century become the sole realm of schoolboys. While historians like Banier and Boyse believe the Metamorphoses to be significant in the early century, by 1750 the historians, too, sought more authentic materials, but writers clung to Ovid as a poetical model and moral teacher at least until that time. Allegory justified the continued usage of Ovid artistically and morally, and ubiquitous use of the Metamorphoses in Augustan poetry testifies to its popularity and significance.</p> <p>A careful examination of the comments on the Metamorphoses indicates that the truths that critics may gather about the scientific progress of an age are not always applicable to the artistic situation of the times. Furthermore, to confirm a thesis, one must go beyond the mere perusal of a few works of the period. In the case of Ovid, Addison's disparaging comment on the allegorization in Ross's Mystagogus Poeticus has been taken as the damaging evidence against the allegorical iv reading of the Metamorphoses, whereas Addison intends his criticism mainly for "mystical" allegory. By a careful study of a number of eignteenth-century works a clearer and more valid picture emerges. The importance of such a study for literary purposes lies in its applicability to the poetry of the period, As I have tried to argue in the last chapter of this thesis, Ovidian matter is not a mere window-dressing for frivolous poems, but an integral part of the structure and meaning. By applying the moralized reading of the Metamorphoses to allusions in poems such as Astraea Redux or The Dunciad and to the metamorphic patterns in such poems as Claremont, The Fan and "Eloisa to Abelard", I have discovered in Augustan verse a moral texture which the well-read poets submerged in subtle allusions, not immediately apparent from a casual reading of the poems. Although travesties and burlesques of Ovid's Metamorphoses were published in the eighteenth century, his master work continued to be regarded a major poetic document, and even those poets who used his work for the purpose of travesty often did so to make a serious point.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Many pages appear darker than others because of necessary rescanning.</p> / <p>In 1908, Henry James prepared a revised version of The Wings of the Dove {1902) as part of the New York Edition of his works. Despite the notoriety of James's habit of revision, and despite the high critical status of the novel as one of James's major works, no scholarly edition of the novel exists. This study attempts to supply such an edition by presenting the text of the first printing of The Wings of the Dove, together with a complete list of substantive variants in the two other editions supervised by the author.</p> <p>There are three forms in which the text of The Wings of the Dove is available: the first American edition (Scribner's, 1902); the first English edition (Constable, 1902); and the New York Edition (Scribner's, 1909). This study refers to these three editions as A, C and N, respectively. The history of the text shows that A, while the first to be published, is not the first printed; moreover, it lacks some of the final corrections which James made in his proofsheets of C. Hence, C, the first text to be printed and the one which contains all of his corrections of 1902, has been chosen as the copy-text for this edition.</p> <p>In addition to a brief discussion of the textual variants, the introduction to this edition presents all the available authorial aids to understanding the novel. Acomplete history of James's composition and publication of The Wings of the Dove, from his first Notebook entries of 1894 to the revision of the novel in 1908, is reconstructed here from published and unpublished letters of the period. A section devoted to analysis of James's epistolary comments on the novel and of his one published critique, the Preface to the New York Edition of The Wings of the Dove_, reveals inconsistencies which are ultimately related to the long and intermittent period over which the novel was composed. Finally, examination of some of James's revisions leads to the conclusion that most of the substantive variants are stylistic in effect, but that the remainder clarify or add to the meaning of particular passages.</p> <p>The text of the first English edition of The Wings of the Dove (C) is reproduced here as this edition's reading text. The correct forms of misprints in C are given in the lateral margins. The substantive variants in A and Nare listed in the lower margins of the pages on which the orginal text appears. This variant edition presents, for the first time, and in convenient form, all the authorial versions of the text of The Wings of the Dove.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Much of C.S. Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces can be examined through one of two binaries. The tension between rationality, or reason, and spirituality, or religion, is one of the core facets of both the text and its main character, Orual. Orual feels the pull of both ideas and thus spends most of the novel in a nebulous space between them. This tension is further complicated by the space between the feminine and the masculine which she also inhabits. By covering her face and body, Orual de-emphasizes her feminine identity and takes on a masculine role, dressing as a man and taking a political role relegated to men. She steps into a liminal, genderless state, both socially and in her own identity. My research explores gender in Lewis' Till We Have Faces by focusing on its intersection with the ideas of rationality and spirituality, thus examining how the discussion of gender contributes to the novel as a whole.

An analysis on Evelyn Waugh's novels: Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies as well as their film and television adaptations. The paper relates all of these works to Waugh's idea that the true value and reason why students should attend university is not because their degree will earn them a massive salary, but because it allows for another four years of sequestered development away from adult society. Waugh stated that the true value of his time as an undergraduate at Oxford was because it provided him with the opportunity to drink, throw parties, discover art, etc...which therefore gave him an appropriate amount of time to grow up gradually. All of these novels, films, and television series provide substantial evidence as to why Waugh's point was correct and is still valid.

This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will interest those who seek a serious and thoughtful challenge to Modernist literary trends that prevail even today.