John Eliot (1601-1690) was one of the first English missionaries to settle in the New World. Over the past four centuries his life and missionary work with the Algonquian Indians of Massachusetts Bay, New England, have been documented in various forms including biographies, poems, fiction and children's stories. In addition to his active missionary work, Eliot was also a profile writer and translator: he contributed to many promotional pamphlets, authored one of the most controversial commonwealth treatises of the seventeenth century, published fictional dialogues of Algonquian Indians, composed language and logic primers to help in the translation of Massachusett into English and vice versa. His most ambitious and famous publication is his translation of the Bible into the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian. Throughout the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation as a missionary and a translator has received much critical attention, especially from historians of the colonial period. However, given recent moves to expand the canon of colonial literature, it is surprising that there is no book-length literary analysis of his work. In order to redress this balance and consider Eliot's work from a literary rather than a historical perspective, this thesis considers the written records of direct speech, conversations, speeches, dialogues and deathbed confessions of Algonquian Praying Indians, in order to investigate the use and manipulation of written and spoken communicative strategies. By considering Eliot's work in terms of speech, text and performance, this thesis traces the performative nature of cultural identity through the emergence and inter-dependence of English, New English, Indian, and Praying Indian identities.

In 1792, the inventor and illusionist Paul Philidor unveiled the ‘Phantasmagoria’ to the people of Paris. Coined by combining the Greek words ‘phantasma’ (appearance, vision, ghost) and ‘agora’ (assembly), Philidor had intended the name to suggest a vast crowd of the undead, a riotous carnival of phantoms. He promised his audience that, using the projections of a magic lantern and other ingenious mechanical devices, he would show them the illusory shapes of ghosts and monsters, reunite lovers separated by death, and call fiends out of hell. However, this exhibition of illusory spectres was to become something far more than a mere footnote in the history of Romantic popular entertainment. The Phantasmagoria was to assume a metaphorical function in the mindscape of the period; this cavalcade of spectres was to come to serve as an image for not only the fantastic terrors of dreams and hallucinations, but also for the unbounded creative power of the imagination. Besides this, the metaphor of the phantasmagoria was to subsume into itself an idea which had its origin in the ‘Curiosity Culture’ of the previous century: the curious collection. As time wore on, this Curious – or Phantasmagorical – collection became a symbol by which writers of the late Nineteenth Century could signal their resistance to bourgeois conformity and their own paradoxical celebration and rejection of consumer culture. This work examines the evolution of the Phantasmagoria metaphor as well as the development of its associated aesthetic: the aesthetic of the curious collection – the collection of weird and fabulous objects that astonishes the senses and confuses the mind, erasing the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha offers the most comprehensive study to date of an intriguing but understudied body of plays. It undertakes a major reconsideration of the processes that determine the constitution of the Shakespeare canon through study of that canon’s exclusions. This thesis combines historical analysis of the emergence and development of the "Shakespeare Apocrypha" with current theorisations of dramatic collaboration. Several new theoretical and historical approaches to early modern authorship have emerged in the last decade. This thesis breaks new ground by bringing them together to demonstrate the untenability of the dichotomy between Canon and Apocrypha. Both within and without the text, the author is only one of several factors that shape the plays, and canonical boundaries are contingent rather than absolute. Chapter One draws on the New Textualism and studies of material print attributions, viewing the construction of the apocryphal canon alongside the growth of Shakespeare’s cultural prestige over three centuries. Chapter Two applies recent repertory studies to authorship questions, treating five anonymous King’s Men’s plays as part of a shared company practice that transcends authorial divisions. Chapter Three seeks dialogue between post-structuralist theory and "disintegrationist" work, revealing a shared concern with the plurality of agents within disputed plays. Within all three models of authorship, the divisions between "Shakespeare" and "not Shakespeare" are shown to be ambiguous and subjective. The associations of many disputed plays with the Shakespeare canon are factual, not fanciful. The ambiguity of canonical boundaries ultimately demonstrates the insufficiency of the "CompleteWorks" model for study of Shakespeare’s drama. Chapter Four confronts the commercial considerations that impose practical limitations on the organisation of plays. In so doing, this thesis establishes the theoretical principles by which the neglected plays of the Apocrypha can be readmitted into discourse, dispersing the fixed authority of the authorial canon.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century habit of comparing Dickens and Thackeray sprang from the existence within the early and mid-Victorian consciousness of certain diametrically opposed ideas: empiricism and intuitive Carlylean spirituality; yearning Romantic subjectivism and a belief in objective authoritarianism and duty; and, in 11terature, realism and the idealism of romance. Reacting against the excesses of the immediate past, the men of the 1830’s and 40’s were yet unable to ignore the impressions left by these. In particular, they were affected by the scepticism of the empiricists, and this produced in their minds a tension between faith and doubt, which, when suppressed by those unwilling to face their own divided nature, found an outlet in externalised comparisons such as that between Dickens and Thackeray. In criticism of Dickens in the 30’s and 40's, he was separately admired as optimist and attacked as pessimist, but only in the early 50's was the dichotomy of hope and scepticism openly stated, in the shape of his antagonism with Thackeray. In the late 40's, the latter’s stylistic purity had seemed more objective than the self-indulgent mannerisms attributed to Dickens, but later, when the centre of contrast shifted to a distinction between optimism and cynicism, the balance inclined in Dicken’s favour, though the darker vision of his rival, mirroring the repressed fears of the age, could never be ignored. Many of the other strands of comparison - the ascription to Thackeray of restless self-consciousness and to Dickens of objectivity; the contrast between the real and the ideal instituted byDavid Hasson - related back to this focal point of hope and doubt, which continued to lie at the heart of the opposition in the 70's and 80's and even in criticism of the 1900's. From the 80's onwards, however, interest in the traditional comparison was declining. The polarity of Dickensian heart and Thackerayan head reflected an important aspect of nineteenth century experience, but it was often a distorted reflection, since the ideas of Victorianism were being used by writers lees conscious of the problems of the time than men such as Carlyle who had created the Victorian ethos. Concepts of optimism, objectivity and realism were more naively and rigidly applied than by the minds (themselves often naive and inconsistent) which had originally formulated them.

The dissertation considers the English morality plays as explorations of inner conflict. The pre-Reformation moralities use personification-allegory as a means of analysing the conflict which takes place within the soul of man between his attachment to this world and his other-worldly aspirations. The social ethic of Reformation theology, however, introduces a new interest in social relationships. The moralities of the post-Reformation period retain allegory to analyse the inner process which lead to ethical choice,but they also incorporate literal dramatis personae in order to express social themes, and the proportion of personification-allegory correspondingly decreases. The early popular Elizabethan "tragedies” are predominantly literal, but they tend to retain personified abstractions as a means of expressing inner conflict. It is suggested that in the transition from this hybrid form to purely literal tragedy, the allegorical technique of the earlier plays is absorbed rather than discarded, that the deliberative soliloquies of later tragic heroes are a development of the analysis of inner conflict leading to ethical choice which is central in the morality tradition.

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative work and a reflective essay. The creative work is a novel entitled Hartsend. In a village in Central Scotland, the characters assemble at the funeral of Mrs Crossthwaite, a domineering woman whose middle aged daughter Lesley must now make her own choices. Four people in particular, teenagers Harriet and Ryan, and middle aged friends Duncan and Lesley attempt to cope with their private pain and the damage done to them in the past, in order to make sense of their lives. Is forgiveness necessary, or even possible? Meanwhile, out of everyone’s sight, another kind of damage is taking place which will affect the entire village. The reflective essay examines first the origins of the novel, those external events which over a number of years preoccupied me and the personal circumstances which intensified my concern. It then considers the factors involved in its writing. These include: the difficulties involved in becoming a writer, the depiction of a paedophile, an exploration of the key concept of ‘Noticing’, the use of the Enneagram in developing characters, the Mindmap as a tool for plotting the novel, the usefulness of experts and the place and purpose of writing in an aleatory world. Examples from several writers including Nadine Gordimer, Carol Shields, Raymond Chandler, Margaret Atwood and William Trevor, whose words have contributed to my ideas about writing and whose work has modified my writing style, substantiate this analysis.

My thesis examines the ways in which the critical structure of modern Irish Bildungsroman deconstructs and re-examines ‘residues of past trauma’ in the form of socio-cultural, psychological, personal and notably political artefacts present in the nation’s unfortunate engagement with the State’s politics of formation. The result is a resistant and radical form which challenges the classical and modern specificity of the genre by introducing a non-conformist, post-Joycean protagonist, whose antithetical perception of history and socio-cultural norms contradicts the conservative efforts of the post-independence Irish State. To examine such a resistant critical structure, this thesis focuses on Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), Dermot Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter (1987), William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), Seamus Deane’s Reading In The Dark (1996), Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) and A Pagan Place (1970), Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996), Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), Flann O’Brien’s The Hard Life (1961), and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965). The selected novels provide an invaluable insight into the nation’s perception of sensitive concepts such as modernism and modern Irish identity, and how the confluence of these two produced a critical dialectical discourse which chronicles the formation of a non-conformist, ahistorical modern protagonist. To achieve a historical relevance, this thesis starts by examining Doyle’s fictionalization of 1916 Easter Rising and the chaotic 1920s; Bolger’s exploration of a repressive, inward-looking post-independence Irish society in the 1930s and the 1940s; Trevor’s engagement with a socio-political divide that further split the nation; Deane’s autogenous reading of an internal neocolonial ‘Othering’ during the ‘emergency’; McCabe’s illustration of the State’s architecture of oppression, and societal introversion from the early 1940s to the 1960s; Edna O’Brien’s and Nuala O’Faolain’s exemplary illustration of women’s blighted sexual Bildung in the 1940s, 50s and 60s; and finally examining a radical, ‘chronocentric’ depiction of a socio-political divide fictionalized by Stuart and McGahern, which emerged during the early days of the State and continued to dominate the nation well into the 1960s and the early 1970s. By examining psycho-social, sexual and political traumata reflected in the modern Irish Bildungsroman, this thesis provides a dialectical reading of the gap that appeared between the revolutionary ethos of independent Irish identity formation, rooted in the principles of 1916 Rising and the 1920s, and that which appeared in the form of a tolerant republicanism in the 1980s. To study this socio-historical gap, I examine the nation’s criticism of the State’s politics and structure of formation, manifested in narratives of individual and national formation. The modern Irish Bildungsroman, I argue, appropriates the traditional features of the genre, for instance, chronicling the individual’s psychosocial formation and the potential to re-engage with their society, and produces a critical matrix for a dialectical discourse which enables the nation to voice their concerns vis-à-vis a politically dichotomous post-independence Irish society, a repressed history, and at the same time to externalize their perception of modern Irish formation, being founded on an anti-colonial, non-conservative and politically aware consciousness. The result, which I call the ‘Meta-National Narrative of Formation,’ is a historically resistant and socio-politically conscious narrative which finds independence in rejection, imposition, and deformation, namely, by defying the State’s architecture of formation as well as their nativist, retrograde visions of Irish identity.

For many critics, Hamlet’s famous dictum that ‘The time is out of joint’ is to be read as a social comment on Shakespeare’s own historical moment (Hamlet, 1.5.189). Generally thought to have been written around the same period as Hamlet, Julius Caesar contains a similar statement—‘it is a strange-disposèd time,’ Cicero remarks early on in the play (1.3.33). In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro suggests that, far from being coincidental, this recurring untimeliness in fact pervades the plays Shakespeare wrote at the turn of the seventeenth century—and most notably Henry V, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. For Shapiro, the many anachronisms that can be found in those plays point to a shared, objective core of historical reality (‘Shakespeare came of age when time itself was out of joint,’ the critic argues). The idea that the ultimate meaning of Shakespeare’s dramas is inextricably bound up with the late Elizabethan (or early Jacobean) moment of their production is a central tenet of historicist criticism. Largely due to the hegemonic status of new historicism in the field of Shakespeare studies in the last thirty years or so, this mode of criticism has become, to a great extent, normative. The present work takes issue with the systematic approach that consists in viewing Shakespeare’s plays as mere reflections of an overarching, ‘objective’ historical reality. Specifically, the thesis challenges the default historicist framework in which many of Shakespeare’s plays have been embedded. Thus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Henry V are here looked at with a large emphasis on the present of interpretation (as opposed to the authorial moment). A key thread of the thesis is the sense that the meaning of these plays is directly determined by the criticism. In other words, their meaning is essentially constructed in the present—a fundamentally unfixed and ever-moving category. Accordingly, alleged anachronisms are here viewed as by-products of this subjective present. Rather than expressing the objective historical ‘real’ of the dramas, such anachronisms are considered to testify to the intrusion of the viewer within the literary scene. This implies that the dramas are always already infected not so much by their author’s historical moment but by the eye of the critic itself. At the heart of the thesis is the sense that Shakespearean drama can be viewed through the grid of an aesthetics of untimeliness, which manifests itself in various ways. The coexistence of multiple presents of interpretation within the hermeneutic field of the plays is one of the ways in which such an aesthetics can be experienced. For instance, the colossal criticism of Hamlet guarantees that no one historical elucidation of the play can prevail. Alternatively, the diegetic content of the plays can also be used to support the idea of an untimely aesthetics. On many occasions, Shakespeare’s dramas comment on the inherent disjunction that alienates them from the historical past which they (supposedly) purport to stage—this is generally done through the medium of key metadramatic characters like the Chorus in Henry V. In either case, complete historical presence is negated. Thus, the thesis posits the impossibility of presence—or untimeliness—as a valid aesthetic category in view of Shakespeare’s dramas. Each individual chapter illustrates how the dramas can be said to aestheticise the intrinsically differential quality of literature. Ultimately, the thesis also emphasises how différance, to use Jacques Derrida’s celebrated coinage, lies at the heart not only of literature but of all forms of staged entertainment.

This thesis examines the actor-clown Will Kemp and his working relationship with Shakespeare. In particular, the thesis explores the theatrical and literary influence Kemp had on his roles for Shakespeare. In the chapters which follow, I investigate the traces of Kemp in some of the early editions of the plays in which he first appeared, before looking at more solid evidence of his continuing rapport with Shakespeare in the two plays which name Kemp in a role. In each case the focus is on the first entry of his clown figure in the plays examined and the interplay of performance and authorial script. The study reveals Kemp not only as an agent of performance for Shakespeare, but also as a catalyst of textual and eventually thematic change in the composition of his plays. Their professional association thus maps the cultural shift identified by a number of critics from a players’ to an authors’ theatre in the late sixteenth century. Over the last three decades, there have been two major revisionist theories about how Shakespeare wrote and disseminated his dramatic works and which acknowledge the dynamic and pragmatic processes leading to the eventual posthumous publication of the First Folio in 1623. One is the hypothesis, embedded most tangibly in The Oxford Shakespeare (1986), that the dramatist revised and reworked his plays primarily for performance. In the second, related but distinct theory laid out in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), Lukas Erne argued that Shakespeare also reworked certain plays specifically for publication. Both theories uphold the notion of authorial revision and both raise questions about how we are to understand the creative and commercial processes which lie behind the surface of Shakespeare’s printed plays. Neither of these overarching theories, however, perhaps pays sufficient attention to the daily realities of the Elizabethan stage, or to the relationship between the plays and the actors who performed them. In the thesis, I contend that Shakespeare’s plays emerged from a vibrant and collaborative theatrical context, articulated in the extant early printed editions, captured in their myriad textual variances and proved in a multitude of details. By scrutinizing these details, I argue, it is possible to see how the conditions of performance made for a dispersal of authorship in playwriting. Actors were not merely the vehicles for the play-texts they performed, but also a root source of written variation. Kemp’s presence undermines the simple binary view of Shakespeare as a theatrical or literary author around which most revisionary scholarship still tends to revolve and points, rather, to far more fluid processes of composition and adaptation in the plays on which he worked with Shakespeare. Indeed, in the stage direction ‘Enter Will Kemp’, where writing meets performance, a whole world of possible change to Shakespeare’s protean art is thus opened up.

This thesis examines David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749) and elucidates how Hartley’s mechanical approach to mind, his conception of emotion, and the religious status he awards the body were newly relevant after 1791. In this way it identifies a ‘Hartlean culture’ within the Romantic period and seeks to explore how such an intellectual climate influenced the radical writers William Blake (1757–1827) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). Blake and Wollstonecraft were acquainted with the famous bookseller Joseph Johnson, who republished Observations on Man in various forms and versions between 1775 and 1801. They also had an association with Johnson’s circle; the Hartlean concepts found throughout their work evidence Hartley’s latent popularity within intellectual culture, as well as the writers’ engagement with contemporary philosophical ideas. I propose that the renewed curiosity in Hartley during the 1790s reveals a specific religious and revolutionary culture wherein non-conformist views about Christianity and new ideas about the body, emotion and women flourished. Such a cultural moment renders Hartley a particularly important figure for debate since he integrated progressive values about equality and faith alongside advancing understanding of anatomy and mind. Hartley identified how God and happiness could be found physically within each person. He did this by combining a complex theory of vibrations and theory of association, where the body and mind functioned mechanically through a person’s feelings of pleasure and pain. These feelings manifested as physical vibrations and eventually led every person to desire goodness until finally, they can become ‘Godlike’ themselves. Hartley’s amalgamation of Christian and new theoretical concepts appealed to Blake and Wollstonecraft, and was much unlike the approach of Joseph Priestley who abridged Observations in 1775 to promote a wholly ‘scientific’ text. In this way, we can see resonances between Hartley, Blake and Wollstonecraft, even if they existed in different cultural contexts. In rethinking Blake and Wollstonecraft through Hartley, I offer new insights into their feminism. In particular I attend to how Hartlean culture enabled these writers to re-imagine gender and emotion: Wollstonecraft reinstates the female experience back into Hartlean concepts in order to promote women’s emotional potential and what she understands as the special power of the female-female bond. Blake responds to both Wollstonecraft and Hartley with his elevation of the feminine, one that envisions new potential for both sexes, emotionally and spiritually. In both cases, the writers share a fascination for the image of the female saviour, and they use terminology and concepts found in Hartley’s work to communicate their views. In being attentive to the shared vocabulary and ideas of these three writers’ works, this thesis highlights the importance of David Hartley and Hartlean culture for the field of Romantic Studies. It also illuminates Observations on Man as a vital contribution to the intellectual context of the 1790s.