This thesis explores how literary editing for the dramatic publication was developed in seventeenth-century England. Chapter 1 discusses how the humanist scholars embraced the concept of textual editing and put it into practice about a half century after the invention of the press. Chapter 2 addresses the development of the concept of literary editing in seventeenth-century England by investigating the editorial arguments preserved in the paratextual matter. Chapter 3 explores Jonsonian convention of textual editing which was established in imitation of classical textual editing of the humanist scholars and which eventually furnished a model for dramatic editing to the later editors who were to be commissioned to reproduce play texts for a reading public. Chapter 4 looks at Thomas Middleton’s The Mayor of Quinborough published by Herringman in 1661 which signals the restoration of the Jonsonian editorial convention. Chapter 5 will attempt to identify the printer of the play and considers the division of the editorial work between the editor and the printer. Chapter 6 addresses the reflection of the Jonsonian textual editing in the 1664 Killigrew folio and assesses its establishment of literary editing of seventeenth-century English drama as a herald of the 1709 Shakespeare edition by Nicholas Rowe.

This thesis is a study of the literary representation of St Margaret of Scotland in England and Scotland from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. Drawing both on existing developments made towards the understanding of the historical Margaret - and other medieval queens - and on advances in the wider theoretical field of queenship studies and feminist scholarship, it demonstrates the usefulness of reading the textual representation of Margaret as a reflection of contemporary ideas about queens and queenship in England and Scotland across the five centuries it covers. It identifies two key strands in the literary representation of Margaret - Margaret as dynastic mother and Margaret as ideal queen - and reveals how these were used both individually and together on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border. This thesis demonstrates both that Margaret is something of a lightning-rod for ideas of good queenship and Scottish independent sovereignty, and that these ideas exist in symbiosis with her sanctity. This thesis ends with a consideration of how my literary analysis of the textual representation of Margaret might be used as a case-study to further understanding of the literary representations of other medieval queens.

This thesis addresses the concept of the contemporary muse in the work of six late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women poets. In my introduction, I detail the history of the muse in literary tradition. I examine the problems that the gendered dynamic of poet/muse presented, by restricting women to a passive, inspiring role. I argue that, due to these problematic aspects, contemporary feminist criticism of the woman poet’s muse has often elided the homoerotic desire and power-play that structures these relationships. To rectify this, I focus on contemporary, living muse figures. I emphasise why these kinds of figures (as opposed to dead, historical or mythological muses) were particularly inspiring to women poets in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth centuries. I also address the specific ethical dilemmas of claiming a living muse. My four main chapters detail and theorise the dynamics between poets and their contemporary muses: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson; Olive Custance and Lord Alfred Douglas; Amy Lowell and Eleonora Duse/Ada Russell; and H.D. and Bryher. My conclusion draws these individual studies together to emphasise their illuminating similarities, including the increased fluidity between the roles of poet/muse, destabilisation of gender categories, and the presence of a third term that mediates the muse/poet relationship.

This thesis explores what remains an under-studied aspect of Samuel Johnson’s profile as a person and writer – his attitude to social improvement. Confronting past and current critical opinion and adhering closely to Johnson’s various writings, the thesis aims to establish the reasons for the failure to identify Johnson’s relationship to social concerns during his lifetime. The study also considers the influence of particular moral philosophies on Johnson’s approach to social improvement, such as those of Hugo Grotius, Richard Cumberland, Francis Bacon and John Locke. A range of sources include Johnson’s essays in the Rambler, Idler and Adventurer, his various reviews in the Literary Magazine and the Gentleman’s Magazine, his Diary of his travels in the Midlands and the Tour of the Highlands with Boswell, as well as various texts he wrote for others who were also concerned with social improvement. When Johnson protests against the institutions of his day he seeks to alleviate a tangible evil, such as the wretchedness of prostitutes, the agonies of imprisoned debtors and the destitution suffered by their families and the terrors of those condemned to death, often for some trivial offence. The profiles of Robert Dossie, Robert Chambers, William Chambers and John Gwynne together with those of Saunders Welch and William Dodd are discussed in the context of their interests in agriculture, architecture and the law, respectively. Placing those eighteenth-century figures at the centre of historical enquiry furnishes a richer dimension to the analysis of Johnson’s mode of thinking which allows us to respond to his works in a multi-faceted way. The interpretive framework of the thesis is cross-disciplinary and applies ii perspectives from social and cultural history, legal history, architectural history and, of course, English literature. This allows Johnson’s writings to be read against the peculiarities of their historical milieu and reveal Johnson in a new light – as an advocate of social improvement for human betterment.

In the twenty-first century, the remix, the mashup, and the reboot have come to dominate Western popular culture. Consumed by popular audiences on an unprecedented scale, but often derided by critics and academics, these texts are the ‘monsters’ of our age—hybrid creations that lurk at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Like monsters, they offer audiences the thrill of transgression in a safe and familiar format, mainstreaming the self-reflexive irony and cultural iconoclasm of postmodern art. Like other popular texts before them, remixes, mashups, and reboots are often read by critics as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. This is especially true within the institutions such remixes seem to attack most directly: the heritage industry, high art, adaptation studies, and copyright law. With this context in mind, in this thesis I explore the boundaries and connections between remix culture and its ‘others’ (adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, postmodernism), asking how strong or tenuous they are in practice. I do so by examining remix culture’s most ‘monstrous’ texts: Frankenfictions, or commercial narratives that insert fantastical monsters (zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc.) into classic literature and popular historical contexts. Frankenfiction is monstrous not only because of the fantastical monsters it contains, but because of its place at the margins of both remix and more established modes of appropriation. Too engaged with tradition for some, and not traditional enough for others, Frankenfiction is a bestselling genre that nevertheless remains peripheral to academic discussion. This thesis aims to address that gap in scholarship, analysing Frankenfiction’s engagement with monstrosity (chapter one), parody (chapter two), popular historiography (chapter three), and models of authorial originality (chapter four). Throughout this analysis, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains a touchstone, serving as an ideal metaphor for the nature of contemporary remix culture.

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and two critical essays on translingual writing. The creative component, Then the Cicadas Sang, is a novel set in 1940s Malta. It is a story about love and aspiration. As a teenage girl, Mari vouches she will do anything to leave the tiny island she lives on. Foreigners – the British who governed the island at the time – and books give her a glimpse of the world beyond her shores. But she craves for more, unaware of what she risks losing by chasing her dreams. The novel deals with how books shape our imagination, how the languages we speak give us access to different systems of conceptualizing the world and how we navigate the spaces in between. It does this through the protagonist, Mari, and the people who help shape who she is, in particular Mrs Applegate, a British evacuee who sought shelter in Gozo in the midst of the Blitz. But as much as it is a story of a girl turning into a woman, the novel is also the story of an island. It sits between Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Series. The extract submitted is Book One in a series of two. The critical essays explore the poetics of multilingual writing. They analyse the linguistic, political and cultural stratifications in multilingual writing, with a focus on the perception and reception of Maltese literature written in English. I ask if a multilingual writer’s role can be akin to that of a cultural translator. They investigate whether, unlike the monolingual writer, a writer’s multilingual background gives him or her access to different systems of conceptualizing the surrounding environment and how this informs the creative process. This study informs my own process of writing Then the Cicadas Sang, with a particular regard to self-translation and how one language can carry another on the page. In this case the languages I am working with are English, Maltese and Italian.

This thesis considers the development of Evelyn Waugh's and Graham Greene’s Catholicism between 1928 and 1939. Focusing predominantly on Waugh’s and Greene’s novels, it investigates how their writings express Catholic ideas, as well how their faith informs their views of human nature, their political sympathies, and their criticisms of modern secular civilization. While it recognizes the important differences between Waugh’s and Greene’s thinking in this period (such as their diverging political sympathies and their uses of different forms and genres of writing), it also establishes some significant affiliations between their Catholic points of view. Both authors associate the increasingly secular condition of English society with themes of decay and disintegration, acknowledge the reality of Original Sin, and believe in a supernatural reality distinct from its earthly counterpart. The Introduction provides an overview of Greene and Waugh scholarship, noting that there is currently no critical study devoted to the topic of early affiliations between these authors’ Catholic principles. The first two chapters propose that the beginnings of Waugh’s and Greene’s Catholic perspectives can be detected in their early fiction. Chapter Three examines in relation to each other Waugh’s and Greene’s novels between 1930 and 1935. Chapter Four charts the development of their respective vantage-points in the period 1936-1938. The final chapter looks at the year 1939 and assesses the nature of these authors' Catholic views prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

My thesis seeks to challenge the existing understanding of the relationship between Romanticism and Post-Modernism in order to put into question the traditional historiographical view of the division of literary history into a series of discrete epochs, each one consecutive to the passing away of the other. My methodology devolves upon a close reading and analysis of the work of three writers and philosophers: the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the 'Post-Modern' French feminist writer Helene Cixous and the 'Romantic' philosopher and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through my examination of the oeuvres of these three writers I seek to demonstrate that, in the domain of subjectivity, there is a strong commonality of approach to the question of the construction of the subject in despite of the gulf of time that separates them. In this way I demonstrate that the historiographical approach, which involves the fissuring of the works of writers and philosophers into discrete historical events, is fundamentally susceptible of being put into question.

The Victorian era was the 'Golden Age' for Shakespeare illustration. Between 1939 and 1880 thousands of illustrations were produced within many different editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works. What is so fascinating about these illustrations is that they have, historically, been widely neglected by academic scholarship. These editions, which were hugely popular in the Victorian era, are a very important part of our cultural heritage and, indeed, our construction of Shakespeare's plays as we understand them today. The 'Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive' is centered on the four major Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works and makes available online over 3000 of these illustrations in an open-access database. The archive is available online at 'ShakespeareIllustration.org' and will allow researchers and members of the public to explore a rich image archive and to ask new questions about this material: for example, 'how did the Victorians portray certain characters and plays pictorially and does this portrayal differ throughout the Victorian era?' Alongside such questions, the archive, more broadly, allows users to explore and interrogate the complex relationship that exists between the page and the stage, between word and image and between the past and the present. Underpinning the project is my strong belief that an online academic resource can be both scholarly rigorous and user-friendly. Further, the archive uses social networking to enable a community of users to discuss the images and to collaborate in exciting new and unforeseen ways. This thesis explores the implications around the creation of such work.

This project seeks to explore representations of Holocaust perpetrators in literature. Such texts, often rather controversially, seek to undo the myth of “pure evil” that surrounds the Holocaust and to reconstruct the perpetrator in more “human” terms. Accordingly, significant questions of “how” and “why” are centralised and explored, providing fertile ground for examinations of the intersections between ethics, literature and history, and enabling ongoing discussions about the characteristics and obligations of perpetrator literature as a whole. Of central concern, these humanising discourses place emphasis on the contextual or situational factors that led up to the genocide. Following these issues through to their logical conclusion, this project takes the question of determinism seriously. This is not to suggest that it disavows individual responsibility, merely that it engages fully with the philosophical problems that are invoked through allusions to external influences, especially as they relate to ideas of contingency. A significant consequence of these discussions is the impact that they have on the reader. That is because, since situational aspects are featured so heavily in these narratives, questions are raised about his or her own capacity for wrongdoing. Consequently, the reader is drawn into the narrative as a potential perpetrator. The tensions that this creates constitutes the second major focus of this work. Ultimately, I hope to expose the challenges that face the reader when they encounter perpetrator narratives, and the ways in which these tensions impact upon our understandings of these figures, and of the Holocaust more generally. In order to provide a more comprehensive overview this project makes use of a large number (in excess of sixty) primary sources, examining both fictional and non-fictional accounts. My aim is not to offer close literary analyses of each of the texts under consideration but, rather, to trace paradigms across the full spectrum of perpetrator literature. In this way, I hope to contribute to the growing body of literature that engages with this topic.