This thesis studies the subject of Spiritualism in relation to the life and work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Introduction refers briefly to the controversial phenomenon of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, and the problems relating to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's belief and active interest in the subject. Chapter One traces the rise of Spiritualism in Victorian times from its ancient origins, concentrating on the life of the famous medium D. D. Home. Chapters Two and Three describe Elizabeth Barrett Browning's experience of the phenomenon, and the following four chapters discuss her poetry within the context of her spiritualistic beliefs. Although she rarely referred specifically to Spiritualism in her work, she was much preoccupied with death, the notion of immortality, the nature and condition of the human soul and of the spiritual life; Chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven do not seek to detect spiritualistic elements in all of her poems, but to explore her handling of these related themes, and her interest in Death as an important thematic element in her work, and as a source of much of her imagery.

Old English poetry is centred on the concept of community and the importance of belonging. Landscape was a component of any community since, during the period when Old English poetry was being composed and written down, the landscape was a far more important constituent of daily life than it is for the majority of people today. Landscape dictated the places that could be settled, as well as the placing of the paths, fords, and bridges that joined them; it controlled boundaries, occupations, and trading routes. In the poetry of the period landscape, as part of the fabric of community, is the arbiter of whether each element of a community is in its proper place and relationship to the others. It is the means of explaining how a community is constructed, policed, and empowered. Erring communities can be corrected or threats averted through the medium of landscape which also positions communities in place and time. Landscape is presented as the cause of dissension in heaven, the consequent creation of hell, and the key to comprehension of the fundamental difference between them. The linguistic landscapes of Old English poetry are a functional component of the meaning inherent in the narratives.

This thesis examines the process of adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays into the graphic novel medium. It traces the history of these adaptations from the first comic books produced in the mid-twentieth century to graphic novels produced in the twenty-first century. The editions used for examination have been selected as they are indicative of key developments in the history of adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays into the medium. This thesis explores how the plays are presented and the influences on the styles of presentation. It traces the history of the form and how the adaptations have been received in various periods. It also examines how the combination of illustrations and text and the conventions of the medium produce unique narrative capacities, how these have developed over time and how they used to present the plays. Sales data of Shakespeare graphic novels is presented and analysed to reveal the target audience is the education sector which in turn drives the publisher’s promotion of the authenticity and fidelity of their editions. How authenticity is claimed and invoked in the adaptation into graphic novels is also examined.

The thesis consists of a biography of Ulpian Fulwell (1546-1586) and a critical edition of The Art of Flattery (1576). The biography contains new material derived from documents at the Public Record Office and the Gloucester Diocesan Registry, giving new information on Fulwell's family background and his career as a clergyman. It is argued that the conflict between the townspeople of Wells and the Cathedral clergy provides the background and impetus for Fulwell's satire in The Art of Flattery. The critical edition of The Art of Flattery outlines the printing history of the book and discusses the variants between the first and second editions, and between the two copies of the first edition. The identification of the Archdeacon of Wells attacked in the Fifth Dialogue is attempted. The Literary Introduction sets Fulwell's satirical dialogues in the context of Lucian, the colloquies of Erasmus, and the English Renaissance dialogues of More, Elyot and Ascham. A critical analysis of the work traces its form to the bipartite structure of classical verse satire, with its confrontation between Author and Adversarius.

Troilus and Cressida is the unusual instance of a Shakespearean play which had long been read and commented upon before stage practitioners explored it in the theatre. My thesis examines the changing perceptions of the play’s characters, paying attention to the chronological relationship between revisions in literary criticism, much of which was written with little proximity to performance, with reinterpretations during its British stage history. The thesis has a particular focus on issues of gender and sexuality. Both the theatre and literary criticism reflected and responded to social change in their dealings with this play, but they did so at different moments. By using the case of Troilus and Cressida, I examine whether theatrical practice or academic literary criticism has acted as the more efficient cultural barometer. Revisions of Cressida are my central example and I also examine the reinterpretations of eight other characters. The delayed acceptance of the play into the theatre means that the claims of relevance become especially acute. Despite the perceived progressive potential of performance, I conclude that theatrical representations of characters in this play have been slow to change in relation to the revisions seen on the pages of literary criticism.

This thesis consists of studies of Lodge's writings in the major genres during his literary career, from 1579 to 1596. The first chapter is a biographical sketch, with particular attention to that period. The literary career is seen as a diversion and a postponement of his real vocations, medicine and Catholicism. The sixth chapter comments briefly on the pamphlets and the later works. The four main chapters treat, respectively, plays, prose fiction, lyric poems and sonnets, narrative and satirical verse. The studies include description of little-known works, structural and prosodic analysis, critical assessment, some textual criticism, source study and consideration of Elizabethan literary history as it impinges upon Lodge's writings. The bibliography is part of the thesis and is intended as a research, tool in its own right. It consists of classified lists of essential materials for scholarly and critical work on Lodge. The thesis is thus partly exploratory and preparatory. The main critical contention is that Lodge's literary reputation has suffered from its subsidiary relationship with Shakespeare's. Lodge excelled as a poet, particularly as a lyrist, and ought to be regarded primarily as such, rather than primarily as a prose romancer (i.e., author of Rosalynde). It is urged that editions of Lodge's works, beginning with the verse, are needed.

Focusing on the novels of Wilkie Collins, this thesis identifies the ways in which Collins’s narratives outline the complex nature of layperson interactions with, and experiences of, medicine, healthcare and illness in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety of contextual sources, ranging from letters, diaries and recipe books to newspaper articles, architectural plans and courtroom testimonies, the discussion uses Collins’s work alongside these documents to demonstrate that many of his middle-class readers would have encountered aspects of medicine and illness in a surprising array of settings, spaces, discourses and domains. In bringing these points of intersection to light, the thesis argues that Collins’s work stands as a substantial record of how the lay public energetically and intelligently engaged with medical matters – a point often overlooked – but also emphasises Collins’s own vibrant interest in medicine, bodies and illness. In so doing, the discussion is able to draw out new dimensions to Collins’s treatment of key themes, such as the relationships between bodies and gender, architecture and illness, and medicine and literature, and to provide new readings of a range of his major and lesser-known works.

The Anatomie of Abuses by Philip Stubbes was printed four times between 1583 and 1595, each new edition undergoing thorough authorial revision. This old-spelling critical edition highlights the complicated textual history of the work and its slow development over a twelve-year period by presenting the text of the final 1595 edition but drawing attention to features of the three earlier versions throughout the critical apparatus. Readers interested in engaging with the work as set out in the original 1595 edition are offered a facsimile of the Huntington copy in an appendix to the thesis. The text of the Abuses has been supplemented with a full and detailed commentary which attempts, in particular, to flesh out the social and economic background in which Stubbes was writing and indicate the extent to which he borrowed material from other contemporary pamphleteers. The introduction includes an examination of the author's supposed Puritan leanings and draws out the fears of excess and social disorder implicit throughout his complaint.

This thesis offers a critical edition of The Plowman's Tale, a poem in the Chaucer apocrypha, which was last edited by W.W. Skeat in 1897. A full collation of all extant editions - both manuscript and printed - has led the present editor to select the text printed by Thomas Godfray in 1535, the earliest printed edition, as the base text for the present edition. The text is accompanied by a commentary and a glossary. The introductory chapters are concerned to relate the poem to its two most meaningful literary contexts. It is argued that almost all of the poem is a characteristic product of the Lollard movement at the end of the fourteenth century, but that by the addition of a Prologue at some time early in the sixteenth century, the anonymous verse tract came to be associated with Chaucer, as it took on its new role as a work of official Henrician propaganda after 1535.

This thesis seeks to re-examine the nature of E.M. Forster’s fiction and its place within the canon of modernist writers, examining criticism of Forster’s fiction and claims that it is transitional in its relation to modernism, founded on a liberal humanist outlook antithetical to modernist innovation. The thesis contends that this is a misreading of turn of the century Liberalism, taking Forster’s friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson as an inspiration for Forster’s political and stylistic beliefs, articulated in the latter’s fiction. Following a survey of New Liberalism, the thesis compares Dickinson’s and Forster’s politics and dialogism, charting how Forster transformed Dickinson’s dialogic method into polyphonic prose. After a survey of other self-reflexive narrative practices in Forster’s prose that might also be considered modernist, the thesis turns to Forster’s dialogic construction of inter-negating discourses at play for dominance throughout his fiction. It uses a model of social intervention derived from New Liberalism as the model for articulating the coercive attempts of discourses to gain dominance as truth over individual subjects, focusing particularly on emerging discourses of homosexual identity and their dialogic relation in Forster’s fiction. The thesis claims that Forster’s fiction is dialogic and liberal in its modernism.