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T. S. Eliot consistently maintained that there was a close relation between his poetics and his poetry; that his poetic theory was the "by-product" of his "poetry-workshop" and best applied to his literary works, rather than regarded as general aesthetic principles to be applied to all poetry. This is the basis on which this study is undertaken. The study itself has two major aims.The first is to approach Eliot's creative works through the perspective of his poetics. I have attempted to identify certain of Eliot's major aesthetic theories and to relate them to those poems contemporary with them. I have also examined some of Eliot's poetic theories which may be seen in a more general way as illuminating and relevant to all his creative works. My study also identifies certain of Eliot's theories concerning drama and demonstrates how each of these is closely related to a particular play.My second aim is to show how all Eliot's poetry may be regarded as one great work of art. This developed in three stages which chart the poet's spiritual progress from the despair of the early poems through the confession and contrition of "The Hollow Men" and "Ash Wednesday" , to the sense of illumination and beatitude in Four Quartets. This progression, which reflects the pattern of the three stages in the Christian drama of salvation, is also evident in Eliot's plays. I have tried to show that his poetry, his poetics, and his life all fall into a common pattern and that there is a close interrelationship between the three.

This thesis shows how the notion of androgyny works in the fiction of Violet Trefusis. It also posits her writing in connection to some novels by Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Working within a theoretical framework provided by Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical theory this thesis focusses on and seeks to redress the traditional conceptualization of androgyny providing a notion of the androgyne more in accordance to Woolf's androgynous ideal. The androgyne is understood in this thesis as a carnivalesque figure that disrupts the patriarchal system of hierarchical binary oppositions. Chapter Two provides a historical framework to Woolf's androgynous ideal. The research focuses, in Chapter Three, on the literary relationship sustained by Sackville-West, Woolf, and Trefusis which produced an, up to now unexplored, intertextual space where Challenge (1919), Orlando (1928) and Broderie Anglaise (1935) are interwoven. The apprehension of androgyny is an attempt on the part of these three women writers to find a different type of sentence whose construction has been theorised by Kristeva as Poetic language. This literary practice is an uncomfortable and dangerous one since it implies the avowal of the maternal serniotic in symbolic language. The difficulties in achieving the symbolic positionality of the subject of poetic language are addressed in Chapter Four in the analysis of Trefusis's Echo (1931) and Woolf's Between the Acts (1941). Chapter Five concentrates on Trefusis's discomforting sense of outsiderness. In Pirates at Play (1952) Trefusis explores the dialectics of foreignerness. Through the transubstantiation of her self into an armchair in Memoirs of an Armchair (1960) Trefusis acknowledges her abject in an attempt to relax the boundaries that separate self from other. Finally Chapter Six examines the search of a feminine Jowssance and its connections to death, or rather undeath, in two novels: Sackville-West's All Passion Spent (1931) and Trefusis's Hunt the Slipper (1937).

Albion and Albanius and its composer, Louis Grabu, have been unjustly dismissed by musical scholars. This thesis seeks to redress that injustice. A documentary biography of Grabu is provided, and a discussion of the inception of Albion and Albanius, detailing the role of each of its creators. The opera is subjected to a thorough examination, including a discussion of: 1) the relationship between the 1685 libretto and the 1687 score; 2) its largescale structure and tonal plan; 3) and its vocal and instrumental writing. These studies reveal that Grabu, in composing the music, Dryden, in writing the libretto, and Betterton, in designing staging, drew upon specific models from Lully's Phaêton (1683). Furthermore, it is shown that Grabu drew upon a thorough knowledge of Lully's other operas: not only the general compositional features and structures, but also specific movements. There is, in addition, evidence suggesting that Grabu borrowed musical ideas and techniques from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. Information regarding the opera's performance is gathered from the score and developed through comparison with contemporary practices. In particular, the similarities between Grabu's score and those of Lully printed by Ballard suggest that Grabu wrote for an ensemble modelled on that of the Paris Opéra. The dance and staging elements of the opera are examined in the light of information about, and illustrations from, English and especially French productions (particularly the drawings of Berain). Grabu's influence on Purcell, and Dioclesian in particular, is demonstrated. The reception history of Albion and Albanius is explored, and the assertion that Grabu was an incompetent composer and the opera an artistic failure is shown to be unfounded. A modern edition of Albion and Albanius with critical commentary is provided.

'Reading Richard Schechner' explores the theatre, theory, and academic leadership of a key figure in American theatre studies, engaging critically with Schechner's contributions, in order to assess their value for future theatre research. Chapter One considers how Schechner's theatre participated in social change and situates Schechner's analogy of theatre to ritual within an avant-garde theatrical tradition. Chapter Two models Schechner's career in terms of a singular performance project which moves from its early focus on theatre production, through performance theory, leading finally to his leadership of Performance Studies as an institutionally validated area. I examine the interplay between Schechner's theatre and his growing interest in anthropology, identifying the ways in which anthropological discourse supported his authority as a theatrical auteur. These chapters include case studies of his productions Dionysus in 69 and The Tooth of Crime. Chapter Three develops the relation between creative authorship and academic authority by introducing two key concepts. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital characterises the rewards for successful and authoritative authorship which, I argue, Schechner has pursued. Allegory articulates the historical relation between creative authorship and socially empowered authority. The logic of Schechner's performance paradigm is analysed as an allegorical structure, following Joel Fineman's definition. Chapter Four concentrates on the ways in which, over time, Schechner has repositioned theatre as subordinate to the broad spectrum he defines as performance. I give grounds for rejecting Schechnerian performance as a viable paradigm for theatre's study. Furthermore, I reinterpret it as an enterprising intermedia arts project aiming to disrupt the institution from within. To deauthorise Schechnerian performance in this way is also to reauthorise it, by returning its ostensibly objective structures to their origin in creative acts. To this end, I conclude by sketching a portrait of Richard Schechner as an author of avant-garde theatre and theory.

The thesis takes its beginnings from the work of Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony and from Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Praz has argued that the construction of the 'femme fatale' as a recognizable type is a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century. Foucault proposes that the nineteenth century is characterised not by a repression of sexual discourses but by a multiplication of centres from which such discourses are produced. The thesis places the 'femme fatale' in the socio-historical context of the 90s and searches both for the plurality of discourses mobilised to define her, and for her presence in other non-literary discourses of the period such as those of evolutionary theory, craniology, criminology and imperialist discourses. It locates this figure in a wide range of contexts: late nineteenth-century debates about female sexuality, biological determinism, theories of decadence and degeneration, invasion anxieties and the censorship debate. It juxtaposes two 'popular' novelists (Stoker and Haggard) with two 'major' novelists (Conrad and Hardy) to demonstrate that the particular discourses mobilised to describe the 'femme fatale' are to be found in works of differing literary 'quality' and in different literary genres. Chapter One examines the representation of the female vampires in Bram Stoker's Dracula in the context of Foucauldian theory about the production of sexual discourses in medicine and science in this period. These 'sexualised' women are contagious and must be annihilated. Chapter No explores the conflation of sexual and imperialist discourses in Rider Haggard's adventure fiction, particularly in She and King Solomon's Mines. Ayesha is an invading sexual being and FET- 'death in the flames can be seen as a 'devolution' into a 'monkey woman': an unveiling. This chapter also examines the other female 'missing links' of Haggard's fiction. Chapter Three continues the exploration of sexual and imperialist discourses, here in the early novels of Conrad: Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, in particular. It explores the way in which Conrad's native women merge into jungle landscapes and into twilight; they signify the threatening 'otherness' of the jungle and of language. This chapter concludes with an examination of Winnie Verloc of the Secret Agent as female murderess and as 'free woman'. Chapter Four focuses on Hardy's Tess as victim and as murderess. It proposes a reading of Tess of the d'Urbervilles as a response to the enforced censorship of the text (Tess) expressed via the moral censure and execution of Tess. A short theoretical Afterword draws on feminist theory and Derridean analysis of phallocentrism to propose that the 'femme fatale' of this period is a sign signifying a multiple or conflated 'otherness': a multiplicity of cultural anxieties.

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Placing the musical theatre in the context of its most recent developments, between 1957 and 1989, the study begins by aiming to define the term, 'musical theatre',and notes the lack of serious critical attention paid to it. In the succeeding four chapters, the author constructs a basic model for critical analysis of musicals, rooted firmly in dramatic principles, not musical ones. He also examines: a) the inherent expressive qualities of its four basic media and their dramatic functions; b) the traditions and conventions which have developed to give theatrical life and dramatic significance to the form; c) questions of style as related to the musical,and, most importantly; d) the principles and process of synthesis,which, he argues, creates a new language of the musical and gives it its place as art. In the second part of the thesis, the author examines shows from the set period in relation to the four variables of his analytical model: i) the ideas artists want to express ii) the discovered devices of creation iii) the mechanics of presentation iv) public and critical response. By this means he explores the expressive range of the musical's recent history and its potential which continues to attract artists and audiences alike.

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