This thesis investigates the textual culture of early modern Scotland, as evident from three literary miscellany manuscripts produced and circulated in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. Each of the main three chapters will consider one miscellany manuscript in its complex totality, dealing with questions of provenance, ownership, editorial history, literary analysis, and an assessment of the manuscript in its wider cultural context. Manuscript transcriptions are appended, particularly since the contents of two out of three of the miscellanies discussed here have never been printed. Chapter One, by way of introduction, considers the current state of manuscript research in Scotland, and the implications for Scottish studies of book-historical methodologies. ‘Histories of the Book’ are currently being written across Europe (and further afield), and Scotland forms no exception. Against this backdrop, Chapter One evaluates recent critical work on early modern Scottish textual culture, and the extent to which book-historical narratives, developed in relation to medieval and renaissance English literature, can be applied to Scottish writing. More specifically, this chapter locates the miscellany manuscript as a prime site of investigation for scribal culture. The first miscellany under investigation, in Chapter Two, is Edinburgh University Library MS Laing III.447. For the largest part, the content of this manuscript has been printed, as a supplementary volume to the works of Alexander Montgomerie. This print is problematic in many respects, however, since it reorganised the entire content, and removed from its immediate context the longest poem of the manuscript, Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae. The appended transcription restores the original order. Chapter Two will investigate the contributions of the many scribes that were responsible for the manuscript, and examine whether any thematic coherence may be detected. Chapter Three deals with Cambridge University Library MS Kk.5.30, a hybrid manuscript that contains two sections. Section one (dating to the late-fifteenth, early-sixteenth century) features a transcription of John Lydgate’s Middle English Troy Book; section two consists of a later supply (c. 1612) by James Murray of Tibbermuir, containing additions to the Troy Book and twenty-seven miscellaneous poems. Though this latter section will be the main focus of the chapter, the manuscript’s other section, and thus its hybridity, will not be ignored. The third and final miscellany to be discussed is National Library of Scotland MS 15937. Containing approximately 175 items (many of which from English sources), this is the most expansive of the three manuscripts considered here. MS 15937 is textually a problematic source, since it is a nineteenth-century transcript of a lost original, the latter compiled by Margaret Robertson of Lude around 1630. This miscellany is an important witness also in musical terms, since it collects the words to a significant amount of Scottish and English songs, many of them unique to the manuscript. All chapters will stress the highly idiosyncratic nature of the miscellanies, but also, where possible, establish common ground between them, and connect them to other Scottish and English manuscripts and printed books. In all their complexity, the miscellanies reveal a literary culture whose nature undermines the monolithic and court-centred history that has been so prevalent in literary criticism (though the court, and courtly writing, are important backgrounds to a great deal of the poetry contained in the manuscripts). Finally, as underlined in the concluding Chapter Five, EUL Laing III.447, CUL MS Kk.5.30, and NLS MS 15937 are important collections both for the preservation, and for evidence about the dissemination, of Scottish and English verse.

This thesis examines the relations between music and literature through fictional women musicians in nineteenth-century European literature and more particularly through their bodies. The female body appears to be a rich juncture between music and literature, facilitating musical references in literature as well as creating complex musical narrative systems anchored in social, cultural and scientific discourses of the long nineteenth century. All types of women musicians are examined (singers, instrumentalists, composers, and even listeners) along with different discourses on the body (social, philosophical and scientific), shedding a new light on gender and the arts. Our chronological as well as thematic approach strives to highlight a common representation of the body and of female musicians in literature. German Romantic texts thus present women musicians as elusive figures who play a key role in the impossibility to materialise the abstract. Realist and sensation novels are analysed through a clinical perspective on the body and envision female musicians as monomaniacs. On the contrary, fiction written by female authors introduces empowered musicians as priestess of art. Finally, fin-de-siècle novels stage the female body as a degenerate entity of society. The parallel analysis of literary case studies with different perspectives on the body posits the women-music-body triangle as a new approach to gender, music and literature.

My thesis focuses on a group of novels dealing with Indo-British interracial marriage, written at the turn of the 20th century. The novels belong to the large corpus of popular literature produced at this time about India by male and female Anglo-Indian writers whose purpose in writing was not only entertainment but also, importantly, instruction.¹ This literature has been neglected by the literary critics but repays close attention for it is a valuable archive for the study of female perspectives on British rule in India. There has been work by historians on Anglo-Indian women recently but the womens' own fictional writing has been largely neglected. Using a historical materialist approach, one of my aims in this study is also to examine the differences of perspective on British rule evident in male and female writing on India. The narrative trajectory is invariably the same: an ignorant British protagonist marries an Indian with whom s/he sets up home, prompted by desires which are gendered. The depiction of intimacy, I argue, is intended to illuminate the hidden space of Indian life (the home) so that marital and domestic practices which were considered to degrade Indian women may be exposed to the British reader. The link made by the British between the treatment of women and the fitness of Indian men for self-rule is important here. The representation of the Indian home as a hidden space about which the British knew very little but imagined much, offers a reading of the anxiety felt by the British about the limits of their control in India, both over the Indians and over themselves. ¹These writers include Alice Perrin, Maud Diver, Fanny Penny, E.W. Savi, Victoria Cross and Pamela Wynne; several male Anglo-Indian writers and non-Anglo-Indians are included.

This thesis aims to investigate how works by Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean writers circulate in translation. The texts under study include allographic translations as well as cases of self-translation. Caribbean texts and their translations are analysed through the prism of the threshold, which offers a multi-faceted entry point into key themes and aspects of Caribbean literature as well as into translational strategies. When discovering the Caribbean in and through translation, readers experience the crossing of multiple thresholds, be they topographical, cultural, linguistic or imaginary. The dual nature of the threshold, which both opens into and signals a limit, heralds movement and continuity on the one hand, but also invokes potential resistance on the other hand. Departing from the semiotic approach adopted by Genette in his seminal study on paratexts as ‘thresholds of interpretation’, this work seeks to examine thresholds as strategic sites of negotiation for translators. Their visibility, in particular, is associated with forms of trespassing that tease out the concepts of authority and originality. When it comes to Caribbean writing, thresholds are presented as ambiguous sites of opaque revelations, a view that contrasts with a more traditional understanding of paratext as a space aiming towards (absolute) clarification of the text. Rather, liminality is presented as favouring acts of subversion whereby Caribbean writing emerges as a literature that manifests constant (re)appropriations and generates renewed (af)filiations for the region. Problematic crossings are also explored to reveal that thresholds act as enclaves of cultural resistance where Caribbean literature is concerned. Here, Caribbean untranslatabilities are investigated as a feature of the region’s fragmentary nature, which, once turned into a poetics of translation based on reciprocal hospitality, offers possible routes of access to a pan-Caribbean cultural memory. Further analysis of translational paratexts as sites of reparation not only seeks to dislocate classics such as Césaire’s Cahier away from corrective manipulations of the text, it also aims to relocate Caribbean writing within a tradition of transculturation and creolization. Here, acts of self-translation expose the importance of self-legitimacy for those Caribbean writers who decide to adopt a bilingual approach to their writing, and raises the issue of whether or not any form of Caribbean writing that circulates on a global scale ultimately becomes a product of translation. The last sections of the thesis argue in favour of alternative models of circulation for Caribbean literature, in which translation is conceived as a series of archipelagic crossings that generates new coordinates for transoceanic solidarities. In turn, re-thinking translation from the perspective of Caribbean ecologies allows us to present a translocal approach to cultural circulation.

Britain imported a vast number of cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were largely male garments in India at the time, which became popular dress accessories for British women. The demand for these shawls was opportune for textile manufacturers at home – particularly in Edinburgh, Norwich, and Paisley, who launched a thriving industry of shawls, ‘made in imitation of the Indian’. There has been considerable scholarship on cashmere shawls and their European copies in textile history. However, it has enjoyed no such prominence in literary studies. This PhD thesis examines Cashmere and ‘Paisley’ shawls in works of literature. Indian shawls are mentioned in a number of literary texts, including plays, poems, novels, opera, and satire. A wide variety of writers such as Richard Sheridan, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Wilkie Collins (to name a few) depict these textiles in their works. For these writers, I argue, shawls provide a means to explore Britain’s changing social and imperial identity through the prism of material culture. The sheer incidence of ‘shawls’ in printed discourse furthermore suggests that they went beyond the realm of everyday fashion to constitute one of the important narratives of nineteenth-century Britain. In emphasising the significance of material culture and recovering new historical contexts, this investigation raises important questions relating to the links between industry and trade, and literary production. I rely on literary criticism, scholarship on India, and textile history to examine the phenomenon of cashmere shawls. In the wider context of postcolonialism, the research suggests that instead of the Saidian model which viewed the East as an abject ‘Other,’ colonies actually exerted a reverse and important influence on the imperial centre. A new emphasis on Indian things in literature, this work hopes, will contribute a fresh strand of thought to studies of imperialism.

This dissertation first sets out to place Du Bartas' Les Semaines in its religious and epic setting, and argues that the poem's mission is to exist as poetry and as religious instruction at the same time. From this and its philosophical backdrop emerges a poetry that emphasises equation, or fusion, over comparison. Antique-type similes are therefore summarily examined and connected with the "primary" sensibilities of Homer. The proper fusive style and language of Sylvester's translation are then considered. Its style is found to be conscious to a degree, relying especially on repetitional devices of catechistic value, such as anaphora and symploce; on devices of oxymoronic and paradoxical metamorphosis, such as agnominatio; and on devices of epigrammatic summary, such as chiasmus. The language of Sylvester's Du Bartas is then examined closely in two domains, those of its scientific and natural description. The two are not wholly separable. It is found that Sylvester's language, as Du Bartas, must be interpreted at more than its literal level; that three levels of interpretation along the lines of three levels of allegory are implicit. This is so in respect the italicised language so prominent in Divine Weeks, discussed in Chapter 5, and in respect of the adjectival and verbal language discussed in Chapter 7. One way of designating the organising principle lying behind these language hieroglyphs is as emblem book turned purely into words. This is insensitive to the poetic third level of Operation, which seeks to do more than teach, which seeks to inspire. This dissertation relates Sylvester's language to two traditions of English poetry, as different one from the other as noun is from adjective: the metaphysical school and the Augustan period. It argues that metaphysical poetry is enthralled with Du Bartas' conceits in Sylvester's translation, is influenced by them, and takes them up. These conceits are nonetheless often one-word, substantive, and hieroglyphic. Augustan poetry on the other hand takes up a Sylvestrian diction, often unaware of its implications, because it deems this language the true language of poetry. The rather dramatic place given to Divine Weeks in the development of English poetic diction is dealt with at a statistical level in an excursus on Sylvester's word and language formulations.

Tracing Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Scottish Men's Fiction takes account of the representation of masculinities in a selected group of novels by twentieth-century Scottish male authors. Rather than attempt a chronological survey of fictions during this period, the argument proceeds by analysing groups of texts which are axiomatic in specific ways: the Glasgow realist novels of the 1930s and post-1970s, from the works of James Barke and George Blake to those of William McIlvanney and James Kelman, which offer particular perspectives on relationships between men of different class identifications; fictions reliant upon existentialism, which intersect with the masculinist values of the Glasgow tradition in the figure of Kelman, but are also produced by Alexander Trocchi and Irvine Welsh; and novels which employ the technique of 'cross-writing', or literary transvestism, from the Renaissance fictions of Lewis Grassic Gibbon to the postmodern works of Alan Warner and Christopher Whyte. In a critical field which has always been concerned with a tradition of largely male-produced texts privileging the actions of male characters, but has neglected fully to consider the production and reception of those texts in terms of their specific articulations of gender positions, this thesis employs theories of masculinities developed in the study of American and English literatures since the 1980s in order to provide new perspectives on Scottish novels. It also draws upon the materialist theory of Louis Althusser for a model of ideological identification, as well as utilising several psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches to gender formation in Western culture, epitomised by the work of Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman. The various perspectives on masculine gender and sexual identities thus assembled are primarily directed towards considering the novels under discussion as 'men's texts' - texts not only by or about men, but often directed towards men as readers too.

This thesis seeks to address the literary, cultural and historical questions surrounding what I will suggest was the reconceptualization of fame in the second half of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth centuries. The only previous analyses of celebrity in this period by Leo Braudy and by Frank Donoghue have claimed categorically that even though a democratization of fame occurred in this period only men had sufficient access to the fame machine and thus to the experience of the frenzy of renown. While I argue that this period witnessed the birth of modern concepts of celebrity, I will suggest that a modernization necessarily entailed a feminization of fame. Traditionally, heroic self-sacrifice had led to assured immortality, but with the rapidly expanding print culture of this period, celebrity was often instantaneous, achieved during a lifetime rather than a lifetime achievement. With the dissemination of the media, the rise of newspaper and periodicals and thus, more importantly, the increasing visibility of the celebrity as a person to be admired and emulated came the means to seduce an eager audience by manipulating one’s career or personal image. Opening with an examination of the confessional politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who sought and found a desiring audience for this outpouring of private sensibility and thus initiated a discourse of fame which no longer relied upon the classical stoicism apparent since Ancient Rome, I will investigate how women writers not only ‘puffed’ themselves in the press, but actively engaged in constructing distinct authorial personae in and through their writings. Far from cowering anonymously in the shades, women writers were actively seeking and achieving the limelight, attaining a level of cultural centrality previously thought by critics such as Braudy and Donoghue to be unattainable. Embracing the public and publicity itself, they took advantage of the shifting mechanics of celebrity to place their writings and, ultimately, themselves, on the rostrum, more than eager to gain literary laurels.

Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespear has offered the first taste of Shakespearean drama to children for nearly two hundred years. Though it has not always been realised, the book has become one of the most influential publications related to the study of Shakespeare. However, academic studies of Lambs' tales are scarce and often inadequate. This thesis is the first extensive and detailed study of Lambs' tales, which also explores their profound influence. It consists of two volumes. In Volume One, I examine the roles of the Lambs as children' s writers; including, how Charles integrated his Romantic criticism into the six tragic tales, and how Mary campaigned for educational reform through her fourteen comic and romantic stories. Moreover, I have identified which editions of Shakespeare' s plays were used by the Lambs as their textual basis. With fresh evidence, I also bridge over many gaps in the publishing history regarding both Lambs' tales and their rival publications. Volume Two is an edition-based annotated bibliography of prose narratives adapted for children from Shakespeare' s plays 1807-1998. The Annotated Bibliography is the most complete documentation on this subject. It covers 42 different versions of Shakespeare stories, and includes, altogether, 304 entries.

The thesis is approximately 60,000 words in length and is divided into three parts. Part I (Chapters 1-4) deals with Hudibras in relation to seventeenth century literary traditions. Chapter 1 introduces the poem and its author, places Hudibras within its immediate historical context, describes its popularity, and states the problem of determining its genre; several possible solutions to the problem are considered, notably those of seventeenth and eighteenth century writers; "mock-heroic" is defined and adopted. Chapter 2 is a survey: it begins by citing two adverse modern criticisms of Butler's method of ridiculing his principal character, and then sets out to test the justness of them. A number of romances popular in the seventeenth century are described; criticism of them is considered; and several satirical and burlesque works using romantic characters, motifs, and plots are analyzed. Chapter 3 places Hudibras with respect to the works and attitudes described in the previous chapter. The generating circumstances of the first part of the poem are considered in the light of Butler's presentation of them as a romance; Hudibras and Halpho are examined in relation to other mock-knights and squires, especially Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Braggadochio and Trompart. Chapter 4 treats Hudibras in connexion with the seventeenth century tradition of classical burlesque, analyzes Butler's treatment of classical themes and characters for the purpose of satire, and in an extended comparison between Hudibras and Gondibert examines Butler's criticism of the heroic ideals of love and military valour. Part II (Chapters 5 and 6) comprises studies of several elements of Butler's literary method in Hudibras. Chapter 5 analyzes Butler's use of metaphor and of dramatic argument as satirical techniques. Chapter 6 treats the mock-speeches (III,ii) and the burlesque heroical epistles, as well as the narrative method of Hudibras, and the device of the comic narrator. Part III consists of three appendices. Appendix A deals with the question of the identity of the 'West Country knight' upon whom Butler says that he based the character of Hudibras. The evidence in favour of Sir Samuel Luke and Sir Hanry Rosewell is examined and Sir Samuel Rolle is presented as the most likely 'original' of Hudibras A certain amount of evidence in his favour is given for the first time in this appendix. Appendix B criticizes the identification of Ralpho in the 'Key to Hudibras' (1715), presenting for the first time the source from which the author of the 'Key' drew the portrait of 'Isaac Robinson,' the man upon whom (he claims) Butler based his characterization of Ralpho. Appendix C criticizes the attribution to Butler (currently accepted) of Mercurius Menippeus, a political pamphlet first published in 1680 and containing a passage of invective against Sir Samuel Luke. It is argued that the attribution is virtually without foundation.