The novel especially the realist novel has been generally understood as a secular, disenchanted form, but the history of the Indian novel complicates this view. A seminal trajectory of realist novels situated in India, by native and non-resident writers alike, presents a perception of God in the daily that is rooted in Indian religious traditions in contradistinction to the deus absconditus European realist novel which has generally restricted itself to the secular sphere. Despite the conspicuous and consequential enchantment of the Indian novel, even postcolonial literary critics have followed in the critical tradition that takes secularism to be the precondition of the novel and dismisses instantiations of religion as mere anomaly, symptom, or overlay. I contend that the powerful realism brought to India by the British novel was immediately injected with a strong dose of enchantment drawn from the popular religious and mythopoetic imagination. The novel invited God to come down to earth to become more real and more compatible with a self-consciously secularizing India unwilling to dispense with its spiritualism; reciprocally, God's presence in the naturalist novel engendered a radically new sense of both the genre and reality. Of all the existing art forms in India, it was only the realist novel with its worldly orientation that could give shape to the profane illumination in everyday life and provide a forum for the praxis of enchantment. The Indian novel was part of a larger phenomenon in which the enchanted worldview became the grounds for independence from England whose disenchanted ethos was understood as the underpinning and justification for its imperialism. Not surprisingly, the place namely, Bengal and that birthed the novel also sparked India's anti-colonial struggle and its religious revival and reform movements. The novel in particular was seen as a privileged form for preserving a spiritualized cosmology, renovating it in some ways, and using it to enable Indian sovereignty. Straddling both the British and the Indian, the worldly and the spiritual, the novel offered a unique opportunity for cultivating a modern religious sensibility. By analyzing the various literary techniques my novelists deploy to enchant a putatively disenchanted form in a (post)colonial context, I rediscover overlooked possibilities for the novel-writ-large. The trajectory I analyze teaches us that mimetic realism can offer a more congenial home to religious enchantment than the non-mimetic experimental modes, such as magical realism, usually considered more apt. My project charts the course of what I call the enchanted realist novel tradition via five seminal novels set in India and published between 1866 and 1980. In this arc, divinity is first made immanent in the phenomenal world, then it becomes internalized, only to meet with a birfurcated fate in the mid-twentieth century. The indigenous writers continue with realist first-order rendering of the divine in the daily, whereas the more international novelists formally distance themselves from the felt enchantment of the first order they struggle to represent. Another way to view that bifurcation: as the disenchanted, statist worldview comes to prevail in the national imaginary at Independence, the enchanted novel must henceforth either restrict itself to tiny local pockets of extant enchantment; or, if the novel still has ambitions to be a national allegory, it must register disenchantment as the nearly thorough-going a priori to what now can only be called a deliberate re-enchantment.

My central premise in “Revised Lives” is that four English writers - Margaret Cavendish, Anne Halkett, John Bunyan, and John Milton - use the lineal family as a central trope in the autobiographical writings they write in response to the political and social upheaval caused by the civil wars, interregnum, and Restoration (1637-85). By portraying themselves as dislocated heirs who resolutely uphold their families' political legacies, these writers capitalize on the political power inherent in lineage as a repository of political power comprised both of material objects - people and property - and their symbolic meaning - social status and political influence. After the Restoration, Cavendish, Halkett, Bunyan, and Milton repurpose their prewar and interregnum portrayals of lineage - of which all but Milton's emphasized dislocation and political defeat rather than political triumph - for a new political climate, revising their initial works in new, more fictionalized autobiographical narratives. Autobiography in this period thus reaffirms the impression of the lineal family as a political force from which individual agents emerge. In chapter 1, I show how Margaret Cavendish recasts herself and her parents, as she depicts them in her 1656 memoir “A true Relation” as allegorical characters who model royalist political action in her Restoration fiction “The Blazing World”. Chapter 2 argues that royalist Anne Halkett mitigates her record of ongoing alienation as an exile in Scotland, as recorded in her journal Meditations (1658-99), when she reasserts the power of lineal relationships that she witnessed during the 1650s while a royalist conspirator in her 1678 Autobiography. In chapter 3, I explain why John Bunyan separates the individual journeys of the protagonist Christian and that of his wife and children in his two-part allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684). By splitting the puritan household into two generations (and two narratives), he portrays a father protecting his family from persecution in order to redress his own involuntary separation from his family, chronicled in the spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Finally, chapter 4 focuses the relationships between fathers and sons in a selection of John Milton's autobiographical and political poems. In his pre-war and interregnum writings, Milton's sons successfully transform resources they have inherited from their fathers - from education to artistic talent and the legacies of political office - into effective political action. When Milton revisits this model in his Restoration verse tragedy Samson Agonistes (1671), however, he undermines the positive nature of these relationships in Manoa's and Samson's competing interpretations of their family's political legacy. Modern English-language autobiography begins not as a genre solely focused on the story of the self, but, rather, as a genre that uses the lineal family from which the author emerges to construct a political legacy that he or she uses writing to uphold.

This dissertation studies a group of twentieth-century plays from India, Ireland, Nigeria and Britain that have rarely been read together. Through close readings of dramatic texts by authors like Utpal Dutt, Brian Friel, David Edgar and Wole Soyinka and, I examine the significant place of translation figured as dramatic technique in contemporary drama and theatre. The dissertation, therefore, adopts a more formal rather than substantive logic of comparison. Translation, in drama and theatre studies, is usually invoked to either describe the transformation of a literary text from page to the stage, or by way of a more general understanding, as the literal transfer of plays from one language into another. I look at translation within rather than of a dramatic text. This approach allows me to address the insufficient attention that figurative uses of translation have received in drama and theatre studies, and make two critical interventions: first, to demonstrate how a dramatic technique figured in translation disrupts the assumptions of what appears to be a constitutive monolingualism in the writing and reception of drama and theatre. Since the ascendancy of performance studies in the nineteen sixties, critical work on drama and theatre has taken an anti-text, and by extension, anti-literary stance. By contrast, my reading is mindful of the performative aspect of these plays without necessarily privileging it at the expense of the literary in so far as such a distinction can be consistently sustained. The second critical intervention is to locate moments in the texts when acts of translation create new social collectivities and hence serve as a point of departure for a political reading. The emergence of social protest movements on the one hand, and the fall of communism at the end of the Cold War on the other frame the different imaginations of collectivity that I trace in these texts. The first and second waves of decolonization in Asia and Africa, and their subsequent postcolonial predicaments productively supplement this framework. My dissertation also relates to the category of translation as it organizes the prevalent concept of `world literature,' which in its focus on the novel has been insufficiently attentive to drama. I trouble as well as extend the logics of classification by recontextualizing the authors beyond their dominant national-literary configurations.

Twentieth-century British literature bristles with words and phrases in foreign languages, fragmentary residues of conflicts between the English-language text and the national languages and cultures that surround it in this era of war and instability. This project addresses the form and function of these remnants of foreign language - what are here called "multilingual fragments" - analyzing and contextualizing them within the historical use of foreign languages in British discourses of national identity and international politics over the course of the twentieth century. Within modernist literature, phrase- and word-length fragments of translated and untranslated foreign language reveal texts' deep engagement with the political conflicts of their time on the level of the letter, enabling authors to express a variety of political ideologies, from the liberal or cosmopolitan to the reactionary or jingoistic. At the same time, these fragments' inherent contrast between foreign language and English context interlace the text with points of rupture, exposing authorial manipulations of language and disrupting any single-minded ideology to reveal ambivalence, ambiguity, and nuance. This study historicizes and expands the long-held conception of multilingualism as a central aspect of modernist commitment to formal innovation, and provides a more comprehensive context for understanding large-scale experimental works. It argues that it is specifically through the disruptive effects of small-scale multilingual fragments - traces of foreign language so slight that they are at once easily overlooked and subtly influential - that modernist texts engage in complex interventions on issues ranging from wartime xenophobia to debates over class, women's rights, immigration, and the afterlife of empire. This project's attention to word- and phrase-length fragments of multilingualism through a series of case studies reveals a more specific, historicized understanding of what Rebecca Walkowitz has influentially termed twentieth-century literature's "cosmopolitan style": first, in demonstrating the centrality of both canonical and minor, extra-canonical authors in the development of new, internationally-oriented multilingual techniques, second, in exposing the breadth of ideologies and complex political discourse that such techniques can facilitate, and finally, in demonstrating how writers use multilingual fragments to reveal the inherent hybridity of all language. This historical and wide-ranging study contributes to current critical discussions in four major fields: twentieth-century British literature, world literature, translation studies, and women's and gender studies. Contrary to past conceptions of modernist multilingualism as benignly aesthetic, exclusionarily elitist, or unilaterally liberal, it demonstrates that multilingualism can be applied in the service of a range of ideologies, and that the inherent instability of fragmentary multilingualism further complicates expressions of political allegiance or affiliation. Further, it expands our understanding of what constitutes "world literature" by making the case for fragmentary, small-scale multilingualism as a vehicle which transports the concerns of world literature - border-crossing conversation, "gaining in translation" - into texts produced in and for a national readership. Finally, it draws together the canons and concerns of world literature and women's and gender studies in order to make the case for marginalized female and homosexual figures as major innovators of multilingual usage, deliberately manipulating multilingual fragments to disrupt and protest the political status quo.

"True and Home-Born" intervenes in critical debates about early modern domestic tragedy, arguing that--far from being a form concerned exclusively with moral admonition or the domestic sphere--it is a centrally important site for dramatic experimentation and theorization at a key moment in England's evolving theatrical culture. Encompassing texts such as Arden of Faversham (1592), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), the term groups plays that share an interest in "ordinary," nonaristocratic life, dramatize domestic events of a sensational and violent nature, and stage detailed and accurate representations of household settings and domestic ideology. While domestic tragedy has a significant forty-year theatrical history--comparable to the early modern revenge tragedy--and is associated with prominent dramatists such as Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and William Shakespeare, these plays continue to be regarded as marginal dramatic texts, mainly of interest as archives of early modern domestic ideology and experience. I argue, in contrast, that domestic tragedies represent a key strand in the development of English tragic drama. Their heightened reflexivity about their dramatic and tragic form suggests a deep and abiding interest in dramatic and theatrical matters: in how drama creates verisimilitude, how it represents "truth," and how it imagines and participates in a new, native, and national theatrical culture. The first half of "True and Home-Born" focuses on a number of plays traditionally identified as domestic tragedies, showing that their interests are not confined to the household, but extend to the dramatic and theatrical implications of faithfully recreating the reality of domestic experience on stage. Heywood and Shakespeare, I suggest, are particularly attuned to these implications, and develop and critique a form of theatrical verisimilitude in their respective engagements with the form. In the second half, I suggest that the subgenre's boundaries are more permeable than previous criticism has allowed. By considering both the revenge tragedy and history play subgenres in terms of the domestic, I show the extent to which domestic tragedy was fully imbricated in the period's dramatic traditions and theatrical culture. The revenge tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare, I argue, turn to the household as a site in which to imagine a new form of revenge drama that differs from its classical forebears and is thus suited to the English stage. Finally, I contend that in a group of historical dramas that I call the "British history plays," focused on historical events set in ancient Britain, the domestic sphere becomes central to the staging of history, offering early modern historical dramatists a means of bridging the gap between ancient past and early modern present.

When Geoffrey Chaucer depicts characters debating the flaws of his works in The Legend of Good Women, or when Marie de France tells histories of literary transmission to frame her Lais, these authors are writing what I describe as metapoetic narratives. By "metapoetic" I mean that their works are in part about the making of poetry, commenting on the authors' poetic activity and creative processes from within. My dissertation, "Revisionary Retelling: The Metapoetics of Authorship in Medieval England," examines how this self-conscious mode of writing enables certain vernacular authors to reflect on their positions as retellers of well-known narratives and established literary traditions. I argue that such self-reflection is central to the efflorescence of vernacular literatures in medieval England. In the last few decades, scholars have called into question the idea that the Middle Ages valued only established literary authority and had no interest in originality, with recent critics noting how medieval authors do make conscious use of the interpretive and distorting possibilities of translation and retelling. Although this line of criticism has been revolutionary, it still tends to view literary authority as inherently limited, so that newer authors must remain entirely subordinate to their sources or seek to replace them. This dynamic of limited authority would seem to be intensified for Anglo-Norman or Middle English retellers; long-standing scholarly narratives have similarly cast the English vernacular languages as competing for linguistic authority with Latin and French. "Revisionary Retelling" challenges these understandings of vernacular creativity by bringing to light the alternative conceptions of authorship and literary authority being invented and explored by writers working in both Anglo-Norman and Middle English. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting a subordinate status, authors such as Marie de France, the Orfeo poet, Thomas Chestre, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate take a revisionary view of the challenges inherent to translation and retelling: challenges such as intertextual dependencies, interpretive distortions, and the recombination of traditions. In their metapoetic narratives, these writers theorize authorship and literary authority by dramatizing those types of literary challenges, as well as their processes of revision more broadly. As these authors tell stories about the possibilities and problems of vernacular retelling, they simultaneously imagine and enact a type of authorship--and a type of authority--based in creative revision. The first chapter traces this metapoetic mode back to Marie de France's Anglo-Norman Lais, arguing that Marie offers a vision of authorship as an ongoing, trans-historic process of collaborative interpretation. Chapter Two examines how later Middle English lay authors consciously use their second-class status in relation to the French lays to leverage themselves into a position of critical distance from the traditions on which they draw. The third chapter argues that Chaucer willfully depicts his own canon as dependent and unstable in his catalogues of his works, and thereby takes ownership of the challenges of vernacular authorship and invents himself as an authoritative Middle English writer. In my fourth chapter, I suggest that the proliferation of literary authorities in John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, which might seem to constrain and subjectify the text, counter-intuitively asserts the equal value of writing across languages, time, and retellings. Together, these four chapters demonstrate the rich complexity of medieval critical retelling and the power of retold narratives to creatively revise not just their sources, but also literary history itself.

A lonely damsel's imprisonment within a castle or convent cell; the eavesdropping of a prisoner next door; the framed image of a woman with a mysterious past. These are familiar themes from 1790s gothic novels, which exploded onto the scene with milestone works like Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis' The Monk. They are also key features, however, of canonical nineteenth-century poems, from Tennyson's "Mariana" to Browning's "My Last Duchess." In this dissertation, I argue that tropes of the gothic novel became disseminated in poetry of the Victorian era, manifesting as formal features that have not heretofore been recognized by scholars as essentially gothic. While most scholars recognize gothic poetry only in a small subset of poems that include ghosts, graveyards or superstition, I contend that gothic tropes became definitive of what we now regard as quintessentially "Victorian" poetic forms: the dramatic monologue, women's sonnets, and Pre-Raphaelite picture poems. "Framed, Imprisoned, Overheard" explores feminist arguments and interdisciplinary crossings between painting and poetry, focusing on both canonical and lesser-known poems of major Victorian poets. Close reading fiction by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft, and poems by Charlotte Smith, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti and G. M. Hopkins, I offer a revisionist history that looks beyond the small subset of poems about ghosts or other "gothic" themes, demonstrating how innovations in 1790s sensation fiction contributed to the evolution of major Victorian verse forms.

In the Mind's Eye: Associationism and Style in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel argues that the British novel, in its syntactic, grammatical, and rhetorical strategies, incorporated associationist premises about reading comprehension. Associationism, as a term, encapsulates a series of theories during the period that attempted to explain the ways in which external stimuli were "represented" in the mind and linked with other ideas. Inquiries into the association of ideas spanned numerous fields but shared a core belief: everything an individual touched, saw, smelled, or read, was translated into a secondary representation in the mind. Since all objects--whether a phrase, a misty moor, or a character's face--were thought to be experienced through mental "miniatures," the association of ideas was the mechanism of the reading experience and of phenomenal experience. Associationist theories delineated how words evoked images, and the ways in which these images became linked to form holistic ideas in the course of a sentence, a paragraph, and throughout a work of fiction. In this project, I show how four canonical nineteenth-century authors--Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot--created prose styles intended to evoke, enhance, or even resist the spontaneous associative mechanisms considered essential to the comprehension of language. In order to trace the contours of an associative stylistics during the period, I pair each author with associationist theories contemporary with their fiction. In Chapter One, I demonstrate how Jane Austen's techniques in Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility incorporated the tenets of the dominant model of associationism in Austen's day: those of David Hartley. Austen's mode of representation is highly metonymic, capitalizing on of principles of language comprehension proposed in Hartley's work. The great degree of stylistic control so often attributed to Austen's prose is inextricably rooted with the Hartleyan paradigm: a strategy of representation to depict a social world and its objects according to an associationist epistemology. In Chapter Two, I read Sir Walter Scott's Waverley with the theories of his teacher Dugald Stewart. Walter Scott studied with Dugald Stewart at the University of Edinburgh and in Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Stewart develops literary-aesthetic guidelines based on the mental models posited in his work. Stewart recommends that a writer delineate in the form of an "outline," a "minimum" required for the reader to comprehend a represented object. Stewart's theories about language cognition and literary technique, I argue, provide guidelines for Scott's development of his own style of literary outline. In Chapter Three, I unfold how Charles Dickens's style in David Copperfield draws on the associative principles in Lindley Murray's English Grammar. In Murray's Grammar, the sentence is a unit of cognition: a precise capsule in which our thoughts are both formed and transmitted. Grammar is an external representation of links between thoughts: the association of ideas in its most tangible form. In Chapter Four, I show that George Eliot integrates a number of discourses about the human mind into her style, with the goal of developing a technique to manage the spontaneous actions of mental associations. The work of James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain influenced Eliot's view of associationist psychology, and Eliot, in turn, develops her own associative theories of language in her essays and journals. Eliot's associative model of reading incorporates principles of chemistry. Elaboration, a term important to both literary and scientific discourse, provided Eliot with a syntactic style closely aligned with the structure of associative links. More importantly, elaboration afforded Eliot a strategy of cognitive delay; a stylistics intended to subvert the spontaneous action of the mind. By providing "raw materials" for the reader in the form of concrete nouns, and elaborating with a series of extended prepositional phrases, Eliot demands that the reader slow down the automatic action of association and redraw the mental picture.

This dissertation analyzes the legacy of Protestant allegory in eighteenth-century fictions. In doing so, the dissertation shows that personifications and allegorically inflected characters became increasingly opaque and vulnerable to charges of impersonation as the novel developed in the early and middle eighteenth century. I attribute the distortion of allegorical representation to the conflicting yet intermeshed interpretive frameworks that allegory and the novel demand of their readers. For evidence, I primarily analyze John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild.

This dissertation reorients the study of British modernism towards the ocean by uncovering modernism’s engagement with a set of ideas about the historical significance of the sea that I term “maritime foundationalism.” A key component of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British nationalism and imperialism, maritime foundationalism held that British history and identity were fundamentally maritime and that the sea, in turn, propelled Britain’s historical development and the course of history in general. Reading works by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot alongside contemporary historical, geographical, and scientific texts, I trace how British modernism developed by incorporating, modifying, and contesting this pervasive maritime-historical ideology. Even as modernist works build on notions of the sea as the foundation of the empire and conveyer of its history, they also disrupt these notions by representing the sea in more unsettling ways, as a testament to the dark sides of maritime-imperial history or an element that threatens to engulf history altogether. Each of my chapters details the literary effects of this interaction of maritime foundationalism and more melancholy conceptions of the sea’s historicity at key points in the intertwined histories of modernism and empire between the 1890s and the 1940s. “The Sea Has Many Voices” thus shows how competing constructions of the sea shape modernism’s historical imagination—the way it defines its present and situates it in relationship to the past.