This thesis scrutinises the complex ‘afterlife’ of sensation fiction in the wake of the 1860s and ‘70s, after the end of the period that critics have tended to view as the heyday of literary sensationalism. It identifies and explores the consistent framing of sensation fiction as a pathological ‘style of writing’ by middle-class critics in the periodical press, revealing how such responses were moulded by new and emerging medical research into the nervous system, the cellular structure of the body, and the role played by germs in the transmission of diseases. Envisioned as a disease characterised by its new immersive and affective reading process, sensation fiction was believed to be infecting its readers. It infiltrated their nervous systems, instigating a process of metamorphosis that gradually depleted their physical and mental integrity and reduced them to a weakened, ‘flabby’, ‘limp’ state. The physical boundaries of the body, however, were not the only limits that sensation fiction seemed to wilfully disregard. ‘[S]preading in all directions’, it contaminated other modes, other media, and other kinds of recreational entertainment, making them equally sensational and pathological. One of these modes was Gothic monster fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, which was repeatedly labelled ‘sensational’ and described as generating the same cardiovascular responses as works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry Wood. This infection of fin de siècle Gothic fiction by literary sensationalism can be gauged in the plots and monsters that those texts portray. Gothic monster narratives at the end of the nineteenth century are shaped by the concerns at the heart of middle-class commentators’ responses to sensation fiction, and by the medical lexicon employed to vocalise these anxieties. Monstrosity is linked to contagion and stimulation, as the monster seems to pollute all those with whom it comes into contact. It triggers a process of degeneration and debilitation akin to that associated with the reading of sensation fiction, producing a host of ‘shocked’, nervous, or hysterical characters. Encounters with the monster are linked to recreational reading or other kinds of behaviour that such reading became associated with, such as thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and illicit sexual desire. The result is a group of texts in which the monster embodies the same threat to boundaries, as well as individual, and, at times, national health that middle-class reviewers associated with literary sensationalism.

This thesis examines characterization in Ælfric’s Old English version of the biblical book of Esther, from the perspective of cognitive stylistics. This area of study uses concepts and methods from linguistics in order to better understand both how literature works and how language works. The study investigates explicit characterization cues, discourse presentation, semantic fields, and deixis to illuminate how Ælfric’s careful linguistic choices construct characters that remain true to their biblical exempla, make sense to his Anglo-Saxon audience, and underscore the doctrinal themes of the narrative. Chapter 1 describes the textual history of Esther, from its origins to its reception in the early Middle Ages. This is followed by a discussion of the history of Ælfric’s version of the story and its treatment by scholars in the modern era. Chapter 2 outlines my methodology, based in cognitive stylistics, which draws on concepts from cognitive science and related fields to understand what happens in the reader’s mind during reading. In addition, I occasionally draw on corpus stylistics methods, and this is also described. The results and discussion of this analysis form the bulk of Chapters 3 through 6. Chapter 3 focuses on explicit cues, those things that directly describe a character’s personality traits. Speech, thought, and writing presentation are the focus of Chapter 4, which examines how these modes of discourse are presented and how this presentation contributes to the characterization. In Chapter 5 I examine two semantic fields of particular importance in this text: emotions and food. Finally, Chapter 6 addresses two aspects of deixis: relational deixis and Deictic Shift Theory. Although, in all chapters, the analysis primarily focuses on the five main characters (Ahasuerus, Esther, Vashti, Mordecai, and Haman), other apposite characters are also discussed, including the Jews, the Persians, God, and even Ælfric. This kind of cognitive stylistic analysis of Old English and other historical literature is doubly useful. First, it offers new and valuable insights into this literature. The present study, for example, notes minute linguistic details that offer significant characterization cues and also explains the peculiar sense of many Anglo-Saxonists (and other historians) that they know very well people whom they have never met. Second, such examination demonstrates that the chosen methods are robust enough to cope with literature much older than that normally engaged in modern stylistic studies. This not only verifies the utility of the methods, but also attests to the universal nature of their underlying principles.

This thesis presents the first critical edition of the Lay Folks’ Catechism using the previously unpublished Oxford, Bodleian MS Don.c.13 as the base text. The list of extant witnesses is revised and includes the newly discovered Chetham Library fragment. The edition presents detailed manuscript descriptions, variants from all 26 witnesses, notes on the text and a comprehensive glossary. The introduction considers the roles of Archbishop Thoresby and the Benedictine John de Gaitrik in commissioning and composing the Catechism, and its sources and orthodoxy are confirmed. Scribal presentation of the text as verse or prose is re-examined in conjunction with Gaitrik’s use of punctuation and various literary devices, and a new conclusion reached concerning the text’s construction. The Catechism’s distribution and circulation, its effectiveness as a didactic text, and the transition from northern clergy to non-secular ownership are discussed. The edition establishes the importance of the Catechism in late medieval vernacular pastoralia aimed at a pious lay audience.

This thesis focuses on fiction and poetry written by women who have migrated from former British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia, to Britain or North America; it explores how issues of race, gender, sexuality, belonging and power are raised through the writings‘ accounts of migration, displacement and changing identity. The thesis stresses the importance of these writings in addressing key issues in feminist politics and in women‘s lives, and in making significant contributions to these debates. It argues that women‘s migration, and literary accounts of migration, are important to feminism, as is feminism to understanding migration. Key texts include Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga; The Unbelonging, by Joan Riley; Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid; and No Language is Neutral, by Dionne Brand. I also draw on a number of other novels, poems and anthologies of migrant women‘s writings. The diversity of the texts by migrant women that form the basis of the thesis has shaped my understanding of the issues they raise; the breadth and variety of the writing calls for a wide range of critical approaches in order that the writing is, as far as possible, illuminated rather than constrained by any one critical model. I am committed throughout the thesis to a feminist approach which incorporates an attention to women‘s activism along with 'the theoretical'; and which takes seriously the personal/emotional implications both of the kinds of imbalances of power which many migrant women explore and resist in their writings, and of feminist theorising and practice. The thesis consists of six chapters, the middle four of which are organised into two pairs. I begin the thesis with a chapter looking at accounts of women‘s decisions and journeys of migration, and the personal, political and historical contexts in which their migration takes place. Chapters Two and Three, which are paired under the title 'Women and Place', examine the impact of migrant women‘s changing relationships with place, before and after migration, on their sense of home, belonging and identity. In Chapters Four and Five, I move on to address the significance of these writings in terms of feminist politics and contemporary debates about identity, difference and racism. I have paired the chapters under the common title 'Literary Activism' in order to highlight connections between reading, writing and political activism. In conclusion, the thesis looks at representations of women‘s emotional and bodily experiences of the liberatory and/or oppressive aspects of their migrations. It addresses the possibilities –or impossibilities—of migrant women living with, coming to terms with, and resisting their oppressions, both personally and politically. This final chapter brings together, and takes further, various issues addressed throughout the thesis, in terms of writers‘ portrayals of both the effects of migration on women‘s sense of themselves, and of their explorations and responses to the impact of migration.

Memory is among the most important of themes that form the basis for the novels of contemporary British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (1954 -). The theme of memory pervades all of Ishiguro's six novels to date, and has proved to be a hallmark of his writing and a theme that he constantly returns to examine in his work. The significance of memory in Ishiguro's novels has often been mentioned by both critics and academics alike, but there has been very little research undertaken specifically on the work of memory in his novels.

This thesis investigates Beckett's interests in the seventeenth-century philosopher Arnold Geulincx, tracing these interests first back to primary sources in Beckett's own notes and correspondence, and then forward through his oeuvre. This first full-length study of the occasionalist philosopher in Beckett's works reveals Geulincx as closely bound, in changeable and subtle ways, to Beckett's altering compositional methodologies and aesthetic foci. It argues that multifaceted attentiveness to the different ways in which Geulincx is alluded to or explicitly cited in different works is required if the extent of Geulincx' importance across Beckett's oeuvre is to be properly understood. Chapter 1 presents a lineage of correspondence dating from 1936 to 1967 in which Beckett cites or alludes to Geulincx. It introduces Geulincx' occasionalism and Beckett's transcriptions from his works. Chapter 2 builds upon this empirical groundwork by arguing for a proposed chronology of Murphy's composition. This focuses Geulincx' importance to Murphy as a frame of reference located predominantly in the novel's latter stages. Chapter 3 investigates Geulincx' explicit presence in manuscript drafts of Watt. It argues that this particular presence is refined out of the novel's final stages at the same time as it is thematised. Chapter 4 focuses in on a specific paragraph that cites Geulincx in La Fin/The End and Suite. The different versions of this paragraph stage a number of textual manoeuvres in revisions and translation that are revealing about Beckett's attitude towards Geulincx as a source. Chapter 5 traces the consequences of this aesthetic attitude through imagery derived from Geulincx in Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, this latter as a novel that seeks to enact certain of Geulincx' ethical principles as narrative voice. The final chapter argues that there are highly refined and abstracted reappearances of Geulincx to be located in How It Is and in the television plays as a reinvigorated fascination with puppetry that also owes a debt to Beckett's reading Heinrich von Kleist. While Geulincx has long been thought of as a fleeting presence in Beckett's oeuvre, this full-length study finds that the philosopher's altering and recurring presences bear closer scrutiny. Geulincx' presences are more deeply embedded in Beckett's work than previously noted by critics, and in this they frequently reflect Beckett's broader changing aesthetic concerns as Beckett developed what he called his ‘series' of works.

This thesis examines the relationship between the work of the sixteenth century English poet Edmund Spenser and the popular press. Previous critical debate has focused upon Spenser‟s debt to the classical traditions of epic, pastoral and georgic, and the work of Italian poets such as Ariosto, rather than considering the role played by more ephemeral and cheap English publications; my research helps to readdress this imbalance. By combining a close reading of Spenser‟s work with an analysis of widely available publications such as almanacs, books of husbandry, calendars, Elizabethan storybooks, the book of Raynarde the Foxe and the Golden Legend, I have endeavoured to open out Spenser‟s literary environment to include the popular. This has involved an analysis of popular publications in relation to theories of copia and encyclopaedic reading practices and demonstrates that Spenser was fascinated by the process of publication as well as the mental and physiological effects of reading. My research includes an analysis of the continuities between medieval and early modern texts, the body as text and the text as relic, the eye as a conduit for lust and iconographic creation, the problems of defining readership and reader response, the blurring of religious iconography across the boundaries of Protestant and Catholic expression, the mutability of time systems and the ramifications of counsel and censorship. This work contributes to studies concerned with the history of the book and the rise of print culture, while also adding to the critical body of Spenser studies. This thesis has an interdisciplinary focus and draws upon the work of historians such as Peter Burke, Tessa Watt and Elizabeth Eisenstein alongside works of literary criticism.

This thesis seeks to provide a new perspective on storms in Shakespeare. Rather than a recurrent motif, the storm is seen as protean: each play uses the storm in a singular way. The works of Shakespeare's contemporaries are explored for comparison, whilst meteorological texts and accounts of actual storms are examined for context. Using close reading and theories of ecocriticism throughout, I show that Shakespeare's storms are attentive to the environmental conditions of experience. Although the dominant practice of staging storms in early modern England is to suggest the supernatural, Shakespeare writes storms which operate quite differently. I argue that this is a compelling opportunity to see Shakespeare develop a complex engagement with audience expectations. Five plays are explored in separate chapters, each with respect to performative conditions and through close reading of the poetry. Firstly, I argue that the Globe's opening in 1599 demanded a spectacular showcase, to which Julius Caesar responded, shaping the play's language and staging. With King Lear (c.1605), the traditional, non-Shakespearean location of the heath betrays a tendency to misread the play in terms of location rather than event. King Lear's storm withholds the supernatural, a manifestly different approach from that in Macbeth (c.1606); Shakespeare both adheres to and resists convention in this respect. The relationship between storm and the supernatural in Macbeth is shown to be fundamental to the play's equivocation. Shakespeare's next storm is in Pericles (c.1608), which also contains a storm by George Wilkins. The two writers' approaches are explored with respect to the Bible, alluded to extensively throughout the play. Finally, with The Tempest (c.1611), I argue that Shakespeare's manipulation of audience expectation through the storm demands a reading which combines the metatheatrical and the ecocritical. Foregrounded as expressions of dramatic and environmental awareness, I bring new insights to Shakespeare's storms.

Victorian literary criticism has within it a longstanding tradition of inquiring about the degree to which literature of the period reflects the realities of nineteenthcentury Christian faith. Many of these studies are admirable in the way that they demonstrate the challenges confronting religion in this period of dynamic social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific change and growth. Similarly, this study will examine the critical intersections between nineteenth-century Christianity and literature. However, this project is unique by virtue of the methodology used in order to access both the expressed and latent perspectives on Victorian faith at play within a given text. I propose that that a spatial, place-based reading has heretofore been largely ignored in critical explorations of nineteenth-century faith and literature. While, literary criticism utilising concepts related to spatiality, geography, topography, and place have increased within recent decades, these critical works are largely silent on the issue of the narrative representations of “place” and the expression and understanding of Victorian Christianity. This project suggests a model for just such a reading of nineteenth-century texts. More specifically, this thesis proposes that by reading for sacred place in the Victorian novel one is able to explore the issue of Christianity and literature from a unique and neglected point of narrative and critical reference. Using Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure as primary texts, this study demonstrates that a careful exploration of sacred place within a particular narrative reflects an author's and, more broadly, a culture's perceptions of a faith. Reading Victorian religion from the vantage point of place acknowledges that place is itself an inescapable and fundamental medium through which individuals and cultures mediate the most mundane and the most exhilarating of their personal and collective experiences and beliefs. Similarly, faith, especially in nineteenth-century England, is a dominant and pervasive metaphysical ideology that is connected to and possesses repercussions for virtually all aspects of individual and social life. A critical reading that unites place and faith – these two fundamental paradigms of human experience and understanding – will inevitably provide fertile soil for a productive reading of the texts under consideration.

Orientador: Cristiane Mansur de Moraes Souza. / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Regional de Blumenau, Centro de Ciências Humanas e da Comunicação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Desenvolvimento Regional.