The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female agency. The eighteenth century was a time in which the separate sphere mentality grew ever stronger within the patriarchal society, and yet, women began to question their subservient place in this society—although this struggle would continue to intensify throughout the nineteenth century and eventually come to fruition in the late nineteenth century.

This thesis explores the development of the Gothic novel in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis establishes the Gothic as a literary mode of middle-class terror by analyzing Gothic novels within the historical context of the Industrial and Democratic revolutions. This requires an in-depth understanding of politics throughout both centuries and this thesis engages with several sources such as Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel which adds important context to my claims. Additionally, I use several contemporary sources such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the writings of Edmund Burke, and On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror by the Aikins. This thesis offers a method of tracking the Gothic as a consistently middle-class genre throughout history, and it ends with a chapter that questions the continued relevance of the Gothic as a middle-class genre in a world where the division of wealth is so skewed.

In 1991, British novelist Patricia Barker published Regeneration, the first of three novels that portrayed the exploits of both factual and fictional characters during the darkest days of WWI. Barker's Eye in the Door (1993), followed by The Ghost Road (1995) for which she won the Booker Prize for Fiction, completed the series that explored the effects of combat on the human psyche. What emerges as a dominant feature of Barker's war novels is her depiction of the ocular sense. Reminiscent of Orwellianism, Barker's texts contain a seemingly ubiquitous ocular presence. For example, neurasthenic patients are scrutinized by army psychiatrists, objectors and subversives are spied upon or imprisoned so that their activities may be observed, and combatants are faced with the challenge of reconciling the horrifying events they have witnessed in combat. This study investigates the role and importance of Pat Barker's depiction of eyes and visuality in her war trilogy. The overreaching goal of the thesis to examine Barker's aestheticized notion of ocularity. It is my aim to come some conclusions about how vision / ocularity signal the emergence of a few central themes in the texts such as power relationships, objectification, exposure and the transgression of boundaries. The social and linguistic theories of Michael Foucault, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Martin Jay and others who have addressed the themes of perception and ocular symbolism will be introduced into my discussion with the aim of providing a theoretic foundation to many of my assertions. Chapters will begin with an interpretation of a piece of theoretical writing by one of these authors followed by an analysis of Barker's texts that incorporates the major tenets of that theory. These tenets will serve as a basis to my discussion and it is my hope that, through the creative application of theoretical writing, I will address a number of aspects of Barker's work, especially in relation to her ocular imagery, that that have thus far gone unexplored.

This thesis examines the Lady of the Lake as an active chivalric player in the thirteenth century Lancelot-Grail Cycle (also known as the Prose Lancelot) and in Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. To study the many codes of chivalry, particularly in regard to women, I use two popular chivalric handbooks from the Middle Ages: Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry, Geoffroi de Charny'sKnight's Own Book of Chivalry. Traditionally, the roles of women in medieval chivalry are passive, and female characters are depicted as objects to win or to inspire knights to greatness. The Lady of the Lake, I argue, uses her supernatural origins and nature to break with female chivalric conventions and become an instructress of chivalry to King Arthur's knights. As a purely human character, her power would be limited. As a guardian fairy and/or enchantress, the Lady is allowed to exercise more autonomy

This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and responsibilities of wives and mothers, and debates about marriage, as well as a review of women tried for murder in the Middlesex assize courts between 1558 and 1625. Chapter Three, comprised of four subsections, engages in critical readings of approximately 52 pamphlets, ballads, and plays published in the same period. Individual subsections discuss how traitorous wives, murderous mothers, women who murder in their communities, and punishment and redemption are represented in the narratives. Woodcut illustrations printed in these texts are also examined, and their iconographic contributions to the construction of bad women is discussed. Women who murder in these texts are represented as consummately evil creatures capable of inflicting terrible harm to their families and communities, and are consistently discovered, captured, and executed by their communities for their heinous crimes. Murderous women in early modern popular literature also provided a means for contemporary men and women to explore, confront, and share in the depths of sin, while anticipating their own spiritual salvation. Pamphlets, plays, and broadsides related bawdy, graphic, and violent stories that allow modern readers a glimpse of the popular culture and mental world of Renaissance England.

During the past five years, the literary critics have discovered William Blake, helping readers to understand clearly the various stages of development and the final form of the poet's entire mythology. And recent criticism has also clarified and expressed more systematically than earlier criticism certain features of Blake's total thought. Nevertheless, much recent criticism has hindered rather than helped the serious student of Blake's poetry.] Most critics treat Blake's poems as if they were only literary, completely avoiding discussion of their visual components. Yet, Blake clearly envisioned and intended that his reader view the poetry as a new form consisting of poetic text combined with visual art. Most of the entire published canon consists of pages reproduced in the method of what Blake called "illuminated printing" or "stereotype engraving," which employs border designs and/or illustrations in 2 conjunction with the poetic text. Of the 375 pages of the poetry published by Blake, only 38 pages of minor verse, all written when Blake was very young, appear in conventional printed form.

My thesis that Coleridge employed universal images of the supernatural and traditional Christian symbols to illustrate the Mariner’s religious conversion in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The basis for this proposition is that Coleridge made religion the Rime’s theme. The following validations of the religious theme proposal will be offered in these chapters: (1) The religious theme synthesizes two popular but unsatisfactory thematic statements: “estrangement” and “sacramental vision.”; (2) Coleridge’s philosophical system is founded upon the postulation of a supernatural reality. The Mariner’s conversion may be seen as his change from Aristotelian conceptualism (which recognizes one reality - nature) to Platonic dualism (which recognizes two realities - nature and supernature).

The opening scene of The Portrait of a Lady takes place upon the broad, sunlit lawns of Gardencourt. Yet, even in this expansive setting, the most essential character in the novel, the protagonist, is, curiously, no more than a narrow, shadowy speculation symbolized by a few odd words found in a telegram of dubious value. The only worth of these words comes in the amount of curiosity they can arouse in the other characters and in the reader. For it appears that, with this slow but significantly unusual means of introducing Isabel, the author intends her for more than a mere foil in a worldly triangle. Henry James does not squander his characters and while the plot of this novel, for example, suggests a debt to the traditional sentimental novel, the characters transcend such a strict formula and take on great depth and mass. Thus, as the reader progresses through the tale, he is continually surprised, and gratified, to discover that the characters emerge as real personalities, each possessing, his own set of ideas, sensibilities, an visions. When these personalities are brought together there can be no chance for a sentimental novel.

Writing at a moment of ideological crisis between individualism and hierarchical society, Jane Austen asserts a definition of moral behavior and female identity that mediates the two value systems. I argue that Austen most effectively articulates her belief in women's moral autonomy and social responsibility in her novels through her portrayal of sisterhood. Austen reshapes the stereotype of sisters and female friendships as dangerous found in her domestic novel predecessors. While recognizing women's social vulnerability, which endangers female friendship and turns it into a site of competition, Austen urges the morality of selflessly embracing sisterhood anyway. An Austen heroine must overcome sisterly rivalry if she is to achieve the moral strength Austen demands of her. As Mansfield Park (1814) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) demonstrate, such rivalry reveals the flawed morality of both individualism and patrilineal society. I further argue that in these novels sisterhood articulates the internally motivated selflessness Austen makes her moral standard. Sisterhood not only indicates female morality for Austen, it also enables this character. Rejecting Rousseau's proposal of men shaping malleable female minds, Austen pronounces sisters to be the best moral guides. In Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen shows the failure of the man to educate our heroine and the success of his sister. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), Austen pinpoints the source of sisterly education's success in its feminine context of nurture, affection, intimacy, and subtlety. With this portrait of sisterhood, Austen adheres to the moral authority inherent in Burkean philosophy while advocating individual responsibility, not external regulation, to choose selfless behavior. Austen further promotes gender equality by expressing women's moral autonomy, while supporting gender distinctions that privilege femininity. By offering such powerful, complex sister relationships, Austen transforms eighteenth-century literary thought about women, sisters, and morality.

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the origins of the enduring differences between the Eastern and Western interpretations of free will and determinism. In my piece, I work to determine the roots of these differences and to what degree these differences have been challenged and disrupted in the 20th century. In this pursuit, I analyze the different philosophies of free will in the East and West and then apply these philosophies to the literature of both regions. For the eastern scholarship, I am using Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Motojirō Kajii's "Lemon." For the Western works, I am analyzing Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." After thoroughly analyzing the pieces, I discuss the possible dialogues between the East and the West to help fully realize the legitimacy of the claim that the two regions continue to harbor distinct interpretations of free will and determinism.