This study addresses the problem critics have faced in identifying contemporary perceptions of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon in early modernity by examining the literature, predominantly the drama, from the period. The name ‘barber-surgeon’ is not given formally to any character in extant early modern plays; only within the dialogue or during stage business is a character labelled the barber-surgeon. Barbers and surgeons are simultaneously separate and doubled-up characters. The differences and cross-pollinations between their practices play out across the literature and tell us not just about their cultural, civic and occupational histories but also about how we interpret patterns in language, onomastics, dramaturgy, materiality, acoustics and semiology. Accordingly, the argument in this study is structured thematically and focuses on the elements of performance, moving from discussions of names to discussions of settings and props, disguises, stage directions and semiotics, and from sound effects and music, to voices and rhetorical turns. In doing so, it questions what it means in early modernity to have a developed literary identity, or be deprived of one. The barber-surgeon is a trope in early modern literature because he has a tangible social impact and an historical meaning derived from his barbery and surgery roots, and consequently a richly allusive idiom which exerted attraction for audiences. But the figure of the barber-surgeon can also be a trope in investigating how representation works. An aesthetic of doubleness, which this study finds to be diversely constructed, prevails in barbers’, surgeons’ and barber-surgeons’ literary conception, and the barber-surgeon in the popular imagination is created from opposing cultural stereotypes. The literature from the period demonstrates why a guild union of barbers and surgeons was never harmonious: they are opposing dramaturgical as well as medical figures. This study has a wide-ranging literary corpus, including early modern play texts, ballads, pamphlets, guild records, dictionaries, inventories, medical treatises and archaeological material, and contributes to the critical endeavours of the medical humanities, cultural materialists, theatre historians and linguists.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Henry James was one of the most renowned writers at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century and is still known for his vast number of literary works and studies about the art of fiction. In his prefaces and critical essays, James discussed his own method of writing fiction, with a special focus on point of view and on issues related to the reception of his fictional work. In this sense, James also considered the importance of the role of the reader to the point of claiming in one of his prefaces: ―attentive reading, I avow, is what, at every point just like here, I completely invoke and hope for‖ (JAMES, 2009, p. 15). This dissertation discusses the construction of the fictional reader in two of James novels: The Portrait of a Lady (1886) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). Written twenty years apart from each other, these novels have meaningful similarities in their themes. The aim is to analyze how differences in the manipulation of point of view have implications to the rhetorical configuration of different readers in the two novels. In The Portrait of a Lady, James basically uses one single center of consciousness to narrate the story and constructs a reader that is gradually more participative and critical. In The Wings of the Dove, on the other hand, James opts for a more impersonal mode of presentation of the story, so the narrative is developed through several centers of consciousness. As a consequence, the configured reader is critical and inferential throughout the whole narrative because the gaps intentionally built by the writer have to be constantly filled. In short, our discussion shows that, along his career, Henry James projected readers that should be more and more critical. / Henry James é um dos escritores mais renomados da virada do século XIX para o século XX, conhecido por sua vasta produção literária e seus estudos sobre a arte da ficção. Em seus prefácios e ensaios de crítica literária, James discutiu o seu próprio método de escrita de ficção, com especial enfoque no foco narrativo, assim como questões relacionadas à recepção de sua obra ficcional. Assim, James também considerou a importância do papel do leitor: ―leitura atenta, confesso a propósito, é o que eu em cada ponto, como aqui, absolutamente invoco e espero‖ (JAMES, 1998, p. 19), exigia James em um de seus prefácios. Nesse sentido, neste trabalho discutimos a construção do leitor ficcional em dois de seus romances: The Portrait of a Lady (1886) e The Wings of the Dove (1902). Esses romances apresentam semelhanças temáticas significativas, apesar de terem sido escritos em um intervalo de quase vinte anos. Nosso objetivo é analisar como diferenças na elaboração do foco narrativo têm implicações para a configuração retórica de diferentes leitores. Em The Portrait of a Lady, James faz uso de basicamente um único centro de consciência para narrar a história e constrói um leitor gradualmente mais participativo e crítico. Já em The Wings of the Dove, James opta por um modo mais impessoal de apresentação da história, no qual a narrativa é desenvolvida por meio de diversos centros de consciência. Consequentemente, o leitor configurado é crítico e inferencial ao longo de toda a narrativa, pois é necessário que vazios intencionalmente deixados pelo escritor sejam preenchidos constantemente. Assim, nosso trabalho mostra que Henry James projetava leitores cada vez mais críticos na medida em que sua carreira avançava.

Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.

This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 378-404).