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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) share numerous reciprocal echoes in their works, especially at the height of their literary activities in the early twentieth century. Despite their singular admiration for each other and strikingly similar working methods, their mutual influence has never been explored. This thesis traces and reevaluates their literary relationship through analysing many unpublished sources, such as letters, notebooks, drafts, fragments, and annotations, alongside printed works. Uncovering new manuscripts from Oxford, London, Dorchester, Eton, Yale, and other archives, the thesis reveals how they responded imaginatively to each other's craft and shaped each other's thinking about poetry and prose. Bringing their works together shows how their preoccupations with ghostly sounds reflect their complex attitudes towards religious belief: their provisional, agnostic views of the world, as well as their sense of being out of place. Instead of closing off the empty space left by an absent God, they explored the possibilities of tentative, momentary belief through literary language, drawing on the inherent uncertainty in auditory perception, and attending to what minute, imaginary, or inexplicable sounds can invoke. Such listening was also a literary haunting - the means of shaping a poetics of absence, full of an immanent but never satisfying sense of presence. This focus on ghostly sounds places their works in the dynamic landscape of discourses on belief, and developments in science and technology during their lifetimes. Chapter 1 outlines the writers' biographical and literary connections, while contextualising these in the period's legal, social, and institutional changes. Chapter 2 establishes a link between the writers' haunted listening and their uneasy sense of God's abandonment by focussing on the vacant church: an obsolete relic that still resonates with elusive voices and presences in such texts as Hardy's "Copying Architecture in an Old Minster" and de la Mare's "All Hallows." Chapter 3 shows how reading names on gravestones recalls ghostly voices, especially those of past writers, such as William Wordsworth and Thomas Browne. Chapter 4 enquires into the writers' obsession with the figure of the suicide. This figure, carrying the metaphorical burden of the stranger and the outcast, haunts their works at the level of literary echo and "return": for instance, in Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) and de la Mare's The Return (1910). Chapter 5 examines those texts in which a call is answered only by a ghostly sound that resists semantic interpretation. It explores the intimate correspondence between several crucial poems, published between 1911 and 1921 - Hardy's "The Voice" and "The Shadow on the Stone"; de la Mare's "The Listeners" and "Who's That?" - as well as the poets' persistent attention to the sound of words both in their manuscripts and published works. Overall, the thesis demonstrates how their distinct characteristics evolved through reading each other. The project attempts to recover a relationship that has been lost to literary history, and thus aims to reshape our view of early twentieth-century literature more generally.

Visual art's departure from the white cube in the mid-twentieth century precipitated what Lucy Lippard declares the 'dematerialization' of sculpture at the same moment poetic practices begin to query language as a situated medium. As sculpture becomes increasingly engaged with the absence of its traditional materials, the cave (defined by an absence in stone) becomes a significant site of activity among a group of sculptors in Britain 'whose work', as Lisa Le Feuvre, writing as Head of the Henry Moore Institute, recognises it, 'uses words'. This thesis is organised in two parts, the first developing models for reading sculptural relief in what Roland Barthes has described as the 'stereographic plurality' of the text. Katrina Palmer's End Matter (2015) identifies the memorial function of sculpture in Portland's displaced limestone, a deep and double site underwritten by the fossil record of Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved (1897). In the binocular blur between the two texts, a radial reading of Hardy's elegiac 'Poems of 1912-13', using Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge's chromatographic experiments with Liesegang rings and opera singer Margaret Watts Hughes' invention of the eidophone, prepares a model of the voice as a depth sounding apparatus. The depthless perception of the monocular cave-dwelling Polyphemus in Brian Catling's Cyclops series (1991-2018) locates the deep 'spot' in modernism's katabasis. The second section enters into the 'cave moment', the apotheosis of the present absence which John MacKay identifies in Wordsworth's inscriptional poetics, to perform deep readings of muddied manuscripts: Wordsworth's pencil-written drafts for the 1805 Prelude; Douglas Oliver's In the Cave of Suicession (1974), written on a typewriter in an alluvial tunnel in Derbyshire; Sean Borodale's twinned works Asylum and Asylum Oedipus (2017-8), recorded on a dictation machine under the Mendips before being returned to the white cube, installed as an enormous cavern of text within the Bluecoat gallery, Liverpool. Surveying the mouth of the cave during the last decade in Britain, this thesis also includes analysis of Drew Milne's The View from Royston Cave (2012), Alec Finlay's Global Oracle (2014), Maria Fusco's Master Rock (2015) and Hanna Tuulikki's Women of the Hill (2015), with brief forays to Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer's The Cave (2009) and the culmination of Lee Ann Brown's project Philtre: Writing in the Dark in 2008. This thesis makes reference to geological and optical models of depth to propose that, in the dark of the cave, site-specific writing produces a holographic form, both a cast of light and a material product of total writing.

This dissertation examines a twentieth-century lineage of writers and poets concerned with signatory inscription. By this, I mean the writing, tracing, branding, embossing, tattooing, or engraving of the name of a person or place onto various kinds of surfaces, as well as other forms of marking that approximate autography. My contention is that James Joyce's novels demonstrate an explicit, underexplored concern with signature and the different imaginary investments (erotic, legal, preservative) that accompany its presence in the world. In Joyce's wake, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and Don DeLillo all produce texts that both engage with Joyce's novels and think carefully about the potential of the signature as a material object. My first chapter, 'James Joyce's Signatures', explores how nineteenth-century developments in graphology and forensic identification inherit ideas from the medicinal doctrine of signatures. I argue that this expanded sense of signature offers a unique perspective on Joyce's taxonomic representation, which questions the boundaries between a body of text and (non)human bodies. The presence of legal trials in Ulysses adds a forensic element to Joyce's signatory imagination. This element is taken to its logical extreme in 'Nausicaa', where scents, sounds, and impressions become bodily, as opposed to alphabetical, signatures - produced by humans, waves, and stones. The second chapter, 'Samuel Beckett and the Endurance of Names', continues this line of argument, showing how Beckett inherits Joyce's interest in autographic inscription, but employs it for different ends. While the epitaphic tradition relies upon hard materials such as stone and metal to preserve lettering, Beckett's interest in excrement ('First Love') and mud (How It Is) remaps inscription onto immanence. Rather than seeking immortality through lithic preservation, Beckett's characters yearn to 'return to the mineral state', to have their bodies subsumed and dispersed throughout a greater container. The third chapter, 'Seamus Heaney and the Phonetics of Place', turns from the signature of persons to the signature of places, from prose to poetry. Explicitly glossing poems like 'Anahorish', 'Toome', and 'Broagh' as inspired by Stephen Dedalus, Heaney performs a critical repatriation of Joyce's work. Joyce uses fictional, motivated relations between names and referents to construct a linguistic correlative for Stephen's youthful naivety - a technique that personalises his lexicon, privileging Stephen's own associations over those of nationality, language, or religion. Heaney, on the other hand, politicises this process, utilising phonetic association to forge imaginary correspondences between Irish place-names and the people and places they denote. The final chapter, 'Don DeLillo, Encryption, and Writing Technologies', examines the novels of Don DeLillo and his interest in signatory technologies. Drawing upon archival research conducted on the manuscripts of Americana, Ratner's Star and The Names, I show that Joyce influenced the composition of these texts to a greater extent than previously thought. In particular, DeLillo uses Joyce to think through the technological dimensions of writing, comparing older methods of inscription like boustrophedon to modern communication technologies via Ulysses.

The habit of honouring outstanding individuals with statues was common throughout the Roman Empire. Yet after the end of the Severan reign at the beginning of the third century AD, a decrease in honorific statues is generally assumed to have taken place. This thesis aims to evaluate this hypothesis, focusing specifically on the years AD 222-285. The thesis is assessing the contemporaneous imperial remains for the Roman Empire as a whole and the evidence from four exemplary cities that are particularly conspicuous in their statuary production and display, both before and after the time frame under investigation (Leptis Magna, Athens, Ephesus, Aphrodisias). The purpose is to explore the standards, conventions, and limitations of statuary practice in Roman society in a synthetic and comparative analysis and thereby to evaluate its political and social role during a state of internal and external instability, labelled 'the third century crisis'. By providing concrete figures, the practice of the third century can be juxtaposed with both the antecedent and subsequent centuries and this will facilitate a more coherent insight into the overall development and changes in Roman honorific statuary practice. The results suggest that the assumed decline in the number of statuary installations might have to be re-evaluated. It has become apparent that in order to obtain comparable numbers, the inclusion of imperial family members in any statistical evaluation is indispensable, a factor which has previously been disregarded. A gradual decrease cannot be supported and neither can a decrease in the appreciation of honours.

“The Body and the Book: Ecologies of Inscription in the Early English Archive” investigates the ecological entanglements of books, bodies, and their environments via representations of bookmaking in 16th- and 17th-century British literature. I argue that acts of inscription, especially those undertaken upon environmental or bodily surfaces, situate the material book as particularly crucial to the formation of the creator’s identity and subjectivity, facilitating intimate and at times violent connection between self and other. I materialize these inscriptive moments in the works of Mary Wroth, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare by examining the tools, processes, environments, and bodies—human or otherwise—enabling textual creation. I extend these conversations to also consider wider cultural discourses of inscription in the period: those occurring in natural-philosophical works, instructional manuals, anatomical treatises, manuscript recipe books, and through printing and publication practices. I examine all of these objects and processes side-by-side in order to foreground the ways they influenced literary approaches to the concept of the material book.Each chapter of this project is organized around a particular site of inscriptive entanglement in order to demonstrate the myriad ways that early modern people saw themselves, their bodies, and their environments (and by extension, their books) as both intertwined and highly porous. I begin in a country house garden, with the ash trees upon which Pamphilia inscribes her sonnets in the Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, before moving to both backwards in chronology and inwards to the city of London where Thomas Bushell worked with printer Valentine Simmes to produce the dangerous books that Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus warns Bushell’s readers against. I then proceed to the early modern kitchen, where women’s domestic interactions with the environment via the cooking and recipe recording processes reflect these broader preoccupations with the assemblages of humans and nonhuman others that inflected their understanding of the body. Finally, I return to the trees, this time via the forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, as a final case study that draws together some of the many valences of inscription that this dissertation interrogates through the play’s investment in logophagy and textual ingestion. This nonlinear narrative demonstrates, through its own varied and entangled assemblages, how early modern people understood the porosity of their bodies and environments through the act of inscription and engaged the book culture that arose from these entanglements.A short coda applies this posthumanist and feminist-bibliographical approach to inscription and embodied bookmaking experiences to interrogate the processes of rendering early modern texts accessible in new material forms online. I outline how the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) recipe digitization project leverages transcription as a form of inscription—relocating knowledge production in embodied experience and community—that is exemplary of how we might approach digital humanities projects in an increasingly digitization-dependent field.

This dissertation analyzes literary and filmic works to point to the post-national and post-catastrophic nature of diaspora Armenian culture in or involving the Western Armenian language. After the 1915 Catastrophe, Western Armenian survivors were forced into exile from their ancestral lands, carrying with them a modern national literary language. By analyzing the works of Shahan Shahnour, Nigoghos Sarafian, Gariné Torossian, Vahé Oshagan and Krikor Beledian, this study traces the various forms in which the emergence of a diasporic Armenian culture is inscribed at the limits of realist and positivist practices of representation informing modern notions of national literature and history. It then theorizes multilingual diasporic culture on the basis of such analyses and positions the latter as a critique of post-colonial multiculturalism.

This dissertation investigates how calligraphic carving emerged as a new literati cultural practice during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in China, by focusing on the versatile scholar-artist Chen Hongshou 陳鴻壽 (1768-1822). Toward this end, the dissertation examines five related issues: first, the extent to which literati engaged in creating inscriptions on solid objects during the period; second, the growing sense of the literati that ancient writing was executed in materials that were distinct from those employed in their brush-based calligraphy; third, how calligraphic carving developed into a literati-style art via seal carving; fourth, the ways in which the active pursuits of the literati in seal carving and the study of ancient bronze and stone inscriptions were extended into their inscribing practice; and lastly, the cultural and intellectual boundaries between the literati and professional artisans that were increasingly blurred. By conducting all these avenues of research, this dissertation demonstrates that a substantial number of mainstream literati engaged in the practice of inscription making during the period as their enjoyable pastime or even as a fashion. In analyzing calligraphic examples carried in a variety of material objects, the dissertation reconstructs the interaction between diverse forms of art not only in visual feature but also in method of execution. In so doing, the present study underscores the importance of cross-media examination in Chinese art. By investigating how the literati practice of inscription making was derived from their artistic sensibility and growing recognition of diverse works of craft as valuable cultural objects, the dissertation demonstrates that the cultural practices of literati and artisans increasingly merged in this period of China’s history.