This thesis examines Dorothy Richardson's thirteen-volume novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915-1967) as a doubly autobiographical text. Pilgrimage is widely considered to be a fictionalised retelling of Richardson's own life, and many critics have found little difference between the lives of Dorothy Richardson and her protagonist Miriam Henderson. Following the Künstlerroman tradition, Richardson's novel sequence concerns itself exclusively with the life and coming to adulthood of Miriam Henderson who, like her creator, has an interest in documenting her own life. Thus, as Pilgrimage is the product of Richardson's struggle to find a place within literature, it is Miriam's too. I begin by foregrounding the theoretical landscape of autobiographical theory to date, focusing on feminist works and noting a historical concentration on male autobiography in critical pieces. In particular, Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses (1994) and Max Saunders' Self Impression (2010) are used to discuss the uneasy space Pilgrimage occupies as an example of autobiographical fiction, fitting into neither binary genre. Pilgrimage is then read chronologically, noting Richardson's development as a writer alongside her protagonist's. Miriam is a voracious reader and the progression of her interest in reading is discussed throughout this thesis, finding the influence of a variety of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ouida, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James and more. The following of this interest in literature is accompanied by a tracking of the narrative innovations Richardson employs in the writing of the Pilgrimage sequence, such as narrative shifts and unusual punctuation formations, which she uses to suggest points in the text in which Miriam can be seen to be telling her life story in the same way that Richardson has. A case is then made for Pilgrimage as doubly autobiographical, meaning that it is Miriam Henderson writing about herself, by Richardson writing about Henderson as herself. This dual mode of life writing can be traced through the novel sequence, developing in its many narrative innovations, as well as in Miriam's clear interest in both the reading and the writing of literature. Pilgrimage then represents both Dorothy Richardson and Miriam Henderson's attempts to represent their lives in literature.

The purpose of the present research is to investigate the presence of Dante in four authors of the twentieth century and to discuss in what ways these authors contribute to our perception of Dante. This study begins with the analysis of Primo Levi’s reaction to Dante, and the first two chapters deal respectively with Levi’s troubled relationship with the monumentality of Dante in Levi’s personal culture and with the modern writer’s attempts at rejecting that very monumentality. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus is on the inclusion of Dante within Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry, and on the issue of ideologically oriented exploitation of Dante both in Sanguineti’s novels and plays and in his critical analyses of the Comedy. The following chapters are about the presence of Dante in Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. In Beckett, a network of Dantean inclusions shows how Dante’s presence can be fertile, controversial, and yet apparently discarded. The last chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s Dantisms and especially the question of translation as both a technical and a cultural issue. The result is the perception of a vital Dantean presence, which generates approaches and revalidations in spite of its apparent distance and of its cultural diversity.

This thesis examines reader responses to Catalan identity through the reception of two Catalan novels in translation: Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal and For a Sack of Bones by Lluís- Anton Baulenas. Drawing on theories from Descriptive Translation Studies and cultural and sociological approaches to translation, it examines how representations of Catalan culture and identity are subject to influence from different agents at each stage of the translation and reception process. The thesis explores three areas: the role of translation within Catalan culture in the promotion of Catalan identity; the way in which this role is relevant to the translation process itself within the target culture; and finally whether the objectives of this role are achieved within the target market. This study offers a new approach to the study of the reader within Translation Studies, using blogs, online reviews and reading groups in order to gain access to real reader responses to translated literature and offers a methodology by which the study of the representation of culture through translation may be explored. The results of this study have relevance not only to translation research and practice, but also to translation policy, particularly for minority cultures.

This thesis is a response to the critics of the pioneering novelist Edgar Mittelholzer whose second novel was instrumental in paving the way for other Caribbean novelists during the 1950s. Critics of Mittelholzer have accused him of fascism, racism, an unhealthy interest in sexually sensationalist topics and death. He has until the recent centenary of his birth been marginalised and understudied. The first chapter of this thesis outlines the areas of study that have thus far been focused on and explores the underlying methods and theoretical framework of this thesis. The second chapter focuses on the author’s background, career and contribution to the Caribbean. The third explores the genesis of Mittelholzer’s creativity with a view to revealing how intertextuality is key to an understanding of his novels. It also discusses his creative use of the Middle Eastern notion of the Jinnee. The fourth chapter offers a critical analysis of The Life and Death of Sylvia and demonstrates how Mittelholzer employed the themes of sex, race and death. The fifth Chapter establishes that the texts of Yogi Ramacharaka were his primary source of inspiration and that Mittelholzer’s novels can be best understood in terms of the Oriental Occultist’s teachings. The sixth chapter explores Mittelholzer’s racial identity and finds that his mixed ancestry was a key source of creative inspiration. The final chapter concludes that further research is needed into his work and that an exploration of the intertextual references serves to clarify the author’s objectives.

This thesis is for ‘literature from below’. I select three groups of poor people –petty criminals, prostitutes, and apprentices –and investigate their dramatic representation in three early modern plays –The Roaring Girl, The Honest Whore, and Sir Thomas More. To overcome their representational distortion, I carry out a tripartite dialogue between documentational evidence, dramatic allusion and poetic imagination. This thesis adopts its methodology from poststructuralist historicism, but my theoretical position on Renaissance studies diverges from it in several respects, which I elucidate in the introduction. The first chapter ascertains, by scrutinizing the hermaphroditic protagonist Moll, that her cross-dressing and protean identities represent the characteristics of early modern London. The second chapter argues that early modern capitalism combined with patriarchy plays a crucial role in giving rise to prostitution by examining the courtesan protagonist, Bellafront. The third chapter, which analyzes the 1517 Ill May Day apprentice riots in the context of the 1590s London crisis, traces there presentational history of the popular insurgency and retrieves ideological implication from the early modern censorial regime. In the conclusion, I estimate ‘use value’ of Renaissance drama in our time, and from the Marxist perspective, I appraise the aesthetic appeal of the three plays.

The aim of this thesis is to examine Psycharis's Greek novels by focusing on his modes of writing and the ideas manifested in them. Psycharis saw his role as that of an intellectual aiming to reform Greek culture and he fought consistently for the establishment of the demotic - as he understood it as the language of literature. Yet his novels serve as a filter not only for his views on language and literature, but also for other social and philosophical issues of relevance to his time, and even to contemporary readers. I have defined three major areas for examination: the didacticism of the novels, expressed in the themes and in the narrative techniques employed by the author; the overall recurring cultural views presented in them, and the preoccupation with the importance of fiction, the role of literature and of the prose writer. The novels will be examined in chronological order and I shall address each of the three major areas explained above in turn, emphasising the most prominent one in each case. The objective of this thesis is to make Psycharis's Greek novels better known and to indicate the role that he played in the development of Modern Greek prose and culture.

The Shakespeare Institute and the University of Alabama are working together on the preparation of a new edition of the works of Robert Greene, the need for which has long been recognised. As a contribution to the project, this dissertation presents Perymedes the blacksmith and Pandosto.

This thesis intends to investigate how educated British women travellers challenged conventional female roles and how they participated in the political culture in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Part One will discuss those who tried hard to challenge or to correct traditionally-defined femininity and to prove themselves useful in their society. Many of them negotiated with and broadened the traditionally defined femininity in this age. Part Two will take Burke and Wollstonecraft’s debate as the central theme in order to discuss chronologically the British women travellers’ political responses to the Revolution controversy. When the Revolution degenerated into Terror and wars, the Burkean view became the main strand of British women travellers’ political thinking. Under the threat of Revolutionary France and during the Napoleonic Wars, a popular conservatism and patriotism developed in Britain. Part Three will use the travel journals of the women who went to France during the Amiens Truce and after the fall of Napoleon in 1814 to analyse the formation of British national identity and nationalism in this period. In the end, these educated British women both stimulated and contributed to the formation of British political and cultural identity at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This thesis investigates competing representations of androgyny as grotesque and/or divine in selected works by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. The literary grotesque is a combination of incompatibles—such as the combination of masculine and feminine—which evokes simultaneous reactions of laughter and revulsion, while I define the divine as that which inspires awe and wonder through its otherworldliness. Throughout, the thesis examines figures such as physical or metaphorical hermaphrodites, eunuchs, Amazons, transvestites, the asexual, the pansexual, and those who transgress gender boundaries. The Introduction establishes historical contexts for physical and behavioural androgyny, the grotesque, and the divine. Each subsequent chapter close-reads one literary text: Chapter 1 examines place-based androgyny in Jonson’s Volpone; Chapter 2 explores Antonio/Florizel’s effect in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida; Chapter 3 analyses role-reversal in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; Chapter 4 investigates Ganymede’s magnetism and Rosalind’s wondrousness in As You Like It; and Chapter 5 evaluates Cesario’s invigoration in Twelfth Night. I argue for a progression in the degree of wonder evoked by androgynous figures, and an increase in these figures’ subjectivity and agency. My thesis is the first to explore the liberating unfixity of androgyny as funny, frightening, repulsive, and yet also potentially divine.

While the growing body of literature on the relationship between feminist theory, classical myth, and classical scholarship has contributed to an understanding of general scholarly trends, there has not been a sustained examination of the relationship between feminist scholarship and classical receptions. Furthermore, the field of classical reception studies focuses almost exclusively on male authors and widely ignores female voices. This thesis addresses these lacunae through detailed discussions of the Ovidian receptions of four women writers active between 1950 and the present: Sylvia Plath, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Josephine Balmer, and Saviana Stănescu. The thesis tracks the ‘difference made’ by feminist scholarship on their varied receptions, and the ways in which recurrent concerns in their engagements prefigure, echo, or explicitly draw upon feminist theory and feminist Ovidian scholarship. This thesis poses the argument that women’s classical receptions offer a critical tool to advance feminist classical scholars’ attempts to ‘reappropriate the text’, by reclaiming female narrative authority from the male poet and interpellating the ‘resisting reader’. This diverse, yet characteristically feminine, Ovidian tradition challenges existing reception traditions based upon male practitioners alone, and reawakens the political and aesthetic critique at the heart of Ovid’s poetry.