This thesis is a response to the critics of the pioneering novelist Edgar Mittelholzer whose second novel was instrumental in paving the way for other Caribbean novelists during the 1950s. Critics of Mittelholzer have accused him of fascism, racism, an unhealthy interest in sexually sensationalist topics and death. He has until the recent centenary of his birth been marginalised and understudied. The first chapter of this thesis outlines the areas of study that have thus far been focused on and explores the underlying methods and theoretical framework of this thesis. The second chapter focuses on the author’s background, career and contribution to the Caribbean. The third explores the genesis of Mittelholzer’s creativity with a view to revealing how intertextuality is key to an understanding of his novels. It also discusses his creative use of the Middle Eastern notion of the Jinnee. The fourth chapter offers a critical analysis of The Life and Death of Sylvia and demonstrates how Mittelholzer employed the themes of sex, race and death. The fifth Chapter establishes that the texts of Yogi Ramacharaka were his primary source of inspiration and that Mittelholzer’s novels can be best understood in terms of the Oriental Occultist’s teachings. The sixth chapter explores Mittelholzer’s racial identity and finds that his mixed ancestry was a key source of creative inspiration. The final chapter concludes that further research is needed into his work and that an exploration of the intertextual references serves to clarify the author’s objectives.

This thesis is for ‘literature from below’. I select three groups of poor people –petty criminals, prostitutes, and apprentices –and investigate their dramatic representation in three early modern plays –The Roaring Girl, The Honest Whore, and Sir Thomas More. To overcome their representational distortion, I carry out a tripartite dialogue between documentational evidence, dramatic allusion and poetic imagination. This thesis adopts its methodology from poststructuralist historicism, but my theoretical position on Renaissance studies diverges from it in several respects, which I elucidate in the introduction. The first chapter ascertains, by scrutinizing the hermaphroditic protagonist Moll, that her cross-dressing and protean identities represent the characteristics of early modern London. The second chapter argues that early modern capitalism combined with patriarchy plays a crucial role in giving rise to prostitution by examining the courtesan protagonist, Bellafront. The third chapter, which analyzes the 1517 Ill May Day apprentice riots in the context of the 1590s London crisis, traces there presentational history of the popular insurgency and retrieves ideological implication from the early modern censorial regime. In the conclusion, I estimate ‘use value’ of Renaissance drama in our time, and from the Marxist perspective, I appraise the aesthetic appeal of the three plays.

The aim of this thesis is to examine Psycharis's Greek novels by focusing on his modes of writing and the ideas manifested in them. Psycharis saw his role as that of an intellectual aiming to reform Greek culture and he fought consistently for the establishment of the demotic - as he understood it as the language of literature. Yet his novels serve as a filter not only for his views on language and literature, but also for other social and philosophical issues of relevance to his time, and even to contemporary readers. I have defined three major areas for examination: the didacticism of the novels, expressed in the themes and in the narrative techniques employed by the author; the overall recurring cultural views presented in them, and the preoccupation with the importance of fiction, the role of literature and of the prose writer. The novels will be examined in chronological order and I shall address each of the three major areas explained above in turn, emphasising the most prominent one in each case. The objective of this thesis is to make Psycharis's Greek novels better known and to indicate the role that he played in the development of Modern Greek prose and culture.

The Shakespeare Institute and the University of Alabama are working together on the preparation of a new edition of the works of Robert Greene, the need for which has long been recognised. As a contribution to the project, this dissertation presents Perymedes the blacksmith and Pandosto.

This thesis intends to investigate how educated British women travellers challenged conventional female roles and how they participated in the political culture in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Part One will discuss those who tried hard to challenge or to correct traditionally-defined femininity and to prove themselves useful in their society. Many of them negotiated with and broadened the traditionally defined femininity in this age. Part Two will take Burke and Wollstonecraft’s debate as the central theme in order to discuss chronologically the British women travellers’ political responses to the Revolution controversy. When the Revolution degenerated into Terror and wars, the Burkean view became the main strand of British women travellers’ political thinking. Under the threat of Revolutionary France and during the Napoleonic Wars, a popular conservatism and patriotism developed in Britain. Part Three will use the travel journals of the women who went to France during the Amiens Truce and after the fall of Napoleon in 1814 to analyse the formation of British national identity and nationalism in this period. In the end, these educated British women both stimulated and contributed to the formation of British political and cultural identity at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This thesis investigates competing representations of androgyny as grotesque and/or divine in selected works by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. The literary grotesque is a combination of incompatibles—such as the combination of masculine and feminine—which evokes simultaneous reactions of laughter and revulsion, while I define the divine as that which inspires awe and wonder through its otherworldliness. Throughout, the thesis examines figures such as physical or metaphorical hermaphrodites, eunuchs, Amazons, transvestites, the asexual, the pansexual, and those who transgress gender boundaries. The Introduction establishes historical contexts for physical and behavioural androgyny, the grotesque, and the divine. Each subsequent chapter close-reads one literary text: Chapter 1 examines place-based androgyny in Jonson’s Volpone; Chapter 2 explores Antonio/Florizel’s effect in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida; Chapter 3 analyses role-reversal in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; Chapter 4 investigates Ganymede’s magnetism and Rosalind’s wondrousness in As You Like It; and Chapter 5 evaluates Cesario’s invigoration in Twelfth Night. I argue for a progression in the degree of wonder evoked by androgynous figures, and an increase in these figures’ subjectivity and agency. My thesis is the first to explore the liberating unfixity of androgyny as funny, frightening, repulsive, and yet also potentially divine.

While the growing body of literature on the relationship between feminist theory, classical myth, and classical scholarship has contributed to an understanding of general scholarly trends, there has not been a sustained examination of the relationship between feminist scholarship and classical receptions. Furthermore, the field of classical reception studies focuses almost exclusively on male authors and widely ignores female voices. This thesis addresses these lacunae through detailed discussions of the Ovidian receptions of four women writers active between 1950 and the present: Sylvia Plath, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Josephine Balmer, and Saviana Stănescu. The thesis tracks the ‘difference made’ by feminist scholarship on their varied receptions, and the ways in which recurrent concerns in their engagements prefigure, echo, or explicitly draw upon feminist theory and feminist Ovidian scholarship. This thesis poses the argument that women’s classical receptions offer a critical tool to advance feminist classical scholars’ attempts to ‘reappropriate the text’, by reclaiming female narrative authority from the male poet and interpellating the ‘resisting reader’. This diverse, yet characteristically feminine, Ovidian tradition challenges existing reception traditions based upon male practitioners alone, and reawakens the political and aesthetic critique at the heart of Ovid’s poetry.

This thesis explores America’s fascination with its own sports as purveyors of national identity. American literature has found unique inspiration in sporting competition, not only depicting professional athletes, but drawing from the experiences of fans and amateurs. While the athlete’s heroism and eventual fall has been analysed in previous discussions of this topic, my route of inquiry positions decline and defeat as more central and complex concepts. The focus of this thesis is on the remarkably diverse ways in which contemporary writers reimagine aspects of sporting failure both for their characters and within their own creative process. The centrality of failure seems an affront to the United States’ celebration of success and victory. However, the common strand in the most ambitious contemporary sports writing is to portray experiences of loss and failure as paradoxical routes to self-affirmation. Postmodern writing on sports has taken from the drama and narrative implicit in sporting contest, but uses this framework to question ideas of masculinity, ethnicity, memory and myth. The writers I discuss incorporate failure into these themes to arrive at points of redemptive discovery.

This thesis consists of a short story collection and an accompanying critical commentary. The story collection comprises ten linked stories all set in a fictional small town in southern England: the eponymous Sudleigh. The cycle examines ordinary lives within that landscape. While the stories may vary in their naturalism, they are linked by a common setting and a scrutiny of the sociological and political nuances of small-town England. The accompanying critical commentary examines, through the lens of writing technique, how writers have used the realist short story not just to portray snapshots of the human condition but also to engage with the issues central to the societies they inhabit. Through the analysis and discussion of various stories by such writers as Chekhov, Joyce, Mansfield, Hemingway, Carver, Simpson, Kelman and Munro, the four chapters respond to several questions. How can the writer renew the realist short story and make it relevant? How can the writer make the short story both represent and interrogate reality? What role does the evocation of place play in the realist short story and its capacity to construct socio-political implication? It also explores the capacity of the story cycle to expand the short story’s socio-political potential, and the suitability of its fragmentary form to portray a fragmented society. In light of the modern, realist short story tradition, the final chapter offers a detailed reflective commentary on the processes and choices made in the writing of Sudleigh. As well as exploring such issues as voice, style, compression, structure, endings, editing practice, constructing the fictive town and binding the cycle, the reflective commentary also weighs the nature of my own socio-political engagements, and my efforts to renew the form.

This thesis explores the writing life of the Northumbrian labouring-class poet Robert Story (1795-1860) who, during the political turmoil of the 1830s, achieved national celebrity for writing a series of songs and poems for Peel’s Conservative party. In his unpublished autobiography (c.1853) he alludes to building an archive of his work. Drawing on these manuscripts, all of which have until now remained hidden, and his published writing, this thesis investigates the relationship between Story’s apparent political conservatism and his progressive and experimental approach to writing. The study is organised into three main parts. The first forms a study of Story’s biographical manuscripts, using his accounts of reading to raise the wider complex theoretical questions that inform the thesis. It goes beyond Story’s connection with the pastoral tradition and hypothesises that Story’s writing was always rhetorical. Tracing Story’s circle of ‘brother’ poets, part two locates him in a distinctly labouring-class canon, imagined or otherwise, that he believed was at least equal to the polite realm of literature. This phase of research also resituates Story’s satirical modes of writing and his party ballads within the great body of political literature produced by working men during the first half of the nineteenth century. Story’s importance lies not only in his pursuit of politics but also in his cultural ambition: the third part of the thesis examines formal hybridity in his writing. It reveals how Story was searching for new forms of self-expression and asks to what extent his pursuit of literature was politicised and predicated on the belief that social and economic emancipation was contingent on cultural equality. Overall this thesis argues that Story was using literature to challenge the political, social and cultural boundaries imposed on him as both a workingman and a labouring-class writer.