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This thesis studies peripheral maternal characters in 'bourgeois feminist fiction', written by and for the urban, upper-class, upper-caste, English-speaking population of India. It considers 10 novels by 4 authors in this canon, namely Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, and Githa Hariharan. It attempts to reconfigure standardised readings of female agency and resistance in these novels by undertaking a tilted focus upon peripheral mother figures and analysing the forms of 'everyday resistance' and negotiation represented through them. Simultaneously, it traces the shifts in agential representation over the years from 1980 to 2009 (during which these novels have been published) in the context of rising Hindu nationalism and the advent of neoliberalism. It argues that the complex agential possibilities for women theorised by Indian feminists in relation to Hindutva and neoliberalism are particularly visible in the bourgeois feminist text's treatment of the peripheral mother character, who more easily presents the necessary negotiations within her discursive framework as compared to her feminist daughter, and the shifts in whose representation over the decades lends itself to a reading of shifts in literary and social perceptions of women's agency and feminism. Each chapter of the thesis concerns itself with a specific function afforded to peripheral mother figures, namely those of villainy, nostalgia and political action. The chapter on villainy studies texts from the 1980s which represent a negatively formed bond between mothers and daughters. The chapter on nostalgia studies texts from the 1990s that showcase the daughters' turning towards their mothers who become upholders of cultural identity. The chapter on political agency analyses texts from the 2000s that represent women's participation in anti�Hindutva activism. Overall, the thesis hopes to establish more complex methods of reading female resistance in feminist texts, while contemplating the intersectional and intertextual methods necessary to formulate a literary feminist tradition that accommodates women's agential capacities irrespective of their position in the framework of hegemonic discourses within which they undertake quotidian negotiations.

The femme fatale is a persistent cultural fantasy, emerging across film, television and literature during times of gendered social upheaval. She is elusive, seductive and dangerous. While critics of film noir have positioned the figure as a cultural effect of masculine anxiety and a signifier of changing social roles, others have argued for the potency of the figure - her strength and sexual allure - beyond the confines of narrative conclusion. In turn, studies of the femme fatale of the 1980s onwards have situated the figure in reference to a backlash against feminism, with the hyperviolent, hypercompetent femmes of this era representing concurrent anxieties regarding agentic career women. In the twenty-first century, the feminist potentialities of the femme fatale continue to demand critical attention. From Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012) and its filmic adaptation (2014) to Emma Cline's The Girls (2016), Sam Levinson's Assassination Nation (2018), the 2018 series of Killing Eve and Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman (2021), this thesis assesses how far the contemporary femme fatale can be read as a feminist analytical tool. I argue that the twenty-first century femme fatale continues to refract discourses around feminism and femininity, from Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train's (2015/2016) girlish subversion of the postfeminist ideation of domestic bliss to Good Girls' (2018-21) fatally deconstructive mums-on-the-run. Spanning genres and modes, this thesis explores the re-emergence of the twenty-first-century femme fatale, situating the promise and disappointment of the contemporary figure alongside the rise and decline of the #MeToo movement.

This thesis analyses how early modern English history plays deploy representations of 'unquiet' medieval queens to navigate contemporary concerns about gender and power. Addressing plays that were written in the late sixteenth century by Shakespeare and his contemporaries Peele, Marlowe, and Heywood, the thesis focuses on dramatisations of the women who occupied or controlled the throne of England before Mary and Elizabeth Tudor: consorts, regents, and dowagers. These plays were all produced between 1589 and 1599, in a socio-political moment framed by the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. This study suggests that the proliferation of history plays in the 1590s is fueled, in part, by an interest in interrogating the gender politics and geopolitics of the present through prisms of the past. It explores history plays' frequent foregrounding and questioning of the agency of queens' bodies and voices in relation to these plays' contemporary moment, when England had had a queen regnant for four decades and other women such as Mary, Queen of Scots and Catherine de Medici had recently been in power elsewhere in Europe. Though there is a corpus of scholarship surrounding queenship, female rule, history plays, and (premodern) historiography, there is a gap in the field that my thesis redresses: it offers the first sustained study of medieval queens in late Elizabethan history plays, exploring the insights that these literary-dramatic representations of queens and history might engender. Chapter One looks at two plays about King John, by Peele and Shakespeare. It argues that these plays place a particular emphasis on older queens, and how these queens derive authority from motherhood even when their sons are grown; in these plays, the queen mother deploys her power to comment upon and shape matters of nation and empire. Chapter Two focuses on plays about the first three king Edwards, and explores how queens' sexual and maternal identities and relationships impact upon these plays' particularly pronounced investments in the insular (geo)politics of the British Isles. It argues that the history plays establish conventions for the roles of queens - conventions that are sometimes queered and/or treated self-reflexively. The third and final chapter focuses on plays set during the Wars of the Roses: Shakespeare's first tetralogy and Heywood's The First and Second Parts of Edward IV. This chapter examines dramatic and rhetorical patterning in the representation of queens' sexual identities; considers queens as embodiments of the Lacanian extimité; and explores how the staging of rival and multiple queens interacts, again, with late Elizabethan contexts. By examining representations of understudied queens in (relatively) understudied plays, this thesis hopes to bring these female characters out of the wings of history and criticism and put them centre stage. Queen figures use their voices to offer alternative perspectives and political commentaries that sometimes threaten to upstage the historical narratives described by the plays' sources and other characters: they interrogate history itself. They also interrogate contemporary female power in a way that neither straightforwardly celebrates nor critiques it: by staging a multiplicity of queens who variously adopt, struggle against, or reject gendered modes of authority and agency, history plays ask more questions than they answer about history, power, and gender.

Between the Lines is a PhD thesis in two parts: a non-fiction memoir entitled And I Miss You Like The Dead and a critical commentary that explores the environmental themes that influence the landscape the memoir is set in, and the ethics within the wider Nature Writing genre. And I Miss You Like the Dead follows the discoveries of family history that are unveiled after the inheritance of an old farm on the Carmarthenshire borders and entwines this with the narratives of the breakdown of a relationship and the protagonist's decision to stay in this landscape and continue on with the family business of organic growing. The critical commentary consists of three main questions that discuss the genre with which the memoir could be included in, and looks at wider questions within environmentalism, nature writing and the practical differences between living and writing environmentally.

Drawing together Braddon's writing and the rapidly evolving Victorian literary world, this thesis examines the remarkable number of fictional authors in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels. Miniature literary marketplaces are found in the pages of The Doctor's Wife, The Lady's Mile, Birds of Prey, Charlotte's Inheritance, Dead-Sea Fruit, Hostages to Fortune, Vixen, One Thing Needful, His Darling Sin, and The Infidel, an array of novels stretching across Braddon's exceptional career. The first chapter traces Braddon's life and literary career as she negotiated between capitalising on her (in)famous status as queen of sensation fiction and influentially participating in contemporary literary fashions. The second chapter explores the practicalities of the literary profession illustrated in Braddon's novels. Braddon unflinchingly acknowledges the marriages, households, and collaborations intertwined with professional authorship. Serialisation was integral to the Victorian literary profession and chapter three hones in on Dead-Sea Fruit's serialisation in Belgravia; I examine Braddon as author and editor strategically confronting her position as target for fears surrounding the commodification of literature and anxieties about the place of women writers in the Victorian literary sphere. The final chapter makes the unlikely pairing of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Sarah Grand, and their metafictional novels The Infidel and The Beth Book. Despite their differences, these women writers used their fictional writers to consciously enter contemporary conversations on female authorship. The project examines how Braddon's metafiction depicts not only her experience as a writer but her understanding of the multifarious Victorian literary marketplace, love of literature, and commitment to forging a commercially successful career. Braddon's conflicting desires and contentious place in the periodical press are echoed in her selfconscious and often confrontational representations of authorship. This thesis explores these fascinating fictional writers as a window into Braddon's career and the Victorian literary marketplace.

Children's fantasy author, Diana Wynne Jones, is known for the complex use of intertextuality in her work. This thesis investigates the question of what intertextuality does in her work as a whole. It demonstrates that Jones uses intertextual references figuratively throughout her work to open windows of interpretation for an alert reader that may enhance and illuminate her themes. Intertextuality can take many forms, and Jones employs everything from direct allusion through parody and dialogism and Barthes' 'circular memory of reading'. Jones's allusions are, first of all, subversive, and almost always not simply retellings but demonstrations that traditional story and genre do not necessarily legislate the outcome. Secondly, the cognitive space in which intertextual meaning may be found echoes a Romantic double vision in which both the real and the fantastic may overlap, and which emphasizes the importance of the creative imagination. Intertextual references can be both an analogue for the use of the imagination and a way to develop individual imaginative power through the reading experience. The interpretive world that is opened with the recognition of an intertextual key creates an experience for readers that can be aligned with enchantment and the sublime. Negotiating Jones's enchanted world gives power to readers.

In order to demonstrate that patronage was an essential component of the eighteenth-century creative economy, this thesis reassesses the social and material conditions of being a patron in the eighteenth century. There are three case studies in the thesis, featuring patrons from across the century, men and women, and writers and artists. Using original archival sources, this thesis examines the literary, material, social, and cultural products of patronage and reveals how they were influenced by the personal, political, or aesthetic values of their patrons. These chapters seek to understand the various performative mechanisms of patronal solicitation and interaction by examining epistolary correspondences, paratextual dedications, and practices of gift-giving. The chapters analyse how Frances Thynne Seymour, countess of Hertford (1699-1754); George, Lord Lyttelton (1709-1773); and Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, duchess of Portland (1715-1785) utilised the performative nature of the implicit negotiations present within these genres in order to not only establish their own identity but also to determine the identity of others by drafting their social role and relationship through social cues. In doing so, this thesis demonstrates the centrality of patronage to constructions of identity within the eighteenth century. At the same time, this thesis broaches larger issues by demonstrating the intersections of patronage with discourses of eighteenth-century sociability; literary production and print culture; politics; material culture; and the enlightenment. It ties these strands of enquiry together by showing how patronage enriches and challenges our current critical understanding of these concepts. By subjecting patronage to hermeneutic analysis, this thesis contributes to original knowledge by showing how patronage is an essential component of the production and dissemination of knowledge, literature, and culture in the eighteenth century.

The peripatetic career of Robert Louis Stevenson has long been a subject of interest for scholars, with interest growing even since the conception of this study. Various Stevenson scholars have also noted the author's exploration of globalization and modernity, as it manifested in the late nineteenth century. This thesis will link these two areas of interest to explore Stevenson's engagement with the growing mobility of the late nineteenth century. Considering his lesser-known works, many of which have received little critical attention, this study will further distinguish itself from previous work on the subject by adopting a literary geographical approach; in particular I am reading Stevenson's works through the cultural geographical concept of mobility. Examining his European, American and Pacific travel writing, as well as the little-known novel The Wrecker, I argue that Stevenson is acutely aware of and interested in the growing and changing mobility of the time, exploring in his literary works the developments in transport driving this increased movement of people, and considering the effects on the people and places he encounters. In the final chapter I argue that The Wrecker is the culmination of Stevenson's varied experiences overseas, where he reflects not on the changes of place, but on how the developments in mobility have altered the nature of time and space in an increasingly connected world system. This concern with mobility is of course linked to his own itinerancy. As arguably the first 'global' author, Stevenson wrote and published from America and the Pacific, employing the very networks of transport and communication he writes about to enable his cross-continental publishing practices. Responding to calls to widen the scope of such studies, I extend the literary geographical approach with extensive use of Stevenson's correspondence and that of his literary network. Alongside textual analysis, I will examine the production geographies and histories of his works, considering not only the influence of Stevenson's itinerancy on the literary content, but also on the production and eventual reception of his writing. I argue that this complementary, combined approach allows for greater insight into Stevenson life and works, that the ideas and meanings in these texts are intimately bound up with their geographic histories of production. The overarching aim of this thesis, then, is to examine the mobility inherent in Stevenson's works, considering both the spaces of the texts and the texts, themselves, in space.

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.

The Awntyrs off Arthure (Awntyrs), The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain (Gologras), Rauf the Collier (Rauf), The Pistel of Swete Susan (Susan) and The Buke of the Howlat (Howlat), five fourteenth and fifteenth-century alliterative poems in rhyming stanzas, are the subjects of a stylistic analysis using a novel methodology. The aims of the analysis are threefold: (i) to reappraise the structure of Awntyrs and provide more evidence than hitherto has been offered for the work originally to have been two poems by different authors; (ii) to provide more securely evidenced data to evaluate the various claims made in nineteenth and twentieth-century criticism for shared authorships between Awntyrs, Gologras, Rauf and Susan; (iii) to demonstrate how, and with what motives, Richard Holland composed his only known poem, Howlat. From the studies of the authorship claims, a proposal is developed that Gologras and specifically the second episode of Awntyrs are more closely related than hitherto described. The methodology considers such elements of literary style as attention to strophic paradigms, syntax, narrative technique and rhetoric. The study of rhetorical style in non-Chaucerian fourteenth and fifteenth-century poetry seems to have been neglected but proves to contribute significantly to an understanding of the stylistic characteristics of the poems that are the subjects this thesis. The rhetorical study of Howlat reveals the extent to which its author followed the teachings of a classical rhetorician when composing his fable and modelled its central panegyric on traditional praise poetry. The thesis demonstrates how the methodology exploits the complex versification of these poems to study the literary style and ability of their authors, and invites its future application to a study of all the extant alliterative thirteen-line stanza poems.

This thesis aims to identify a distinct Welsh Christian Aesthetic within Welsh poetics between 1730 and the present day. It is not a comprehensive survey of Welsh poetics. Rather, this work focuses on particular trends within a large corpus of religious verse and documents how changing theologies and/or beliefs actually influence the artistic output. It identifies and examines the characteristics of the Welsh Christian Aesthetic as well as adopting a shaping metaphor of pilgrimage to explore the nuances within it. The shaping metaphor of this study is the pilgrimage: poets are imagined as making religious pilgrimages through a particular landscape. Each chapter charts a different territory which the poets pass through. The first territory is the Calvinistic Mysticism and the early establishment of the Aesthetic during the eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries. The second territory is the terrain of the nineteenth-century Nonconformist Nations, and the chapter documents the complexities and changes in the Aesthetic. The third territory is that traversed by two Modernist poets in the twentieth century who backtrack and re-engage with an earlier religion whilst using a new idiom. The fourth territory is a contemporary terrain which explores the pluralism which is possible within the Aesthetic by focussing on four very different poets. As these pilgrim poets travel, they produce poetry that reflects their spiritual experiences or, indeed, their lack of them. These territories are metaphorical; however, they intersect with one another, as well as intersecting with both the theologically-charged and terrestrial landscape of Wales. Having explored the changing territories, the thesis concludes with a definition of the Welsh Christian Aesthetic.

In the twenty-first century, the remix, the mashup, and the reboot have come to dominate Western popular culture. Consumed by popular audiences on an unprecedented scale, but often derided by critics and academics, these texts are the ‘monsters’ of our age—hybrid creations that lurk at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Like monsters, they offer audiences the thrill of transgression in a safe and familiar format, mainstreaming the self-reflexive irony and cultural iconoclasm of postmodern art. Like other popular texts before them, remixes, mashups, and reboots are often read by critics as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. This is especially true within the institutions such remixes seem to attack most directly: the heritage industry, high art, adaptation studies, and copyright law. With this context in mind, in this thesis I explore the boundaries and connections between remix culture and its ‘others’ (adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, postmodernism), asking how strong or tenuous they are in practice. I do so by examining remix culture’s most ‘monstrous’ texts: Frankenfictions, or commercial narratives that insert fantastical monsters (zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc.) into classic literature and popular historical contexts. Frankenfiction is monstrous not only because of the fantastical monsters it contains, but because of its place at the margins of both remix and more established modes of appropriation. Too engaged with tradition for some, and not traditional enough for others, Frankenfiction is a bestselling genre that nevertheless remains peripheral to academic discussion. This thesis aims to address that gap in scholarship, analysing Frankenfiction’s engagement with monstrosity (chapter one), parody (chapter two), popular historiography (chapter three), and models of authorial originality (chapter four). Throughout this analysis, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains a touchstone, serving as an ideal metaphor for the nature of contemporary remix culture.

This thesis analyses hospitality in three of Shakespeare’s plays: The Merchant of Venice (c.1596-7), Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601-2) and Timon of Athens (c. 1606-7). It draws on ideas from Derrida and other recent theorists to argue that Shakespeare treats hospitality as the site of urgent ethical inquiry. Far more than a mechanical part of the stage business that brings characters on and off the performance space and into contact with one another, hospitality is allied to the darker visions of these troubling plays. Hospitality is a means by which Shakespeare confronts ideas about death and mourning, betrayal, and the problem of time and transience, encouraging us to reconsider what it means to be truly welcoming. That the three plays studied are not traditionally linked is important. The intention is not to shape the plays into a new group, but rather to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s staging of hospitality is far-reaching in its openness. Again, while the thesis is informed by Derrida’s writings, its approach is through close readings of the texts. Throughout, the thesis is careful not to prioritise big moments of spectacle over more subtle explorations of the subject. Thus, the chapter on ‘The Merchant of Venice’ explores the sounds that fill the play and its concern with our senses. Other chapters similarly approach the plays not as exemplars of hospitality but as illuminating problems posed by the complex nature of what it means to be welcoming. The second chapter on ‘Troilus and Cressida’ explores the vulnerability of guests and hosts to one another on and off the battlefield, while the last chapter on ‘Timon of Athens’ argues that the emphasis Shakespeare places on death and mourning problematises the play’s gift economy and its representation of hospitality. Finally, the conclusion glances briefly ahead to ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (c. 1610-11) and the relationship between hospitality and forgiveness. But there are no easy answers to the problem of hospitality in the late plays either, since they, too, remain caught in the dilemma of what it means to be welcoming.

This thesis examines the responses to and rewritings of the Historia regum Britanniae in England, Scotland, and Wales between 1138 and 1530, and argues that the continued production of the text was directly related to the erasure of its author, Geoffrey of Monmouth. In contrast to earlier studies, which focus on single national or linguistic traditions, this thesis analyses different translations and adaptations of the Historia in a comparative methodology that demonstrates the connections, contrasts and continuities between the various national traditions. Chapter One assesses Geoffrey’s reputation and the critical reception of the Historia between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, arguing that the text came to be regarded as an authoritative account of British history at the same time as its author’s credibility was challenged. Chapter Two analyses how Geoffrey’s genealogical model of British history came to be rewritten as it was resituated within different narratives of English, Scottish, and Welsh history. Chapter Three demonstrates how the Historia’s description of the island Britain was adapted by later writers to construct geographical landscapes that emphasised the disunity of the island and subverted Geoffrey’s vision of insular unity. Chapter Four identifies how the letters between Britain and Rome in the Historia use argumentative rhetoric, myths of descent, and the discourse of freedom to establish the importance of political, national, or geographical independence. Chapter Five analyses how the relationships between the Arthur and his immediate kin group were used to challenge Geoffrey’s narrative of British history and emphasise problems of legitimacy, inheritance, and succession. Chapter Six examines how the linguistic change of place names, and the reconfiguration of the insular landscape, undermine claims of British sovereignty and legitimise the transition of power between the Britons and the Saxons. Finally, the conclusion addresses how translators, adaptors, and compilers used the strategies of evaluation, quotation, translation, imitation, and revision to determine the authority of Geoffrey’s narrative of British history.

In my examination of the influence of John Milton’s poetry on eighteenth century literature, I argue that eighteenth-century writers engage with ideas of space and place as they seek to transform Miltonic verse into a suitable medium for describing the Newtonian astronomy and imperial geography of their day. My first chapter examines John Philips’s Cyder and John Dyer’s The Fleece alongside county maps and commercial atlases, as part of a study of how their verse appropriates Milton’s politics and revises his geography. In my second chapter, I use digital mapping technology to explore the different viewing perspectives James Thomson uses in The Seasons, how they derive from Milton, and how they support his project to describe a harmonious, providential global geography. My third chapter investigates adaptations of Milton’s A Mask Performed at Ludlow Castle (1634). Across the eighteenth century, A Mask generated an opera, a play and a novel, and I examine how the meaning of each adaptation changes due to the altered place and context of performance. In my last two chapters, I argue that the female tradition of astronomical poetry seeks to reconcile Miltonic verse with Newtonian science whilst also critiquing it from a devotional perspective. Finally, I claim that Ann Yearsley and Charlotte Smith used Milton’s influence as a means to usurp the exclusively male territory of the eighteenth-century prospect poem, through poetry written from Clifton Hill in Bristol and Beachy Head on the South Downs. In my coda on William Wordsworth I conclude that to view him as the culmination of eighteenth-century engagement with Milton is to bias our understanding of both authors. Reconsidering Milton’s eighteenth-century influence is a vital part not only of understanding the worldview of the age, but also of distinguishing Milton himself from what the eighteenth century made of him.

This submission for the candidature of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing consists of a novel that is in many ways concerned with masculinity as well as other facets of individual identity - family, class, nationality, social and political allegiance - and a critical commentary that examines the representation of masculinity in the novels of a number of contemporary Welsh women writers in English. Together, these two components of the thesis explore the contestability of male status, behaviour and values when the established patriarchal models are in a condition of terminal decline - which I believe to be the case, however much it sometimes appears that the forces of reaction are holding out.

Kilroy F****n Jones is a PhD thesis of two parts: a novel, and an evaluative critical commentary based around elements explored in Kilroy F****n Jones. The novel itself is about a young man still grieving for what he sees as his abandonment by both parents. Denied a stable family home, he has set out on a path of hedonism and reactionary thinking which can only inevitably lead to tragedy. The critical commentary, consisting of five chapters, explores the themes of identity, masculinity, the underclass, the Welsh novel, and the two primary dialects of south east Wales: Cardiff English and Wenglish. These chapters demonstrate the critical decisions I made during the creative process, which in turn substantiate the significance of such elements as Kilroy's point of view and character. Taken as a whole, they explain the Welsh - and indeed Cymraeg - nature of the story itself.

The aim of this thesis is to establish the canon of Thomas Kyd’s plays and to explore Shakespeare’s relationship with that oeuvre. Chapter One begins by examining Shakespeare’s verbal indebtedness to plays that have been attributed to Kyd for over two centuries, including The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Soliman and Perseda (1588), and The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1589). The first chapter argues that Shakespeare’s extensive knowledge of Kyd’s plays contributed towards the development of his dramatic language. The second chapter provides an overview of some of the complex methods for identifying authors utilized throughout the thesis. Chapter Three then seeks to establish a fuller account of Kyd’s dramatic canon through a variety of authorship tests, arguing that in addition to the three plays above Arden of Faversham (1590), Fair Em (1590), and Cornelia (1594) should be attributed to Kyd as sole authored texts. The fourth chapter examines the internal evidence for Kyd’s hand in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part One (1592). The chapter contends that Shakespeare’s chronicle history play was originally written by Kyd and Thomas Nashe for the Lord Strange’s Men, and that Shakespeare subsequently added three scenes for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The fifth chapter argues that Shakespeare and Kyd collaborated on The Reign of King Edward III (1593) and that Kyd should thus be recognized as one of Shakespeare’s earliest co-authors. Finally, Chapter Six, by way of conclusion, outlines other possible links between Kyd’s plays and Shakespeare. The thesis as a whole argues for a reconsideration of Kyd’s authorship of a number of key plays that influenced Shakespeare, and for a reconsideration of the collaboration between these two dramatists.

The Victorian era was the 'Golden Age' for Shakespeare illustration. Between 1939 and 1880 thousands of illustrations were produced within many different editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works. What is so fascinating about these illustrations is that they have, historically, been widely neglected by academic scholarship. These editions, which were hugely popular in the Victorian era, are a very important part of our cultural heritage and, indeed, our construction of Shakespeare's plays as we understand them today. The 'Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive' is centered on the four major Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works and makes available online over 3000 of these illustrations in an open-access database. The archive is available online at 'ShakespeareIllustration.org' and will allow researchers and members of the public to explore a rich image archive and to ask new questions about this material: for example, 'how did the Victorians portray certain characters and plays pictorially and does this portrayal differ throughout the Victorian era?' Alongside such questions, the archive, more broadly, allows users to explore and interrogate the complex relationship that exists between the page and the stage, between word and image and between the past and the present. Underpinning the project is my strong belief that an online academic resource can be both scholarly rigorous and user-friendly. Further, the archive uses social networking to enable a community of users to discuss the images and to collaborate in exciting new and unforeseen ways. This thesis explores the implications around the creation of such work.

Starting from David Bevington’s observation that ‘Shakespeare’s disparate ventures into tragic expression in the years prior to 1599 suggest that he had not yet found the model or models he was looking for’,1 the current thesis explores four early tragedies in terms of their experimental nature: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and Julius Caesar. Central to the thesis is how metadrama in these plays point towards an exploration of tragedy that is marked by the intermingling of genres and sources. The thesis argues that each of the four tragedies under discussion is creatively imaginative in the way it involves adding a fresh perspective to tragedy and its mixing of genres. The thesis begins by arguing that in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-the play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare mocks the amateur staging of tragedy which he seeks to revitalize, starting with Titus Andronicus as a bloody revenge tragedy uneasily mixed with poetic language. Chapter Two suggests that Romeo and Juliet explores some of the ways in which comedy collapses into tragedy, while Chapter Three asks questions about Shakespeare’s use of history as a source for tragedy in relation to Richard II. The final chapter concentrates on Julius Caesar as a ‘broken’ play, examining the role of the ‘hero’. Each chapter examines a number of features, including the blending of genre types,the creation of the tragic ‘hero’, unsatisfactory endings as well as metadrama. Finally, Hamlet is seen to incorporate many of these experiments, and thus to lead on to the later tragedies.

This thesis analyses the political ideologies of the fifteenth-century King and Commoner tradition. This critically neglected yet widespread tradition occupied a unique political and cultural space in the literature of the later Middle Ages, leaving an indelible mark on British culture. Its influence and study impacts on outlaw literature, romance, and Shakespearean drama. This thesis provides the first detailed critical history and close textual analysis of the King and Commoner tradition as a whole. Drawing on Bakhtinian and Foucauldian methodologies, it examines this material’s amalgamation of carnival rituals with late-medieval complaint literature and insurgent demands. The Introduction traces King and Commoner analogues across other cultures, insular romance and chronicles. Chapter One focuses on King Edward and the Shepherd (c. 1400), arguing that this ‘bourde’ utilises the commoner’s carnivalesque poached feast and anti-noble complaints to invert social norms and deconstruct hierarchical boundaries. The King emerges here as a proto-panoptical spy, while the court is identified with corruption, oppression and alterity amid the commoner’s containment. Chapter Two explores this carnival inversion in John the Reeve (c. 1450), arguing that this text repeatedly stages a carnivalesque violence directed at the social body, culminating in John’s insurgent storming of the court. Chapter Three focuses on Rauf Coilȝear (c. 1460) and A Gest of Robyn Hode (c. 1500), contending that the tradition’s carnivalesque elements allow it to interact with both the worlds of Carolingian romance and outlaw literature in these hybrid texts. Chapter Four examines the King and Commoner ballads and chapbooks of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, arguing that this conservative, pro-monarchic material self-consciously contains and remediates the tradition. The Appendix to Chapter Four also identifies King and Commoner influenced drama from the sixteenth century onwards, highlighting the tradition’s absorption into an array of cultural narratives, from Robin Hood plays to national histories.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the changing representation of ships and sailors in English maritime fiction in the early twentieth century, as sailing ships were being replaced by steamships. It begins with a critical review examining the reception of Joseph Conrad’s maritime fiction and subsequently presents new readings of five of his sea novels and their response to the transition between sail and steam: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Romance (1903), Chance (1913) and The Shadow-Line (1917). Arguing that Conrad’s work is not the culmination of the maritime fiction genre, the third chapter examines sea stories that retreated back to the past in pirate adventure narratives. It begins with a contextual review of pirate fiction, followed by analyses of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s pirate short stories (1897 and 1911), F. Tennyson Jesse’s Moonraker (1927), and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1929). In the same period, other maritime texts turned away from the pirate romance to embrace the harsh realities of the brave new mechanised maritime world and the changing role of the sailor on modern vessels; chapter four examines the impact of war on maritime fiction through an analysis of Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which responded to and exacerbated national fears about invasion, while chapter five considers the impact of industrialisation on maritime fiction in James Hanley’s Boy (1931) and Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine (1933). The sixth chapter considers the role of fact and fiction in Richard Hughes’s In Hazard (1938) and examines the ways in which this text looks back to Conrad’s work. Ultimately, the texts discussed prompt a reconsideration of the maritime fiction genre, while the conclusion suggests how it enables further experimentation with the sea story throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.

Investigating conceptualisations of the feminine creative imagination, this thesis examines representations of the Brontës and adaptations of their novels released between 1996 and 2011. I focus on portrayals of Charlotte and Anne Brontë alongside reworkings of Jane Eyre (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in various media. Contributing to existing research on the cultural afterlives of the Brontës and their novels, I position the works discussed within contemporary middlebrow culture whilst considering the influence of feminism. The Introduction discusses the gendering of creative genius before identifying the tensions between critical, middlebrow and popular discourses’ conceptualisations of the Brontës’ imaginations. Thereafter, the first chapter proposes the contemporary usefulness and considers the gendering of the concept of the middlebrow. I demonstrate that middlebrow culture is fascinated by the Brontës’ lives, art and feminine creative imaginations. To further this argument, the second chapter analyses neo-Victorian novels’ engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life, art and creativity. I illustrate that these works draw from second-wave feminist criticism on Jane Eyre and belong to a tradition of middlebrow feminine writing about the Brontës. The third chapter also examines representations of feminine creativity and discusses how screen adaptations portray the artistry of Jane Eyre’s heroine. Additionally, the legacies of second-wave feminism in a wider postfeminist cultural context are explored. In the fourth chapter, the thesis turns to analyse the cultural dissemination and reputations of Anne Brontë and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I delineate how middlebrow culture has rediscovered the youngest Brontë, her novel and her feminism. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the works examined indicate middlebrow culture’s efforts to engage with feminism through the feminine creative imagination. Yet these works expose a prevailing tension in feminism between the status of the individual and the collective.

Mae’r traethawd hwn yn archwilio’r portread o amlddiwylliannedd yn ne Cymru a geir mewn ffuglen Gymraeg a Saesneg er 1990. Trwy ddefnyddio cysyniad theoretig yr ‘arall’ a damcaniaethau ôl-drefedigaethol cysylltiedig, mae’r astudiaeth hon yn ceisio osgoi pegynu rhwng cymunedau Cymraeg a Saesneg eu hiaith Cymru, fel y mae astudiaethau eraill ar amlddiwylliannedd Cymreig wedi’i wneud. Eir ati, yn hytrach, i drafod sut y mae’n bosib i gymeriadau o unrhyw gefndir ethnig, hiliol, crefyddol neu ieithyddol brofi aralledd oherwydd safbwyntiau goddrychol gwahanol, ac oherwydd y cyfuniad o wahanol elfennau sy’n creu hunaniaeth yr unigolyn. Trwy ystyried yr hybridedd hwn a berthyn i’r cymeriadau a’r nofelau fel ei gilydd, cynigir ffordd newydd o feddwl am amlddiwylliannedd yng Nghymru. Gesyd fframwaith theoretig trwy olrhain datblygiad cysyniadau aralledd a hybridedd yng ngwaith Hegel, de Beauvoir, Fanon, Said a Bhabha, gan fanylu ar berthnasedd eu damcaniaethau i ddadleuon am amlddiwylliannedd yng Nghymru. Ceir wedyn bedair pennod o ddadansoddi testunol. Mae’r cyntaf yn tynnu ar waith Bakhtin i drafod sut y mae awduron yn defnyddio nofelau hybrid, aml-leisiol fel gofod hybrid lle y gall cymeriadau archwilio’u haralledd. Defnyddia’r ail bennod ddamcaniaethau Bhabha am yr ystrydeb drefedigaethol a phegynau deuaidd i ystyried sut y mae aralledd a hybridedd cymeriadau’r nofelau yn herio delweddau ystrydebol a phegynol o Gymreictod. Mae’r drydedd bennod yn troi at ystrydebau am y siaradwyr Cymraeg a Saesneg a thrafodir sut y mae’r cymeriadau yn defnyddio lleoliad y dafarn er mwyn eu herio. Ystyria’r bedwaredd pennod effaith mudo a mewnfudo ar aralledd y mudwyr yng ngoleuni theorïau Said am alltudiaeth. Daw’r traethawd i gasgliad ar berthynas y portread llenyddol hwn ag amlddiwylliannedd yn y byd go iawn, gan awgrymu bod darllen testunau Cymraeg a Saesneg ochr yn ochr â’i gilydd yn gallu’n annog i ddatblygu’n genedl fwy cynhwysol.

Critics have long acknowledged the allusive effect of William Wordsworth’s language in the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This thesis abjures allusive influence to focus on the intertextual presence of Wordsworth in poems by each of these authors. Its methodology hinges on a separation between an intentional authorial allusivity and an involuntary, or unbidden, intertextuality. As a result of this heuristic, the poets are seen to be caught within a Wordsworthian web, which complicates the way in which their poetry functions. The authorial entrapment that results is anxiety-generating, but the thesis does not place this anxiety within a Bloomian paradigm. Its concentration on male, canonical authors is Bloomian, however, as is its acceptance that the meaning of the texts by Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins discussed is a Wordsworthian poem. Chapter One investigates the intertextual strategies of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ (1842), which work to expose the loss attendant upon the Wordsworthian transcendent moment. The poem’s recasting of Arthur Henry Hallam’s own unconscious Wordsworthian allegiance in ‘Timbuctoo’ (1829) leads into the analysis, in Chapter Two, of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and its implicit reliance on the language of Wordsworthian transcendence as a means by which both to assuage the poet’s grief at the death of Hallam and his dissatisfaction with contemporary scientific and theological discourse. Chapter Three develops the previous chapters’ findings by tracing how Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860) rewrites Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). Chapter Four examines Wordsworth’s presence in two Browning monologues, ‘Saul’ (1855) and ‘A Death in the Desert’ (1864), demonstrating how the poems find a new use for the language of lyrical interiority. Chapter Five considers Hopkins’ unconscious inscription of Wordsworth’s poetry and the threat it poses to his Incarnationalism and linguistic practice alike. The thesis finds its conclusion in the literary-historical effects that the after-presence of Wordsworth’s language engenders, which become an embodiment of legacy. The depth of each poet’s literary dependency on Wordsworth is also brought into focus, allowing the thesis to claim the earlier poet as a primary influence upon the trinity of later figures it addresses.

This thesis traces the relation between Anglophone Welsh fiction and politics, in light of the campaign for, and introduction, of devolution. Focusing primarily on the period 1970 – 2011, the thesis analyses a range of novels, short stories and journal articles produced in this period. The Introduction begins with an analysis of the history of devolution in Wales and considers theories of nationalism proposed by theorists including Benedict Anderson and Raymond Williams, both of whom suggest that heightened awareness of a wider national community is integral to the development of a cohesive nationalist impulse. Chapter I commences with an analysis of the relation between literature and politics in the years prior to the 1979 referendum on Welsh devolution. Taking as its starting point Fredric Jameson’s theory of political allegory in literature, this chapter considers the way in which the presentation of politics in Anglophone Welsh fiction becomes gradually more overt by the close of the 1970s. Chapter II examines the way in which Anglophone Welsh fiction writers responded to the outcome of the 1979 referendum, alongside other political events of the 1980s such as the Falklands War and widespread industrial decline. Chapter III charts the development of the relation between fiction and politics in 1990s Wales, suggesting that the years preceding the 1997 referendum on devolution witnessed a more overt engagement between Anglophone Welsh fiction and politics than had been evident in the 1970s. The final chapter argues that in the wake of devolution fiction from Wales has responded by presenting an increasingly diverse and multi-faceted image of Wales, characterised by a more overt engagement with politics and nationalism. The Conclusion considers how the changes outlined in this thesis relate to wider cultural developments in Wales and suggests how this research may be expanded to incorporate broader areas of the arts in Wales.

This thesis analyses how the British South Asian diaspora is conceptualized, understood and reflected in a selection of female-authored literary texts which engage with the multicultural policies of the British state from the 1950s to the present. The primary sources include Attia Hosain’s Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Kamala Markandaya’s Possession (1963) and The Nowhere Man (1972), Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman seeks the One (2009) and Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune (2012). I conceive of British multicultural state policies as unfolding in three major phases: Assimilation (1950- 1979), Integration (1980-2001), Social Cohesion/Interculturalism (2001- present). The thesis examines these policy changes and illustrates how these shifts are mirrored in and shape the character of British South Asian women’s writings. In the light of this I argue that British South Asian women writers’ engagement with a sense of exile, dislocation or a ‘teleology of return’ along with a symbolic longing to create imaginary homelands has produced new alliances which exist outside what has been called the national time/space in order ‘to live inside, with a difference’. Through the selected writers’ individual attempts to configure new fictional home spaces, a new architecture for the diasporic imagination is constructed around the poetics of home and the multicultural politics of identity. Such cross-cultural literary interventions exist both within and outside colonial and postcolonial genealogies, reconfiguring the critical geographies by which they have been mostly defined. The first two chapters of the thesis attempt to define the complex configurations of the concept of multiculturalism and its interconnections with the terminology of diaspora. I have adopted a reading strategy tracing the South Asian migration history to Britain and the early literary representations which powerfully illuminate the fragmented imagination of the South Asian diaspora in terms of contemporary theoretical paradigms. The next three chapters analyse literary representations by Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Rosie Dastgir, who highlight and complicate the issues of race, ethnicity and gender in relation to the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multicultural policies. The writers use various strategies that testify to the innate relation between the political ‘real’ and the literary ‘imaginary’ and explain how real life experiences provide fuel to the ‘diasporic imaginary’ and affirm the transnational potency of literature.

Divided into three large chapters, this thesis explores sixteenth-century concepts of history, considers how those concepts appear in Elizabethan history plays on English history, and finally looks at Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays. The aim of the thesis is to consider in some detail the wider context of historical and dramatic traditions in Tudor England to gain a better appreciation of how they influenced possible readings of Shakespeare’s early history plays. Chapter One looks at how medieval approaches were modified in the fifteenth century. St. Augustine’s allegorical method of biblical exegesis made it possible to interpret history from inside the historical moment by allowing historically specific incidents to stand for trans-historical truths. However, the sixteenth-century chronicle tradition shows an increasing awareness of the difficulties of interpreting history. Chapter Two looks at early English history plays outside of the Shakespearean canon. History plays borrowed the conventions of comedy, tragedy and the morality play to provide frameworks for interpretation. Nevertheless, early histories such as Kynge Johan, Edmund Ironside, Famous Victories, Edward III, The True Tragedy, and The Troublesome Reign did not fit comfortably within established dramatic modes, leading to history’s gradual recognition as a separate genre. Chapter Three looks at the contribution Shakespeare’s plays made to the developing genre. The un-unified dramatic structure of the Henry VI plays denies the audience a stable framework within which to interpret events. In Richard III, a clear tragic framework appears, but is undermined by a strong thread of irony that runs through the play. History appears in the tetralogy as a repetitive cycle of violence perpetuated by characters’ attempts to memorialise the past while failing to learn from it. The crisis presented by history is the necessity of acting on partial information, while the promise of fuller understanding is projected into an unknowable future.

Over the last two decades, our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and work has been expanded by an unprecedented number of biographies, memoirs and personal correspondence published for the first time. As a result, academic research has been able to plot a series of connections between the writer’s literary work and the cultural and historical moments that shaped it. Beckett has been hailed as a poet whose work engages like no other with the atrocities of the Second World War. This thesis takes as its starting point an issue that often arises in evaluations of the writer, but which has never before been explored in detail: the theme of trauma. With reference to the work of prominent contemporary theorists, this project elucidates what we mean by the term trauma, and why it can be useful to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s work. Drawing on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, and others, this thesis diagnoses traumatic symptoms and gestures in Beckett’s post-war writing. It identifies the role that ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ plays in some of his late theatrical texts. And, moreover, the thesis begins to trace the role that trauma can play in our understanding of language and meaning. Adopting a broadly poststructuralist view, this study engages with texts by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida to ask how trauma challenges the status of language and the Western humanist subject. It will demonstrate how how trauma problematises our understanding of walking and thinking in Beckett’s post-war prose; where the presence of live theatrical production is unsettled by traumatic repetition; and why Beckett’s plays for radio undermine our expectations of twentieth-century modernity. While charting the way that Beckett uses and adapts traumatic themes and ideas, the thesis observes how the term signals a broader crisis in Western humanist understandings of time, place and identity.

Medieval nobility was a compound and fluid concept, the complexity of which is clearly reflected in the Middle English romances. This dissertation examines fourteen short verse romances, grouped by story-type into three categories. They are: type 1: romance and lost heirs (Degaré Chevelere Assigne, Sir Perceval of Galles, Lybeaus Desconus, and Octvian); type 2: romances about winning a bride (Floris and Blancheflour, The Erle of Tolous, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Degrevant, and the Amis-Belisaunt plot from Amis and Amiloun); type 3: romances of improversihed knights (Amiloun's story from Amis and Amiloun, Sir Isumbras, Sir Amadace, Sir Cleges, and Sir Launfal). The analysis is based on contextualized close reading, drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. The results show that Middle English romance has no standard criteria for defining nobillity, but draws on the full range of contemporary opinion; understandings of nobility conflict both between and within texts. Ideological consistence is seldom a priority, and the genre apparently serves neither a single socio-political agenda, nor a single socio-political group. The dominant conception of nobility in each romance is determined by the story-type. Romance type 1 presents nobility as inherent in the blood, type 2 emphasizes prowess and force of will, and type 3 concentrates on virtue. However, no romance text offers just one definition; implicitly or explicitly, there are always alternatives. This internal variety indicates tha the romances imagine nobility scene-by-scene; even a text seemingly committed to one perspective is liable to abandon it temporarily if there is another better suited to the narrative moment. Ideological expression always comes second to effective story-telling. This means the texts are frequently inconsistent and sometimes illogical, but that multiplicity is of their very essence.

The Mabinogi Tetralogy by Evangeline Walton consists of four novels: Prince of Annwn (1974), The Children of Llyr (1971), The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and The Island of the Mighty (1970, first published under the title The Virgin and the Swine, 1936). This thesis locates the Tetralogy as a founding text of modern feminist fantasy fiction by analysing its rewriting of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. The analysis demonstrates how feminist debate, Welsh medieval literature and Celtic history combine to produce an important, if hitherto largely ignored, contribution to both fantasy fiction and women’s writing. Walton re-visions the Mabinogi as a tale of a fictional Celtic Wales’s transition from a mother-worshipping tribal society to the patriarchal, monotheistic power structure that governed the construction of the medieval text. The fantasy genre which Walton helped form enables the author to use magic as a symbol of female agency. The female characters in The Mabinogion Tetralogy with the strongest connection with the fictional deity referred to as the Mother – Rhiannon and Arianrhod – also have the highest degree of magical capabilities. Conversely, those who lose their connection with the Mother – Branwen, Penardim and Blodeuwedd – become subject to the control of their male counterparts. A feminist reading of the Tetralogy, which draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, reveals Walton’s series as a story about the cultural demise of Mother-worship and the institutionalisation of a patriarchal society that permanently re-defined gender roles. An examination of Walton’s source material elucidates how the author uses historical research to provide a realistic framework for the Tetralogy. By examining how Walton merges history with fantasy, and a medieval text with modern feminist thought, this thesis argues for a re-evaluation of Evangeline Walton as one of the most important developers of feminist fantasy fiction.

Questions concerning whether Shakespeare wrote for the stage or the page are a perennial issue in Shakespeare studies. Part of the problem rests on expectations of literature and theatre. These expectations are in fact voiced in Shakespearean drama itself, a drama that often articulates ideas concerning audience expectations. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, before Troilus visits Cressida he exclaims “expectation whirls me round”. Of all the plays in the Shakespearean canon, variants of “expect” feature most in this play. Troilus and Cressida itself scrutinises expectation of a story with famous classical, medieval and contemporary precedents, for a play to be performed by the leading theatre company of the day, and of a play by a playwright who was also conscious of his role as a published author. In the play, characters are frequently staged as spectators or audience members, raising issues relating to expectations, taste, value judgements, and viewpoints. Shakespeare responds to the plays of his contemporaries and, arguably, the political scene as well. The thesis reworks Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field to gauge the way that Shakespeare’s play engages with its theatrical and literary environment, and resituates Bourdieu’s work on taste and social distinction to consider how Shakespeare’s Trojan play responds to the contingencies of audience expectation. The first chapter considers critical expectations of the play from 1609 to the present; the second chapter focuses on the way Shakespeare stages patrons, performers and especially audience members; the third chapter reads the language of food and taste in the play in relation to developing early modern distinctions about literature and theatre; the final chapter provides a correction to readings of the play that have relied on the unique 1609 quarto preface to the play for understanding the work; this chapter argues that even the play, as staged, presents literary issues, and characters that show an awareness of print culture. Within its own early modern literary-theatrical field, Shakespeare’s play is far more about elitist tastes than it is elitist itself. Ultimately, the thesis argues that Troilus and Cressida marks Shakespeare’s growing confidence as a literary dramatist, not simply as an author whose plays were published as literature, but as a playwright who was capable of using theatre and audience expectation to re-evaluate literary tastes. Broadly positioned, the thesis provides a case study which revises critical expectations of this play in order to situate better Shakespeare’s contribution to early modern drama and literature.

For many critics, Hamlet’s famous dictum that ‘The time is out of joint’ is to be read as a social comment on Shakespeare’s own historical moment (Hamlet, 1.5.189). Generally thought to have been written around the same period as Hamlet, Julius Caesar contains a similar statement—‘it is a strange-disposèd time,’ Cicero remarks early on in the play (1.3.33). In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro suggests that, far from being coincidental, this recurring untimeliness in fact pervades the plays Shakespeare wrote at the turn of the seventeenth century—and most notably Henry V, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. For Shapiro, the many anachronisms that can be found in those plays point to a shared, objective core of historical reality (‘Shakespeare came of age when time itself was out of joint,’ the critic argues). The idea that the ultimate meaning of Shakespeare’s dramas is inextricably bound up with the late Elizabethan (or early Jacobean) moment of their production is a central tenet of historicist criticism. Largely due to the hegemonic status of new historicism in the field of Shakespeare studies in the last thirty years or so, this mode of criticism has become, to a great extent, normative. The present work takes issue with the systematic approach that consists in viewing Shakespeare’s plays as mere reflections of an overarching, ‘objective’ historical reality. Specifically, the thesis challenges the default historicist framework in which many of Shakespeare’s plays have been embedded. Thus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Henry V are here looked at with a large emphasis on the present of interpretation (as opposed to the authorial moment). A key thread of the thesis is the sense that the meaning of these plays is directly determined by the criticism. In other words, their meaning is essentially constructed in the present—a fundamentally unfixed and ever-moving category. Accordingly, alleged anachronisms are here viewed as by-products of this subjective present. Rather than expressing the objective historical ‘real’ of the dramas, such anachronisms are considered to testify to the intrusion of the viewer within the literary scene. This implies that the dramas are always already infected not so much by their author’s historical moment but by the eye of the critic itself. At the heart of the thesis is the sense that Shakespearean drama can be viewed through the grid of an aesthetics of untimeliness, which manifests itself in various ways. The coexistence of multiple presents of interpretation within the hermeneutic field of the plays is one of the ways in which such an aesthetics can be experienced. For instance, the colossal criticism of Hamlet guarantees that no one historical elucidation of the play can prevail. Alternatively, the diegetic content of the plays can also be used to support the idea of an untimely aesthetics. On many occasions, Shakespeare’s dramas comment on the inherent disjunction that alienates them from the historical past which they (supposedly) purport to stage—this is generally done through the medium of key metadramatic characters like the Chorus in Henry V. In either case, complete historical presence is negated. Thus, the thesis posits the impossibility of presence—or untimeliness—as a valid aesthetic category in view of Shakespeare’s dramas. Each individual chapter illustrates how the dramas can be said to aestheticise the intrinsically differential quality of literature. Ultimately, the thesis also emphasises how différance, to use Jacques Derrida’s celebrated coinage, lies at the heart not only of literature but of all forms of staged entertainment.

This thesis examines the actor-clown Will Kemp and his working relationship with Shakespeare. In particular, the thesis explores the theatrical and literary influence Kemp had on his roles for Shakespeare. In the chapters which follow, I investigate the traces of Kemp in some of the early editions of the plays in which he first appeared, before looking at more solid evidence of his continuing rapport with Shakespeare in the two plays which name Kemp in a role. In each case the focus is on the first entry of his clown figure in the plays examined and the interplay of performance and authorial script. The study reveals Kemp not only as an agent of performance for Shakespeare, but also as a catalyst of textual and eventually thematic change in the composition of his plays. Their professional association thus maps the cultural shift identified by a number of critics from a players’ to an authors’ theatre in the late sixteenth century. Over the last three decades, there have been two major revisionist theories about how Shakespeare wrote and disseminated his dramatic works and which acknowledge the dynamic and pragmatic processes leading to the eventual posthumous publication of the First Folio in 1623. One is the hypothesis, embedded most tangibly in The Oxford Shakespeare (1986), that the dramatist revised and reworked his plays primarily for performance. In the second, related but distinct theory laid out in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), Lukas Erne argued that Shakespeare also reworked certain plays specifically for publication. Both theories uphold the notion of authorial revision and both raise questions about how we are to understand the creative and commercial processes which lie behind the surface of Shakespeare’s printed plays. Neither of these overarching theories, however, perhaps pays sufficient attention to the daily realities of the Elizabethan stage, or to the relationship between the plays and the actors who performed them. In the thesis, I contend that Shakespeare’s plays emerged from a vibrant and collaborative theatrical context, articulated in the extant early printed editions, captured in their myriad textual variances and proved in a multitude of details. By scrutinizing these details, I argue, it is possible to see how the conditions of performance made for a dispersal of authorship in playwriting. Actors were not merely the vehicles for the play-texts they performed, but also a root source of written variation. Kemp’s presence undermines the simple binary view of Shakespeare as a theatrical or literary author around which most revisionary scholarship still tends to revolve and points, rather, to far more fluid processes of composition and adaptation in the plays on which he worked with Shakespeare. Indeed, in the stage direction ‘Enter Will Kemp’, where writing meets performance, a whole world of possible change to Shakespeare’s protean art is thus opened up.

This thesis elucidates some of the ways in which concerns about the status of ‘the book’ at the end of the nineteenth century both inform and are, in turn, informed by the representation of books in the period’s fiction. Focusing on the work of Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, M.R. James and E.M. Forster, I argue that their fiction places a discursive ‘idea’ of the book at the centre of a range of socio-political debates in which literary texts participate and which they also help to shape. In particular, I argue that the fragmentation of dominant nineteenth-century print-cultural institutions forms an important context for these authors’ preoccupation with the ability of the written word to refract ideas and experiences it purports accurately to reflect. In Wilde’s work, for example, books are simultaneously the facilitators of panoptic surveillance and sites upon which, by asserting their right to a wholly subjective interpretation of text, readers can resist such surveillance. Stevenson’s adventure fiction is underscored by similar anxieties about the insidious formative influence of fiction – anxieties that lead him to adopt a range of metafictional strategies, designed to draw the reader’s attention to the book as the product of a specific marketplace. James and Forster’s fiction goes further, using books as the symbol of a wider epistemological crisis that underscores turn-of-the-century reading practices. Ultimately all four writers reject, in different ways, a utilitarian conception of books as repositories for knowledge about the world, to which readers’ own subjectivities must become subordinate in order to ensure a ‘right’ reading. Instead, they foreshadow modern reader response theory, presenting books as sites upon which ‘ideas’ – the product of a dynamic interaction between text and reader – are continually shaped and reshaped as they circulate within the ideologically-charged materiality of a particular historical moment.

It has long been recognised that chastity is a problem in Book III of The Faerie Queene. The problem arises in part because the poem does not clearly define chastity but instead ambiguously praises it both as virginity and marital love. Behind the poem, too, lies the problem of Elizabeth with her Protestant virginity sometimes represented in Britomart,sometimes in Belphoebe, but also dangerously Catholic in its iconography. Indeed, wherever we turn in The Faerie Queene there are tangles of meaning. The contention of this thesis is that these problems are not merely surface writings, but stem from the Protestant breach with the Church Fathers and the long history of virginity. That history, I suggest in the main body of the thesis, has been broadly ignored by the critics who, by failing to grasp its theological complexity and development, have failed to produce an adequate platform from which to read the Protestant reformers and The Faerie Queene. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The Introduction examines recent critical discussions of virginity in Spenser, the Middle Ages and patristics, thus working backwards historically to the patristic writings themselves where I offer, in Part I, a detailed examination of the growth of the theological significance of virginity. Part II then looks at the reformers’ attacks on virginity, Luther and Erasmus especially, before turning to a discussion of the troubled meanings of virginity and chastity in Spenser’s epic poem.

While the popularity of the Arthurian myth among twentieth-century and contemporary women writers is well known, earlier female engagements with the legend have remained largely unexplored. By recovering a number of unexamined texts, this thesis aims to offer a more comprehensive account of the rise of British women writers’ interest in the Arthurian story between 1775 and 1845. Locating women’s engagements with Arthur in Gothic verse, travel writing, topographical poetry, and literary annuals, it argues that differences in the kinds of Arthurian texts available to women writers in the period led to the formation of a distinct female tradition in Arthurian writing. Works by Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Felicia Hemans are discussed alongside those by lesser-known writers such as Anne Bannerman, Anna Jane Vardill, and Louisa Stuart Costello. The initial chapter examines how Arthurian material was bowdlerised and recast for presentation to the female reader in the Romantic period. This provides the context for a new interpretation of various images of anxiety in early Arthurian texts by women as a symptom of their limited, or often second-hand, access to medieval Arthurian works. The following two chapters explore the prevalence of Arthurian material in women’s Gothic verse and travel writing respectively. The fourth chapter investigates the evolution of women’s responses to contemporary Arthurian scholarship, from the popular and satirical through to romance editions of their own. The final chapter turns to Arthurian poems by women in literary annuals, culminating in a comparison of women writers’ treatments of the Maid of Astolat tale and Tennyson’s own. Annual Arthuriana informs and anticipates many of the trends that come to dominate the Arthurian revival in the second half of the nineteenth century, which I identify in conclusion as the moment when the imaginative power of female Arthuriana becomes fully realised.

History is a problem for the history plays. The weight of ‘true’ history, of fact, puts pressure on the dramatic presentation of history. Not fiction and not fact, the plays occupy the interstitial space between these opposites, the space of drama. Their position between the binary opposites of fact and fiction allows the history plays to play with history. They view history as a problem to be solved, and the different ways in which each play approaches the problem of history gives us a glimpse of how they attempt to engage and deal with the problem of creating dramatic history. Each history play rewrites the plays that preceded it; the plays present ‘history’ as fluid and shifting as competing narratives and interpretations of the past come into conflict with each other, requiring the audience to act as historians in order to construct their own narrative of events. In this way the plays dramatise the process of remaking history. This can be seen in the relationship between the two parts of Henry IV, which restage the same narrative in a different emotional key, and the way that Henry IV’s retelling of the events of Richard II from his own perspective at the conclusion of 1 Henry IV forces the audience to re-evaluate the events of the earlier play, reinterpreting the dramatic past and imaginatively rewriting the play in light of the new perspective gained on events. The history plays thus create a new, dramatic history, a history without need for historical precedent. The plays deliberately signal their departure from ‘fact’ through anachronism, deviation from chronicle history and wholesale dramatic invention. In this sense the plays deliberately frustrate audience expectations; knowledge of chronicle history does not provide foreknowledge of what will happen onstage. History in the theatre is new and unpredictable, perhaps closer in spirit to the uncertainty of the historical moment rather than the reassuring textual narrative of the chronicles.

This thesis demonstrates how selected texts by J.G. Ballard—Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High‐Rise 1975)—and Kurt Vonnegut—Player Piano (1952), Slaughterhouse‐Five(1969) and Galápagos (1985)—can be considered in terms of theoretical stances derived from posthumanism. By analysing representations of the ‘human’ in relation to both the ‘machine’ and the ‘evolutionary human animal’, this thesis illustrates the emergence of the posthuman subject. In addition, by recognising the intersection between posthumanism and evolutionary theory, a wider project of this thesis involves demonstrating how the use of various theoretical approaches, from the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’, contributes to the formation of a ‘posthumanities’ approach to literature. J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut consistently present fictional scenarios in which the lines between ‘human’, ‘machine’ and ‘evolutionary animal’ are disrupted and blurred. Depictions assume various triangulations and configurations: from the protagonist Ballard’s auto‐eroticism, to the characters of High‐Rise conflating boundaries between the ‘human’ and the evolutionary animal that is conveyed as a constituent of human identity, as well as between the machinic environment and the human inhabitant. Further,comparable configurations characterise Vonnegut’s texts: Player Piano’s Paul Proteus’ war against the machine is superimposed by human affiliation with the machine, and the castaway characters of Galápagos are stranded by evolutionary forces that displace human authority and control to the uttermost limit. Each of these instances contributes to the effective intervention of posthumanist thinking when reading the texts. In addition, the utilisation of evolutionary concepts derived from contemporaneous publications circulating in the cultural and scientific sphere highlights the usefulness of acknowledging sources from beyond the remit of traditional literary studies’ methodologies when reading texts. The triangulation between literature, posthumanism and evolutionary theory results in a reconfigured methodological approach to fictional texts: the posthumanities.

Ernest Alfred Walter George Aris FZS, SGA, (1882-1963) was born in Islington and moved to Bradford where he spent his formative years and attained a diploma at the Bradford Technical College of Fine Art in 1900. Aris was a professionally trained commercial artist, author, and prolific illustrator of 170 children’s and natural history books. He also illustrated over 250 books for other authors, including Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, and May Byron, as well as contributing to a number of leading periodicals, magazines and newspapers. Aris was not a member of any of the active artists’ clubs or societies and was possibly shunned by his contemporaries and peers, who considered him unoriginal and an unscrupulous opportunist. Volume I of this thesis seeks to examine these suggestions and assesses why Aris’s name, despite his significant output, has remained relatively anonymous and why much of his legacy appears to have been unidentified, overlooked or forgotten. Chapter 1 discusses the historical influences of anthropomorphism on Aris’s style and those of his immediate predecessors. I have categorised Aris’s books into three periods for this appraisal and examined his technical attributes and qualities, together with his trademark features and characteristics, with the purpose of identifying what makes Aris’s creative design instantly recognisable and his output of illustration so distinctive. Chapter 2 discusses Aris’s relationship with the children’s author and illustrator, Beatrix Potter. Aris holds a unique place in history in that he was commissioned by Beatrix Potter to provide illustrations for her book and was the only artist with whom she seriously contemplated a professional working partnership (1916). However, Frederick Warne and Beatrix Potter later accused Aris of plagiarism and of exploiting any opportunity to achieve a commercial advantage. There is an argument to suggest that Aris’s affiliation with Potter and the allegations of plagiarism had a significant impact on his long term reputation and was possibly the reason for adopting the pseudonym Robin A. Hood. Chapter 3 examines the creative scope and features of Aris’s prestigious commercial partnerships. These start from the beginning of his professional career at the turn of the twentieth century, which coincided with the technical development and advancement of the colour picture postcard. Aris was at the forefront of this revolution, designing several series of comic and humorous postcards for leading printers that are now associated with and representative of a bygone era. In 1915 Aris was commissioned to design six tram posters, which were selected by Frank Pick at London Transport, as part of the National Collection of Posters. Pick single handedly revolutionised poster art in Britain and was responsible for establishing the national collection, where these posters now reside and have remained forgotten and out of sight for the last century. In the 1920s the trend for collecting novelty cigarette cards enabled Aris to produce a number of outstanding natural history designs as well as the infamous Frisky series, where his mischievous sense of humour is much evident in his trademark characters. Perhaps Aris’s final and greatest legacy, however, lies in the legendary Cococubs campaign for Bournville Children’s Cocoa, which was described as ‘one of the cleverest publicity schemes of the year.’1 The success of the advertising campaign meant demand outstripped supply of the product, as youngsters eagerly sought the ‘free toy in every tin’ promotional figurines that Aris designed (1934-1936). Volume II of this thesis comprises of a unique catalogue of Aris’s creative output over fifty years and spans a range of commercial fields of art. The catalogue is divided into four parts. Part one consists of Aris’s literary publications, with a detailed bibliographic record and image of the cover of each book that he wrote and illustrated under his own name and pseudonyms, as well as prominent books Aris illustrated for other eminent authors and a compendium list of books Aris illustrated for authors and other publications. Part two is a record of Aris’s commercial work, including the early series of pictorial postcards that he completed for leading quality publishers at the start of his career (1904-1909) and the six pictorial natural history posters, which Aris was commissioned to undertake for the London Transport tram system (1915). Part three comprises of Aris’s collectables and contains the four unique series of cigarette cards that Aris designed for leading tobacco manufacturers (issued 1929-1935). Part four includes a comprehensive description of each of the limited editions and subtle colour variants of the Cococub lead figurines inserted into Bournville Children’s Cocoa (1934-1936). The aim of the thesis is to justify why I believe Aris deserves further merit for his contribution within the field of illustration and commercial artwork. I have sought to highlight the factors that make his contribution and the success of his creative designs within these different fields so significant. 1 The Grocery and the Provision Merchant Journal, November 1934, p. 276.

This is a study of the multiple constructions and appropriations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s paternitas of the English literary canon. It examines the evidence from the compilatio and ordinatio of fifteenth-century manuscript anthologies containing the poet’s works, and it interrogates the social conditions of production of these codices, as well as the ideology informing their compositional and paratextual programmes. Conceptually, my thesis is underpinned by a broad engagement with manuscript studies, as the codices to which I attend become objects of bibliographical and codicological examination, while being scrutinised through a post-structuralist framework. This theoretical approach, which comprises Michel Foucault’s revisions o f historiography and the contiguous debates on translation practices and queer theories, allows me to read critically the socio-cultural situations which inform the plural incarnations and appropriations of Chaucer's paternal authority. My study is structured in four chapters. I begin in Chapter I by engaging with Thomas Hoccleve's literary and iconographic mythopoeia o f Chaucer who is positioned as the clerical and sober fons et origo of English vemacularity. In Chapter III interrogate the appropriations of this initial paradigm of paternal authorship and I demonstrate how fifteenth-century manuscript collections fabricate Chaucer as a courtly and lyrical Father whose work is validated by his affiliations to and reproduction of dominant aristocratic literary practices. Chapter III situates these hegemonic modes of composition and mise-en-page in the context of French manuscript culture with which Chaucer's patemality of the English canon is inextricably intertwined. These associations with the ‘master’ culture, however, disperse the Father's authority in an intervemacular site of linguistic and cultural negotiations. Similarly, Chapter IV engages with the displacement of Chaucer's paternitas in the material space of the codex, as the glossarial apparatus of the manuscript copies of his works articulates voices of dissent. No longer the stable patriarch constructed by Hoccleve, Chaucer occupies a fluid and permeable space of authority that can be inhabited by a polyvocality of hermeneutic voices and is, therefore, susceptible to perpetual acts of co-option.

Nineteenth-century texts that focus on Gypsies construct a figure who ought to be locatable in a racial hierarchy, in a class system, and along gender lines. When read psychoanalytically, however, the texts reveal signs of having repressed uncertainty about where such boundaries may be drawn and what they signify. The figure of the Gypsy, existing literally and metaphorically on the verges of society, disrupts the stable locations of identity fenced off by discourse even as texts hope to offer the Gypsy as an example of how one may categorise others. Chapter One studies the figure of the Gypsy in the work of Walter Scott (1771–1832) and its relationship to that of a later writer, George Borrow (1803–1881). Chapter Two concentrates on the work of the Romany Ryes, examining the discursive implications of their impulse to conserve Gypsy culture in the face of its perceived annihilation. Chapter Three explores the construction of the Gypsy between engraved image and written text in the 'Illustrated London News', reading the ways in which the two forms work together on the page. Chapter Four looks at George Eliot's 'The Spanish Gypsy' (1868) and 'Daniel Deronda' (1876) to examine the differences in the representation of a male Jew and female Gypsy in her work. The final chapter discusses the pervasive stereotype of Gypsies kidnapping children in the context of children's literature. The readings performed throughout the thesis are underpinned by a deconstructive psychoanalysis (drawing on Jacques Derrida's rethinking of the work of Sigmund Freud), which not only lends the project a methodology but demands an exploration of the ethics and responsibilities of reading and writing now, in the past, and for the future The texts are thus under analysis and are seen to preserve traces of the nineteenth-century discourses in which they are woven (and which they also weave). Such conservation also always institutes a difference, however, and the attempted repression, silencing, banishment and fetishization of all the uncontained features of the figure of the Gypsy do not mean that the text has the Gypsy under control all of these things come back to haunt it.