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Item Controlled Access “The Sunlit Prison of the American Dream”: Representing Carcerality in Contemporary American FictionPsilopoulou, AikateriniThis thesis argues that contemporary American literary authors are reconfiguring the genre of prison writing to better represent and encompass the ever-extending reach of the carceral State in the twenty-first century. This new form of prison writing can be better understood as carceral writing, as its focus extends beyond the prison cell, and aligns with the newly established field of carceral studies, to which this thesis aims to contribute. Taking as its starting point Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness (2010), this thesis explores how contemporary authors and artists utilize the space and iconography of the criminal justice system to expound on carcerality’s increasing reach beyond the physical prison in the form of surveillance, poverty, and exploitation under late-stage capitalism. My study diverges from typical discussions of carceral writing in that the authors examined have not been incarcerated but recognize carcerality as an issue that impacts our sociopolitical reality and the literary tradition. Consequently, this study questions the relationship between writing – typically a form of free expression – and the repressive context of the carceral State and what can be realized from this productive tension. Each chapter explores a different dimension of the contemporary US carceral experience and how the novel, as a form, represents the carceral turn. I begin with an analysis of the roots of carcerality in slavery through selected works by Jesmyn Ward and Colson Whitehead, exploring how the genre of the slave narrative was shaped by its historical context and how it has influenced contemporary writing about prisons. I then discuss the impact of incarceration on family units, as seen in Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage (2018) which engages in dialogue with James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). I examine how this theme is also treated in film through Garrett Bradley’s documentary Time (2020). I then shift to examine the experience of incarcerated women, focusing on Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (2018) and the ethics of representation and testimony in these works of fiction that are inspired by true stories. The final chapter analyses at the works of Sergio De La Pava, whose writing critiques carcerality through experimental narrative techniques that broaden the artistic possibilities of prison writing. These authors are paving the way for a new form of carceral writing that is socially conscious, while maintaining a sense of artistic integrity, utilizing past forms and genres to better represent and elucidate our current moment.Item Embargo ‘They all looked such good meat’: Cannibal Metaphors in Early Twentieth Century English FictionAli, SarahThis project examines cannibal metaphors in early twentieth-century English fiction, exploring how one of the most powerfully enduring colonial tropes about the savage Other seeped into the literary imagination of English-language authors and informed much of their imagery. I read cannibalism as a complicated trope: as both a symptom of imperial racism and as an unstable configuration that boomerangs back on the British and works to undermine firm oppositions between coloniser and colonised. This thesis goes further by investigating the figure of metaphor itself, and examining how it might lend itself to undermining received structures of belief or ethical principle. The project is buttressed by postcolonial theory, and my methodology draws on applied linguistic analysis, giving close attention to lexical choice. Chapter One, ‘Cannibalism in Travel Writing’, reads representations of cannibalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, analysing travelogues by David Livingstone, Henry M. Stanley, and Robert Louis Stevenson. While cannibalism in their writing is a process of othering, it is not a unidirectional process and rather rests on the unspoken awareness of the cannibal-in-oneself. Chapter Two, ‘Cannibalism in Imperial Fiction’, looks at fiction by H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad. Cannibalism in these tales makes a textual intervention to consolidate stories of fictional protagonists, thus serving as an imaginative spur to European heroism. Chapter Three, ‘Cannibal Metaphors in D. H. Lawrence’, explores anthropophagic imagery and its socio-political and cultural import in Lawrence’s fiction. Lawrence appropriates this colonial stereotype about the racialised Other and utilises it in calculated cannibal metaphors to subvert the pillars on which English identity rested: traditional sexual roles, Christianity, colonial power, class system, and capitalist industrialised modernity. Chapter Four, ‘Metaphors of Consumption in Virginia Woolf and Mulk Raj Anand’, asks whether the idea of critique from within the Empire, in the form of cannibal metaphors, precludes authors who did not write from the official British subject position, such as women or colonised subjects. In Woolf and Anand, I argue, cannibal metaphors cast a unique light on both oppression and resistance. In sum, the project explores the ‘domestication’ of the cannibal trope, entailing its redeployment from colonial ‘calumny’ to internalised acknowledgment of, or satire on, the ‘savage’ heart of civilisation. This thesis reads English fiction in the early twentieth century through the narrative and structural lens of cannibalism; I theorise cannibalism as a rich interpretive device and a functional metaphor.Item Embargo Being aesthetic after the American midcentury: Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John AshberyBrewis, Oliver‘What else is there’, John Ashbery asked Kenneth Koch in 1965, ‘besides matters of taste?’ This thesis seeks to recover a neglected point of encounter between poetry and philosophy in postwar modernity: the crucial yet previously unexplored conjunction between first-generation New York poetry and philosophical aesthetics. Despite an increasing critical emphasis on the intellectual dimensions of New York School writing, its members are still regarded as the least philosophically-inclined of authors: Frank O’Hara’s famous description of lyric composition as ‘just go[ing] on your nerve’ remains emblematic of the poets’ apparently allergic resistance to formal philosophical analysis. Taking up three exemplary figures – Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery – this thesis proposes a new reading of their work and its significance. Far from rejecting the concerns of aesthetic philosophy, the poets’ shared interest in questions of taste enabled them to engineer forms of lyric experience that are as thoughtful as they are exciting, liberating aesthetic inquiry from the constraints of philosophical prose. Not only does their writing enable new kinds of aesthetic encounter, but also new kinds of thinking about our experiences of art – forms of thought that are tied so intimately to the act of reading that they are inextricable from its pains and pleasures. In three extended chapters, I use materials that are either little-explored or entirely unknown – from O’Hara’s Harvard notebook to Guest’s uncollected poems – to map each poet’s early engagement with the questions and tensions of philosophical aesthetics, tracking these concerns into the texture of their lyric address. The first chapter examines O’Hara’s undergraduate engagement with Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1941), showing how her concern with meaning and symbolism inflects his early poetic experimentation. Taking up Langer’s concern with musical aesthetics, O’Hara creates forms of reading that aspire to the condition of music: aesthetic reflection becomes reinvented as a series of effervescent and time-bound moments of pleasure, as uncapturable in the display-cabinet of discursive language as music itself. Where O’Hara’s lyric forms aspire to brevity, Guest’s poetic address invites the longue durée of history into the space of reading. My second chapter investigates Guest’s early engagement with Partisan Review, the journal in which her first poem was published, and for which she acted as poetry editor from 1955 to 1958. Liberating Partisan’s emphasis on the historical dimensions of aesthetic experience from the journal’s critical prose, Guest began to develop lyric forms in which aesthetic reflection is reunited with the historical conditions that make it possible. Her 1968 breakthrough volume The Blue Stairs contaminates our post-Enlightenment experience of art with the horrors of the Vietnam war, presenting an implicit rebuke to O’Hara’s ahistorical poetics. A third chapter shows John Ashbery grappling with the intellectual and social anxieties latent in judgements of taste, anxieties that surface in his neglected newspaper journalism of the 1960s. Where his famously intractable volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) seeks to dismantle the possibility of aesthetic judgement, crowding it out with an array of excremental and discomfortingly bodily affects, Ashbery’s breakthrough long poem ‘The Skaters’ (1964) harnesses the uncertainty of aesthetic reflection to conduct a deft inquiry into the uncertainty of life itself: through his structuring allusion to Frederick Ashton’s 1938 ballet Les Patineurs, Ashbery reworks the tensions of Kantian aesthetics into a responsive, affectively resonant lyric experience of subjective fragility. An exploratory coda suggests that the poets’ desire to invite aesthetic reflection into the moment of poetic reading is responsible for one of the most remarkable aspects of their lyrics: their ability to dismantle the opposition between aesthetic delight and serious thought, sensuous immediacy and abstract cognition. In doing so, the poets enable their work to survive beyond the quotidian minutiae and particulars of reference which often make up their texture – and to become, as O’Hara wrote of death in 1958, ‘suddenly inhabited by you without permission’.Item Embargo In the Midst of the Spectacular: Performance, Media, and Criticism in Frank O’HaraBosman, Izaak WilliamThis thesis repositions Frank O’Hara as a writer whose sustained engagement with different media forms reveals a neglected chapter in the history of thinking about media. Scholars of O’Hara typically discuss his relationship to media in terms of poetry and painting, while those who do consider his writings on other media—particularly the performing arts—often do so by way of analogy, describing his work as ‘theatrical’, ‘cinematic’, or as emulating the kinaesthetics of dance. This overwhelming focus on the metaphorical affinities between O’Hara’s poetry and the arts has, I argue, ultimately led scholars to overlook the key role that his detailed critical engagement with these mediums played in shaping his aesthetics. In this study, I address this oversight by considering the generative relationship O’Hara fostered between his writing and a host of performance media, arguing that it was these media that enabled him to see past the ‘high-low’ art dichotomy and explore the intersections between traditional and emerging cultural forms. Situating O’Hara between what scholars describe as the first media age and the later age of mediatization, I argue that his writing on performance acts as an intermediary between two opposing conceptions of the arts, reconciling a modernist formalism with a burgeoning multimedia convergence culture. The first of its kind to consider O’Hara’s relationship to a variety of performance contexts, this study uncovers a sense of O’Hara as a writer who sought to reimagine the relationship between these media forms. I begin by arguing that the persistent tendency to use ‘theatricality’ as a metaphor for O’Hara’s lyric self has led critics to miss the centrality of his engagement with actual theatre. Developing a more thoroughly historicized account of his ‘theatricality’, I consider how his early participation in Harvard’s theatre scene, as well as his interest in the medium of opera, actively shaped his understanding of ‘the self’ as being produced through the act of roleplaying. Further expanding this discourse of intermedial exchange, my second chapter challenges the long-standing assumption that O’Hara’s writings on film are little more than a quasi-camp celebration of popular culture. Instead, I argue that film for O’Hara is less an object of naïve enthusiasm or appropriation than a critical interlocutor, one that sheds light on the United States’ cultural, political, and historical formations over time. Finally, in my third chapter, I deepen the engagement with the problem of medium-specificity by considering O’Hara’s role as a poet-critic. Examining his writings on the New York City Ballet choreographer George Balanchine, I argue that O’Hara uses poetry as a critical lens, complicating the formalist rhetoric surrounding Balanchine’s work by opening it up to new imaginative horizons. It is this attention to the relationship between the arts which, I claim, ultimately makes O’Hara a preeminent critic of the mid-century medium.Item Controlled Access ‘To Recover Art to the Florentine Original’: William Blake’s Reception of MichelangeloMarks, Rebecca; Marks, Rebecca [0000-0003-2313-2092]This thesis is an examination of William Blake’s reception of Michelangelo, focusing primarily on visual works and art criticism. I argue, firstly, that by understanding Michelangelo’s reception in London across Blake’s lifetime we can better contextualise the rise in interest in Italian culture which occurred in Britain in the latter-eighteenth century. Secondly, I contend that Blake’s lifelong interest in Michelangelo offers a novel way of contextualising Blake within the fine arts culture of his period. Using Michelangelo as a nexus, I thus categorise Blake as one of a group of English school artists (including Fuseli, Barry, and Flaxman) who were all looking to Michelangelo as a model for Romantic artistic ideals (such as affect, genius, and the sublime). This thesis fills a gap in Blake scholarship. There has been no examination of Blake’s ideological commitment to the Italian Renaissance, nor has there been any sustained visual analyses of his artistic inheritances from Michelangelo (E 698). Moreover, because Blake never visited Italy, his understanding of Michelangelo would have been almost entirely amassed from mediated materials. Thus, another contribution here is a collation of materials relating to Michelangelo which would have been available in London in the eighteenth century. The first two chapters examine the literary and print cultures through which Blake encountered Michelangelo’s works. Chapter one looks at early modern and eighteenth-century Anglophone art criticism, arguing for a shift in Michelangelo’s reputation, away from moderate Neoclassical ideals and towards a Romantic celebration of genius and emotional intensity. Chapter two explores the role of reproductive engravings in shaping Blake’s understanding of the Renaissance, and shows how the graphic linearity of sixteenth-century prints would have profoundly influenced Blake’s style and philosophy of art. Chapters three, four, and five are case studies. Chapter three addresses a series of drawings by Blake after reproductions of the Sistine Chapel which I term his ‘Sistine Studies’ (c. 1770–90). I contend that these works represent Blake’s amassing of visual library of affective archetypes from Michelangelo. I show how Blake returns to these poses and gestures on numerous occasions in his later work, and situate these Studies alongside comparable drawings by Blake’s contemporaries. Chapter four addresses the impact of the historic association of Michelangelo with the Hellenistic statue, the Belvedere Torso, on Blake. I collate four quotations of the Torso in his works (Blake’s ‘Blasphemer Series’, c. 1800–20) and argue the physical characteristics of the Torso (the fragmented body and the serpentine line) visibly inform Blake’s development of a Michelangelesque figural style. The final chapter reframes Blake’s lost Last Judgement, and its earlier designs (c. 1805–27), as history painting. I interpret Blake’s Last Judgement as a public-facing, didactic, narrative work in the tradition of the Renaissance painters, made with the ideological purpose of making ‘England like Italy’ (E 768).Item Embargo Parallel Texts: Contemporary Women’s Experimental Art Writing in North American Exhibition Catalogues from the 1970s to the PresentGomis Watson, Emma-JoanaExperimental writing can inhabit liminal spaces in-between genres and disciplines as it strives to rupture normative rhetorical patterns by playing with form and pushing language beyond its expected conventions. When this mode of writing is brought to bear upon an art object, the resultant text often reads as a type of splintered, improper criticism (in its disregard for conventions and often satirical take on art criticism), an elaborate exercise in ekphrasis, or an entirely new contextualization of the art object embedded within playfully anarchic and hybrid prose. This thesis focuses on pieces of writing produced by four women in the United States and Canada from the 1970s to the present which were initially published in exhibition catalogues and extend the worlds of the art objects they are in conversation with. It is structured chronologically, focusing on the writing of Lucy Lippard in the 1970s, moving to Lynne Tillman’s in the 1980s, followed by Lisa Robertson’s in the 1990s, and ending with Renee Gladman’s in the 2000s. These four writers, while very different in writing styles and background — with Lippard primarily considered an art critic, Tillman a fiction writer, and Robertson and Gladman regarded as poets — all share a similar approach when it comes to producing a piece for an exhibition catalogue. Writing in a mode of what Lisa Robertson calls ‘the parallel text’ or what Lynne Tillman (via Craig Owens) calls writing ‘alongside’ rather than ‘about’ art, they allude to the artwork without making direct reference to it in the text, avoiding naming it explicitly. Through close readings and historical research, I analyse the different rhetorical moves of these four writers as a way of tracing a genealogy of contemporary women’s art writing and the development of the form of ‘the parallel text’. Following a tradition of the avant-garde, these experimental texts gesture beyond conventional structures and expand through politically activist and feminist thinking. They serve as fulcrums to investigate critical and creative architectures that revel in the gap between visual art object and text. They question the ways in which we talk and write about art.Item Embargo Bunting in Persia: A Post-War Poetics of SimultaneityAbbas, Reem; Abbas, Reem Mundher AzizBUNTING IN PERSIA argues that Basil Bunting refined his post-war poetics primarily through his translations from Persian, which facilitated the development of what I call his poetics of simultaneity. My first chapter examines Bunting’s early translational praxis by reading his first translation from Manūchehrī Dāmghānī (c. 11th) against another one from the same poet written a decade later. In doing so, I draw out Bunting’s version of a Poundian poetics of translation and expose a lie surrounding the Manūchehrī translations that seems to have gone unnoticed by other critics. This chapter establishes the foundational role translation played in Bunting’s nascent formal poetic and generic ambiguity. Chapter Two turns to one of Bunting’s understudied masterpieces, Ode 36 (1949). I show how this ekphrastic poem about Isfahan’s Masjed-e Jame’ mobilizes architectural, art-historical, and urban modes of seeing to transform the poem into a pluralistic and palimpsestic object in its own right. I attend to the personal correspondence of this time to demonstrate their valence as what I call ‘draft work’ — a coinage that draws on Bunting’s own term for his translations, ‘overdrafts’. I contend that Bunting’s epistolary writing becomes ‘draft work’ when he uses them to work through an aesthetic principle, poetic schema, and drafting poems. Given that he left no drafts in the conventional sense, these correspondences offer unique insights into Bunting’s compositional process. Chapter Three extends these architectural epistemologies to The Spoils (1951). In it, I examine the draft work in which Bunting discusses the politics of his new poetics. By drawing on the field of spolia studies, I demonstrate that Bunting’s art-historical eye was by this time ethically ‘corrupted’ through an analysis of the manifold spoliations that operate in this complex poem. Chapter Four is a prelude to Briggflatts (1965) that fills the contextual gap between 1952-1964 and constitutes the first ever extensive account of Bunting’s expulsion from Iran by Mohammad Mossadegh (1952). In the Prelude, I posit that the humiliation Bunting experienced following the expulsion conditioned the composition of Briggflatts, particularly that it would take the form of a national autobiography that has a homecoming love story at its centre. Finally, using archival evidence, Chapter Five illustrates how Briggflatts’ soil, sky, and inaugurating bull-cry can be traced to Bunting’s time in the Zagros Mountains. Extant work on the impact of Persian literature and art on Bunting’s work is scant. This thesis aims to address this gap and encourage further work on Bunting’s engagement with the Persian literary and plastic arts.Item Embargo The Self-Destructive Book and The Library: Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992-)Provino, JustineThe evening of the 9 December 1992 was supposed to be remembered as a night when people had gathered and watched live, from their home computer screens, the one-off launch event of a self-destructive book entitled Agrippa (a book of the dead), a project brought together by the publisher Kevin Begos Jr, the artist Dennis Ashbaugh and the writer William Gibson. This launch event did not happen, or at least not as planned: instead it turned into a series of local happenings from which Agrippa escaped in multiple forms and survived to this day. Based on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award and undertaken in partnership with the Bodleian Library, which holds the publisher’s archive for Agrippa and two copies of the book, this thesis uses Agrippa as a case study with which to explore an iconoclastic bibliographical category, ‘the self-destructive book’, and how it resonates in the ur-space for the preservation and sharing of books, the library. Through a survey of surviving copies and interviews with the work’s creators and owners, it asks what Agrippa has to teach us about the book and the library as institutions. The thesis is divided into four chapters, following an Introduction that addresses the contexts within which Agrippa emerged, at the time of popularisation of the Internet and amid looming fears of the death of print. In chapter 1 on Methodology, I establish the protocols for my project, arguing that Agrippa as a self-destructive book answers to some of the imperatives of rare book and of limited edition publishing, but that it also aims to upset the standards of this category. I suggest that Agrippa opens up challenges to the ways in which cultural heritage institutions, and the library in particular, perceive the materiality of rare books and the priorities of conservation. Chapter 2 on Mythology highlights how, over the past thirty years, the question of what collectors and cultural heritage agents think they have when they own a copy of Agrippa shaped by the initial publicity coup of 1992. While the book is haunted by claims to self-destruction, it is difficult to pin down the ephemerality of the book. Chapter 3 on Moving Images locates the ephemerality of the analogue element of Agrippa in the prints by Dennis Ashbaugh. Through a survey of the prints in the surviving copies I establish that it resides less in the physical degradation of images than in variations arising from the long ‘in-between’ of the publishing process. Chapter 4 on Automating Reading explores how private and public collectors have worked to keep their options for reading William Gibson’s work open since 1992, in analogue as much as in digital, finding substitutes to control the matter of a poem that has been judged to be troubling in its ephemerality. In my Conclusion I reflect that, to maintain access to a self-destructive book, libraries have had to rely on Internet resources that are threatened by the same phenomenon that first released Agrippa to the public in 1992: the hack.Item Embargo The Material Imagination: Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas HardyHard, ClarissaThis thesis explores the relationship between physicality and imagination in the poetry of Philip Larkin, focusing on different kinds of literal and imaginative space. I adduce two major influences, D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, who appealed to Larkin as a self-proclaimed ‘materialist’ (Letters to Monica, p. 15). He admired these writers for their ability not only to capture a ‘tough rich sense of life’, but crucially ‘to relate any given part of life to the rest of it’. Material details are not incidental, but illuminate ‘the person’s whole life, & the state of their world’. Likewise, Larkin was intrigued by spaces, objects, and daily routines not in isolation, but rather by how they reflect or even shape human behaviour. I refute the common critical assumption that his poetry was limited by its empiricism. Writing about the fabric of everyday life was his way of thinking about the nature of existence itself. The introduction establishes Larkin’s lifelong interest in the ‘strange reciprocity’ (The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, p. 320) between mind and matter. I clarify my use of the term ‘the material imagination’ and acknowledge my debt to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958). I justify my inclusion of Lawrence and Hardy, explaining why I chose to prioritise these figures over Larkin’s direct contemporaries such as the other Movement writers. I argue that they provide unique insights into his mind. Larkin’s literary engagement with Lawrence has been neglected, while there has never been a full-length study of this trio. Lawrence himself read and wrote about Hardy, so there is a clear intellectual genealogy to be explored. Chapter 1 is concerned with the intimate space of ‘home’, delving into Larkin’s fascination with domestic interiors and dwelling places. At this stage I focus on Larkin alone, laying the groundwork for the rest of the thesis. Larkin returned to the idea of finding one’s ‘proper ground’ (CP, p. 29), examining the complex relationship between inhabitant and inhabited space. Many poems yearn for refuge, but how can we reconcile this ‘hanker[ing] for the homeliness / Of den, and hole, and set’ (CP, p. 318) with the rented rooms and landscapes of suburban alienation in his poetry, and indeed his own life? I argue that his inability to realise the dream of domesticity actually sanctifies the concept of home; it remains an untouched and untouchable ideal. Chapter 2 explores another side of the material imagination, looking at spatial aspects of the way we think. How do we picture ‘unfenced existence’ (CP, p. 49), for example? I shift from the local ‘here’ to the luminous dream of ‘beyond’, identifying Hardy as a parallel. Both writers are known for their depictions of everyday life, yet they were also drawn to the immaterial and ineffable. I revisit their sense of the transcendent, focusing on lonely environments, absences, and disembodied states of being. Chapter 3 introduces time as space, exploring the workings of memory and anticipation in order to understand Larkin’s ‘long perspectives / Open at each instant of our lives’ (CP, p. 68). Lawrence, Larkin’s ‘touchstone against the false’ (Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, p. 131), is important here. I suggest that Larkin was fascinated by Lawrence’s ability to relate the instant to the eternal, and this informed his approach to epiphanic experience well beyond the 1940s. Chapter 4 develops this discussion of ‘long perspectives’ in relation to churches. I investigate Larkin’s ‘moment of ecstasy’ (The Philip Larkin I Knew, p. 74), Lawrence’s ‘incarnate moment’ (Phoenix, p. 221), and Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’ (The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, p. 459) in the context of sacred space. There is a shade of the Angry Young Man about Larkin, railing against the purposelessness of his age – and yet for a man who could be so derisive of organized religion and the apparent self-deception it entails, he returned to the dynamics of the Church with a kind of secular devotion. Even if he did not believe in a Christian God, following Hardy and Lawrence, he gravitated to forms of worship that express and partially fulfil our desire to transcend ourselves. Finally, in Chapter 5 I turn from ‘somewhere’, ‘anywhere’, and ‘elsewhere’ to ‘nowhere’. As established in Chapter 4, Larkin, Lawrence, and Hardy were all drawn to Christianity but ultimately rejected faith. How did they make sense of death in a heavenless world? I analyse different representations of darkness, death, and nescience, approaching nothingness as an unbounded conceptual space. I end the chapter, and indeed the thesis, by considering afterlives, asking whether literature vouchsafed these writers a form of immortality and whether this afforded them any consolation. The work itself becomes an imaginative space where experience can perpetuate itself endlessly.Item Embargo Meeting Like This: Dramaturgies of Encounter in the Context of the Climate CrisisHarries, MiloThis thesis studies four artists – Tim Crouch, David Finnigan, Zoë Svendsen, and Mojisola Adebayo – who offer alternatives to what the thesis will call ‘deficit models’ of climate-engaged theatre, and the unequal, unidirectional and explanatory dynamics they suppose. Through interviews with these artists, and inductive analysis of their work, the thesis uses the concept of ‘dramaturgies of encounter’ to articulate the relationships they propose between artist, audience and event. The thesis’s first chapter discusses the work of Tim Crouch, arguing that Crouch’s plays do not explain ideas, but invite their audiences to enact them – not presenting thoughts to the audience, but offering them novel ways in which to think. Through this process, the thesis will argue, Crouch’s play Superglue offers its spectators an intuitive means by which to grasp ecological entanglement. The second chapter explores the practice of David Finnigan, suggesting that he replaces the hierarchies of earlier science-based ‘climate theatre’ with humbler forms of address. Observing Finnigan’s repeated staging of his failure to ‘deal with’ climate change, the chapter argues that Finnigan rejects a heroic conception of the autonomous artist to identify possibilities for renewal in patterns of error and iteration. In its third chapter, the thesis turns to Zoë Svendsen, proposing that her work challenges colonial capitalism’s restriction of the contemporary imagination. The chapter suggests that rather than communicating ‘the way things are’, Svendsen’s work empowers its audiences to rehearse ways that the world might be, inviting them to practise dispositions that refuse colonial-capitalist structures of relation. The thesis’s final chapter considers the theatre of Mojisola Adebayo, noting that Adebayo not only rejects a didactic approach to ‘climate change’, but more broadly rejects ‘climate’ as a disavowedly white-coded historical frame. The chapter therefore proposes that the ecological work of Adebayo’s Family Tree lies in a deeper claim on the present, re-working the relationships between actors and spectators within ongoing histories of extractivist harm. In concluding, the thesis draws a principle for practice from these earlier discussions, beyond ideas of messaging and persuasion. The thesis’s closing argument is for a principle of metabolism, proposing a dependent, regenerative theatre that seeks not to transmit, but transform.Item Open Access The Idea of Vacuity in Chaucer's WorksLoveday, PatrickIn the Middle Ages, Aristotelian influence helped shape an image of the universe that was defined by a sense of ‘fullness’. Of all the teachings of ‘The Philosopher’, perhaps the most famous was that a void space could not exist within the structure of the cosmos. Because of the scale of Aristotle’s influence throughout the later Middle Ages, the modern critical perspective has implicitly deemed that medieval literature, like medieval nature, does not much interact with void space. In examining the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, this study begins to readdress that understanding. The study offered here concerns the laconic moments an audience encounters when reading Chaucer’s work. Whilst this examination concerns gaps, absences and ciphers, it also concerns moments of generation and creation. The phrase horror vacui might have begun to emerge in the fourteenth century, but the notion of the void aroused responses a great deal more varied, and more complex, than fear alone. Aristotle might well have denied the possibility of a void, but medieval theologians were deeply concerned with contemporary philosophy’s suggestion that God would be incapable of producing one. The ensuing discourse between Christian doctrine and ancient logic helped define the shape of theology and philosophy in Chaucer’s time. The idea of the void became intricately tied up with God’s power, and, simultaneously, with the mind’s capacity to imagine counterfactual realities. Using the philosophical currents of the 14th century as a guide, this study explores how a contemporary understanding of vacuity arises and is utilised in Chaucer’s works. When the emergence of vacuity is understood as a kind of textual device, a reader is offered the opportunity to re-examine the essential subjects of Chaucer’s texts. Moving well beyond the idea of terror, this study explores themes of death, desire, time and the very concept of poetry itself. Moments where the idea of vacuity arises are moments of profound interiority: because nature abhors a vacuum, suggestions of empty space indicate that a text is working through an inflection of a character’s mind. In other words, when emptiness comes to the fore, Chaucer’s texts explore the very deepest mechanisms of human experience. Two things, in the fourteenth century, were capable of ‘forming’ a void: God and the human mind. As God creates reality, the human mind creates fantasy. Voids, in Chaucer’s works, are proof of the extreme power of the mind: their arrival in his works demarcates a profound questioning of humanity’s capacity to participate in a single, shared reality.Item Embargo The Pastoral Image: Guillaume de Deguileville’s Spiritual Pedagogy in the Pèlerinage AllegoriesStatz, Alexis FrancescaThis thesis examines the Cistercian monk Guillaume de Deguileville’s three allegories: the Pèlerinage de vie humaine (1330 and 1355), the Pèlerinage de l’âme (1355), and the Pèlerinage de Jesus-Christ (1358). The thesis analyses each of these allegories as dream visions filled with ethical and moral instruction, designed to guide both the reader and the pilgrim-narrator from the terrestrial life to the next life. Designed as Christian pedagogy for laypeople, the Pèlerinages form part of a tradition of memorial art and personification allegory. Nevertheless, as readers have noted, these allegories also portray their pilgrim-narrator as strangely incapable of learning from the teaching he is offered. This thesis proposes that a deep vein of sacramental iconography and thought underlies the poems’ pedagogy – it is this sacramentalism that, for Deguileville, counters the endemic human tendency towards sin. The thesis also explores Deguileville’s tendency to describe, counterintuitively, spiritual processes in material terms. What I call Deguileville’s allegorical ‘pastoral image’ refers to his complex and poetic notion of how the soul as imago dei is to be moulded, both materially and spiritually. The pastoral mission is summarised in the twenty-seventh Canon of the Fourth Lateran Council: ‘To guide souls is the art of arts’ (ars artium regimen animarum). Deguileville depicts the soul as a malformed, misshapen thing when it is captured by sin, increasingly conceiving of the soul as dependent on the mechanics of grace. I argue that this shift, especially apparent in the second recension of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine and his later allegories, derives from the author’s Augustinian pessimism about the compromised state of the human soul after the Fall. It is well known that Deguileville draws on the Roman de la rose. In Chapter One, I discuss his pastoral reworking of a number of narratives and images from the earlier poem. In the second chapter, I examine Frère Laurent’s Somme le roi as an example of vernacular pastoral care, to demonstrate how Deguileville draws on this didactic tradition – particularly the Somme’s reliance on instructive imaginative images. Identifying pastoral ideas common to both authors, the chapter discusses Deguileville’s broadly Augustinian theology. The third chapter explores his novel use of what I term ‘sacramental craft’: these are images of the soul reformulated and remade to supplement the pedagogy offered to the ineffectual pilgrim. They include traditionally Cistercian images such as the sacramental Christ-in-the- winepress and the ‘Mystic Mill’ – images of Christ torn apart. The pilgrim is taught that by grace channelled through material signs (sacramenta) he can be redeemed. The fourth chapter argues that Deguileville’s pastoral enterprise can also be seen from another angle, proposing that the Pèlerinage trilogy is a novel kind of ars moriendi. Deguileville makes the case for living a life of virtue in preparation for the soul’s final reworking through death. I show this process to be another kind of sacramental craft in imitatio Christi, the full ramifications of which are ultimately expressed in the Pèlerinage de Jesus-Christ.Item Embargo A Theory of the Animate Form of Literary Art: Kind-normativity, Criticism, and AxiologyGentry, GeradIn this dissertation, I ask whether the possibility of experiencing a work of literary art as literature is conditioned by concept of literature or whether we can just get on with reading literature without such a concept. I begin with the question: is a concept of literary art necessary? I explore some key discussions of this idea, particularly over the past century. I argue that a concept of literary art is inescapable, since the very possibility of encountering a work as literature of a specific kind necessitates it. The question then becomes what is the fundamental concept that makes possible our engagement with literary art (and its diversity of forms in their incommensurate particularities)? Chapter 2 develops a fundamental distinction between primary ends that arise from a given whole, and secondary ends. I argue that literary art bears an autonomy beyond such secondary, external ends; it exists first and foremost as an end-in-itself. As such an internally purposive end itself, it may well serve secondary functions, but these can only ever be secondary to that which makes it the kind of whole it is. So, I argue, we have good reason to recognize literary art as an internally purposive, animate whole. And as such a whole, some key forms of inner normativity or “for its own sake” conditions bear necessarily on the activity of reader and literary work. Chapter 3 explores one version of this concept of literary art as an internally purposive whole, through the thought of Goethe and Hegel and as carried forward to some degree by Adorno and T.S. Eliot, and thence into features of various contemporary critical traditions. In chapter 4, I argue that quite apart from the specific moral content and even apart from specific determinate content, the animate form of literary art does bear a key innate moral significance that persists across all forms of literary art in virtue of the kind it is (irrespective of specific content or genre). In Chapter 5, I argue that if the foundational concept of literary art developed so far is correct, and more specifically, if this concept is a condition of the possibility of our experience of such wholes, and if we have reason to think that this condition is a concept of a literary work as an internally purposive whole, then two fundamental axiological paradoxes of literary art are entailed. These axiological paradoxes are a consequence of two features of the concept of literary art. First, the literary work consists in an identity that is not entirely distinct from such seemingly external things as the environment, the experiences and mode of apprehension of the reader, and the thought of the author. At the same time, however, despite an interdeterminative, fluid relation with these, it retains a distinct autonomous identity in-itself, not despite such seemingly external features, but in part through them. I call this first the “paradox of unity in diversity” (or paradox of autonomy in an actual environment). It is a fluid yet stable identity, an organic unity in diversity. At the heart of this first paradox of literary art are three fundamental characteristics of literary art: namely, what I will call (1) entelechy, a term invented by Aristotle to identify the actuality of a flourishing kind through its characteristic activity, but as adopted by Goethe and repurposed by Adorno to what might be called the “process characteristic” of the literary work in itself and visible in T.S. Eliot’s notion of the “autotelic”, (2) the “becoming (or decaying)” of the literary work, and (3) the “self-differentiation” of the literary work from the author’s idea. The second paradox is that the literary work itself is the highest normative standard for good literary criticism. Literary criticism is necessarily conditioned by the inner normativity of the whole itself. Here I explore what it means to enter into a literary work of art on its own terms, for its own sake, without this entailing losing sight of a host of external ends. I suggest that it is through engaging the literary work for its own sake that an experience is made possible that allows for the actualization of the unique value that literary art holds for a range of secondary ends. This axiological paradox is one that, I submit, is shared with all ends that are intrinsically valuable. This account bears significant implications for most literary critical traditions, since it is an argument not about a specific tradition of criticism or area of literature, but about concept that conditions the possibility of experiencing a literary work as such. It entails that, though reading a work through the lens of external forms of normativity (e.g. moral, epistemic, cultural, political, etc.) may be (and are!) of great importance, such external forms are not determinative of the inner normativity of the literary work in itself, even in cases where such external ends are relevant parts and central tropes.Item Embargo Internationalism and Anglophone Literatures, 1900-1950Williams, JoeThis thesis examines the literary contours of social relations, space, and community under the global capitalist formations of the first half of the twentieth century. Examining international structures of feeling with particular reference to the literary and social contexts of Aotearoa New Zealand and southern Africa, the thesis extends materialist analysis of the relationship of literary production and aesthetic cultures to the social processes of the world-system. It is especially attentive to the antagonistic procedures of the world-system and the literary-political projects which seek to confront these procedures. The further interests of the thesis lie in modernism, the poetics and politics of resistance, and the historical development of images of communion across transnational formations. Drawing on original archival work conducted in Europe, North America, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, the thesis produces its analysis by engaging recondite literary texts as well as prominent figures. Its key theoretical coordinates include Marxism, postcolonial literary studies, and the historiography of imperialism and economy. The thesis has three chapters. Chapter One interrogates the spatialising of social relations within imperialist capitalism, examining its aesthetic presentation and strategies. In this chapter, I analyse writers such as Daphne de Waal, James Inman Emery, and Blanche Baughan, attending to their depictions of formal subsumption, infrastructural development, and frictious senses of imperialist connection. Chapter Two examines internationalist structures of feeling of particularly the 1930s. It examines how three writers, William Plomer, Robin Hyde, and Peter Abrahams, evince different preoccupations with circumstances of affiliation and disaffiliation across the spatio temporal articulation of the world-system. Despite very clear political differences, I argue that the continuity of this preoccupation between all three writers evidences how social relations at non-local scales presented with particular urgency in this period. Chapter Three, the final chapter, examines the social presence and political interventions of what can be termed literary internationalism. It comprises a historical-literary itinerary of the leftwing news agency, Democratic & General News, run by Eric and Freda Cook in London between 1936 and 1950. This anticolonial, antifascist, and socialist news agency—which I delineate for the first time—I argue evidences how the enterprises of internationalist literary production are enmeshed with other forms of social praxis. Accordingly, I argue that it offers a concrete, if mediated, instance of internationalist art as political intervention.Item Embargo ‘Spered in an hous aloone’: Enduring Spiritual Enclosure in the Middle AgesNewis, Millicent-RoseThis doctoral thesis offers a new consideration of solitary spiritual enclosure in England in the Middle Ages (c. 1080-1525). It examines texts written for and by medieval cell-dwellers – particularly anchorites and Carthusians – to explore three broad areas of research. Firstly, it picks apart the exemplary reputation of the eremitic life in both medieval literature and subsequent scholarship. By emphasising the intensity of the cell-bound life and the tensions which persist even (or sometimes especially) when it is chosen voluntarily, this thesis argues that its potential for both extreme satisfaction and dissatisfaction is a crucial, yet often underestimated, aspect of understanding the experiences of medieval cell-dwellers. Secondly, this thesis pays close attention to specific features of life in the cell – namely enclosed space, time in confinement, and social isolation – to gain a deeper understanding of some of the nuanced physical, mental, and emotional challenges which may have faced cell-dwellers. As well as the subjective difficulties of confinement, this thesis is interested in the ‘coping techniques’ present in eremitic texts to help assuage the hardships of life in the cell and facilitate spiritual progress. Thirdly, this thesis often uses a comparative framework to shed new light on experiences of medieval eremitism. It considers anchoritic and Carthusian texts in tandem, for example, seeking both to deepen existing discussions in anchoritic scholarship and develop the literary examination of the Carthusian order, which is considered ‘thin and disjointed’ (Luxford, 2008). It also draws from modern research into the effects of solitary confinement to help identify parts of the medieval experience which are rooted in their cultural-historical contexts, and others which seem to speak to more enduring affective experiences. The first chapter of this thesis explores the extremity of the cell with reference to legal and ecclesiastical documents, as well as examples of regretful anchorites and Carthusians for whom the cell was not the expected seat of spiritual flourishing. Chapters Two, Three, and Four are each dedicated to an aspect of the cell-bound life. Chapter Two focuses on confined space, considering the physical qualities of cells as well as their textual treatment. It examines Goscelin of Saint Bertin’s 'Liber Confortatorius', 'Ancrene Wisse', and Julian of Norwich’s 'Revelations', all of which acknowledge and seek to ease the affective difficulties of living in confinement. The third chapter considers the peculiarities of time inside the medieval spiritual cell, exploring the different ways in which writers and readers confront the threat of a confinement-induced ‘chronophobia’. The primary texts of this chapter are a set of verses written on the cell doors of the London Charterhouse and their problematic explication by John Blacman, an inhabitant of the Charterhouse in the mid- fifteenth century. Chapter Four examines affective experiences of social isolation in the medieval cell. It pushes against a body of criticism which emphasises how cell-dwellers readily participated in both solitary and communal contexts by investigating some of the frictions between these two very different ways of living. Major sources for this chapter include letters concerning Isolda de Heton (an anchorite who left her cell in the interests of her children), Guigo I’s 'Consuetudines Cartusae', and Aelred of Rievaulx’s 'De Institutione Inclusarum'.Item Controlled Access Form's Philosophy: Poetry and Moral Thinking in Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey HillRizq, Michael; Rizq, Michael [0000-0003-0210-8544]This dissertation explores the kind of moral thinking at stake in the poetry and poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill. For these poet-critics, poems could be a means of articulating matters of moral and spiritual value. This emerges, however, less often by propositional statement than by means of the multifaceted generic operations of poetry, drawing on a wider range of verbal, visual, sonic, and imaginative resources. At its most interesting, I propose, Hopkins, Eliot, and Hill’s work is characterised by strenuous, densely wrought, uneven processes of thought and feeling: a moral thinking grounded in the complexities and contrarieties of poetic and critical practice. The dissertation’s focus is therefore double. Firstly, it traces a through-line which runs from Hopkins, to Eliot, to Hill: a persisting, interconnected set of ideas and habits which—taken together across three centuries—constitute a broad, developing argument for the moral and spiritual interest of verse. Recognising connections between these poets and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, philosophers, and theologians (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Henry Newman, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, I.A. Richards, Simone Weil, Theodor Adorno, Gillian Rose, and many others), I argue that their poetry and criticism should be seen as a substantial contribution to long-running debates about the nature of moral reflection in an increasingly secular age. The dissertation’s central three chapters argue especially for the salience of each poet’s formal repertoire, reflecting as I believe they do distinctive and rigorous engagements with philosophy, theology, and politics. Secondly, the dissertation seeks to exemplify ways of reading which are alert to commitments of this kind, and to the processual, non-propositional character of moral thinking as it happens in poems. The so-called ‘ethical turn’ in literary criticism has largely focused on novels, and formalist criticism of poetry often resists ascribing an ethics to the features it describes. As these three poets knew, however, the formal and affective effects of verse cannot be dissociated from ethical ones; nor can a poem simply be understood as reducible to moral assertions. Rather, I argue, the close reading of poems demands attention to the layered implicatures of their words and meanings, an awareness of what might be disturbing, self-critical, or inchoate as much as appealing and mellifluous; and thus an account of verse-practice as entangled—not always straightforwardly—in moral and spiritual life. My three central chapters are preceded by a general introduction, on the philosophical and theoretical background of these questions, and on Hopkins, Eliot, and Hill’s shared intellectual lineage. With this in mind, the dissertation is intended not only to further understanding of the poet-critics in question, but also to exemplify certain methods and stakes in the study of modern poetics.Item Embargo Shakespeare and the Ecofeminist Killjoy: Disruptive Women and Untamed Nature in Early Modern EnglandSandmann, KaitlinThis dissertation enters into conversation with the timely and expanding corpus of ecocritical responses to William Shakespeare’s plays to examine the ways in which the early modern period lay what Amitav Ghosh refers to as the ‘literary grid of forms and conventions’ that continues to shape narratives of gendered interaction with and responsibility toward climate. In particular, this work offers an original lens through which to reflect upon the inherited stories which underpin climate crises as it reads Shakespeare’s comedies and romances for the presence of ecofeminist killjoys. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s figure of the ‘feminist killjoy’ in her texts The Promise of Happiness and The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, the term ecofeminist killjoy describes a person whose gendered relationship to the environment disrupts the promise of a future happiness derived from the reinforcement of normative re-productive exploitation of both environments and women. Examining Shakespeare’s plays and their wider cultural contexts, this dissertation considers how the early modern ecofeminist killjoy’s knowledge of and stories of proximity to nature productively disrupt directional and teleological orientations toward normative reproductive futurity. Broadly defining the first chapter’s focus as girlhood/puberty, the second as motherhood, and the third as old age, this dissertation focuses on anxieties concerning young women’s sexual agency in Twelfth Night, Pericles, and The Two Noble Kinsmen; the dangers of maternal minds and bodies in Cymbeline, All’s Well That Ends Well, and The Winter’s Tale; and the disruptive potential of elderly women’s storytelling in The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest as lenses through which to understand herbal recipes, witchcraft, and fairylore respectively. This three-chapter organization emphasizes how within the assumed ability to reproduce, the act of reproducing, and the distance from expectations of reproduction emerge distinct but related opportunities for transgression of normative scripts and promises, destabilizing the foundation of inherited narratives which continue to stymie contemporary responses to climate apocalypse.Item Controlled Access Beyond Playthings: Materiality and Embodiment on the Modern StageDilek, MertThis thesis examines the ways in which materiality and embodiment animate each other on the mid-twentieth-century stage: its aim is to unveil how the mutual schooling of objects and bodies constitutes a dramaturgical force across a range of Anglo-American plays from the 'long' 1960s. Even though stage objects had long been a versatile tool of theatrical meaning-making, their utilization by several Anglophone playwrights in the post-war era sharply demonstrates their ability to forge and propel dramaturgies centred on the physical contingency of bodied subjects. Drawing on dramatic criticism, performance histories, archival sources, and critical theories of materiality, the thesis presents in-depth case studies focussed on three influential dramatists: Samuel Beckett, David Storey, and Adrienne Kennedy. United by their prolific material imaginations, this trio of playwrights provides a unique focal point through which the varieties of the theatrical symbiosis between objects and bodies come to light. Chapter 1 centres on a detailed reading of Beckett's Happy Days (1961), in which the play's deployment of objects as compensatory tools of manipulation and habituation proves essential to its structural and characterological imperatives. It then draws on this relation to discuss Beckett's other works, particularly Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (1981), elucidating how they incorporate manipulated objects of habit as inscriptive aids that facilitate the corporeal conditioning of actors. Chapter 2 deals with Storey's representation of manual labour as a mode of embodiment fundamentally allied with material objects and only thereby conducive to the formation and cultivation of broader collectives of humans and nonhumans. With reference to the theories of Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Michel Serres, and Brian Massumi, this analysis treats the extensive networks of objects in The Contractor (1969) and The Changing Room (1971) as essential catalysts in the alignment of embodiment, labour, and collectivity. Chapter 3 zooms in on Kennedy's incorporation of culturally weighted objects into her racially charged theatre. As it scrutinizes the racialized and fetishistic configuration of key objects in Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), the chapter traces their historical lineage and enduring influence within Kennedy's body of work. Kennedy's acute concern with these loci of material culture—straddling North American, European, and West African legacies—reveals complex links among racial identity, psychic disavowal, and bodily experience. The concluding chapter assesses the implications of these concentrated studies for an understanding of stage objects as 'playthings' and reflects on the affordances of an object-oriented approach to dramatic criticism.Item Embargo Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary ProseLouks, AmeliaThis thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse—the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates—in structuring our social world. The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures. I focus largely on prose fiction from the modern and contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy of olfactory prejudice into today and situate its contemporary relevance. I suggest that smell very often invokes identity in a way that signifies an individual’s worth and status in an inarguable manner that short-circuits conscious reflection. This can be accounted for by acknowledging olfaction’s strongly affective nature, which produces such strong bodily sensations and emotions that reflexivity is bypassed in favour of a behavioural or cognitive solution that assuages the intense feeling most immediately. Olfactory disgust, therefore, tends to result in rejection, while harmful forms of olfactory desire may result in sublimation or subjugation. My thesis is particularly attentive to tensions and ambivalences that complicate the typically bifurcated affective spectrum of olfactory experiences, drawing attention to (dis)pleasurable olfactory relations that have socio-political utility. I argue that literary fiction is not only an arena in which olfactory logics can be instantiated, but also a laboratory in which possibilities for new kinds of relations and connections can be fostered and tested. Chapter One explores how smell can be used to indicate class antipathies, partly as they relate to homelessness, beginning with George Orwell’s seminal non-fiction text, The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), before considering Iain Sinclair’s The Last London (2017) and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). In Chapter Two I explore the fantastical, idealistic, and utopic thinking that surrounds olfaction, which presents smell as fundamentally non-human, by addressing J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021), and Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020). Chapter Three focuses on the intersectional olfactory dimensions of ‘misogynoir’—the coextensive anti-Black racism and misogyny that Black women experience—and considers Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), Bernice McFadden’s Sugar (2000) and Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020). In Chapter Four, I conceptualise an oppressive olfactory logic, which is used against women and girls in order to legitimise their harassment or abuse, drawing primarily on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), but also Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985). Chapter Five discusses two forms of olfactory desire—perversion and queerness—which have separate moral valences. I address J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994), Ann Quin’s Berg (1964), and Sam Byers’ Come Join Our Disease (2020), and argue for fiction’s role in reorienting readers’ habitual relations to olfaction.Item Embargo Byron's Poetics of EventsGotthardt, Marc-AndréMy thesis proposes a new encounter with Byron’s poetry, one which I have tentatively called ‘evental’. I take events to mean, following Heidegger, not points on an already established timeline, but rather occurrences unfolding the dimensionality of time in its horizons of past, present, and future. This approach is particularly suited to Byron’s tendency to poeticise the event in terms of its aftermath, in the thusness of the present which stands opposed to Manfred’s key insight of ‘having been otherwise’. Such an inquiry into the poetic structure of events poses an alternative to the historicist presupposition of an event as a nexus of possibilities; as I read it, Byron’s poetry exhibits an awareness of and challenge to the metaphysical foundation of a movement from potentiality to actuality, or the relationship between essence and existence. Each of my chapters attends to a moment which suspends the regular, or regulated, flow of time. Byron’s insomnia has been well-documented, but Chapter One charts his troubled relationship with sleep from a poetic perspective. Not reproducing the Romantic interest in the oneiric imagination, Byron rather idealises dreamless sleep as an atemporal space. Recurring dreams and nightmares, however, disrupt that narrative both personally and poetically; in response, Byron takes up the habit of nocturnal composition to exhaust his imagination. At the same time, he begins to believe the inner dynamism of sleep to be at work in composition, too, conceiving of poetry as ‘somnambulism’. Chapter Two works out the dynamics of experiencing the present as a moment of stasis. Manfred and Cain are both locked in a time of aftermath, though of a different make in each case. Proceeding from Manfred’s judgment that ‘actions are our epochs’, the chapter reads ‘event’ in its etymological meaning of ‘outcome’, one which Byron himself favoured, and ‘epoch’ both as a point and a period which follows an action, to argue that even in this retrospective insight, the dramatic poems hold the event to remain inconceivable and therefore unsayable. Chapter Three turns to the historical dimension of Byron’s works. I argue that for Byron, history occurs essentially as event, and inquire specifically into what happens when Byron announces the historical moment with a ‘perchance’. The aim is to show how the historical event emerges as an effect produced by an adherence to the Aristotelian unities in the plays and an episodic treatment in the narrative poems. ‘Perchance’, then, as an archaic marker of the past (in contrast to the future-orientated ‘perhaps’), points not merely to the contingency of historical events but allies itself to an ‘alas’, engendering a tragic historical consciousness. Chapter Four maps the vatic dimension of Byron’s poetic interventions, reading his ‘prophecies’ not as attempts to predict but to enact the future. Veterotestamentarian precedent is related to contemporary political events to produce writing for another time and other generations, while also posing a form of resistance literature in the present. This ethical impetus of Byron’s poetic self- conception, his Promethean sympathy, is related to his notion that ‘words are things’: poetry holds the power to be effectual, to form an event as much as an intervention in the course of events. The thesis concludes that Byron’s evental poetics ultimately result in a particular notion of poetic freedom, which I situate outside of a metaphysics of potentiality. The Conclusion probes, lastly, Byron’s utopian thinking in relation to the efficacy of literature, and the tensions that remain in such speculative efforts.