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Milton’s History of Britain in its historical context
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe prologue studies the Tory publication of Milton's Character of the Long Parliament (1681). It argues that the provenance of this tract is best explained if Milton did in fact attempt to include the Digression in his History of Britain. Further ambiguities in Milton's early reputation are discussed in a review of the History's reception. -
Representations of Elizabeth I
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis looks at three themes in representations of the Queen in Elizabethan literature. They are: the problem of representing a female ruler; the relation between the cult of Elizabeth and the cult of the Virgin Mary; and representations of Elizabeth as Cynthia, the moon-goddess. These topics are seen as focal points for problematic issues in panegyric. -
Marriage and the position of women, as presented by some of the early Victorian novelists
Posted on April 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe subject of this thesis is the unusual nature, in the presentation of courtship and marriage, of Trollope's depiction of women as compared with that of other novelists of the first part of the Victorian age. -
Irish journalists and litterateurs in late Victorian London, c. 1870-1910
Posted on April 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe above thesis is an examination of nineteenth century Irish literary emigration to London, with particular reference to the 1880s and 1890s. It begins with an exploration of the political, social, economic and cultural reasons, both in Ireland and Britain, why Irish writers, Catholic and Protestant, flocked to London, and especially Fleet Street, during this period. -
“The lying’st knave in Christendom”: The Development of Disability in the False Miracle of St. Alban’s
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsWhat none of these studies have examined, however, is the performance of disability at the center of the St. Alban's episode. -
The Treatment of Disability in 19th and Early 20th Century Children’s Literature
Posted on March 31, 2013 | No CommentsIn many books, disability, where it occurs, and its cure are associated with character. Cure may result directly from a healthier attitude to life, often implying a voluntary relinquishment of the disabled role. -
The First French and English Translations of Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsAn investigation of the editions of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is an exciting subject in itself, but a comparison of the first French and English translations throws remarkable light upon the parallel developments of the two countries in Renaissance literary history. -
Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England and Spain
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsTrue to his didactic interests, Dickens’ idea was to allow not only his son to learn the history of his country in the way that his own father wanted him to know it, but to convey a particular authoritative viewpoint as to how English youths should learn the history of their country, that is, with an England-centred bias. Literary criticism has not been kind with Dickens’s incursion into children’s and youngster’s historiography and has not therefore been too generous in terms of appraisal. -
Dark Side of the Moon: Dickens and the Supernatural
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsDickens’s initiation into the genre of supernatural fiction may be attributed to his nanny Mary Weller about whom Dickens says ‘Her name was Mary though she had none on me’. -
The Singing ‘Vice’: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsAmidst non-textuality and the resulting shortage of extant scores to serve as documentation of musical activity, even the most restrained speculative approach still leads to the conclusion that music and musicians were crucial both to the emergence of the interlude as a genre of household entertainment and in the actual performance of interludes. -
John Dee, King Arthur, and the Conquest of the Arctic
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsSince neither of the most significant early Arthurian pseudo-histories go so far as to place Arthur in Greenland, America, or the Arctic—although Geoffrey's account prefigures such claims by extending Arthur's conquests to the farthest known northern and western limits of European civilization—we must therefore turn to Dee's own manuscripts for some illumination as to where this idea came from and how it developed. -
Making Darkness Visible Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsLike another remarkable Victorian visual apparatus, the camera, we might think of Holmes (and the "sharp-eyed" detectives he represents) as the literary embodiment of the elaborate network of visual technologies that revolutionized the art of seeing in the nineteenth century. -
“Tell me a story, dear, that is not true”: Love, Historicity, and Transience in A. Mary F. Robinson’s An Italian Garden
Posted on March 8, 2013 | No CommentsThrough a poetic voice compelled to recognize that individual desire is often not reciprocated and that love entails great risk that is itself ennobling, Robinson explores the nature of love that is selfless in that one gives oneself to another, yet selfish in that one comes to need a totality of love not possible in a finite context. Paradoxically, then, love evokes both pleasure and pain. -
Reassessing Gilbert and Gubar: Women, Creativity, and Hopkins
Posted on March 5, 2013 | No CommentsGilbert and Gubar’s identification of Hopkins with Victorian sexism has undoubtedly influenced Hopkins studies. Since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, several Hopkins critics have speculated that the poet’s wish for ‘masterly execution’ appears to betray his own fear of becoming unmanly or effeminate in his art and life. -
My Secret Life and the Sexual Economy of Fin-de-Siècle England
Posted on March 4, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough in 1969 the memoirs were regarded as an obscene publication, they can be read as an important document of sexual history and will be treated as such in this paper. In doing so, it engages with but challenges earlier readings of My Secret Life. -
Re-orienting Victorian Studies: A European Perspective
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsAt the same time, however, the study of the relationship between the world of Victorian literature and culture and the context of Continental Europe remains firmly Anglocentric, or to be more precise Britocentric: both Continental Victorianists and Continent-conscious Anglophone critics tend to think about the relationship between Victorian Britain and Europe very much from within the context of English literary studies, relating their discoveries and analyses back to the conceptual frame of reference defined firmly in terms of the literary and cultural context of the British Isles, -
All Shut Up: Carlyle and the Pursuit of Domestic Silence
Posted on February 26, 2013 | No CommentsThese two opposing visions of the home – as a form of super secure refuge, and as a mode of dizzying flux and tumult – were contained, however uncomfortably, within the same four walls. -
The Mysterious Miss Austen
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsFor the past two centuries, historians and literary scholars have attempted to solve the mystery that is Jane Austen’s life. How did a woman from a small village in Hampshire come to write six of the most beloved novels in the English language? -
Trust your senses? An Introduction to the Victorian Sensorium
Posted on February 14, 2013 | No CommentsIt is not surprising to find such a wide divergence of opinion on the value and veracity of sensory experience in the nineteenth century. In an era of rapid industrialization, urbanization and increasing democratization, the Victorian sensorium was under assault as never before. -
Sensate Detection in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
Posted on February 14, 2013 | No CommentsMore importantly, however, I want to demonstrate through a close reading of The Law and the Lady how this novel brings the two genres into such close alignment that emotion and imagination, sensate subjective categories, rather than objective analysis and facts, become the unlikely investigative tools by which any particular case is solved. -
Sexuality in Jude the Obscure and the Sexuality of the Victorian Era
Posted on February 13, 2013 | No CommentsSexuality has an important role to play in one’s life. Sexual feelings should be given vent to. This paper draws a comparison between the sexuality of the Victorian era and the sexuality of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. -
Romeo and the Apothecary
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsSince the apothecary in the source is no more than a plot device, we might wonder why Shakespeare devotes so much space to him if he is only such a device in the play as well. -
Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsIn the decades after the path-breaking work of Lillian Faderman and Caroll Smith- Rosenberg, critical energy was largely directed to questions of the compatibility of female romantic friendship with marriage and the contested erotic content of inter- female intimacy. -
Boys’ Adventure Magazines and the Discourse of Adventure, 1860-1885
Posted on February 7, 2013 | No CommentsRecent cultural critics have cited adventure magazines as tools—of a ruling class frightened of the increasingly powerful underclasses; or of the Imperial establishment; or of a middle class dead set on imposing its narrow racist, patriotic, Evangelical, superior, manly, anti-virtually-everything-not-it attitude on impressionable working- and lower middle-class boys. -
Taste, Appreciation and the Study of Literature: F.D. Maurice, R.G. Moulton and the Extramural Effect
Posted on February 6, 2013 | No CommentsAspects of what might be termed the pre-history of extramural literary education have been traced by Franklin Court in the lectures delivered by Adam Smith and Hugh Blair at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the eighteenth century. -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
Preserving Knowledge Through Popular Victorian Periodicals: An Examination of The Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News, 1842–1843
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis study is based upon a detailed empirical study of every weekly issue of both of these periodicals for a period of twelve months between May 1842 and May 1843. -
Pride and Prejudice celebrates 200th anniversary
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No Comments'In retrospect, we can see that Pride and Prejudice marks a beginning for the modern novel, with its domestic focus, its slight plot, and in its flawed heroine, the funny and loyal, opinionated and brave Elizabeth Bennet, a distinct personality.' -
The house is hers, the soul is but a tenant’: Material Self-Fashioning and Revenge Tragedy
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsPlaying dead, however, is not merely a staging issue, though performance of a single character in two simultaneous but separate locations is a legitimate concern, both metaphysical and staging, since playing dead also poses eschatological and ontological challenges to neoplatonism, stoicism, and Christian theology, frameworks within which many Jacobean and revenge plays are conceived. -
‘An honest dog yet’: Performing The Witch of Edmonton
Posted on January 24, 2013 | No CommentsAt the climax of Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s 1621 tragedy The Witch of Edmonton, the devil treats a young morris dancer named Cuddy Banks to a discourse on the relationship between the everyday world in which Cuddy lives and the demonic realm over which he himself reigns. -
The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th-Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe epistemology behind this research follows from my understanding of a novel not as a literary genre, but rather as a ‘cultural form’ in Raymond Williams’ cul- tural-materialist sense (Williams, 1997), according to which cultural production (in order to be properly understood) can be studied only in relation to its specific societal and historical frameworks. -
The Purgation Of The Hero In Shakespearean Tragedy
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsIn each play, when the hero has seen the failure of his subjective passion, the nature of the universal Good, upon which all goods, natural and human depend, begins to appear. -
Victorian Christmas
Posted on December 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe Victorian era has long been associated with an idealized vision of Christmas. Where did this modern notion originate? -
Lessons from history: asylum patients’ Christmas experience
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhile it may be claimed that contemporary practice offers drug treatments and a wide range of therapeutic interventions unimaginable 150 years ago, it could also be argued that for all the advances in care and treatment the quality of life that patients experienced in the 19th century was, to some extent, superior. -
Social status and literacy in north-east England, 1560-1630
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsExamination of the surviving depositions from our ecclesiastical jurisdictions reveal something of the pattern of illiteracy in England from the age of Elizabeth to the end of the Stuart era. -
A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital
Posted on December 22, 2012 | No CommentsWhat would a post-Victorian Christmas look like after capitalism? Is it even possible, or desirable, to exorcise our Victorian Christmas ghosts? -
Spectacular Sympathy Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
Posted on December 21, 2012 | No CommentsA Christmas Carol (1843) is arguably Dickens's most visually evocative text. In its detailed attention to and elaboration of surfaces, its reliance on contrasts between darkness and light, its construction as a series of scenes (a structure reproduced in the images the spirits exhibit to Scrooge), and particularly its engagement with a dynamic of spectatorial desire... -
Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsThat’s a glimpse of the sort of evidence I’ll canvass in this book. I hope to conjure up a social world full of ornery, funny, sickening, and lethal controversies about gender, patriarchy, misogyny, public and private, and more. -
Demonology, Neurology, and Medicine in Edwardian Britain
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe victory of psychiatry over demonology is a long-familiar theme in the history of medicine. -
Shakespeare’s Richard II: Machiavelli for the Good of England
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe name Machiavelli has negative connotations, and this way of thinking is not new. Throughout Europe, in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, Machiavellianism was associated with unscrupulous abuse of power, and Machiavellian methods were seen as immoral and evil. -
The Sad Death of a King: The Legacy of Richard the Second
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will examine the manner in which Shakespeare drew upon existing sources material to depict a king whose inherent character flaws made him unworthy of his crown. -
Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray
Posted on December 7, 2012 | No CommentsThe case of Thackeray is different, more interesting, and ultimately more suggestive. Here is an artist who developed as caricaturist-illustrator and novelist simultaneously. -
Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves
Posted on November 27, 2012 | No CommentsThree large questions concern me here: (1) What inspired all this looking at looking? (2) How were Victorians coming to terms with their increasing interest in watching their own watching? (3) What consequences were brought about by the rationales Victorian viewers devised to justify a happy spectatorship and to come to terms with the unreliability of vision? -
Othello’s Alienation
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough I agree broadly with the arguments of Jones and Hunter, it seems to me important to appreciate the particularityof Shakespeare'sportrait and its resistance both to negative stereo- typing and abstractuniversalizing. There is little question that in choosing Othello for his protagonist Shakespearesought to create a realistic portrait of a Moor. -
Hot Holiday Reads!
Posted on November 23, 2012 | No CommentsGreat reads & holiday ideas! -
A Special Reference to the Correspondence between England and the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt 1585-1587 ; Diplomatic Communication in the Early Modern Europe
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsA significant part of this Leicesterian correspondence has been preserved to our days, and it offers an excellent case study of the diplomatic communication in the Early Modern times. The original letters are located in the various archives of the Netherlands, Great Britain and France. In addition, many of them are printed in collections. By examining this correspondence, it is perhaps possible to trace the broader conventions of communication in the Early Modern Europe. -
Shakespeare’s Use of the Supernatural
Posted on October 31, 2012 | No CommentsTherefore, this thesis aims to approach this issue from a different perspective and will deal with the concept of the Supernatural only in three selected plays of William Shakespeare and will present a comparison with three pieces of drama by different authors. -
Victorian perspectives on the supernatural: The imaginary versus the real in two Brontë novels
Posted on October 31, 2012 | No CommentsVillette and Wuthering Heights exhibit a striking similarity: both rely on the gothic tradition (more specifically, on one of its elements, the supernatural) to evoke psychological realism. -
Some Bloody good reads for Halloween!
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsSome Bloody good reads for Halloween! -
Women in The Book Of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England
Posted on October 24, 2012 | No CommentsFoxe had made the decison to publish his work on the martyrs and the history of the Christian church in English, thus providing him with a much larger audience. As a good humanist, he had first considered Latin (his earliest work on the martyrs, written during his exile, was in Latin) but he felt the English people had the best claim on this information, and it could only reach them in the vernacular.