This thesis analyses the paratexts of Dorothy Richardson’s long modernist novel sequence, \(Pilgrimage\). Peritexts, such as the prefaces to \(Pilgrimage\), and epitexts, such as letters written by Richardson and others about \(Pilgrimage\), are explored alongside other paratextual material such as the front covers of different editions, peritextual blurbs and epitextual reviews. I consider the paratexts of \(Pilgrimage\) to be as worthy of study as the anchoring text itself and seek to explain the recurrence of particular paratextual themes which have served to cast doubt on \(Pilgrimage\)’s status and Richardson’s qualities as a writer. Linguistic markers of tentativeness and reservation circulate in \(Pilgrimage\)’s paratextual space, inscribing a dominant tone that has served, at times, to undermine \(Pilgrimage\) and its author. This thesis, by using a range of interdisciplinary, contextualist approaches from narratology, stylistics and modernist studies, traces the links between \(Pilgrimage\)’s paratexts. In so doing it seeks to explain the prominence and liminality of certain paratexts and analyses the collisions and collusions that have characterised \(Pilgrimage\)’s paratextual space.

This thesis aims to examine the varied notions of space in early modern play-texts as well as to challenge the assumed text-space relationship that has been the foundation of various scholarly approaches towards early modern theatrical practice, including a Shakespeare-centred historiography and theatre reconstruction carried out by scholars such as Andrew Gurr and Richard Hosley and contemporary editorial practices that appear to reconstruct early modern performances scenographically through annotations and editorial interventions. In order to depart from such Shakespeare-centred and London-biased architectural determinism, the thesis will adopt a repertory approach to the Queen’s Men, a methodology that emphasises the materiality of the play books and an author-function approach to the plays associated with Robert Greene in order to explore the alternatives to a conventional architectural and scenographic theatre reconstruction based primarily on the literary analysis of play-texts. In addition to challenging the assumption of an interchangeable relationship between play-texts, performance and space, this thesis aim to demonstrate how the concept of space within a play-text will be ultimately an issue of dramaturgy, determined and defined by the diverse dramatic forces in this period and the idiosyncratic styles of their narrative.

My thesis seeks to conceptualise and explore the relationship between Sensation and New Woman fiction, two popular genres of the mid- to late-Victorian era, to investigate the extent to which Sensation literature is a forerunner to the early development of the New Woman novel; and consequently how the two genres blur, or cross, temporal and conceptual boundaries. Both genres challenged prevailing attitudes to gender, sexuality, morality and domesticity: Sensation fiction more implicitly by making the erstwhile Angel of the House the agent of domestic and marital upheaval and even crime, New Woman fiction explicitly by making the rebel of the house the rebel in society; here, she was more often positioned within the larger socio-economic setting for which her rebellion could have dramatic consequences. While previous comparisons of the two genres (although they are limited in number) have focused solely on the crossovers between the female protagonists, I seek to extend existing scholarship by investigating the relationship between Sensation and New Woman fiction through the two genres' response to contemporary legal and social debates, the characters, both female and male, Gothic literature, a mode both genres revisited, and their subversive endings. I argue that it is in challenging Victorian ideologies that Sensation and New Woman literature obscure and, to a certain extent, redefine genre paradigms.

This thesis examines how concepts and images of nakedness are used to shape literary and theological meaning and experience within the literature and culture of early modern England. It considers how nakedness functions within a number of key literary and spiritual forms, including theological treatises, the spiritual allegory, religious lyrics, and drama. The first three chapters establish the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of nakedness, through an examination of the Bible, the works of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Anglican Church practice and debate, and anatomical texts and practices. The final three chapters offer a close analysis of the meaning and affect of nakedness within three distinct literary forms. This thesis contends that nakedness has a spiritual potency: a spiritual charge recognised and utilised by early modern theologians, preachers and writers, as they debated, defined and expressed their faith. It considers how far the meaning of nakedness is shaped by gender, and how early modern society negotiated the tensions between bodily sanctity and obscenity, naked praise and pornography. The thesis concludes by reflecting how far tropes and experiences of nakedness in our time remain obscurely charged, albeit in non-theological contexts, with something like theological meaning.

The present study considers Brome’s playbooks and his reputation as a dramatist from the perspective of different approaches to ‘the history of the book.’ It examines various methods of critical discourse while it re-evaluates the worth of a dramatist whose work has been underappreciated. The study takes seven unconventional approaches as the Complete Works of Richard Brome Project (forthcoming 2010) will be addressing the theatricality of Brome’s plays; and, because Matthew Steggle’s 2004 monograph, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage, synthesises most discoveries about Brome’s life and career found in recent years. Chapter 1 speculates on how the commercial and political context of play publication can impact the received meaning of plays as texts. It reflects on how bibliographical environments can create meaning. Chapter 2, on the other hand, looks at the effect that delayed publication had on Brome’s late-Caroline revivals. It explores twentieth-century ideas of “decadence” once associated with Brome. Chapter 3 addresses a series of related issues bearing in mind certain print conventions and performance practices. In it, I contend that certain print conventions had yet to become standardised in the 1630s. I do so using a cast list and a pamphlet to suggest community expectation behind the staging of Brome’s Antipodes. Chapter 4 examines Brome’s syncretic texts. This examination is founded upon an understanding that play-writers could act as ‘play patchers’ – Tiffany Stern’s term – and that such ‘patching’ must be acknowledged in the study of printed books. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 show how Brome’s career as an author, which has been studied through his plays, involved theatrical and non-theatrical creativity. Brome’s commendatory verses allow me to address issues of “paratext,” i.e., concerns that have become apparent because of English translations of Seuils. Brome’s non-theatrical publications indicate to me that Brome, as a dramatist, was more than simply aware of print – as Lukas Erne has argued of Shakespeare. Brome’s skills as a literary contributor (c. 1639) provided him with opportunities for employment (c. 1649). My final chapter stresses the significance of playtexts of the 1630s and playtexts of the 1650s by reconsidering the reception of Brome’s plays as playbooks. It also suggests that the Commonwealth period – a period in which the public performance of Brome’s plays was forbidden – became a defining force in his twentieth-century biography.

This thesis examines Korea's reception of Shakespeare from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, paying specific attention to the significant extent to which this reception has been influenced by the nation's political circumstances. The thesis focuses on Korea's political upheavals, including Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, the division of the country, dictatorship and rapid modernisation and Westernisation, which affected attitudes towards accepting, understanding and adapting Shakespeare and his works. My introduction explores how Korea has made Shakespeare its own, along with a theory of adaptation and appropriation. Chapter 1 considers Korea's first encounter with Shakespeare in the early twentieth century via his biography, excerpted quotations in magazines and newspapers and translated Victorian-era presentations of his works, all of which focused on moral didacticism. Chapter 2 analyses two Shakespeare-inspired novels written under the political hardships of Japanese colonial rule and dictatorial governance. Chapter 3 addresses political renditions of Hamlet on the stage under the dictatorial regime. Chapter 4 investigates North Korea's socialist reception of Shakespeare since the division of the country to today. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 discuss culturally-invested adaptations of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century that put Shakespeare's characters and stories in Korean locales. This thesis concludes by arguing that even though Shakespearean adaptations today focus mostly on creating culturally localised versions so that they can become less political, Korea's reception of Shakespeare over the past century has been informed by many political motifs arising from artists' concerns about the fate of their country.

New technologies have long been considered important to the development of modernism – especially theories of efficient form in Vorticism and Italian Futurism This thesis rethinks the relation between modernism and technology in the inter-war years. It uses the work of theorists of technology including Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Sigfried Gideon and Marshall McLuhan picking up a strand in inter-war modernism highlighting concerns about mechanicity and technologisation as overwhelming and somewhat malign forces. Ezra Pound’s ‘Machine Art’ is influenced by the work of Francis Picabia but demonstrates crucial differences between their conceptions of technology. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is an early example of machine antipathy articulating fears about war and mechanistic mental processes. Henry Green’s factory novel, Living, demonstrates the malign effects of organisational techniques on working-class lives, whilst Wyndham Lewis’s novels Snooty Baronet and The Revenge for Love’s protagonists with prosthetic legs satirise the systematic techniques used in warfare to control individuals, turning them into mechanised grotesques. Finally, Henry Green’s Back enacts Marshall McLuhan’s notion of man as servo-mechanism to the machine. The thesis concludes that some inter-war modernisms display an antipathy towards machine culture which transcends the simple machine, and critiques mechanistic systems which control human bodies and minds.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the reception of John Milton’s writings in the Arab-Muslim world. It examines the responses of contemporary Arab-Muslim readers to Milton’s works, and in particular, to his epic poem: Paradise Lost. It contributes to knowledge of the history, development, and ways in which Milton’s writings are read and understood by Muslims, mapping the literary and more broadly cultural consequences of the censure, translation and abridgement of Milton’s works in the Arab-Muslim world. This study examines and compares cultural, theological, linguistic and translational issues, and draws upon primary empirical data from fieldwork carried out at Egyptian universities, libraries and publishers. It finds that Milton occupies a surprisingly significant place in the intellectual life of the Middle East. It also finds that the Arab-Muslim reception of Paradise Lost is coloured by the prevailing socio-political climate, the overarching religious culture of readers, and semantic shifts between Milton’s original English text and Mohamed Enani’s Arabic translation. Overall, the thesis breaks new ground in presenting a rich and multi-faceted picture of the potential attitudes and responses of twenty-first-century Arab-Muslims to the writings of Milton, epitomised by an unexpectedly reciprocal relationship between Paradise Lost and its Muslim reader.

This thesis argues for the innovative potential of an abortion trope, exploring its capacity for conceptual reformulation in both contemporary criticism and the nineteenth-century poetry of Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson. In contemporary deliberations over the ethical and legal legitimacy of abortion, critics will often converge upon aesthetic questions of ‘appropriate analogy’, ‘conceptual errors’ and discursive boundaries. This investigation takes up this point, highlighting its parallel with contemporary anxieties concerning the ‘use’ and ‘autonomy’ of literature. Combining the work of four key critics (Barbara Johnson, Kevin Newmark, Christina Hauck and Maria C. Scott) it will be argued that abortion has already undergone a degree of formulation as a less negative aesthetic, and its manifestation as an aesthetic is presented as governing textual strategies, as well as dynamics between author, reader, and text. The poetry of Hardy and Dickinson offers an invaluable starting-point in which to explore this possibility in practice, clarifying the trope’s characteristics and potential. The abortion trope informing nineteenth-century poetics impacts various aesthetic paradigms during the period, while also shedding light upon conventional perceptions of abortion today. The impetus here is to encourage conceptual expansion and support conceptual change, challenging some of the more debilitating formulations of abortion.

This thesis is the first fully annotated modern-spelling critical edition of Love’s Cure, or The Martial Maid by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. The play, first published in 1647 as part of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio, has been neglected in performance and relatively unappreciated by scholarship. It had not been edited critically since George Walton Williams published his old-spelling edition in 1976, which included little accompanying commentary. This new edition offers a modernised text with annotation and a critical apparatus, generally following the editorial principles of the Arden Early Modern Drama series. It reconsiders the dating of the play, providing evidence to assign its composition to 1615. It traces the origins and processes of transmission of its main narrative source, La fuerza de la costumbre by Guillén de Castro, and also proposes for the first time a source for one of its characters in Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán. Finally, it also reconsiders the staging possibilities of the play based on evidence from a practice-based project developed at the Shakespeare Institute in 2012 during rehearsals for a staged reading, a recording of which is included on DVD as an appendix.