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This study explores the presentation of transgressive, effective and erotic relationships in a selected group of early modern plays as those relationships relate to the English Renaissance ideal of marriage and sexuality expressed in religious and secular tracts. The depictions of illicit love and sexuality in these plays reveal problematic social and moral issues inherent in the construction of the English Renaissance ideal of love and marriage. Not only do the dramatists reveal the tension between transgressive and normative love and sexuality, but they do so through the use of aesthetic forms that transgress conventional dramatic structure. This dissertation contends that the unconventional dramatic representation of transgression functions as a cognitive mode for the audience in their understanding of the practical social reality associated with the abstract ideality of love and marriage. Focussing on a selected plays of English Renaissance dramatists William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and two anonymous playwrights, I suggest that the dramatists refuse to condemn or condone the transgression. Rather, they endow it with meaning, and while not rescinding the ideal love and sexuality, offer possible ways of accommodating it.

The thesis sets out to examine Hardy's representations of women in sexual and marital relationships, and to relate those representations to contemporary developments in sexual ideology and in fiction. An Introduction considers the way in which ideology exerts pressure upon literary form, and discusses the particular appeal of female characters to Hardy's imagination. The first chapter is concerned with the constitution of sexuality as a subject of public discussion, and with its decisive shift from the area of moral discourse to that of the scientific. The influence of Darwinism and of neo-Darwinism upon ideologies of sexual difference and the nature of woman is discussed, together with the ambiguous political status of much contemporary feminist thought. There follows a chapter on Hardy's experimentalism with genre and narrative voice in his early fiction, and its relation to his female characters. An examination of The Return of the Native situates it as Hardy's first attempt at a double tragedy, of a man and of a woman, intellectual and sexual. "Women and the New Fiction 1880-1900" gives an account of the development of the "Fiction of Sex" and the novel of the "New Woman", and discusses the novel of womanliness, liberal feminist fiction, and the fiction of womanhood. The challenge that these new forms and modes of writing posed to the dominance of realism in the period is discussed. The last three chapters examine Hardy's last major novels in this enabling context of the New Fiction, and focus on the experiments with narrative method that bring about a radical break between Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. A brief conclusion argues that Hardy's experimentalism must be seen in its relation to contemporary fictional practice, and not as the product of personal temperament or of his own sexual and marital experiences. The thesis ends with a bibliography of works consulted.

The subject of this thesis is the unusual nature, in the presentation of courtship and marriage, of Trollope's depiction of women as compared with that of other novelists of the first part of the Victorian age. To demonstrate Trollope's remarkable objectivity and realism, I consider first the treatment by him and by three other male novelists of the period of the motivations towards marriage of women. In the first chapter I sketch out the concept of marriage that actually prevailed and suggest thereby the importance of its achievement for women; and also give a rough idea of the restrictions imposed on the treatment of the subject by the critical consensus of the times. In the next four chapters I illustrate the artificiality, according with these restrictions, with which Dickens, Thackeray and Kingsley deal with the subject of courtship, and contrast with this the sympathetic understanding towards women that Trollope exhibits. I examine in detail in the sixth chapter critical reactions to the works of these writers, in an attempt to show to what extent the distinctions I have made were noted by the Victorians and by more recent critics. In the second part of the thesis I deal with the treatment of relations in marriage itself. Having first considered the singularly few instances in the novelists discussed earlier of the workings of marriage treated on an independent basis, I examine the approach of George Eliot who, along with Trollope, expands upon the subject at length. Arguing that a dogmatic view of the marital relation vitiates her treatment, in the final chapter I explore the contrast offered by Trollope's realistic presentation of the topic.

Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität Berlin, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 282-316).

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-86). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis--Radcliffe College. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-291).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2010. / "Graduate Program in Comparative Literature." Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-215).

Thesis--Radcliffe College. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-291).

Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität Berlin, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 282-316).