Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, and Hanif Kureishi are all canonical authors whose fictions are widely believed to reflect the cultural and political state of a nation that is post-war, post-imperial and post-modern. While ...

Erasmus Darwin’s task as a Deistic Dissenter poet who wished to promote science education to a mixed audience was complex. There was mainstream concern over what Deists and Dissenters actually believed about God, their ...

What did William Blake mean when he threatened the world with a “Bible of Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)? A critical survey of the history of scholarship on the topic reveals a variety of unsupported Bible ...

I believe that disguise reveals that medieval identities were fluid and unfixed, but also subject to patriarchal and authoritarian attempts to stabilize them. In these romance traditions, disguise exposes at once the ...

In this dissertation, I argue that there is a tendency in postcolonial studies to equate injustice with a lack of knowledge. The political task for postcolonial studies is then framed in pedagogical terms: to provide the ...

This dissertation analyzes the construction of discursive communities amongst authors, editors, and readers of early modern prose fiction through language, material texts, and reader response. It analyzes Thomas More’s ...

Imagining Public Education in Early Modern England argues that the Tudor vernacular logic and rhetoric manuals participate in the development of early modern publicity. Although the seventeen extant manuals have a diverse ...

From W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, modernists have frequently attested to the anxiety permeating members of modern civilisation. While critics have treated anxiety as ...

This dissertation examines the corpse as an object in and of American hardboiled detective fiction written between 1920 and 1950. I deploy several theoretical frames, including narratology, body-as-text theory, object ...