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Item Beautiful Science: Victorian Women's Scientific Poetry and Prose(2014) Boswell, Michelle; Rudy, Jason R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship in literary studies and the history of science has demonstrated increasing interest in scientific writing by women. “Beautiful Science” investigates why form and genre are important interpretive tools—not static categories—for considering ways in which women entered Victorian scientific debates, how they accommodated scientific ideas for various audiences, and how formal tensions within their texts reveal broader intellectual frictions between secular and religious science in nineteenth-century Britain. Far from being marginal figures in scientific studies, the voices of these women were prominent, and their interpretations of contemporary theories shaped the reception of science among nonspecialists. Literary forms and genres—including parables, fairy tales, verse dramas, novels, and comic poems—brought with them a wide horizon of readerly expectations into conversations about science. Deploying these genres for a variety of purposes, women science writers could deliver new knowledge in familiar, recognizable literary ways. My first chapter uncovers Mary Somerville use of Byron's closet drama Cain both to explain an astronomical phenomenon, parallax, and to respond to the play's depiction of its protagonist's response to “sublime” astronomical distance. In chapter two, I demonstrate how Margaret Gatty and Arabella Buckley employ the genres of parable, beast fables, and fairy tales to negotiate the entangled debates of morality, religion, science, and education in the Victorian era. Chapter three suggests that reading George Eliot's early “Ilfracombe Journal,” her Westminister Review essays, and The Mill on the Floss within a tradition of Victorian natural history writing illuminates matters of form and exchange within both natural history narratives and the development of the mid-Victorian novel. Lastly, in chapter four I argue Constance Naden's comic “Evolutional Erotics” poems and her philosophical poems all suggest an engagement with scientific and philosophical discourse at the level of prosody, particularly in Naden's choices of rhyme. As a whole, “Beautiful Science” argues that an examination of form and genre within both the nineteenth-century literary publishing world and the discourses of scientific popularization reveal the mutual exchange between both realms, and that Victorian women's writing makes these changes most visible.Item Staged Magic in Early English Drama(2013) Lellock, Jasmine Shay; Cartwright, Kent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In late medieval and early modern England, magic was everywhere. Although contested, occult beliefs and practices flourished among all classes of people, and they appeared regularly as a subject of early English drama. My dissertation focuses on staged magic in early English drama, demonstrating the ways in which it generates metacritical commentary. It argues that magic in drama serves more than just a symbolic function, but rather, some early English drama saw itself as performing a kind of magic that was also efficacious. To this end, this project theorizes that drama participated in forms of contemporary magic that circulated at the time. This dissertation focuses on representations of magic in early English drama, specifically in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1471), Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1588-92), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-1), and John Milton's A Maske Performed at Ludlow Castle (1634). These early English plays stage their magic as socially and personally beneficial, not just illusory, flawed, or demonic. Whether staging magic as a critique or apology for its own medium, however, the plays suggest that theater draws upon magic to depict itself as efficacious. This project thus reads magic as both a metaphoric, literary convention and its own entity with accompanying political and cultural effects. Examining magic and its representation as part of a continuum--as contemporary audiences would have done--offers a clearer picture of what magic is doing in the plays and how early observers might have apprehended its effects. This dissertation offers a textually based cultural context for the magic found within its central plays, bringing extraliterary magical texts into conversation with literary, dramatic texts. Because the borders between natural philosophy, religion, and magic were not clearly defined in early modern England, this project draws as well upon scholarship and primary materials in the history of science and religion. The motivation of this project is to reanimate early English theater with a sense of wonder and magic that it historically offered and that it continues to bring to readers and audiences to this day.