Englishing the Virgin argues that the vocabulary and iconography of Marian devotion became, for early English writers and printers, the currency of literary expression in the mother tongue. Reading texts on female virtue, from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale of Melibee to the encomia of the 1557 Songes and Sonettes printed by Richard Tottel, this dissertation provides an account of how the Virgin Mary and her followers, especially women living the enclosed life within religious houses or in the isolation of the desert, occupied a central role in the development of the early English book. More than the chief subjects of the majority of the early books printed in England, the imitation of both Christ and his mother were two of the key strategies of the press. The early English book, as conceptualized by Geoffrey Chaucer and his first printers, was a Marian book: it was a record of the suffering of mother and child, of the singular promise offered by the fecund virgin womb, and the bound, wounded text. Connecting the Book of Margery Kempe to the printed books of William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde, this dissertation concludes that the development of the early printed book in England did not mark a swift break with the Catholic past of England. Rather, the first printers of the English book drew from the devotional cultures of the enclosed women to whom the first vernacular prose texts were addressed. The symbolism of enclosure, especially de Worde’s presentation of a womb-like book, helped to make possible the widespread dissemination of the vernacular text, whether sacred or secular, in England.

This dissertation examines the relationship of modernist literary experimentalism to popular detective fiction from 1890-1945 in Britain and Ireland. The project argues that both literary forms grow out of an emerging challenge to questions of knowledge – how it is generated, rhetorically packaged, and socially applied – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, classic detective and modernist fiction challenge claims to objective empiricism in the physical and social sciences. Both literary forms suggest that the sciences are enmeshed in cultural methods of analysis, are prone to fall under the influence of presumptions and biases, and tend to work in the service of dominant social groups at the expense of the less powerful.

In both literary forms, human populations are too dynamic to classify with accuracy, and demography is influenced by biases against the lower classes. The biological sciences are misused to support theories of criminal determinism which incriminate individuals based on looks and lineage. Theories of natural selection are misapplied to our understanding of human society and socioeconomics. Lexicography is wrongly employed as a tool for linguistic nationalism. And the rhetorical strategies of modernist architecture, sport, and health culture evoke and reinforce martial values. In all, both forms of literature regard scientific positivism with irony and ground its discursive elaborations in social satire. Arguing for a deeper understanding of modernist experimentalism in its engagements both with mass culture and with theoretical discourses in the sciences, the project reads modernist writers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene beside popular writers like Conan Doyle, Stephen Leacock, G. K. Chesterton, and obscurer contributors to popular detective fiction.

This dissertation examines women’s ecological thinking in seventeenth-century English literature as England transitioned to an agrarian-capitalist economy built on the intensified exploitation of the nonhuman world. More specifically, the women examined here raise serious concerns about the ways in which economic change and intellectual discourse together encouraged the more intensive use of the nonhuman world for humankind’s gain during this period. The Introduction explains how property law, agricultural practices, and environmental policies shifted in seventeenth-century England, and details the project’s methodology, Marxist ecofeminism. Chapter 1 contends that the female figures in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and John Milton’s A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634) repurpose the Early Stuart court masque, which was designed to legitimize royal power by representing it in an idealized way, to instead criticize the ruling classes for asserting and sustaining their power by dominating the nonhuman world. Chapter 2 builds on the former by arguing that Lucy Hutchinson, Aemelia Lanyer, and Margaret Cavendish appropriate the country-house poetic genre to condemn estate lords for similar behavior. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Anne Bradstreet’s verse re-energizes the New England Puritan model of stewardship, which viewed agricultural labor as an expression of love for God and his creation, as a way of resisting the intensified exploitation of the nonhuman world in colonial New England. Chapter 4 compares Fifth Monarchists Mary Cary’s and Anna Trapnel’s prophetic writings with Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666): While Cary and Trapnel portray the prophesied New Jerusalem as a refuge in which the nonhuman world will no longer be “abused by men that are unreasonable,” as Cary says, Cavendish both fantasizes about the Empress of the Blazing World’s scientific and technological control of nature and warns against the tremendous harm this power can inflict on other human beings and nature itself. Last, the Coda examines Eve’s earnest, if imperfect, efforts to steward Eden with care in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667-1674). Taken together, Miranda and Eve serve as bookends of a longer story about humankind’s failed stewardship of, and active efforts to turn a profit on, the nonhuman world in seventeenth-century England.