This study seeks to provide historical and literary contexts for elderly characters from English play-texts c.1580 to 1625. Its primary aim, from a literary perspective, is to draw attention to the ways that a better understanding of elderly characterisation can enrich the appreciation of much-studied play-texts, and to indicate some interesting features of more obscure ones. Its secondary aim is to suggest the value, for social historians of old age in early modern England, of play-texts as social evidence. I have examined most of the published extant play-texts of the period, and have found approximately 150 of these to be relevant (the most important of these are listed in the Appendix). Because of the problems of handling all aspects of such a large amount of material, I have chosen to consider the plays chiefly as texts to be read, with little reference to their performative aspects. However, I analyse the dramas as literary as well as social documents. Specific plays provide illustrations for observations and support for various hypotheses about dramatic representations of the elderly. In some instances, I address plays which have received little critical attention. The thesis falls into two parts. In the first three chapters, I discuss the socio-historical, cultural and non-dramatic literary contexts for representations of elderly men and women in play-texts. In chapters four through seven, I examine elderly characters in specific role or relationship categories: as sovereigns and magistrates, in sexual and marital relationships, and as parents. In the final chapter, I offer a detailed analysis of The Old Law by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.

Between 1740 and 1770, a number of women writers choose to make explicit in their printed texts their collaboration with a ‘familiar’: a family member or close friend. In so doing, they strategically enact their personal relationships through the medium of print in order to claim for themselves a level of literary power and delineate the terms on which they entered the marketplace as authors. This thesis argues that familiar relations expressed along a horizontal axis – those of husband, wife, brother, sister and friend – offer a relatively flexible model of familiar relations in which women could acquire a level of agency in self-definition, supported by ideologies that valued women’s contribution to the polite sphere of sociable conversation. It demonstrates that Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Susannah and Margaret Minifie not only engage in collaborative literary production that is thoroughly inflected with the pressures of their historical context but that through familiar collaboration women writers display their professional authorial personae and generate social and literary criticism. Through close readings of carefully selected collaborative texts in the corpus of each writer, including the material history of the texts themselves, and the relationships expressed through those texts, this thesis highlights the complexity with which family relations interacted with print culture in the period. Far from using the familiar relation as a means of modestly retiring to the domestic sphere these women writers used their familiar relations as a basis from which to launch, describe and defend their authorial careers.

The writings of John Aubrey (1626-1697) cover a variety of subjects, including natural philosophy, mathematics, educational theory, biography, and magic, among others. His principal scholarly interest, however, was antiquarianism, the early modern discipline which embraced subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and palaeography. This thesis is a study of Aubrey’s antiquarian writings within the context of the European Republic of Letters. It begins with a revisionary survey of antiquarianism in England, 1660-1720, and proceeds to map his personal contacts and library before studying each of his major antiquarian works in detail. Aubrey emerges from this as a product of his time, but somewhat unusual in his eclectic use of the antiquarian tradition and his blending of antiquarian and natural philosophical methodologies. He was receptive to the latest scholarship, regardless of its origin, and his antiquarian writings were never mere antiquarianism, but moved beyond technical scholarship to address wider issues concerning the origins of English culture, the evolution of religion, the antiquity of the earth, and the nature of human invention. Aubrey is now best known for his so-called Brief Lives, a series of biographies of contemporaries, and this thesis also includes a chapter studying the Lives as a form of antiquarianism. It argues that their keen observation and unconventional form are due to a mixture of antiquarian minuteness with traditions of Theophrastan character-writing and Tacitean historiography and that previous readings of them rely too heavily upon an outdated view of Aubrey as eccentric and peripheral to the larger intellectual movements of the century. This thesis concludes with a reassessment of Aubrey’s scholarship and an argument that the patterns revealed highlight the insufficiency of current theories of antiquarian development in the early modern period. It also argues for the “literary” quality of Aubrey’s work and emphasises the importance of reading his antiquarian texts within the context of early modern definitions of literature.

This thesis is a cultural history of the textual afterlives and poetic appropriations of John Donne's verse. I use print and manuscript miscellanies, hitherto unstudied commonplace books, letters, diaries and seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism to ask, who was reading Donne and in what physical forms? By looking at allusive strategies and reading practices of the time, I demonstrate how many different Donnes can be identified when we strip away modern notions of what 'Donne' is and seek multiple afterlives. I nuance the idea of Donne as a determinedly coterie poet, suggesting his print presence might have looked to his early audience like a strategic writer who had not, despite Izaak Walton's narrative, closed off the possibility of public authorship. I find there was a period of radical re-appropriation and re-reading of Donne in the seventeenth and eighteenth century: Donne was as a guiding influence to canonical poets. Rochester is perhaps the poet whose voice most vividly recalls Donne's swaggering persona and intricately-constructed rendering of apparent spontaneity. Katherine Philips's verse makes sophisticated use of Donne's voice in her intimate quasi-erotic verse; I contrast this with the voice of her poems written for state occasions to show how Donne becomes a resource for self-revelation. Dryden offers a sustained critical vision of Donne: although, as the primary mercenary proponent of mass popular literature, he may seem initially wholly unDonnean, I show how his verse both explicitly and obliquely negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the dual critique and celebration in Pope's versification of Donne's Satyres, and at the Dunciad, to see where the limits of allusion come up against Pope's cacophonous multiplicity of voices. These four poets take different threads from Donne's canon to different ends and, in so doing, create different Donnes.

"The Devil in the Detail" explores the rationality of magical belief on the early modern English stage. I examine how demons and demonic magic were depicted in the theatre, arguing that playwrights ascribed a sense of realism to the devil’s methods. In explaining the devil's modus operandi and exposing the limitations of his magic, the stage validates supernatural belief and depicts the devil’s craft as plausible. More broadly, this thesis is situated within the ongoing debate over the relationship between magic and scientific thought in early modern Europe, confirming that demonology was not an irrational superstition but a valid pre-science. Set against a background of witch persecution and the widespread belief that demons were a material reality, the devil was both the subject of prevalent intellectual inquiry and a popular figure on the early modern English stage, featuring in at least fifty-two plays between 1509 and 1638. Underpinning this particular brand of entertainment is a cohesive and consistent ontological framework that dictated the extent to which the devil could - and could not - operate in the material world, entirely in keeping with the dominant demonological thought of the time. "The Devil in the Detail" focuses on seven devil plays: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (c.1590), Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1590), John of Bordeaux (c.1590), Jonson's The Devil is an Ass (1616), Dekker, Ford and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton (1621), Brome and Heywood's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611). In each chapter, I demonstrate how these texts both adhere to orthodox demonology and emphasise the devil’s humanlike qualities. The final chapter presents the case for demonism in The Tempest.

This thesis investigates the phonology of loanword adaptation focusing on English loanwords in Urban Hijazi Arabic (UHA). It investigates the segmental adaptations of English consonants that are absent in UHA as well as the various phonological adaptations of illicit syllabic structures. It is based on dataset of around 100 English loanwords that were integrated into UHA that contain several illicit consonants and syllable structures in the donor language. This dataset is compiled from different published sources along with a data collection exercise. The first significant source is Abdul-Rahim (2011) a dictionary of loanwords into Arabic, while the other one is Jarrah's (2013) study of English loanwords into Madinah Hijazi Arabic (MHA) adopting the on-line adaptation. The third source is original pronunciation data collected from current UHA speakers. Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was consulted for the etymology and transcription of the English words. The goal is to provide a thorough analysis of these phonological patterns whether consonantal or syllabic ones found in the adaptation of English loanwords into UHA. To accomplish this, the adaptations have been analysed according to two theoretical frameworks: the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies Loanword Model (TCRSLM) proposed by Paradis and LaCharité (1997) and Optimality Theory (OT) introduced by Prince and Smolensky (1993). The different proposed analyses in this study facilitated an evaluation of the adequacy of each of these theories in accounting for the discussed phonological patterns found in UHA loan phonology. The thesis concludes that OT better explains the adaptations, but neither theory fully accounts for the variety of adaptations found in UHA.

This is an account of qualitative ethnographic case study research investigating the identity construction of English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers. This study was conducted at a higher education (HE) college, namely, Public High College (PHC) in Oman over a period of six months. In this study, I explore teacher identities in relation to the particular spatial locations of the teachers as well as the ways that networking and social capital and institutionalised cultural capital intersected with their nationalities and linguistic backgrounds to produce complex hierarchies. The thesis provides a rich exposition of teacher identity construction in Omani HE as theorised through the lens of Bourdieu, recognising the different educational practices, such as assessment and teacher evaluation, as well as the influence of space in the field of struggle within which teacher identities were implicated. The methodological approach and research design adopted in this study was dictated in part by the nature of the research questions and the theoretical framework adopted. Because I was interested in the embedded struggles in different educational practices between different groups and how these groups articulated and expressed these struggles, I positioned my research within a constructivist-interpretive paradigm. I adopted a case study approach and drew on ethnographic methods, such as semi-structured interviews, observation, and field notes. Over thirty-five local and non-local ESL teachers from western, Arab, African, and Asian contexts took part in this study. Furthermore, I kept a research diary to record my own experiences and decisions about my research. In addition, I analysed official documents from macro, meso, and micro levels. Both content analysis and thematic analysis were conducted to trace the tensions which were observed during my ethnography of teacher identity construction at Public High College in part produced by the emergence of new assessment procedures, and quality assurance agendas, and the Global North's influence on the Omani HE system. In the analysis chapters (Chapters Five to Seven), I problematise how educational practices were implicated in the production of hierarchical, spatial, and at times, male-female positioning of teachers. In the first analysis chapter, I conduct a documentary analysis of the national standards for the General Foundation Programmes to trace back potential tensions that were embedded in the new assessment processes and teacher appraisal procedures and the potential importance of these for teacher identity production. In Chapter Six, I examine the significance of space in producing hierarchical relations between local and non-local teachers and other hierarchies that cut across these groupings. My analysis shows that research respondents gained social capital from networking and highlights the complexity of this networking. In my final analysis chapter, I examine both assessment and teacher evaluation as the key processes through which teacher hierarchies at Public High College were produced. My analysis shows that assessment was one of the fields where struggle for positioning and legitimacy took place so that teacher identity production was bound up with assessment practices at Public High College. In addition, my analysis focuses on teacher evaluation processes in this chapter as another field where struggles for teacher positioning and legitimacy took place. My analysis interrogates both implicit and explicit teacher evaluation processes and the implications of such processes for the production of teacher identities. Through its ethnographic approach, the thesis shows the tensions, nuances, and power relations that pervade this HE institution, and examines how these were central in the production of teacher identities. It also shows the importance of taking teacher identity construction into account in the expansion and reform of Omani HE.

This thesis examines the reciprocity of literary and legal cultures, and seeks to enhance understanding of cultural and socio-legal constructions of morality in early modern England. Identifying the tensions in an institutional legality in which both secular pragmatism and moral idealism act as formulating principals, it interrogates the sense of disjuncture that arises between imaginative concepts of moral justice and their translation into the formal structures of law. Chapter 1 investigates representations of rape in light of the legislative changes of the 1570s, and addresses the question of how literature shapes the legal imaginary of immorality. Literary models, notably Shakespeare's The Rape Of Lucrece (1594), and George Peele's Tale of Troy (1589), are examined together with the texts of Edward Coke and Thomas Edgar to argue that lawyers' mythopoeic interpretative strategies produce a form of legal fiction in relation to sexual crime. These strategies are contextualised in Chapter 2 in relation to the education and literary-legal culture at the Inns of Court, and the thesis progresses to an examination of the inns' literary and dramatic output – notably that of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorbuduc, and Arthur Broke's contemporaneous revels' masque, Desire and Lady Bewty (1561-2) – to establish how the legal fraternity wielded significant authority over Tudor sexual politics, moral signification, and interpretative practices. Chapters 3 and 4 explore legal and ethical challenges heralded by the Jacobean accession, particularly those posed by the Somerset scandal. Analysis of histories, letters, and court satire, together with Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque (1607), and George Chapman's Andromeda Liberata (1614) and The Tragedy of Chabot (1639), illuminates the period's textual negotiations of legal, political, and personal ethics, and offers a revealing picture of the moral paradoxes produced by the opacity of the parameters between the personal and political lives of the ruling elite.

Nell’ambito della linguistica storica inglese si è assistito solo negli ultimi anni all’emergere di un nuovo interesse accademico e al conseguente sviluppo di un nuovo campo di ricerca: il Late(r) Modern English (LModE). Lo studio diacronico della lingua inglese, tradizionalmente spintosi fino a includere il periodo dell’Early Modern English, ha infatti solo recentemente accolto nel suo raggio d’indagine lo studio dei secoli a noi più vicini, il XVIII e il XIX, precedentemente soprannominati “the Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study” (Jones 1989). Il presente lavoro propone un’analisi storica e sociolinguistica del periodo che considera l’evoluzione linguistica del British English, l’importante fenomeno del prescrittivismo linguistico e lo sviluppo della grammatografia inglese nel XVIII secolo. Il primo capitolo propone una collocazione temporale del LModE tra il 1660 e il 1945, ne traccia i principali sviluppi storici e sociali, e presenta lo stato dell’arte sulla variazione linguistica del periodo. Il secondo capitolo presenta un’analisi approfondita delle diverse ideologie che hanno contribuito allo sviluppo del prescrittivismo quale fenomeno linguisticamente e culturalmente pervasivo. Il terzo capitolo, infine, traccia lo sviluppo settecentesco della grammatica come genere normativo e presenta l’analisi dettagliata di un'opera finora poco osservata: “Grammatical Observations on the English Language” (1766) del reverendo Caleb Fleming (1698-1779). / A growing amount of scholarly attention has been paid to Late(r) Modern English since Jones (1989) famously dubbed the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “the Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study”. The present work aims to contribute to such process of “De-Cinderellisation” (Rodriguez-Alvarez & Rodriguez-Gil 2011) through a historical and sociolinguistic account that links the evolution of British English in modern times to the rise of linguistic normativism and the development of grammars. The first chapter frames the period between 1660 and 1945, reports on the major socio-historical developments of the time, and tracks the linguistic variation through a state-of-the-art survey. The second chapter offers a lengthy and thorough examination of the different ideologies which brought about the all-pervasive linguistic and cultural phenomenon of prescriptivism. Finally the third chapter details the eighteenth-century development of English grammars as a normative genre and focuses on the micro-level analysis of the under-researched work by Rev. Caleb Fleming (1698-1779): “Grammatical Observations on the English Language” (1766).

"God's Spies": Reading, Revelation, and the Poetics of Surveillance in Early Modern England The recent material turn in humanities scholarship has yielded fascinating and insightful research in roughly the past decade, especially in the fields of book history and the history of reading. Scholars of material culture have researched the concrete particulars of book production, the places books were sold, and the conditions in which they were read. This dissertation focuses on the clandestine aspects of early modern English material culture, with particular emphasis on the secret spaces in which reading occurred. Early modern English monarchs cultivated a culture of surveillance in an effort to eliminate illicit religious texts, which combined with changes to the conditions in which texts were read to encourage more private and secretive reading habits. Ultimately, technological, religious, and political change became epistemological as readers increasingly applied a hermeneutics of surveillance to the texts they approached, reading for hidden meaning and for total interpretive control of a text. Writers of imaginative fiction staged scenes of what I call textual surveillance in their works, transforming the hermeneutics of surveillance into a poetics of surveillance that scrutinized the validity of this interpretive strategy and explored how these material, religious, and political changes warped the way readers interpreted, thought, and perceived reality.