The dissertation investigates the correlations among the development of general anthologies of Canadian literature, the Canadian canon, and visions of national identity. While literature anthologies are widely used in university classrooms, the influential role of the anthology in the critical study of literature has been largely overlooked, particularly in Canada. The dissertation begins with an analysis of the stages of development of general anthologies of Canadian literature, demonstrating that there are important links between dominant critical trends and the guiding interests of the various phases of anthology development and that anthologies both reflect and participate in moulding views of the nation and its literature. Focusing then upon five eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canadian authors, the dissertation traces their treatment in anthologies and analyzes in detail the impact of stages of anthology development upon authors’ inclusion and presentation. The reception of Frances Brooke, John Richardson, William Kirby, Susanna Moodie, and Emily Pauline Johnson over a span of nearly 90 years is examined, and points of inclusion and exclusion are scrutinized to determine links with prevailing critical interests as well as canonical status. These case studies reveal the functions of anthologies, which include recovering overlooked authors, amending past oversights, reflecting new areas of critical inquiry, and preserving the national literary tradition. Their treatment also reveals the effect of larger critical concerns, such as alignment with dominant visions of the nation, considerations of genre, and reassessments of past views. The dissertation shows that the anthology is a carefully constructed, culturally valuable work that plays an important role in literary criticism and canon formation and is a genre worthy of careful scrutiny.

The dissertation investigates the correlations among the development of general anthologies of Canadian literature, the Canadian canon, and visions of national identity. While literature anthologies are widely used in university classrooms, the influential role of the anthology in the critical study of literature has been largely overlooked, particularly in Canada. The dissertation begins with an analysis of the stages of development of general anthologies of Canadian literature, demonstrating that there are important links between dominant critical trends and the guiding interests of the various phases of anthology development and that anthologies both reflect and participate in moulding views of the nation and its literature. Focusing then upon five eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canadian authors, the dissertation traces their treatment in anthologies and analyzes in detail the impact of stages of anthology development upon authors’ inclusion and presentation. The reception of Frances Brooke, John Richardson, William Kirby, Susanna Moodie, and Emily Pauline Johnson over a span of nearly 90 years is examined, and points of inclusion and exclusion are scrutinized to determine links with prevailing critical interests as well as canonical status. These case studies reveal the functions of anthologies, which include recovering overlooked authors, amending past oversights, reflecting new areas of critical inquiry, and preserving the national literary tradition. Their treatment also reveals the effect of larger critical concerns, such as alignment with dominant visions of the nation, considerations of genre, and reassessments of past views. The dissertation shows that the anthology is a carefully constructed, culturally valuable work that plays an important role in literary criticism and canon formation and is a genre worthy of careful scrutiny.

In his Defence of Poetry (c. 1580), Philip Sidney argues that poetry—a category in which he includes all imaginative fiction—aims at the education of its readers. Archepollycyes studies the attempts of a loose group of sixteenth-century writers around Sidney to write fiction that lives up to this aim, in order to understand the methods they developed to educate readers and the relationship between this education and the politics of the monarchical state. Sidnean fiction demands long study on the part of its readers because it aims to transform their mental habits and create new internal resources for right action. The works of fiction I study here—Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, George Buchanan’s Baptistes, Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and A Discourse of Life and Death, and Fulke Greville’s Mustapha—were products of their authors’ experiments with genre, narrative, translation, and style as tools to achieve this aim. Through the reading experience these works invite, readers exercise their judgment in the interpretation of fictional examples and reflect explicitly on the mental habits of generalization and application that inform decisions about how to act in new circumstances. Readers also come to see these habits of judgment as shared with others and experience the act of reading as participation in both real and imagined interpretive communities. I argue that these interpretive communities are best understood as loose political institutions, networks of organization and affiliation whose members could think and act together through common habits of judgment and the mutual resolution that results from recognizing this commonality. I adopt the term “archepollycyes” from Gabriel Harvey in order to describe the role of such institutions in monarchical politics. Harvey coins the term to describe the foundational forms of political knowledge, action, and organization, in contrast to the day-to-day work of government and the business of political rule. “Archepollycyes” hold a political community together in spite of changes in its ruler or government; understanding and creating such institutions was thus a means of responding to the escalating crises of succession, absolutism, and civil war that confronted early modern monarchies. By reading and writing fiction, I argue, Sidney and a broader network of writers aimed to act at a distance from contemporary political conflicts by founding “archepollycyes,” loose institutions capable of acting independent of the monarchical state and outside of existing structures of government, but on behalf of the long-term stability of a political community. In this way, I offer a new way of thinking about fiction and political institution in relation to the contested emergence of the modern sovereign state.

This dissertation claims contributions on two fronts. First, it aims to contribute to the theory of reception with a practical model of reading postclassical texts that substantially engage ancient ones. In the second place, it contributes three individual readings of three important works of literature on which nothing has been written by anglophone classicists working on classical reception: José Watanabe’s Antígona, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost. This dissertation’s contribution to the theory of reception is the proposition of a practical schema of reading, which is a figure upon which the imagination can operate. Simply put, it posits a schema as the place where meaning is construed. The schema calls attention to the constructedness of meaning and to the act of construction and organizes different moments of “reception”: that of the postclassical text receiving the ancient one (which the schema imagines as a vertical line) and that of the scholar receiving that particular instance of reception, the “I” of interpretation, which is theorized as one of two axes of transcendence of the schema (the other one being the world of/to which the schema speaks and means). Furthermore, the schema puts the “where” of meaning in the relation of (at least) two texts, but the “of” of meaning belongs to the postclassical texts. The postclassical text receiving ancient text(s) is proposed as a complex work, simultaneously in relationship with texts from the past as well as other texts from other periods. The relations of the postclassical text with each of these texts are different and need to be differently traced or theorized. The relation with the ancient texts is properly textual and thus the primary way of tracing it in the schema is a vertical line that first and foremost pays attention to form, with the tools of structural analysis and philology. Then, the theorization of the vertical line is made thicker with the operation of concepts upon it. As each of these texts (the classical and the postclassical) mean in relation to webs of texts that are relevant to the vertical relation, the schema imagines an additional dimension to the vertical one: the horizontal. Each of the horizontal lines traced for both the classical and the postclassical texts are in one way or another “historicist” readings, they trace contexts for the texts, but the way that context is understood in the theorization of the horizontal dimension of the schema is plural and never saturated. While this horizontal aspect of meaning is understood as textual, the schema also imagines for it an axis of transcendence, the world on which writers write and in which the reader is situated. The first chapter’s primary goal is to provide a reading of José Watanabe’s Antígona using the schema to illuminate the ways in which this text makes meaning in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone and part of the body of texts that have come to form part of that name. This reading counters the predominant approach to this work (and to many a work in classical reception), which reads it allegorically, as a commentary on a particular moment in the history of Peru. That predominant way of reading not only ignores the vertical orientation of the text in relation to its avowed ancient source, it also limits itself to one way of tracing the horizontality of the postclassical text, construing “context” in the most immediate and literal sense. The chapter contributes a reading that opens up Antígona to much more than allegory, highlighting its powerful affective and aesthetic dimension, as well as its intersection with recent feminist readings of the Greek tragedy that turn towards the figure of Ismene and the politics of sisterhood. The second chapter sets itself to the analysis of the complex role that ancient texts play in Christine Brooke-Rose’s radically experimental novel Amalgamemnon. This novel has not been the focus of attention of any work by a classical scholar, and those scholars who have written about it in other fields have failed to analyze the importance that Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon play at both the structural and the thematic levels. Tracing the vertical line, the chapter shows how these two texts are essential to the novel’s writing and themes. In the horizontal dimension, the schema situates the novel’s engagement with those ancient sources in the context of contemporary feminist discourse, especially as it concerns the question of the possibility of a feminine discourse and an outside of the phallocentric system of signs. That intersection illuminates both how Brooke-Rose is reading the ancient sources as well as what are arguably some of the limitations of her writing in contrast to the ethical commitments of feminisms. Finally, the third chapter is a reading of Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, a text that is perhaps better known than the texts treated in the previous two chapters, at least in the Anglophone world, but which has nonetheless been fairly disregarded in the scholarship. The chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the “work” of this text, of what it does and how it does it, as the scholarship on Carson’s work has failed to posit or satisfactorily respond to the important questions regarding what constitutes the undeniable originality of her writing. In this particular book, which combines academic and poetic discourses into a new form that partakes of both, Carson proposes a comparative mode of making meaning that cannot be captured with a structural analysis of inter- or -trans- textuality, as the previous two chapters construed the vertical dimension of the schema. Instead, the theory of metaphor developed by Paul Ricoeur provides the appropriate tool to imagine the vertical dimension of the schema and analyze Carson’s exercise in bringing an ancient and a modern author together. This particular construction of the schema brings into the terrain of classical reception the possibility of interpretating comparative works that do not fit nicely within the theoretical margins of this subfield of classical studies. Finally, the chapter provides the occasion to trace another aspect of the schema, its other axis of transcendence, which is the “I” of interpretation.

This dissertation focuses on mid-eighteenth-century British periodicals and their claims to educate middle-ranked women in natural philosophy, modern history, and vernacular literature. I argue that articles published in female-penned periodicals are comparable to articles in male-penned periodicals and therefore allowed women to pursue an informal education through reading. I propose that female periodicals also illustrate how women formed counterpublics of learning through correspondence that rivaled the conversations that took place in the male-dominated public spheres, such as in coffee houses and meeting halls. As formal classical education was reserved for elite men, women learned through reading books and periodicals, and through conversation. Given the cost of books, periodicals became the main source for informal learning for middle-ranked women. I call attention to the periodical form that allowed women to complete feasibly short lessons between their daily domestic duties and amusements. Female-penned periodicals encouraged women to diversify their interests by deploying literary depictions of the moral pitfalls of women’s focus on the beautification of the body. Driven by the financial and social rise of the merchant class, middling-ranked women with small dowries sought to gain advantage in the marriage market by distinguishing themselves as suitable wives for merchant or even gentry husbands. Periodicals thus made an economic as well as a moral case for their single female readers to balance fashionable amusements with intellectual pursuits. By examining not only how mid-century female-penned periodicals defined themselves in relation to male-penned periodicals but also the impact of broader changes in formalized education, my thesis uncovers an important and under-discussed aspect of the rise of the middling ranks in eighteenth-century Britain. I show how female-penned periodicals encouraged women's involvement in discussions about the development of the modern disciplines of education. My thesis is organized chronologically and follows the work of three notable periodical editors and authors with chapters on Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (1744-46), Frances Brooke's The Old Maid (1755-56), and Charlotte Lennox's The Lady's Museum (1760-61). The purpose of my thesis is not only to chart the changes in representations of women's learning over time, but also to reveal how Haywood, Brooke, and Lennox propose that women share their proto-disciplinary knowledge beyond their counterpublics in order to encourage intellectual discussions between like-minded males and females in the public spheres.

This thesis studies the clash between the hero and the First World War in the works of Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It explores the impact on their poetry and attitude towards the concept of the hero as it applied to them as people and poets. The study shows that over prolonged contact with the horrors of the First World War, it is evident in both literary sources and their poetry that both Sassoon and Owen changed their attitudes negatively towards both the idea of heroes and heroism, as well as the War as a just and glorious cause.  However, the myth of the hero was still a core belief of their society, and in order to not be branded cowards and discarded along with their warnings, they had to become heroes in the eyes of their society, to openly attack the concept and the war it fueled. This thesis then studies how and why First World War poetry and literature should be utilized within the subject of English in the Swedish School System, as a means to provide a multicultural and critical education.