This dissertation examines the use made of details from the natural world by English poets of the mid-seventeenth century. It is concerned with two main aspects of the subjects the function of natural imagery; and the rhetorical methods by which details from nature are exploited in poetry. It also seeks to demonstrate that the way a poet manipulates his material is influenced both by inherited literary tradition, and also by his age's changing conception of the nature of the universe and of man's relationship to it. Part One of the thesis explores the implications of the title in the light of some early critical treatments of the subject of Nature in poetry and of more recent theories of seventeenth-century imagery and rhetoric, and surveys those changes in the thought and sensibility of the period which seem to have had a bearing on the poetic handling of natural imagery. Part Two investigates the various ways in which details from nature were employed by poets during the years 1645-1668. The material has been organised under three general headings, dictated by the function of the images in the poems in which they occur. Part Three examines the work of seven poets whose contribution is deemed to be of particular interest. Their poetry is related to the wider cultural setting discussed in Part One and to the literary background provided in Part Two. Part Four furnishes a brief survey of some of the major lines of development in the use of natural details in the poetry of the period immediately following the years studied in the main body of the thesis. The study concludes with three appendices and a bibliography of books and articles cited and consulted in the course of its composition.

At present no scholar has provided an in-depth study into the dissemination of the Pater Noster outside the clerical sphere. This thesis provides a detailed consideration of the ways in which the Pater Noster was taught to the laity in medieval England. It explores the central position of the prayer in the lay curriculum, the constitutions which played a fundamental role in its teaching, and the methods by which it was disseminated. Clerical expositions of the prayer and its tabular and diagrammatic representations are examined to consider the material available to assist the clergy in their pedagogical role. The ways in which material associated with the Pater Noster was modified and delivered to a lay audience provides an important component in the holistic approach of this thesis. The thesis itself proposes that the prayer was widely known and recited, drawing on a variety of mediums in which it was presented to the laity. These include sermon material, which would have been delivered in the vernacular; the recitation of Paternosters, an earlier version of the conventional rosary; the performance of the Pater Noster plays in the northern locations of York, Beverley and Lincoln; and representations of the prayer in wall paintings.

The contention of the essay which follows is that the presumption that Wyatt's rhythm can be judged by standards which are impervious to the actual performance of his poetry, to the actual affects achieved and the 'meanings' thereby imparted, leads ineluctably to the rejection of Wyatt's poetry by prosodists and that the rejection of that presumption leads as rigourously to the conclusion that prosody (as that term is widely understood) has no role to play in the assessment of Wyatt's poetry. Evidence in favour of this conclusion is provided by the slight and previously unacknowledged testimony of the punctuation of two principal Wyatt manuscripts (transcripts of which are provided in vols. 2 and 3) and slightly reinforced by attention to the phrasal rhyme-scheme of some of the poems. The evidence is considered suggestive rather than conclusive, but by following through the suggestion of a non-quantitative rhythmical principle an attempt is made to show that in Wyatt's poetry there is a creative and dramatic significance indicative of a pervasive though limited set of preoccupations - metaphysical, political and psychological - within the poems. In conclusion it is maintained that, although no final placing of Wyatt can rest purely upon his rhythmical accomplishment, the approach to Wyatt's rhythm which has been proposed is important in that it reveals a presence of such basic and important preoccupations in the poems and these, set within but transforming the conventions of amour courtois, are finally adduced to establish Wyatt's place in relation to the sixteenth century.

My thesis argues that Gabriele d’Annunzio and Thomas Mann both conceive of artistic creation as a process which is influenced by their interpretations of Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian, and that striking affinities characterise their respective literary portrayals of the relationship between the artist and (a version of) the Dionysian. D’Annunzio and Mann, who were contemporaries, are rarely considered together, and it is widely assumed that there is little common ground between them. This thesis will demonstrate that their creative and critical engagement with Nietzsche, especially his idea of the Dionysian, offers a productive way of comparing the two writers and illuminating hitherto overlooked parallels between their understandings of creativity. The relationship between the artist and the Dionysian will constitute the main point of comparison. For both d’Annunzio and Mann, the Dionysian appears as a drive that can promote creativity, through encouraging liberation from repression and the rediscovery of primordial energies, but also destruction, by threatening self-dissolution, chaos and annihilation. The Dionysian will be seen to offer a highly precarious form of creativity. The artist’s success, and even survival, will depend upon his ability to master this potentially lethal drive, and channel the impulses it triggers into artistic production.

This thesis investigates the conception and development of an English literary canon across the mid- to-late-seventeenth century, examining ideas about literary production, preservation, genre development, literary criticism, notions of fame and the role of the author in a period before the term 'canon' was applied to secular writing. Current scholarship into literary canons often concentrates on the eighteenth century and later. My study argues that many of the ideas, institutions, aesthetic features, and commercial factors that contribute to English literature canon-formation predate the eighteenth century, even if the notion of an English literary canon is not made explicit until this time. I approach this topic through a series of five case studies. Four concentrate on specific categories of writing that I argue influence the development of a literary canon from the mid-seventeenth century onward: printed collections, literary criticism, life-writing and commendatory poetry. The fifth chapter focuses on an individual author, Abraham Cowley, and how he endeavours to position himself into the pantheon of English worthies. I am not arguing that the seventeenth century is where canon-formation begins, but aim to demonstrate that ideas about canonicity existed during the seventeenth-century and have impacted the shape and content of the English literary canon.

This thesis explores the writing life of the Northumbrian labouring-class poet Robert Story (1795-1860) who, during the political turmoil of the 1830s, achieved national celebrity for writing a series of songs and poems for Peel’s Conservative party. In his unpublished autobiography (c.1853) he alludes to building an archive of his work. Drawing on these manuscripts, all of which have until now remained hidden, and his published writing, this thesis investigates the relationship between Story’s apparent political conservatism and his progressive and experimental approach to writing. The study is organised into three main parts. The first forms a study of Story’s biographical manuscripts, using his accounts of reading to raise the wider complex theoretical questions that inform the thesis. It goes beyond Story’s connection with the pastoral tradition and hypothesises that Story’s writing was always rhetorical. Tracing Story’s circle of ‘brother’ poets, part two locates him in a distinctly labouring-class canon, imagined or otherwise, that he believed was at least equal to the polite realm of literature. This phase of research also resituates Story’s satirical modes of writing and his party ballads within the great body of political literature produced by working men during the first half of the nineteenth century. Story’s importance lies not only in his pursuit of politics but also in his cultural ambition: the third part of the thesis examines formal hybridity in his writing. It reveals how Story was searching for new forms of self-expression and asks to what extent his pursuit of literature was politicised and predicated on the belief that social and economic emancipation was contingent on cultural equality. Overall this thesis argues that Story was using literature to challenge the political, social and cultural boundaries imposed on him as both a workingman and a labouring-class writer.

This thesis explores the connections between the nineteenth century periodical press and the development of detective fiction, between approximately 1840 and 1900. It argues that these two Victorian developments were closely interrelated, and that each had significant impacts on the other which has hitherto gone underexplored in academic scholarship. The thesis argues that the relationship between the police and the periodical press solidified in the mid-Victorian era, thanks to the simultaneous development of a nationwide system of policing as a result of the passage of the 1856 County and Borough Police Act and the abolition of the punitive 'taxes on knowledge' throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. This established a connection between the police and the periodical, and the police were critically examined in the periodical press for the remainder of the nineteenth century from various perspectives. This, the thesis argues, had a corresponding effect on various kinds of fiction, which began to utilise police officers in new ways - notably including as literary guides and protectors for authors wishing to explore growing urban centres in mid-Victorian cities which had been deemed 'criminal'. 'Detective fiction' in the mid-Victorian era, therefore, was characterised by trust in the police officer to protect middle-class social and economic values. Towards the end of the nineteenth century however, everything changed. The thesis explores how journalistic reporting of a corruption scandal in 1877, as well as the Fenian bombings and Whitechapel murders of the 1880s, contributed to significant changes in the detective genre. This was the construction of the image of the 'bumbling bobby', and the corresponding rise of the private or amateur detective, which ultimately led to the appearance of the character who epitomised the relationship between the police and the periodical - Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

'To Amaze the People with Pleasure and Delight': an analysis of the horsemanship manuals of William Cavendish, the first Duke of Newcastle (1593-1676). William Cavendish published two horsemanship manuals in 1658 and 1667, setting out his method for the noble art of the riding house. This thesis argues that within the canon of Newcastle's writing, his horsemanship manuals are key texts, offering insights into his writing practice, personal philosophy and motivation. To understand the importance of the manuals in their cultural context, Newcastle's contribution to the development of riding as an art is considered, with particular reference to the way in which his attitude towards other authors influenced each manual. A detailed examination of the technical aspects of the manuals illustrates that to ignore the method in favour of the historical and political material is to overlook a vital element. Newcastle's understanding of the horse's mind is a key to his approach, therefore this study argues that his royalist ideologies are supported and paralleled through his treatment and expectation of his horses. The engraved plates that illustrate the first manual are analysed as multi-layered images, offering a notional journey through his estates. The thesis will conclude with consideration of near-contemporary responses to Newcastle's work and argue that the manuals' importance to his own self actualisation and emotional security is written as much into the practicalities of the method as the theatricalities of its presentation.

This study explores the masochistic aspects of Decadent literature, which to date have been relatively neglected, or have received only sporadic attention as merely the passive forms of sadism, or sadomasochism (Mario Praz). As Jennifer Birkett suggests, Decadent sensibility and sexuality have arguably less affinity with Sade than Sacher-Masoch. Following Birkett, and utilising Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the independence of masochism from sadism and description of the distinctive aesthetic features of masochistic texts, I investigate masochistic formations in French Decadent texts; the work of Jean Lorrain and of Joséphin Péladan. This study also involves a review of relevant writings by Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysts (Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman); an engagement with current literary-critical scholarship in Decadence (Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Bram Dijkstra and Rita Felski), and in Sacher-Masoch (Nick Mansfield, John K. Noyes, and Anita Phillips), and his influence on Decadent writers.

The primary impulse for this dissertation was the striking disparity between the initial critical reaction to Doderer's works in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the long-term evaluation of his literary stature • .In the Introduction, an outline of the theoretical foundations of the study is followed by a brief survey of the academic criticism devoted to Doderer. This survey attempts to establish whether the 'new beginning' in Doderer criticism inspired in the mid-1970s by Anton Reininger and Hans Joachim Schroder has succeeded in clearing the way for a more balanced approach to Doderer's work. The survey reveals, however, that recent Doderer criticism has seen an alarming increase of interest in Doderer the man, as opposed to Doderer the writer. Chapter One is devoted to the reception accorded to Doderer's Ein Mord den jeder begeht. The critical reaction to Doderer's novel can be directly linked to suggestions made by his publishers in their 'Verlags- . prospekt' as to how the novel ought to be read, namely as anything but a detective novel. A detailed examination of Doderer's use of motifs familiar from detective fiction indicates that the author so consistently 'breaks the rules' of classical detective story writing that Ein Mord den jeder begeht might justifiably be regarded as a forerunner of the parodies of the detective novel so common in modern literature. An examination of Doderer's novel in the context of its first publication in 1938 reveals how uncannily closely the detective element in Ein Mord den jeder begeht resembles the official Nazi line on detective fiction, and this throws up the vexed question of whether Doderer's 'anti-detective novel' was an attempt to placate the Nazi censor. However, a comparison with Friedrich DUrrenmatt's anti-detective stories shows that the ideology of the irrational which informs Doderer's novel is not necessarily fascistic in nature, as some of Doderer's critics imply. A brief 'Excursus' on Claus Hubalek's television adaptation of Ein Mord den jeder begeht is intended to illustrate the difficulties involved in transferring Doderer's work to a visual medium. The critics' reactions to Hubalek's play provide a useful up-to-date picture ofoDoderer's current literary standing. In Chapter Two, the focus is turneq on the critical response provoked by Doderer's most controversial work, Die Merowinger. The outrageous plot and 'scurrilous' style of this novel present the reviewer with an unenviable dilemma, for he is confronted with a new work by a major titerary figure which does not conform with the pattern of the author's past successes. The survey of the reception of Die Merowinger is intended to illuminate how the reviewers were so prejudiced by their familiarity with what many regard as a 'Viennese trilogy', Die strudlhofstiege, Die erleuchteten Fenster and Die D~onen, that they were unable to arrive at a reasonably open-minded evaluation of Die Merowinger. The key problem in Doderer reception is the identification of the author with the image of an amiable Viennese raconteur. An examination of the reception of Doderer's works in America reveals that the author's very conscious 'Vienneseness' presents a major obstacle for many non-Austrian readers, and accounts to a large extent for the accusations of parochialism not infrequently levelled at Doderer. Yet, paradOXically, it is undoubtedly to his realistic depictions of Vienna, allied to an apparently apolitical ideology, that Doderer's success in the 19506 must be attributed. In view of the grossly oversimplified identification of Doderer with the image of the chronicler of Vienna, and the increasing politicization of literature in the 1960s, it is perhaps understandable that Doderer has gradually become little more than a peripheral figure in German literature today. The dissertation is supplemented by a Doderer-bibliography of some 1,955 titles. Although it makes no claims to be comprehensive, ·the bibliography is nevertheless a first attempt to collate the diverse material on Doderer which can be found in the archives in Munich and Vienna.