This dissertation uncovers a strand in early twentieth century British literature that is currently missing from readings of modernism - a fascination with portraying meditative states of mind. Modernist authors were intrigued by the mind's capacity to be in constant movement between the present, past, and future - what they represented as a stream of consciousness. This study examines the potential of the "still," calm, and concentrated mind in modernist visions of consciousness by exploring how the meditative mind takes a different shape in theme and form in the writings of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. Drawing from the works' preoccupation with physical practices such as spiritual and ritual dance, relaxation techniques, Yoga, the Alexander Technique, and meditative walking, this study highlights the role of the body in views on consciousness in modernist literature. This dissertation argues that looking at modernism through the lens of meditation allows us to see the period not only in terms of the split, wounded self in the fast-paced modern metropolis but reveals its yearning for what the authors in this study call "wholeness," "mind-body harmony," and "the spirit of peace" - a search for peace attainable within, if not without, an attempt to cure the self in the fracturing modern world through experiencing the mind at peace.

How did British nineteenth-century literature articulate its relationship to the past? In Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle introduces the Middle Ages through a description of what he believed the collar of a serf would have looked like, dwelling on the shine of the brass as it would have stood out against the green of the forest, as if it were a painting to be evaluated aesthetically for its color palette rather than part of a controversial defense of medieval feudalism. In Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot compares the eighteenth-century setting of her novel to a realist painting, pointing out the visual details that would appear unfamiliar to her contemporary readers, such a "mob-cap" or an old-fashioned spinning-wheel. These moments may appear like intermittent, typically Victorian examples of intrusive editorializing that risk repelling readers from engaging with the world of the past. But my dissertation shows that Carlyle and Eliot are part of a large and important body of Victorian historical texts that seek to engage their reader closer with their evocation of the past through the visual imagination. Romantic historiography had introduced the idea of seeing the past "in the mind's eye", and Victorian writers frequently asked their readers to explicitly treat the past as if it were itself an image. My dissertation argues that a tradition emerged during the nineteenth century which sought to develop that language of vision for a particular purpose: to observe the striking distance, and differences, between the past and the present. And the effect is not one of detachment but its opposite: historical distance is the connecting device that ties the reader to the text, across Victorian historical works. My dissertation moves through the Victorian period broadly conceived, from 1820 to the 1890s, and across genres of novels, poetry and non-fiction prose. This breadth of scope is a consequence of my argument. Many critics treat, for instance, Thomas Macaulay's constant shifts between past and present as a feature of his idiosyncratic style, or Elizabeth Gaskell's minute descriptions of Napoleon-era uniforms as distinctive of the genre of realism. But I show that Victorian literature that deals with the past needs to be understood across styles and genres, in the broader cultural context of their era's fascination with historical distance. Throughout the nineteenth century, the emphasis on the gap between past and present serves to engage, rather than repel, the reader's imaginative investment in the world of the past. The distance between the past and the present works to immerse the Victorian reader more fully in the imagined past, thereby cultivating a more actively critical engagement with history.

This dissertation considers how defenses of traditional faith in Britain have adapted to new frontiers of cultural relativism and religious difference. Its contention is that poetry has become central to such defenses. Relativistic thinking would seem to dispose against metaphysical belief; poetry, as a parallel claimant for cultural and expressive particularity, and as a sensuously non-empirical rhetorical medium, offers a way of muffling the dissonance that might otherwise arise from positioning difference and particularity as pretext for claims of universal truth. This study traces formal and rhetorical innovations from the Victorian crisis of faith forward to literary modernism, with a brief conclusion contemplating related developments in more contemporary poetry and religious thought in Britain.

Speech acts described as forms of “complaint”—lamentations, accusations, supplications—permeate early modern theatrical tragedy. “Shakespeare and the Drama of Complaint” explores and theorizes the largely unexamined relationship between complaint and tragedy in light of the fact that in the early modern period, “complaining” was cultural shorthand for ineffective, effeminate, and shameful responses to loss and injury. Focusing on familiar Shakespearean tragedies such as Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet, and King Lear, as well as contemporaneous plays by other writers, including Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, I argue that complaint was at the very heart of the way the genre of tragedy was conceptualized in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As I show, speeches and scenes of complaint were central to the construction of tragic plots and characters, and to the genre’s didactic and affective objectives. But the intersection of tragedy with complaint is more than simply formal and stylistic. I argue that through its engagement with a dazzling array of rhetorical modes and literary forms of complaint, tragedy recuperates “complaining” as a valuable mode of social expression and action. The first half of “Shakespeare and the Drama of Complaint” focuses on plays that attribute ethical value and political efficacy to complaining—to articulating individual and collective grief and grievance, alone and in community with others. Its first chapter explores the ethical dimensions of the existential complaints of the characters of King Lear in relation to what I call the “complaint-shaming” rife in Stoic and Calvinist moral philosophy. My second chapter, picking up on Lear’s notion of complaining as an act of bearing witness to the suffering of others, looks at the plays of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, and particularly Richard III, as unconventional revenge tragedies in which reiterated speech acts of complaint are politically powerful and efficacious. The second half of the project pivots to plays that take up the interpellative and affective force of complaint within their narratives in order to reflect on the particular agency, and social value, of tragedy itself: my third chapter reads Hamlet as a meditation on how the structure of complaint, incorporated into tragic narrative, might strike theatrical audiences’ consciences, while my final chapter, on Richard II, shows how performances of complaint, even if they do nothing else, might move audiences to tears. As a staging ground for complaint, the early modern theater and its tragic shows oriented audiences to respond to and participate in social modes of complaining—and taught them to be more sophisticated spectators and consumers of tragedy.

This dissertation examines the importance of the concept of measurement to poets and literary critics in eighteenth-century England. It documents attempts to measure aspects of literary form, especially prosodic phenomena such as meter and rhythm, and it explores how these empirical and pseudo-empirical experiments influenced the writing and reading of poetry. During the Enlightenment, it argues, poets and critics were particularly drawn to prosody's apparent objectivity: through the parsing of lines and counting of syllables, prosody seemed to allow one to isolate and quite literally measure the beauty and significance of verse. Inquiries into the social and historical functions of literature routinely relied on this discourse, exploring questions of style, politics, and philosophy with the help of prosodic measurement. By drawing on works and artifacts ranging from dictionaries and grammars to mnemonic schemes and notional verse-making machines, and through close readings of poet-critics such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Johnson, "Poetic Numbers" contends that the eighteenth century's fascination with prosody represents a foundational moment in the history of literary criticism: a moment whose acute self-consciousness about literary critical methods, as well as about whether and how these methods can aspire to count and account for aspects of literary experience, anticipates many of the methodological questions that mark our own time.

The present thesis is concerned with how the poetry written in Northern Ireland throughout the twentieth century reifies the city of Belfast through language, metaphor and imagery, compiling a concrete constellation of aesthetic experiments. It also examines how its poets have represented not only Belfasts concrete and architectural landmarks, but also its historical and spatial displacements. Due to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, through which Ulster remained a constitutive part of the British Isles, while the South started to build the foundations of what was going to become the Republic of Ireland, Northern Irish poets have built a poetic landscape that has been instead incessantly fragmented through the motifs of alienation and displacement of subjectivity. Through the analysis of the Belfast poems by the poets Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Padraic Fiacc, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, Allen Gillis and Miriam Gamble, the thesis shows the poetic architecture of Belfast points to wider sociological spaces. It is never alone, or even single, but always plural and globally referential. Through a space of confluence which brings together dissimilar discourses, the selected poems present a desire to possess Belfast artistically, a city where art, history and memories intermingle and interact in a dynamic manner. Images, styles and ideas are carried from generation to generation and create a constellation of fearful and hopeful dreams. It engages past and present in a fruitful reflection on identitarian and artistic belonging. / A presente tese tem como objetivo compreender como a poesia escrita na Irlanda do Norte representa a cidade de Belfast durante o século vinte. A hipótese defendida pela tese é a de que o trabalho poético com a métrica, figuras de linguagem e imagens cria uma constelação de experimentos estéticos. O trabalho também compreende como os poetas recriaram não somente os pontos de referência arquitetônicos de Belfast, mas também os seus próprios deslocamentos históricos e geográficos. Devido à assinatura do tratado anglo-irlandês em 1922 através do qual o Ulster se manteve parte das Ilhas Britânicas e o sul começava a 7 construir as fundações do que seria chamada futuramente de República da Irlanda, os poetas pertencentes à Irlanda do Norte criaram uma paisagem poética que é incessantemente fragmentada por meio da alienação e do deslocamento subjetivo. A análise dos poemas de Belfast escritos por Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Padraic Fiacc, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, Allen Gillis e Miriam Gamble, demonstra que a arquitetura poética de Belfast aponta para espaços sociológicos mais abrangentes. A cidade não é retratada singularmente, mas em sua conexão com outras localidades globais. Por meio de um espaço de confluência, que agrupa discursos diversos, os poemas selecionados apresentam um desejo simbólico de possuir Belfast, uma cidade em que arte, história e memórias interagem de forma dinâmica. Imagens e estilos são passados de geração para geração, criando uma constelação de sonhos aterrorizantes e esperançosos, que engajam passado e presente em uma reflexão sobre pertencimento identitário e artístico.

Because the first part of the twentieth century in Ireland was marked with nationalist milestones like the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War, most accounts of modern Irish literature and culture are nation-centered. This dissertation offers a new understanding of modern Irish writing by placing national identity in conversation with global consciousness, a burgeoning concept in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, this project explores three aspects of globalism: the attachments to foreign countries that Irish writers form; the ways in which these attachments affect their relationships with Ireland; and their subsequent articulation of global consciousness based on these transnational experiences. The introduction provides a critical and historical context for the project by negotiating between the established discipline of Irish Studies and the emerging field of Irish Diaspora Studies. Each chapter then investigates an Irish writer whose work indicates a relationship between global and national consciousness. The Irish-Argentine writer William Bulfin and the evolution of his relationship with gauchos, as it is suggested in his Tales of the Pampas, forms the subject of the next chapter. The second chapter juxtaposes Helen Waddell's The Princess Splendour and Other Stories, which retells fairytales from the Middle and Far East as well as from Ireland, with Lady Gregory's and Douglas Hyde's nationalistic collections of Irish folklore. The third chapter investigates the connection between the feminist underpinnings of Kate O'Brien's novels with the transnational movements that frequently accompany them. The fourth chapter examines the cosmopolitan imperative of Brian Moore's Irish-American novels. Finally, in the epilogue I briefly suggest the ways in which contemporary Irish writing extends the projects begun by these earlier figures.

This dissertation examines the representation of social memory in British historical fiction from 1810 to 1880. I argue that social memory is crucial to the analysis of historical fiction during this period because it affords us an opportunity to see how authors in the nineteenth century viewed the social dimensions of memory as constructed by communities that envision their pasts in relation to prevailing ideologies and dominant authorities. Specifically, literary representations of social memory are important in understanding how communities come together to achieve common goals or resist dominant authorities through their sense of a common past in one of the most popular genres of nineteenth-century literature, the historical novel. The significance of social memory for the study of nineteenth-century British historical novels centers in the fact that it reveals the processes by which kinship or kindred groups and other social groups can be formed and by which historical consciousness is developed and communicated among those groups within the novel and to the reader. Social memory is defined here as a shared vision of the past, its narratives, and its symbols that embodies the cultural and communal influences on an individual's and broader groups contemporary identity. Social memory can represent a positive, unifying force in an individual's lift and a community's day-to-day lived experiences, a force that can be used to achieve common purposes or resist common foes. The activation of social memory, though, offers a paradox: on the one hand, individuals are united by a powerful sense of togetherness as understood by their relationship to the past and its significance to their present, lived experience; yet, on the other hand, individuals may resist this totalizing or homogenizing sense of the past when it threatens the uniqueness of individual subjectivity, specific characteristics of group culture, or forecloses on the possibilities of social action by those on the margins. This dissertation looks at how social memory is represented in non-canonical and canonical historical novels by Sir Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, and Philip Meadows Taylor.

Despite recent scholarly interest in Anglo-Islamic relations and the Turk figure on the early modern stage, the intricate power dynamics of interracial romance has been largely neglected. My project seeks to address this lacuna in the scholarship by examining the ways in which romantic relationships between interracial couples invert gender, racial, and religious stereotypes in plays by William Shakespeare, Phillip Massinger, Lodowick Carlell, and Robert Greene. Many studies have found a xenophobic, racialized gender ideology in such plays, but as I will demonstrate, the representation of Muslims as licentious, cruel, and barbarous is not always the norm. Nor are the captive maids, brides-to-be, or wives as weak or helpless as critics have made them out to be. lnstead, Christian-Muslim relations in these plays challenge what have been seen as the official gender, racial. and religious ideologies in early modern England.

In this project, I use Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Charles Dickens to trace the emergence of what I call a poetics of private life. I argue that a literature of individualized, interior domesticity developed in response to the effacement of the Scottish Enlightenment and its local specificity at a time of British assimilation. In the eighteenth century, metropolitan Scotland, buoyed by hopes of cultural and economic renewal, developed and popularized antiquarian studies of local folk culture and theories of history positing telic models of societal development. Such concepts and practices were the intellectual fruits of the universities, learned societies, and philosophical circles that typified Scotland's heavily institutionalized Enlightenment. In the wake of the Act of Union, a new literature emerged, one exchanging models of universal human progress for narratives of private life. This arc coincides with Scott's renunciation of regional, historically inflected Scottish poetry in favor of three-volume fiction and Wordsworth's corresponding need to develop an increasingly autobiographical (and generically "British") Romanticism. These dual developments would significantly alter the shape of British literature for Scott's novelistic successors such as Dickens. Thus, this dissertation resituates the emergence of British Romanticism and the nineteenth-century three-volume novel both historically and geographically, within a narrative beginning in the eighteenth century, with Scotland's assimilation into an increasingly urban, homogenous Britain.