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The abortion trope : a study in contemporary criticism and nineteenth-century poeticsJones, Natalie Linda January 2013 (has links)
This thesis argues for the innovative potential of an abortion trope, exploring its capacity for conceptual reformulation in both contemporary criticism and the nineteenth-century poetry of Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson. In contemporary deliberations over the ethical and legal legitimacy of abortion, critics will often converge upon aesthetic questions of ‘appropriate analogy’, ‘conceptual errors’ and discursive boundaries. This investigation takes up this point, highlighting its parallel with contemporary anxieties concerning the ‘use’ and ‘autonomy’ of literature. Combining the work of four key critics (Barbara Johnson, Kevin Newmark, Christina Hauck and Maria C. Scott) it will be argued that abortion has already undergone a degree of formulation as a less negative aesthetic, and its manifestation as an aesthetic is presented as governing textual strategies, as well as dynamics between author, reader, and text. The poetry of Hardy and Dickinson offers an invaluable starting-point in which to explore this possibility in practice, clarifying the trope’s characteristics and potential. The abortion trope informing nineteenth-century poetics impacts various aesthetic paradigms during the period, while also shedding light upon conventional perceptions of abortion today. The impetus here is to encourage conceptual expansion and support conceptual change, challenging some of the more debilitating formulations of abortion.
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'Love's Cure, or, The Martial Maid' by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger : a modern-spelling critical editionPérez Díez, José Alberto January 2015 (has links)
This thesis is the first fully annotated modern-spelling critical edition of Love’s Cure, or The Martial Maid by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. The play, first published in 1647 as part of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio, has been neglected in performance and relatively unappreciated by scholarship. It had not been edited critically since George Walton Williams published his old-spelling edition in 1976, which included little accompanying commentary. This new edition offers a modernised text with annotation and a critical apparatus, generally following the editorial principles of the Arden Early Modern Drama series. It reconsiders the dating of the play, providing evidence to assign its composition to 1615. It traces the origins and processes of transmission of its main narrative source, La fuerza de la costumbre by Guillén de Castro, and also proposes for the first time a source for one of its characters in Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán. Finally, it also reconsiders the staging possibilities of the play based on evidence from a practice-based project developed at the Shakespeare Institute in 2012 during rehearsals for a staged reading, a recording of which is included on DVD as an appendix.
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'[T]hese seemingly rival spheres constitute but one cosmos' : Constance Naden as scientist, philosopher, and poetStainthorp, Clare Georgina January 2017 (has links)
Through her poetry and essays Constance Naden (1858-1889) sought to create an interdisciplinary philosophy predicated upon finding unity in diversity. By providing close-readings of Naden’s poetry, essays, and unpublished notebooks, and thus considering the full breadth of her intellectual pursuits, this thesis demonstrates the extent of her secular world-scheme which attempted to synthesise science, philosophy, and poetry. I begin with an intellectual biography that situates Naden’s scientific education, philosophical ideas, and poetic output in their nineteenth-century contexts. This creates a framework for understanding the trajectory of Naden’s endeavours as scientist, philosopher, and poet. The subsequent chapters demonstrate how these three strands of her life were fundamentally intertwined. Chapter Two focuses upon Naden’s engagement with scientific ideas and the scientific imagination, specifically examining the importance of light as it manifests in the study of botany, astronomy, physics, and physiology. Chapter Three turns to Naden as philosopher, teasing out the details of her childhood faith (newly demonstrated by the notebooks) and analysing the development of her relationship with the freethought movement and wider philosophical discourses. Chapter Four analyses Naden’s equivocal relationship with poetic tradition, focusing on her shifting engagement with Romanticism, and her use of the lyric ‘I’ and the comic mode.
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The early modern dream vision (1558-1625) : genre, authorship and traditionBuffey, Emily January 2017 (has links)
This thesis offers the first full-length investigation into the reception and influence of the dream vision poem in the early modern period. One of the main aims of this research is to challenge the assumption that the dream vision was no longer an attractive, appreciated or effective form beyond the Middle Ages. This research breaks new ground by demonstrating that the dream vision was not only a popular form in the post-Reformation period, but was a major and enduring means of literary and political expression throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. This thesis is therefore part of an ongoing scholarly attempt to reconfigure the former aesthetic judgements that have dominated scholarship since C. S. Lewis dubbed the sixteenth century as the 'drab age' of English verse. The main focus is upon three writers who have been largely ignored or misunderstood by modern scholarship: Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), Richard Robinson (fl. 1570-1589) and Thomas Andrewe (fl. 1600-1604). Through close analysis of their work, this thesis demonstrates that the dream vision could both inform and was greatly informed by contemporary political, cultural and literary developments, as well as the period's relationship with its literary and historical past.
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Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida : audience expectation and matters of taste in relation to authorship and the bookGregory, Johann January 2013 (has links)
Questions concerning whether Shakespeare wrote for the stage or the page are a perennial issue in Shakespeare studies. Part of the problem rests on expectations of literature and theatre. These expectations are in fact voiced in Shakespearean drama itself, a drama that often articulates ideas concerning audience expectations. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, before Troilus visits Cressida he exclaims “expectation whirls me round”. Of all the plays in the Shakespearean canon, variants of “expect” feature most in this play. Troilus and Cressida itself scrutinises expectation of a story with famous classical, medieval and contemporary precedents, for a play to be performed by the leading theatre company of the day, and of a play by a playwright who was also conscious of his role as a published author. In the play, characters are frequently staged as spectators or audience members, raising issues relating to expectations, taste, value judgements, and viewpoints. Shakespeare responds to the plays of his contemporaries and, arguably, the political scene as well. The thesis reworks Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field to gauge the way that Shakespeare’s play engages with its theatrical and literary environment, and resituates Bourdieu’s work on taste and social distinction to consider how Shakespeare’s Trojan play responds to the contingencies of audience expectation. The first chapter considers critical expectations of the play from 1609 to the present; the second chapter focuses on the way Shakespeare stages patrons, performers and especially audience members; the third chapter reads the language of food and taste in the play in relation to developing early modern distinctions about literature and theatre; the final chapter provides a correction to readings of the play that have relied on the unique 1609 quarto preface to the play for understanding the work; this chapter argues that even the play, as staged, presents literary issues, and characters that show an awareness of print culture. Within its own early modern literary-theatrical field, Shakespeare’s play is far more about elitist tastes than it is elitist itself. Ultimately, the thesis argues that Troilus and Cressida marks Shakespeare’s growing confidence as a literary dramatist, not simply as an author whose plays were published as literature, but as a playwright who was capable of using theatre and audience expectation to re-evaluate literary tastes. Broadly positioned, the thesis provides a case study which revises critical expectations of this play in order to situate better Shakespeare’s contribution to early modern drama and literature.
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Shakespeare's search for tragic form in the 1590sO'Connor, Lara January 2016 (has links)
Starting from David Bevington’s observation that ‘Shakespeare’s disparate ventures into tragic expression in the years prior to 1599 suggest that he had not yet found the model or models he was looking for’,1 the current thesis explores four early tragedies in terms of their experimental nature: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and Julius Caesar. Central to the thesis is how metadrama in these plays point towards an exploration of tragedy that is marked by the intermingling of genres and sources. The thesis argues that each of the four tragedies under discussion is creatively imaginative in the way it involves adding a fresh perspective to tragedy and its mixing of genres. The thesis begins by arguing that in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-the play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare mocks the amateur staging of tragedy which he seeks to revitalize, starting with Titus Andronicus as a bloody revenge tragedy uneasily mixed with poetic language. Chapter Two suggests that Romeo and Juliet explores some of the ways in which comedy collapses into tragedy, while Chapter Three asks questions about Shakespeare’s use of history as a source for tragedy in relation to Richard II. The final chapter concentrates on Julius Caesar as a ‘broken’ play, examining the role of the ‘hero’. Each chapter examines a number of features, including the blending of genre types,the creation of the tragic ‘hero’, unsatisfactory endings as well as metadrama. Finally, Hamlet is seen to incorporate many of these experiments, and thus to lead on to the later tragedies.
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Representations of the aristocratic body in Victorian literatureBoucher, Abigail Kate January 2015 (has links)
This thesis examines the representations of the aristocratic body in Victorian literature. This thesis argues that the authors often wrote, coded, and interpreted an aristocrat’s physical form as a paradoxical object which reflected many of the complex interclass issues and socio-economic transitions seen throughout the Victorian era. By exploring distinct, sequential genres and types of ‘popular’ fiction in this dissertation, I investigate a broad-spectrum literary treatment of aristocratic bodies as cultural paradoxes: for the same usage of the aristocratic body to crop up again and again in disparate, discrete, and hugely popular forms of literature speaks to the nineteenth-century resonance of the aristocratic body as a codeable symbol and textual object. I use what is termed ‘popular fiction’: fiction largely excluded from the canon, yet with a very large contemporary readership and authors or genres which continued to be widely read immediately following the publication of those individual texts. Popular fiction is, by its very nature, the type of literature that can most reasonably be considered to represent the general, broad-spectrum views of large populations, and in doing so these texts can be used to determine wide-scale desires, anxieties, and expectations surrounding the subjects they contain. Body theory and gaze theory serve as the overarching foundation for exploring the portraiture of aristocratic characters by authors from all classes, although individual chapters deal with their own theoretic approaches to the texts examined within them. Chapter 1 on silver fork fiction from the 1820s to the 1840s uses socio-economic theory, including Bourdieu’s idea of habitus to examine the genre’s treatment of aristocratic bodies as consumer goods and luxury products, which in turn reflected contemporary shifts in social and economic class hegemony. Chapter 2 on G.W.M. Reynolds’s radical 1840s to 1850s serial, The Mysteries of the Court of London, uses the medical humanities and masculinity theory to investigate the text’s endemic infertility in aristocratic men; Reynolds uses the biology of aristocratic male bodies as the locus for moralistic discussions about primogeniture and politics. Chapter 3 on the sensation fiction of Mrs Henry (Ellen Price) Wood utilises feminist theory to illustrate Wood’s portrayal of female aristocrats as bodiless, and yet continually gazed upon; Wood uses the aristocratic female body as a magnifying glass to depict the nineteenth-century female experience, in particular the paradoxes of adhering to private, domestic ideologies while at the same time fulfilling the requirements of the public gaze. Chapter 4 explores the influence of evolutionary theory upon two sister-genres of the fin de siècle Medieval Revival: Ruritanian fiction in Part 1 and a genre I have named the Evolutionary Feudal in Part 2. In Part 1, the aristocratic body is represented as outside of evolution; the genre provides escapism from Darwinism and fin de siècle anxieties of history and (d)evolution by whitewashing the feudal era and subscribing to Thomas Carlyle’s theories of divinely- or cosmically-appointed leaders. Part 2 focuses on texts which depict a post-apocalyptic world returning to a feudal Dark Age, and in which aristocratic bodies are seen evolving or devolving; rather than whitewashing history, the Evolutionary Feudal locates history’s darkest origins in the aristocratic body as a way of predicting possible futures and coping with the concerns of degeneration.
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Poets as legislators : self, nation and possibility in World War Two Scottish poetryMcCaffery, Richard January 2014 (has links)
This thesis is the first sustained critical and sociological reappraisal of the poetry produced by Scottish poets who came of age during World War Two and a selection of those who were old enough to have experienced the previous conflict whilst still responding in their art to World War Two. This thesis carves out a critical space for World War Two poetry beyond the poetry of pity and loss espoused by poets of World War One. It also takes into account the conditions and circumstances that mark out Scottish poetry of this conflict from English poetry of the same era, for programmatic, political, poetic and linguistic reasons as well as re-configuring the definition of World War Two poetry to encompass the experience of women poets. At the core of this thesis lies the idea that the Scottish poetry of World War Two was committed to something more than anti-fascism. These poets did not simply oppose a tyrannical, fascist force in their work, they were also developing ways in which their work and art could contribute to a better post-war Scottish society and in many ways espousing both internationalism and proto-transnationalism as well as anti-imperialism. All of these poets contributed in both practical and intellectual ways to post-war Scottish society. In this, this thesis takes its lead from Alice Templeton’s literary theory of a war poetry of ‘possibility’ that transcends both the trauma, witness and outrage of reactions to war. The cumulative effect of the work of these poets is a legislative and educational impact made on society, that poets could have a say in their work on how post-war society could be reconstructed in fairer and more equitable ways. This poetry is both modernist and romantic in the sense that it desires a change and sees life and potential that is being denied by imperial super-powers and structures while it invests the poet with an empowered voice. From the home-front to the front-line, diverse avenues of experience are treated as being of vital importance. The first chapter of this thesis explores the Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica and a number of folk songs by Hamish Henderson, to show his unique commitment to post-war Scotland in his folk-song work. Chapter two compares and contrasts the work of Alexander and Tom Scott, showing their range of reaction from the epic to the highly personal elegy. The thesis then moves into an analysis both of George Campbell Hay’s war poetry, which sympathised with the native Arab populations during the desert war, and the work of Sorley MacLean, who found his political certainties shaken. From this point the thesis explores the anti-heroic work of Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch as well as the political and personal reasons for refusal of conscription expounded by Douglas Young and Norman MacCaig. The thesis closes with a discussion of women’s experience and poetry of World War Two, and an in-depth a look at the major influential figures on the poets of this time, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir. Between these figures we shall see a range of experiences, but each poet is united in their struggle, dramatized in their work, for a better post-War Scotland, a drive which this thesis explores and discusses for the first time in detail.
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Positioning the woman writer : Augusta Webster and her Victorian contextLei, Victoria January 2000 (has links)
This thesis takes its direction from the belief that the preoccupations of a period are often most helpfully discussed through the work of its so-called minor writers. Such writers also enable the critic to articulate and clarify the concerns of other writers more firmly established in the canon. At the same time, of course, the minor writer is inevitably given importance and position within the context of the period, in a fruitful two way process. This is particularly the case with the Victorian writer Augusta Webster since her use of a wide variety of literary genres helps to express the breadth of literary culture in the period. At the same time, since she is a woman and a woman writer, subject to the historical circumstances peculiar to her sex, a study of her work enables the articulation of the linked literary, social and political concerns that surround the problem of identifying how writers construct and are constructed by gender. Positioning Augusta Webster, which is what this thesis seeks to do, thus unavoidably involves a discussion of the Victorian context within which she works and, I hope, goes some way to illuminating both the writer and the context. I begin by offering a literary and biographical overview with the aim of identifying the major issues both formal and historical which she encountered as an aspiring writer and semi-public figure. I try to show that her growth as a writer was linked to her preoccupations with the 'woman question', specifically with the education, work and political situation of women. I try also to show how these issues were those of the time and how Augusta Webster's treatment of them affected contemporary responses to her work. The Introduction is followed by a chapter on Webster's novel, Lesley's Guardians. My next chapter engages with Webster's translations of Æschylus and Euripides. The central section of my thesis is devoted to Webster's most famous work, A Castaway, which notoriously provides the fallen woman, here a middle-class prostitute, with a voice. Dickens, Gaskell and Barrett Browning are also introduced in their treatment of the fallen woman. Portraits, in the next chapter and the way in which the outsider is employed as social critic is analysed. Chapter five deals with Webster's closet dramas. I begin with brief outlines of these little known works; place them among other nineteenth century dramas and note that they were generally well reviewed. The sixth chapter takes Webster's writing life towards its conclusion with a discussion of her fantasy for girls. Daffodil and the Croäxaxicans. This story of the adventures of a young girl in a frog kingdom is situated within the genre of Victorian writing for children. I conclude with some speculation about the reputation of Augusta Webster. Beginning with Theodore Watts-Dunton's prediction that Webster would, like many others, probably be forgotten after her death, I suggest that although the factors that shape the subsequent reputation of a writer are extremely complex, some possibilities may be put forward to explain why Webster is only now becoming known again.
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Martyrdom and masculinity : ideology and masculine identity in the work of Radclyffe HallMacnamara, Steven January 2018 (has links)
This thesis explores the depiction of masculinity by one of literature's most famous female masculine writers, Radclyffe Hall. Chapters One and Two discuss two extremes in the reception of Hall's work: one a successful poem, 'The Blind Ploughman' (1913); and the other, The Master of the House (1932), a novel that was a commercial and critical failure for Hall. Both 'The Blind Ploughman' and The Master of the House depict spiritual, sensitive working class men who are different. While these texts are often mentioned in Hall scholarship, they have rarely been discussed individually. Chapter One addresses the impact of 'The Blind Ploughman' and its success as poem/song through association with the war wounded and how this, in turn, influenced Hall's depiction of damaged/different masculinity and its relationship to homosexuality. Chapter Two explores Hall's engagement with themes that were also being explored by modernist writers, in particular D. H. Lawrence's reimagining of the Christ story in his novella, 'The Escaped Cock' (1928); the chapter argues that The Master of the House uses Christianity to disguise the homoromantic subtext of the novel. In contrast, Chapter Three explores the more familiar topic of female masculinity in relation to Hall, but instead of focusing on male masculine identities, it presents evidence that Joan of Arc, one of history's most famous crossdressing women, was a female masculine role model for Hall. The influence of Joan of Arc is present both in Hall's understanding of her own female masculine identity and in the representation of her female characters. The aim of all three chapters in this thesis is to present a new way of viewing Hall and her work in order to demonstrate that she is more than just a writer of lesbian fiction.
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