Prophecy — that is, the action of foretelling or predicting the future, particularly a future thought to represent the will of God — is an ever-present aspect of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a reading of the dramas of Shakespeare’s English history cycles — from 1 Henry VI to Henry V — that focuses exclusively upon the role played by prophecy in representing and reconstructing the past. It seeks to show how, through close attention to the moments when prophecy emerges in these historical dramas, we might arrive at a different understanding of them, both as dramatic narratives and as meditations on the nature of history itself. As this thesis seeks to demonstrate, moreover, Shakespeare’s treatment of prophecy in any one play can be viewed, in effect, as a key that can take us to the heart of that drama’s wider concerns. The comparatively recent conception of a body of historical plays that are individually distinct and no longer chained to the Tillyardian notion of a ‘Tudor myth’ (or any other ‘grand narrative’) has freed prophecy from effectively fulfilling the rather one-dimensional role of chorus. However, it has also raised as-yet-unanswered questions about the function of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English history cycles, which this thesis aims to consider. One of the key arguments presented here is that Shakespeare utilises prophecy not to emphasise the pervasiveness of divine truth and providential design, but to express the political, narratorial, and interpretative disorder of history itself. It is also argued that any conception of the English history plays that rejects homogeneity and even consistency must also acknowledge that prophecy, as a form of historical narrative in essence, cannot be expected to manifest itself in the same ways in each drama throughout Shakespeare’s career. In this sense, the purpose of this thesis is to show that Shakespeare not only uses ‘prophecy’ to construct ‘history’: as a dramatist, he also thinks through ‘prophecy’, in various ways and from multiple perspectives, in order to intensify and complicate our sense of the complexity and drama of history itself. This thesis treats the English chronicle plays in order of composition and performance. While the Introduction contextualizes concepts of prophecy in the early modern period, and its relationship to history in particular, chapters 1–3 address the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with chapters 4 and 5 examining Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV. Henry V is addressed in the Conclusion. The inclusion of the second cycle of histories, rarely interrogated by critics in relation to prophecy, is crucial to the approach taken by this thesis. Unlike previous studies, this thesis privileges prophecy in both the earlier and the later histories, not least because its perceived absence from the plays of the second cycle is capable of informing our understanding of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy more generally. What is at stake in this reading of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English histories, both locally in the plays themselves and more generally across the cycles, are questions of causality, identity (both personal and national), monarchy, and the art of theatre itself.

This thesis is concerned with exploring different forms of Jacobean drama and performances that span across different sites, from the commercial stages of London, to the civic pageants that took place on the Thames and in the City, and the court entertainments held at Whitehall Palace. My research necessarily casts a wide net over its subject matter in order to illustrate how these different modes of performance engage with representations of the marine through the technologies available to them, whether poetic, material, or both. While the sea had long been a receptacle for literary and poetic attention and can repeatedly be found as the stronghold of adventure, wonder, danger, and exile in the English narrative tradition, it is specifically at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the sea takes a hold of the literary imagination with particular force. The cultural, political, and economic predominance of the marine in early modern England found numerous means of expression in drama, where the different facets of marine identity and occupation create on-stage marine spaces. The thesis elucidates how these modes of performance often invoke and exploit the dramatic potential of the marine and its commercial, political, and iconographical meanings. Commercial drama, written for a pre-proscenial stage, realises the marine through language and metaphor, appealing to a collective imaginary in bodying forth the limitless watery expanses on which the action takes place. This imaginative embodiment finds a very different—and indeed a more material—means of expression in civic drama and the court masque, where the extensive and elaborate pageant devices and stage machinery were largely indebted to and shaped by continental theatrical design. The material means of expressing the marine that are found in the civic performances and the court masques discussed in this study necessitates a consideration of European trends in theatre design and the decorative arts. In looking to visual and material culture this thesis explicates the interdependence between different modes of creating on-stage marine spaces and the ways in which the material presence inflects both language and action in Jacobean drama.

This thesis seeks to analyse how the transcendental as experienced in everyday life is presented and represented in my poetry and in the poetry of four selected contemporary Ulster poets. The thesis argues that many emerging Ulster poets take a secular viewpoint. Nonetheless, religious terminology or, at least, the use of spiritual imagery and symbolism, pervades contemporary Ulster poetry. Clay, is an attempt to reconcile the usual secular Western and Christian-based preconceptions of the spiritual and moral with the Vaisnavist viewpoint through the medium of poetry and examine those themes through reflective writerly-critical engagement with my own work and four selected contemporary Ulster poets. Of the contemporaries selected, some also explore faiths other than the traditional Christianity that has pervaded culture and society here and which influenced, in various ways, predecessors such as William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. Two linked aspects of contemporary society that feature in contemporary Ulster writing are consumerism and hedonism. These have been challenged in various ways by the chosen contemporary writers. In Clay, the negative impact of these aspects is explored. The thesis uses close reading and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact the spiritual has on my writing and how the transcendental impacts on the poetry that I produce. The philosophies of agrarianism and vegetarianism, linked as they are to Eastern transcendentalism and contemporary environmentalism, feature in my writing, and these are compared and contrasted to how they are treated by my chosen contemporaries. Mention is made of poetic influences and recurring concepts such as defamiliarisation and the notion of poetic vocation.

Recent work by scholars including Jed Esty and Alexandra Harris has emphasised a renewed focus among English interwar modernist writers upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions. This thesis builds upon such work in examining that focus in the prose works of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), John Cowper Powys (1872-1963), Mary Butts (1890-1937) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). All of these figures have a profound sense of attachment to place, but an equally powerful desire to engage with the upheavals of interwar modernity – in terms of urbanisation, cosmopolitanism, and developments in technology and transportation – and to participate in contemporary literary experimentation. This dialectic between tradition and change, I argue, is analogous to a literal geographical shuttling between rural and metropolitan environments, and in all four writers I identify imagery and literary techniques which reflect those experiences, and are applied across diverse geographical realms. One central claim is that modernity’s tendency to challenge cultural and geographical boundaries, and its oscillations between disintegration and renewal, are manifested in new ways of depicting and understanding our relationships with place and nonhuman animals. I also emphasise the continuity of particular literary techniques (such as paratactic syntax) and forms of imagery (trees, bodies of water) across metropolitan ‘high’ modernism and the texts of the later interwar period, presenting this as evidence for the consistent influence of a tradition/change dialectic in these writers’ work. Another key claim is that all four writers call for an expansion of our conception of modernism, through their challenge to the urban-central/rural-peripheral dichotomy, their emphasis on the past and tradition (particularly the sense of temporal layering within landscapes), and the unorthodox ways in which their work can be considered experimental (for example, through meandering or non-linear structuring). Chapter One emphasises ambivalence in the work of Lawrence, in terms of the persistence of underlying tensions, and argues that these are inextricably bound up with his intimate, empathic understanding of place. Lawrence longs to return to an idyllic, prelapsarian landscape connected to the Nottinghamshire of his childhood, but recognises the impossibility of doing so, given his exposure to the maelstrom of cosmopolitan and metropolitan experience. These experiences generate the need for a renewed relationship with place, although he struggles to articulate any such vision. In Chapter Two I argue that Powys has a similarly ambivalent relationship with modernity, but defuses this through the deliberate playfulness of his work: his ‘Wessex novels’, written from the USA, reimagine the landscape of home through a fantastical, nostalgic lens that can be described as ‘imaginative realist’. This approach, he suggests, is one way in which the contradictory desires and inclinations of the peripatetic modernist author can be reconciled. Through his complex identity and experience of self-imposed exile, Powys develops a strong sense of the English landscape as layered, expressing a kind of temporal cosmopolitanism. In Chapter Three, I again note a vexed relationship with modernity and place in the work of Butts, whose work often expresses a dismayed sense that her childhood landscape in Dorset is being invaded by urbanites and tourists. Like Powys she attempts to resolve this through a re-enchantment of place, emphasising a sense of an ‘unseen world’ in the region, but such fantasises are both less self-conscious and more ethically problematic than Powys’. Nonetheless I do note a distinctively cosmopolitan reimagining of rural England, as a potential haven for marginalised communities, in works such as Armed with Madness (1928). Finally, Chapter Four posits Woolf as a figure in whom the dialectical tensions between belonging and place are less troubling. I relate this ability to manage tensions to Woolf’s equally strong attachments in childhood (and throughout her life) to both urban and rural environments, reflected in the development of an ‘urban pastoral’ form in Mrs Dalloway (1925). In all four writers there is evidence that modernism’s expansion of perspectives can be fruitfully extended to those of place and nonhuman animals, and Woolf’s work is particularly sustained and successful in this respect. The central stress in my thesis conclusion, accordingly, is on the need to incorporate such perspectives into understandings of modernism as a community-oriented movement.

Romantic Disillusionment in the Later Works of Mary Shelley argues that, despite a growing consensus among modern critics that Mary Shelley’s works, and especially the novels written after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death, are of lesser quality than her earlier novels, especially Frankenstein, the later works deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. The title Romantic Disillusionment, at once establishes my disagreement with those of Shelley’s critics who insist that her work is continuous with her father’s, her mother’s and her husband’s. No doubt, she rehearses various elements that characterise her family’s writings, revisits their favourite themes, but she does so in a way that is distinctively her own. The thesis locates in Shelley’s work a more general sense of disillusionment with Romantic ideas, amongst them a reverence for the sublime, a confident faith in the power of the imagination, and a belief in human perfectibility, ideas current in her father’s writing and discussed in the circles in which he moved, as well as those she joined as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lover and wife. The influence of her parents and husband and other contemporaries is traced with particular attention to the disillusionment that she at first shared with them and later came to feel in them. Shelley often invokes Romantic ideals, but characteristically she invokes them only to ironise or undermine them. The thesis is organized in six chapters: an introduction is followed by four chapters on the four novels Shelley wrote after her husband’s death, and a conclusion. The introduction gives an overview of Shelley’s early novels, Frankenstein and Valperga, as well as the novella Matilda, trying to establish how far Shelley even in her early writings did not simply, as seems to be the consensus, follow her family’s notions. This is followed by a chapter on The Last Man, which discusses the opposition between the public and the private life, between a life devoted to public activity and a life spent in seclusion. This chapter also explores Mary Shelley’s understanding of creativity and in particular her interest in biography. Indeed, all Mary Shelley’s later novels can be understood as disguised biographies, substitutes for the book that she had been forbidden to write, the biography of her husband. This chapter also discusses the function of the plague as, like death itself, a leveller, the destroyer not simply of humanity but of all human ideals. I understand the novel in conclusion as a parodic challenge to Godwin’s and P.B. Shelley’s belief in human perfectibility and the millenarian cast of mind that the two men shared. The following chapter on The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck examines Shelley’s single later experiment in the historical novel. Clearly she is responding to the achievement of Walter Scott, as well as to his extraordinary commercial success, but once again hers is an active response. Unlike Scott, she does not pretend to offer a disinterested description of historical events but instead undertakes a passionate engagement with history. She effects, I will argue a self-conscious feminization of the genre of the historical novel. The chapter on Lodore focuses on education, especially the question of female education that has preoccupied not only Shelley’s mother, but many of the most significant female intellectuals of her mother’s generation. In the penultimate chapter, I argue that Falkner is an appropriate culmination of Shelley’s career as a novelist. It is a novel in which she incorporates disguised the ‘Lives’ of Godwin and Shelley, as well as a novel in which she attempts a vindication of the reputation of her mother. It is a novel in which she is especially concerned with her relationship with her father, but for her it is a literary as much as a personal relationship. The novel is modelled, I shall argue, on Hamlet, the play in which Shakespeare explores most complexly the fraught relationship between the parent and the child, and it can also be understood as a re-writing of her own father’s most successful novel, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams.

This thesis develops a reflexive methodology to read four North American long form poetic projects: Lorine Niedecker's North Central; Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest; and Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract. The methodology, 'ecoseriality,' provides a way of reading serial structures in the 'web of life' (Jason W. More). Ecoseriality emerges through two research threads: ecological thinking (Lorraine Code, Dianne Chisholm), an interdisciplinary approach to ecological methodologies, and seriality, an extension of serial poetic form into an interdisciplinary understanding of serial qualities. The project's ecological thinking comprises a recombinant methodology primarily adapted from Moore's theories and methods for reading capitalism in the web of life, a number of philosophical approaches and concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping. The project's seriality begins with Joseph M. Conte's typology of serial poetic form, Unending Design: the Forms of Postmodern Poetry, reading serial structures across genres and disciplines to refresh understanding of serial poetry and poetics. Ecoseriality develops along three primary, overlapping lines of inquiry: Moore's oikeios, adapted to read competing subjectivities and values brought to bear on relations in the web of life; Jameson's cognitive mapping, adapted into a post-Cartesian strategy for reading the imbrication between matter and meaning; and an examination of how the parts of a series relate to the whole. The project applies these foci to the four case studies, exposing fresh perspectives on the poetry and poetics of each. By reading Howe's 'cannibal cosmology' (Miriam Nichols) through Moore's theories of world-economy and world-ecology, the thesis arrives at an understanding of ecoseriality as an ethical ecological practice within the complex series of relations in the web of life. Ecoseriality thereby emerges as an oikeios for valuing complex relations in the web of life. The analysis concludes with discussion of the cosmological values of the serial poetic projects examined in relation to ecological thinking.

This thesis examines a range of poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Modernist period to the present day, who take the relationship between humans, poetry and the natural world as a primary point of concern. Through precise, materially attentive engagements with the coastal, littoral, and oceanic dimensions of place, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Jen Hadfield, respectively turn towards the vibrant space of the Atlantic archipelago in order to contemplate new modes of relation that are able to contend with the ecological and political questions engendered by environmental crises. Across their works, the archipelago emerges as a physical and critical site of poetic relation through which poets consider new pluralised, devolved, and ‘entangled’ relationships with place. Derived from the geographic term for ‘[a]ny sea, or sheet of water, in which there are numerous islands’, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ has recently gained critical attention within Scottish and Irish studies due to its ability to re-orientate the critical axis away from purely Anglocentric discourses. Encompassing a range of spatial frames from bioregion to biosphere, islands to oceans, and temporal scales from deep pasts to deep futures, the poets considered here turn to the archipelago as a means of reckoning with the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene poses about the relationships between humans and the environment. Crucially, through a series of comparative readings, the project presents fresh advancements in ecocritical scholarship, with regards to the rise of material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the ‘Blue Humanities’.

The Imperative Commands is an interdisciplinary creative writing PhD in two parts: (a) a poem-object of 365 pages, which is an original engagement with found everyday instructional language, reimagined in an experimental/visual format; (b) ‘Appropriate Language,’ a critical and theoretical afterword exploring the inspiration, themes and methods of the poem. The premise of The Imperative Commands is to investigate current institutional and corporate language and appropriate it as poetry. It is a collagistic arrangement of found imperatives and assertions, harvested from the language of state institutions and corporate bodies that hail people on a daily basis. To create this long poetic work I set myself the initial constraint of harvesting found language during the course of a calendar year (May 1st 2014 to 30th April 2015). During this time I collected found imperatives, assertions, naturalizations of contestable information as fact, and other forms of overt and tacit instruction. The material was then transcribed, organized and rearranged in a variety of forms, using both chance and editorial interventions to make deviant collocations, stochastic juxtapositions, concrete-visual constellations and lyrical expression. ‘Appropriate Language’ breaks into several forms of afterword. The introduction outlines the general architecture and aims behind The Imperative Commands, as well as key influences on my practice and what inspired the thesis. Its main purpose is to explore ideas around how society is manipulated by language and ideology by, and for, the various institutions that seek to influence us. To do this it focuses on the writing of two thinkers: (1) the so-called ‘father of public relations’ Edward Bernays (1891-1995), who was instrumental in developing PR in the 20th century; and (2) French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and his theory of Ideological State Apparatuses—which form and inform the essential structure of society outside the state—and interpellation, whereby individuals become ‘subjects’ through the ways in which they are hailed by ISAs and ideology. The second purpose of ‘Appropriate Language’ is to consider the affinities and differences that The Imperative Commands has with Conceptual Writing, with a particular focus on the work and ideas of poet Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961). My research into Conceptual Writing, and its claims of unreadability, helped to remind me of the importance of readability that I feel about my own work. That the organization of the found texts should be a readable, though idiosyncratic, book is crucial to The Imperative Commands. The harvested material when reorganized to make the poem reveals aspects of the life of a subject during a specific period of time, with disparate facets of social control brought into focus through the various language forms that constitute everyday life. The poem-object, that is also a social document, explores ways of uniting the notion of ‘concept’ and experimental writing—particularly within some of the methodologies of Conceptual Writing—with ways of maintaining and supporting a ‘self’ that is both lyrical and political.

Frequently employing the device of close textual analysis, this thesis attempts to chart, and subsequently examine, some of the ordering systems which would appear to inform, in a variety of ways, Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano. The introduction sets out to try and explain why the novel can be regarded, to some extent at least, as an 'open' text, and further suggests that the reader himself is posited by Lowry as an implied organising consciousness. Dividing the analysis into the fields of external, symbolic and motival areas of potential order, the thesis then proceeds to further examine smaller units of Lowry's processes. Although generally acknowledged as a dense or complex text, Under the Volcano has infrequently been subjected to rigorous textual analysis and, as such, the thesis charts some large new areas which have so far only remained peripheral to Lowry studies, always seeking to draw attention to how any given system corresponds to itself, as well as to other related areas of reference. Mythic, literary, cabbalistical, and other relevant material is introduced if it assists in defining any specific aspect of a potential ordering system. The thesis concludes that Under the Volcano seeks to draw attention to its own obsession with pattern and that one of Lowry's purposes is to enable his reader to imaginatively participate in the ordering and re-ordering of the novel's basic materials.

This thesis concerns the conflict between Byron the poet and Byron the man of action in so far as such a study illuminates the poetry. The aim has been to trace this conflict as it developed in Byron's work, in terms of a discourse between what he himself regarded as the spectator role of the poet and the participatory role of the man of action. The study therefore concentrates on those poems and materials that illustrate the tension between the poet and the man, and reflect Byron's movement from poetry to action. The first chapter outlines the argument of the subsequent discussion and provides certain relevant biographical details as a background to it. Hence we move from Byron's early poetic expressions of his desire for fame and action, through his critical observations on poetry and action, his parliamentary schemes and his attitude towards Napoleon, to his engagement in the Italian uprising and, finally, to his active commitment to the Greek War of Independence. Bach succeeding chapter seeks to formulate more cogently the principal issues that arise in this first chapter. Chapter 2 discusses Byron's interest and performance in the House of Lords. His speeches, which have met with little critical scrutiny, are considered both as pieces of oratory and as an effort by Byron to engage seriously and actively with English politics. The third chapter analyses Byron's attitude towards Napoleon as the archetype of the contemporary man of action. In particular, a sustained critique is offered of the ode to Napoleon Buonaparte and the Napoleon poems of 1815, since none of these has received due critical attention. Chapter 4 studies closely three crucial texts The Prisoner of Chi lion. The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante. These are considered as a sequence, as an extended meditation on the theme of mental imprisonment, in order to reflect Byron's coming to terms with himself and his emergence from poetry to action. The final chapter continues this profession, resuming a polarity sketched in the first chapter between the world of poetry and the world of action. The aim here has been to re-iterate the tension between the poet and the man, in order to secure more forcefully the argument that the poem 'On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year', of which a new MS reading makes a material difference to its interpretation, is a poem of choice, the poetic endorsement of Byron's commitment to action. Marchand's complete edition of Byron' s Letters and Journals has been used throughout, as have, wherever possible, the first three volumes of McCann's new edition of The Complete Poetical Works.