My dissertation, Pen and Printing-Block: William Morris and the Resurrection of Medieval Paratextuality, considers William Morris’s influence on the rise of paratextual awareness, his negotiation strategies for Victorian England’s social identity, and his rhetorical construction of an idealized past through textual artifacts. The effect of Morris’s growing social awareness on his transition from illumination to print is reframed by considering his calligraphy as paratextual experiments, based on medieval examples, in combining graphic and discursive meanings with rhetorical and social dimensions. The varied and less ambitious agendas of those printers who followed Morris’s Kelmscott Press, however, limited Morris’s legacy in the book arts. The full significance of his illuminations’ meaningful interplay between text and image, and the social intent of these innovations applications in print, has received little critical attention. The opening chapter frames Morris’s visual work in light of his philosophies and introduces the major concerns of material art, the role of history, the limits of language, and the question of meaningful labour. The second chapter surveys select predecessors of Morris’s developing conception of the Gothic, the significance of architecture as its defining form, and the irreplaceability of the physical past. The third chapter considers the role of the illuminated manuscript in Pre-Raphaelite art, tracing Morris’s calligraphic experiments chronologically while identifying medieval inspirations and examining his artistic development. These experiments led to his final collaborative manuscript, the illuminated Æneid which is the fourth chapter’s focus. The sophistication of its paratextual elements is discussed in light of its unique physicality and limitations. The fifth chapter asserts the Kelmscott Press’s role in balancing craftsmanship and aesthetic paratextual strategies with reproducible models. The Kelmscott Chaucer is the culmination of these strategies, and it is compared to the visual rhetoric of its predecessors. The final chapter compares the philosophies and calligraphic elements of major private presses that followed Kelmscott’s legacy. This evolution of aesthetic, social, and practical considerations is also identified in the work of selected Canadian printers, and a final note considers the implications of the rise of immaterial digital text (radiant textuality) for the continuation of material paratextuality’s role in the future.

My dissertation, Pen and Printing-Block: William Morris and the Resurrection of Medieval Paratextuality, considers William Morris’s influence on the rise of paratextual awareness, his negotiation strategies for Victorian England’s social identity, and his rhetorical construction of an idealized past through textual artifacts. The effect of Morris’s growing social awareness on his transition from illumination to print is reframed by considering his calligraphy as paratextual experiments, based on medieval examples, in combining graphic and discursive meanings with rhetorical and social dimensions. The varied and less ambitious agendas of those printers who followed Morris’s Kelmscott Press, however, limited Morris’s legacy in the book arts. The full significance of his illuminations’ meaningful interplay between text and image, and the social intent of these innovations applications in print, has received little critical attention. The opening chapter frames Morris’s visual work in light of his philosophies and introduces the major concerns of material art, the role of history, the limits of language, and the question of meaningful labour. The second chapter surveys select predecessors of Morris’s developing conception of the Gothic, the significance of architecture as its defining form, and the irreplaceability of the physical past. The third chapter considers the role of the illuminated manuscript in Pre-Raphaelite art, tracing Morris’s calligraphic experiments chronologically while identifying medieval inspirations and examining his artistic development. These experiments led to his final collaborative manuscript, the illuminated Æneid which is the fourth chapter’s focus. The sophistication of its paratextual elements is discussed in light of its unique physicality and limitations. The fifth chapter asserts the Kelmscott Press’s role in balancing craftsmanship and aesthetic paratextual strategies with reproducible models. The Kelmscott Chaucer is the culmination of these strategies, and it is compared to the visual rhetoric of its predecessors. The final chapter compares the philosophies and calligraphic elements of major private presses that followed Kelmscott’s legacy. This evolution of aesthetic, social, and practical considerations is also identified in the work of selected Canadian printers, and a final note considers the implications of the rise of immaterial digital text (radiant textuality) for the continuation of material paratextuality’s role in the future.

In 1655 and again in 1686-1689, the Waldensians of Piedmont were massacred by the Duke of Savoy after he issued edicts forbidding the practice of their religion. The Waldensians were later followers of the medieval religious movement of the Poor of Lyons, declared heretical in 1215. The Waldensians associated with the Reformation in 1532, and thus formed a link with diverse groups of Protestants across Europe. In the periods immediately surrounding both massacres, an outpouring of publications dedicated to their plight, their history, and their religious identity appeared, a large number of which emerged in London. On both occasions, the propaganda gave rise to international sympathy and encouraged international intervention, eventually provoking the Duke to rescind the edicts that had instigated the massacres. While most contemporary scholars consider the Waldensians to have been fully absorbed into Protestantism after 1532, it is clear from the writings of both the Waldensians and their sympathizers that they considered themselves a separate entity: the inheritors of a long tradition of dissent from the Catholic Church based on their own belief in the purity of the Gospel. The Waldensian identity was based on a history of exclusion and persecution, and also on a belief that they had transmitted the true embodiment of Christianity through the centuries. The documents that were published surrounding the massacres address the legitimacy of the Waldensian identity based on centuries of practice. English and continental Protestants identified with the Waldensians, who provided ancient ties and legitimacy to their ‘new’ religion, and the Waldensians adopted that identity proudly, all the while claiming continuity. Protestants also used the Waldensians in propagandist documents, most often to justify political or religious actions and ideologies. The continuity of Waldensianism through the Reformation became crucially important for the wider umbrella of Protestantism as a legitimizing factor for the movement. This thesis investigates the claims of continuity and finds that while the Waldensians underwent a dramatic change in religious doctrine to conform to the Reformation, their belief in the continuity of their religious identity can be validated by examining religion from a socio-cultural perspective that takes aspects other than theology into consideration.

This thesis approaches eighteenth-century utopian thinking from a new methodological angle, namely by utilising the Reception Reader, an open-access text reuse detection tool, to study a sub-corpus of 39 utopian works available in ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), the largest collection of digitised eighteenth-century texts printed in the British and Irish Isles. As the first study of text reuse in utopian thinking, this thesis shows that text reuse detection is a viable method for gaining new insights into eighteenth-century utopian thinking. Engaging with existing theories of text reuse in historical materials, this thesis proposes a theoretical framework that is particularly suited for the study of text reuse in eighteenth-century books, with an emphasis on the interrelationship between text reuse and contemporary print culture. This thesis argues that an investigation of text reuse patterns at three interconnected levels—reflecting print culture, genre popularity, and individual authors’ persuasive strategies—results in a better understanding of the presence and purpose of text reuse in eighteenth-century utopian works. This thesis posits that text reuse was often a deliberate choice on the part of the author to signal belonging to a shared intellectual tradition, and, most importantly, to support the overall critical aim of the utopian work. Individual instances of text reuse in utopian works are signs of deliberate or unintentional engagement with the culture that surrounded these works. A more nuanced interpretation of how utopian thinking interacted with contemporary print culture is crucial for recognising why utopian thinking continued to be prevalent throughout the eighteenth century.

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This thesis is an interdisciplinary study that traces colloquial engagements with extinction in Victorian print culture (1859-1901). Extinction’s broad cultural life demonstrates the extent that scientific and cultural topics intricately entangled within Victorian print networks. Non-specialist Britons absorbed and transmitted evolutionary (particularly, Darwinian) knowledges within public discursive spaces instead of exclusively institutional settings. Class stratification did not bar non-specialists from absorbing and perpetuating cultural conversations about collapses, conservationism, and overconsumption. My project thus seeks to amend the critical discourse that assumes that Victorians passively accepted impending catastrophes or paid scant attention to extinction pressures. I recover multiple subjects formerly hidden in the vast Victorian archives: obscure non-specialists of the working and middle classes, obscurer animals cohabiting the Victorian’s everyday spaces, and the popular (and in some cases, underappreciated) literary texts demonstrating how Victorians circulated extinction discourses. Chapters One and Two explore the non-literary side of print culture, recovering widely disseminated but now largely unknown periodical artifacts (the domain of Punch, The Times, or Funny Folks). Chapter One focuses on cultural reactions to collapses of England’s domestic birds. Chapter Two traces the economized conservationism of the Brooke Brothers, popular game and meat traders. In both chapters, I determine how experienced evolutionary knowledges revealed the human-caused tenuousness of a trans-species milieu. Chapters Three and Four concentrate on scientific romances originally serialized in periodicals, including my key literary case studies, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). Musing on extinction led to a mindset that acknowledged entanglement with nonhuman others as an ethical imperative. However, some case studies demonstrate a profound ambivalence toward the human’s self-extinction, resulting in a complicated engagement with future forms that often re-privileges the human from within a radical ontology. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This study examines how Victorians absorbed and communicated ideas about extinction, especially as informed by evolutionary theory. Throughout Victorian newspapers, journals, and literature, extinction was adopted for disparate uses. A culturally, economically, and philosophically muddied topic, extinction provoked reconsiderations of the natural world and humankind’s place within it. I begin by examining advertisements, articles, and illustrations from popular newsprint and periodical sources that communicated fears about the extinction of common animals and concerns about controlling or maintaining bird and game populations in everyday Victorian life. When I turn my attention to my literary case studies, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, I analyze the period’s preoccupation with the human’s future forms, looking at both posthuman evolutionary outcomes and the experience of becoming-nonhuman itself. Significantly, this project recovers underappreciated Victorians and texts, filling important gaps in Victorian periodical studies and animal studies.

En se basant sur l’histoire des Bradfords, l’une des plus grandes familles d’imprimeurs de l’histoire américaine, ce mémoire étudie la relation entre l’imprimé, les imprimeurs, et divers discours sur la liberté au cours du « long » 18e siècle. Il retrace la transition entre une ère de la « liberté de parole, » née des débats sur la liberté de presse et d’expression de la période coloniale, et une ère de la « parole de la liberté, » née au cours de la Révolution et entretenue sous la jeune république. Cette transition fut le produit de la transformation du discours des contemporains sur la liberté, mais s’effectua également en lien avec la transformation du milieu de l’imprimerie et de la culture de l’imprimé. Selon les circonstances politiques, sociales, économiques et culturelles particulières des périodes coloniale, révolutionnaire, et républicaine, l’imprimé et les imprimeurs américains furent appelés à disséminer et à contribuer au discours sur la liberté. Ils établirent ainsi une forte association entre l’imprimé et la liberté dans la culture de l’imprimé du 18e siècle, qui était destinée à être transmise aux siècles suivants. Mots- / Based on the family history of the Bradfords, one of America’s most celebrated printing dynasties, this thesis studies the interplay between print, printers, and various discourses on freedom during of the long 18th century and through the colonial, revolutionary, and early republican periods. It traces the transition between an era of the “speech of freedom,” born out of the colonial debates on the freedom of speech and press, and an era of the “freedom of speech,” born in the course of the Revolution and upheld during the early republic. This transition resulted from the transformation of the contemporaries’ discourse on liberty, but also had to do with the transformation of the printing trade and print culture. As a result of the political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances of the colonial, revolutionary, and early republican periods, American print and printers were led to disseminate and to contribute to the discourse on liberty. They thus established a strong association between print and freedom in the 18th-century print culture, an association which was destined to be transmitted to the following centuries.

<p>My dissertation is situated at the intersection of modernism, print culture, and early-twentieth-century post-Newtonian physics, namely relativity theory and quantum theory. I investigate the ways in which the emerging concept of the unknowable—loosely defined as that which is beyond knowledge but maintains an influence on what can be known—catalyzed a cultural reorientation away from Victorian notions of positivism and progress and toward those aspects of reality that resist knowledge. Although a great deal of critical attention has been paid to modernism’s epistemological uniqueness, scholars are only beginning to acknowledge that concurrent revolutions in physics both reflected and influenced modernists’ conceptions of history, subjectivity, and aesthetics. Scholars such as Gillian Beer, Michael Whitworth, and Mark S. Morrisson have demonstrated that print and popular culture provided crucial avenues through which scientific ideas were disseminated in British society. Furthermore, their research has shown that modernist authors not only read popular science material but also published their work alongside articles about science in a variety of magazines, journals, and newspapers. Building on these connections, I show that books and periodicals served as platforms for dialogue and ideological exchange between science and literature as both disciplines increasingly recognized and grappled with the pervasive influence of the unknowable. </p>