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Diaper, Hilary. "The English reaction to modern French painting circa 1850-1880." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.238657.
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Luo, Jian. "The narrative art of modernist fiction : a corpus stylistic and cognitive narratological approach." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/2979/.
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This thesis explores modernist narrative art embodied in modernist style of constructing narrative space. Within Chatman’s conceptual framework, narrative space can be divided into story-space (settings and characters) and discourse-space (focus of spatial attention). In a corpus-stylistic approach, the structuration of the story-space in The Mill on the Floss, The Good Soldier and To the Lighthouse is examined. The findings show that modernist tendency to deemphasise particularity of place shapes a narrative design of spatial detachment. In consequence, the establishment of settings in early modernist fiction is generally sketchy, but sometimes spatially informative. This is a mixed character. By contrast, settings in classic modernist fiction are symbolic of viewers’ psychological states, a clear manifestation of a modernist interest in characters’ interiority. To further trace the style change from early modernism to high modernism, a cross-disciplinary model for character analysis and a cross-axial model for the examination of discourse-space have been constructed. They help detect some similarities and dissimilarities between early and classic modernist styles of spatialisation. As a whole, this thesis has two features. First, it applies corpus stylistic methods to inform cognitive narratological interpretation. Second, it resorts to visualisation as an attempt at a multi-modal study of narrative space.
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Wright, Jarrell D. "Dancing before the Lord| Renaissance ludics and incarnational discourse." Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3725605.
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Play is a manifestation of overflowing excess. When applied to the study of discourse, this bounty can be understood in terms of figurativeness and depth. If “degree-zero” discourse is the almost entirely unfigured language of an instruction manual, then verse lies near the other extreme: highly figured and elaborate language open to rich interpretive possibilities. I posit a further pole yet on this continuum: the hyperabundant texts of the Renaissance, when ludics were at a height partially quashed by the Enlightenment preference for the plain style. These ludic texts are not merely decorative but rather reflect the incarnational impulse of Renaissance Christian thought; they attempt to praise and to imitate the power of Divine language, in which Word is made Flesh in the West’s master model of superabundance, grace through Christ’s Incarnation and Sacrifice.
This project conducts three case studies of playfully incarnational discourses during the Renaissance: in speech, in imagery, and in verse. First, it analyzes sermons by John Donne that reflect candidly on the power of Donne’s own ludic speech, concluding that his transgressive, gamelike rhetoric was oriented toward stimulating responsive action. Next, it examines period images through the lens of contemporary popular works that conceive of images as puzzles to be decoded, solved, and read, concluding that period anamorphoses and similar works were efforts to infuse images with lively presence in a way that helps to account for iconophobic and iconophilic strains in English Reformation thought. Finally, it reads George Herbert’s deceptively simple poem, “The Altar,” examining how the piece may be understood as an intervention into the shaped-verse tradition and how it reflects on period debates about Church fabric, concluding that the toylike or tricklike construction evokes the Eucharistic presence of the Divine in Herbert’s worshipful meditation.
At stake are a greater appreciation for Renaissance artistry, a fuller understanding of the complexityof the English Reformation, and a richer vocabularyfor play theorists working with ludic discourses. A conclusion considers these implications and explains whyRenaissance thinkers might have chosen a ludic mode of imitative worship—God’s grace and creation are themselves forms of play.
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Reginio, Robert, David Houston Jones, and Katherine Weiss. "Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2017. https://www.amzn.com/3838210794/.
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This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art―he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.The volume explores Beckett's formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism's theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like minimalism and conceptual art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett's work. Perceiving Beckett's ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett's remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1182/thumbnail.jpg
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Brazil, Kevin. "The work of art in postwar fiction, 1945-2001." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f8102451-09cf-4f92-8e6e-e7c1ced2641c.
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'The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001' explores the responses of postwar novelists to visual art by focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger and W.G. Sebald. In doing so, it opens up a new approach to understanding the relationship between fiction and art in the postwar period as a whole, for what distinguishes these writers is that they use an engagement with visual art in order to historicize their own work as distinctly 'postwar' fiction. This thesis shows that in the writings of these novelists, long running aesthetic issues in the study of the relationship between text and image are reformulated and transformed: medium specificity; ekphrasis; and visual representation as a model for literary realism. Drawing throughout on original archival research, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 traces what T.J. Clark terms the 'processes of conversion and relation' between art, its contexts and its commentators, and it is by studying these mediations that the literary consequences of the work of art for these writers are shown. With a historicizing approach throughout, and an interest in the ways in which postwar novelists mediate their engagement with art through history, this thesis contributes to a new understanding of the literature and art of the postwar era, or what Amy Hungerford has called 'the period formerly known as contemporary'. This thesis offers a revisionary account of a relationship previously subsumed under the dominant logic of postmodernism, which according to Fredric Jameson was defined by a 'waning of historicity'. In returning historicity as method and theme to the study of the relationship between literature and art since 1945, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 shows the diverse ways in which postwar writers historicized their writing, and reflected on their techniques, in dialogue with visual art. Concerning itself with the distinct challenges posed by focusing on what Hannah Ardent called the 'most recent' past, this thesis also develops new ways of thinking more broadly about the relationships between literature, art and history. Chapter 1, 'Reviewing Postwar Fiction', situates this thesis within recent debates in literary studies surrounding what Mark McGurl has termed a discipline-wide 'hegemony of history'. Chapter 2, on Samuel Beckett, argues that Beckett's postwar art criticism responds to a specific strand of Marxist humanist aesthetics developed after the war, and it studies Beckett's manuscripts to show the relationship between this criticism and the composition of The Unnamable. Chapter 3 discusses William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions, arguing that the novel pivots around some of the central cruxes of postwar American aesthetic debate: Clement Greenberg's theory of abstraction, and Michael Fried's identification of the problem of 'art and objecthood'. Chapter 4 discusses the work of the British art critic and novelist, John Berger. It shows that Berger's critical account of Cubism shaped the narrative forms of his novels A Painter of Our Time and G., and that these narrative innovations were central to his theory of the artistic and revolutionary 'moment'. Chapter 5 focuses on the relationship between photography, painting and aesthetics in the work of W. G. Sebald. It argues that aesthetic concepts such as 'the readymade' and 'objective chance' offer a better account of Sebald's engagement with art than accounts which draw on trauma theory. The thesis concludes with a short discussion of how the writers studied in this thesis have influenced the contemporary fiction of Jonathan Franzen, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy.
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Braidwood, Alistair. "Iain Banks, James Kelman and the art of engagement : an application of Jean Paul Sartre's theories of literature and existentialism to two modern Scottish novelists." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3024/.
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Over and above applying Sartrean literary philosophy to Banks and Kelman this thesis therefore also offers a model of literary criticism that can be applied to a number of other contemporary Scottish authors. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that Sartre’s theories of literature can assist in the attempt to better understand the value of the writer in society, and of Kelman and Banks in particular. The comparison and contrast between Banks and Kelman makes clear the importance of contextualising the individual writer not only with the work of their contemporaries, but with the time, place and position in which they are writing. The intention of the thesis is to discover how Sartre’s ideas of existentialism and literature can be applied to writers and their work in a way that allows ‘the critic’ to analyse both the novelist’s fictional technique and to gauge the value of their role in society – in other words, how Sartre’s theories allow us to better understand the individual writer in a social, political and moral context, both nationally and internationally.
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Lokash, Jennifer Faith. "In sickness and in health : romantic art therapy and the return to nature." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=82920.
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This thesis explores the network of relationships among health and healing, the natural environment, and poetry during the Romantic period in Britain, and thus offers a new perspective on the Romantic relation to Nature. The context for this study is both the long and varied history that links literature to ideas of health and disease, and the intersection of the late 18th- and early 19th-century discourses of holistic science and healing that emphasize the synergy between self and world and recognize that our living environments can be either hostile or congenial to body and spirit. For many Romantic poets, illness was a painful reality that became vital to their thoughts about poetry and creativity in general. Through Wordsworth's partnership with Coleridge, a vocabulary of health and disease emerges in relation to poetic production and reception that has influenced critics of the period. It constructs the "natural" as a source of health, and establishes Wordsworth and his poetic celebrations of the therapeutic potential of nature as the often problematic legacy both for Coleridge and for second generation poets like Byron and Shelley. While composing Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III, Byron tests Wordsworth's notion that immersion in the natural world can be spiritually therapeutic from the point of view of poetic production. The intensity of Byron's bodily existence, however, prevents him from fully experiencing the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Wordsworthian nature. As his attempts to disengage the spirit from the body by meditating on nature actually have the reverse effect of bringing him more in touch with his physical identity, he must reject Wordsworth's methodology as a possible vehicle for healing. In refiguring Wordsworth's ideas about "taste," Shelley conceives of his poetry as healthy food for thought. His frequently used metaphors of "literature as food" have their source in his attitudes towards intake first exp
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Amid, David Jonathan. "Where art meets life in secret : excavating subjects in selected works of Michael Ondaatje." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/6556.
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Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In re-imagining the relationship between words and life, or alternately between self and world, the novelist is in a unique position not merely to reproduce these interlinked relationships through the practice of writing, but to use the unique possibilities extended by the form and content of the novel as literary genre to reveal this interpenetration of ontological and epistemological domains; to render visible what is normally regarded as separate. To disclose how the imaginative domain of fiction writing mirrors the novelistic character of material reality, this dissertation discusses three Michael Ondaatje works, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost and Divisadero. Through a careful close reading it explores the manner in which Ondaatje‘s form of philosophical thought juxtaposes many genres and expressive forms into a highly complex, playful and self-referential metafictional whole. With a focus on close reading supplemented rather than determined by critical theory, this dissertation then sets out to demonstrate how the author‘s work advances the provocative central thesis that fictional texts not only reflect upon events, thoughts and emotions, but that philosophical works of literature and art are necessarily performative and interrogative, able to question aspects of the self, and ultimately able to present ethical ways of being and therapeutic escape to readers.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Deur die voorstelling van die verhouding tussen woorde en die lewe, of alternatiewelik tussen self en wêreld, is die outeur uniek geposisioneer om nie net hierdie verwikkelde verhoudings deur die skryfproses weer te gee nie, maar ook om die unieke moontlikhede wat die roman as literêre genre bied, te ontgin. Eenvoudig gestel, die vorm en inhoud van die roman maak dit moontlik om hierdie wisselwerking van ontologiese en epistomologiese gebiede oop te vlek, om wat gewoonlik as afsonderlik beskou word, te beklemtoon en op die voorgrond te plaas. Om dan ten toon te stel hoe die verbeeldingryke gebied van fiksieskryfwerk die romankarakter van die materiële werklikheid weërspieel, fokus hierdie studie op ‘n bespreking van drie werke van Michael Ondaatje, naamlik The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost en Divisadero. Deur kritiese stiplees ondersoek hierdie verhandeling die wyse waarop Ondaatje se konkretisering van abstrakte en filosofiese idees teenoor verskeie ander genres en beeldende denkvorme geplaas word, en sodoende ‘n self-verwysende, uiters komplekse metafiktiewe geheel skep. Hierdie studie fokus op stiplees van die tekste, maar word ook aangevul deur literêre en filosofiese teorie. Uiteindelik poog hierdie studie om uit te beeld hoe die outeur se werk die uitdagende argument dat fiksie nie net gebeurtenisse, denke en emosies bepeins nie, maar dat filosofiese en literêre tekste en kunsvorme noodwendig dramatiserend en ondersoekend is. Tekste soos dié van Ondaatje beskik dan oor die vermoëns om eienskappe van die self te bevraagteken, en om eindelik etiese vorme van menswees en terapeutiese ontvlugting aan lesers te bied.
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Kwok, Yin-ning, and 郭燕寧. "Concepts of realism and the reception of John Constable's landscape paintings." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B39707301.
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McDermott, Lydia Eva. "Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetic art as "current language heightened" : (with reference to selected sonnets and in the light of contemporary stylistic theory)." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002019.
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The aim of this thesis is twofold: To examine Hopkins's writings on poetics and to relate these to modern theories of poetic stylistics; and to show, through an examination of two sets of Hopkins sonnets, the ways in which Hopkins's writings on language and poetics are reflected in his verse (Introductory outline, p. 5)
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Schalk, Ashley C. "The Sketcher: Reverend John Eagles, His Poetical Shelter from the World and the 1812 Collection." Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2015. http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/410.
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...Since identifying Eagles as at least one of the artists of the 1812 Collection, I have discovered that his specific tour of the Lakes, the route he followed and the scenery conveyed in his images, deviated from the conventional tours in that Eagles was in search of what he regarded as a poetical landscape rather than a traditionally picturesque one. In other words, Eagles sought to capture more than an aesthetically pleasing scene as a picturesque image would, he endeavored to capture the soul of the scene and the 1812 Collection is evidence that Eagles practiced the artistic principles he so often espoused. As such, the 1812 Collection offers further implications for Eagles's body of work, his aesthetic, and his strong criticisms of the changes he witnessed in landscape art during his lifetime. In this essay, I therefore propose demonstrate not only how the 1812 Collection is in critical conversation with the picturesque tradition, but also how Eagles's sketches, like his writings and criticisms, expressed his own guiding aesthetic on discovering the poetry of nature instead of a strictly picturesque aesthetic. In doing so, I hope to restore Eagles's reputation as an artist and art critic as well as reveal the historical importance of the recently rediscovered 1812 Collection.
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Simons, Gary. ""Show Me the Money!": A Pecuniary Explication of William Makepeace Thackeray's Critical Journalism." Scholar Commons, 2011. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3347.
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Scholars have heretofore under-examined William Makepeace Thackeray's early critical essays despite their potential for illuminating Victorian manners and life. Further, these essays' treatments of aesthetics, class, society, history, and politics are all influenced by the pecuniary aspects of periodical journalism and frequently expose socio-economic attitudes and realities. This study explicates the circumstances, contents, and cultural implications of Thackeray's critical essays. Compensatory payments Thackeray received are reconciled with his bibliographic record, questions regarding Thackeray's interactions with periodicals such as Punch and Fraser's Magazine answered, and a database of the payment practices of early Victorian periodicals established.
Thackeray's contributions to leading London newspapers, the Times and the Morning Chronicle, address history, travel, art, literature, religion, and international affairs. Based upon biblio-economic payment records, cross-references, and other information, Thackeray's previously skeletal newspaper bibliographic record is fleshed out with twenty-eight new attributions. With this new information in hand, Thackeray's views on colonial emigration and imperialism, international affairs, religion, medievalism, Ireland, the East, and English middle-class identity are clarified. Further, Thackeray wrote a series of social and political "London" letters for an Indian newspaper, the Calcutta Star. This dissertation establishes that Thackeray's letters were answered in print by "colonial" letters written by James Hume, editor of the Calcutta Star; their mutual correspondence thus constitutes a revealing cosmopolitan - colonial discourse. The particulars of Thackeray's Calcutta Star writings are established, insights into the personalities and viewpoints of both men provided, and societal aspects of their correspondence analyzed.
In his many newspaper art exhibition reviews Thackeray popularized serious painting and shaped middle-class taste. The nature and timing of Thackeray's art essays are assessed, espoused values characterized and earlier analyses critiqued, and Thackeray's role introducing middle-class readers to contemporary Victorian art explored. Other Thackeray newspaper reviews addressed literature; indeed, Thackeray's grounding of literature in economic realities demonstrably carried over from his critical thesiss to his subsequent work as a novelist, creating a unity of theme, style, and subject between his early and late writings. Literary pathways originating in Thackeray's critical reviews are shown to offer new insights into Thackeray novels Catherine, Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, and Pendennis.
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Ferris, Natalie. "'Ludic passage' : abstraction in post-war British literature, 1945-1980." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5b3034e6-3a32-4684-b8a0-eb91cfc756c6.
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This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.
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Haxton, Robert Peter. "Refusal and rupture as a postdramatic revolt : an analysis of selected South African contemporary devised performances with particular focus on works by First Physical Theatre Company and the Rhodes University Drama Department." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015671.
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This mini-thesis investigates the concepts of refusal and rupture as a postdramatic revolt and how these terms can be applied and read within the context of analysing contemporary devised performance in South Africa. The argument focuses on the efficacy of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic terminology and the potential of its use in an appreciation of contemporary performance analysis. I investigate the potential in South African contemporary devised performance practice to challenge prevailing modes of traditional dramatic expectation in order to restore the experience of discovery and questioning in the spectator. This research is approached through a qualitative process which entails a reading and application of selected critical texts to the analysis with an application of Lehmann’s terminology. This reading/application is engaged in a dialogue with the interpretative and experiential aspects of selected South African devised performances with particular focus on four cross-disciplinary works selected for analysis. Chapter One functions as an introduction to the concept of postdramatic theatre and the application of the terms refusal and rupture as deconstructive keywords in the process of a devised performance. Chapter Two is an analysis of several South African contemporary performances with particular focus on Body of Evidence (2009) by Siwela Sonke Dance Company, Wreckage (2011) a collaboration by Ubom! Eastern Cape Drama Company and First Physical Theatre Company, Discharge (2012) by First Physical Theatre Company, and Drifting (2013) by The Rhodes University Drama Department. This mini-thesis concludes with the idea that with an understanding of refusal and rupture in a postdramatic revolt, contemporary devised performance achieves an awakening in its spectators by deconstructing the expectation of understanding and the need for resolve; the assumption and need for traditional dramatic structures and rules are challenged. Instead, it awakes an experience of discovery and questioning.
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Scholar, John. "The impression in the essays and late novels of Henry James." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3f9f1508-816d-43ce-8b65-13aaf045f851.
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This thesis examines the meanings and uses of the impression in the essays and late novels of Henry James. While James found fault with impressionism in French painting and literature, he repeatedly called the novel an ‘impression of life’, and used the term to figure important moments of perception and action for his protagonists. This thesis offers the first full-length study of the impression on its own terms, rather than through the lens of a wider artistic or philosophical movement, the most obvious example being impressionism. It locates James’s impression within an intertextual history comprising British empiricist philosophy (Locke and Hume), empiricist psychology (William James), British aestheticism (Pater and Wilde), and, looking forwards, twentieth-century theories of the performative (Austin, Derrida, de Man, Butler). It offers a series of close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872-88), his prefaces to the New York edition (1907-09), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). This exploration does not produce any unified definition of the impression in the work of James. It finds, rather, that the impression crystallizes one of James’s main themes, the struggle between art and life, a consequence of the competing empiricist and aesthetic tendencies that the thesis distinguishes within accounts of the impression available to James. The thesis goes on to show that impressions in James may be made as well as received, and so introduces a further distinction, between ‘performative’ and ‘cognitive’ impressions. It argues that what James does with these competing impressions – empiricist and aesthetic, cognitive and performative – is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and their drama of consciousness.
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Byington, Danielle. "Transmutations of Ophelia's "Melodious Lay"." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2017. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3203.
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There are multiple ways in which language and image share one another’s aesthetic message, such as traditional ekphrasis, which uses language to describe a work of art, or notional ekphrasis, which involves literature describing something that can be considered a work of art but does not physically exist at the time the description is written. However, these two terms are not inclusive to all artworks depicting literature or literature depicting artworks. Several scenes and characters from literature have been appropriated in art and the numerous paintings of Ophelia’s death as described by Gertrude in Hamlet, specifically Millais’ Ophelia, is the focus of this project. Throughout this thesis I analyze Gertrude’s account in three sections—the landscape, the body, and the voice—and compare it to its transmutation on the canvas.
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Kim, Joanne S. "Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1523659373305353.
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Boykin, Dennis Joseph. "Wartime text and context Cyril Connolly's Horizon /." University of Sydney, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1959.
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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)This thesis examines the literary journal Horizon, its editor Cyril Connolly, and a selection of its editorial articles, poems, short stories and essays in the context of the Second World War, from 1939-45. Analyses of these works, their representation of wartime experience, and their artistic merit, serve as evidence of a shared and sustained literary engagement with the war. Collectively, they demonstrate Horizon’s role as one of the primary outlets for British literature and cultural discourse during the conflict. Previous assessments of the magazine as an apolitical organ with purely aesthetic concerns have led to enduring critical neglect and misappraisal. This thesis shows that, contrary to the commonly held view, Horizon consistently offered space for political debate, innovative criticism, and war-relevant content. It argues that Horizon’s wartime writing is indicative of the many varied types of literary response to a war that was all but incomprehensible for those who experienced it. These poems, stories and essays offer a distinctive and illuminating insight into the war and are proof that a viable literary culture thrived during the war years. This thesis also argues that Horizon, as a periodical, should be considered as a creative entity in and of itself, and is worthy of being studied in this light. The magazine’s constituent parts, interesting enough when considered separately, are shaped, informed, and granted new shades of meaning by their position alongside other works in Horizon. Chapters in the thesis cover editorials and editing, poetry, short stories, political essays, and critical essays respectively. Analyses of individual works are situated in the context of larger concerns in order to demonstrate the coherence of debate and discourse that characterised Horizon’s wartime run. In arguing that Horizon is a singular creative entity worthy of consideration in its own right, this thesis locates itself within the emerging field of periodical studies. Further, by arguing that the magazine demonstrates the value of Second World War literature, it articulates with other recent attempts to reassess the scope and quality of that literature. More specifically, this thesis offers the first focused and in-depth analysis of Horizon’s formative years.
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Jones, Rebecca E. "Catching All Passions in His Craft of Will: Portraits and Pater in Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”." VCU Scholars Compass, 2016. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4219.
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This thesis examines Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” as the product of Wilde’s long interest in critic Walter Pater’s literature and scholarship. From its first iteration published in 1889, through Wilde’s ongoing revision and expansion into the version commonly anthologized today, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is an evolving work that mirrors Wilde’s enduring relationship with the art and ideas of his former teacher. This relationship is explored in three contexts: Pater’s contribution to Wilde’s understanding of the Renaissance period; the steady influence of Pater’s ideas and persona on Wilde’s other major works from the period that saw the publication and revision of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.;” and the particular influence of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits on the structure and themes of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” Because of Pater’s extensive writings on art, and Wilde’s passionate interest in the subject, many of these intersections occur around the image of the portrait in Wilde’s work.
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CANTU', VERA. "Hazlitt critico di Shakespeare." Doctoral thesis, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10280/512.
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La tesi investiga la critica shakespeariana di Hazlitt, concentrandosi sulle analisi alle quattro maggiori tragedie del bardo, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet e King Lear. Uno dei i principali e più importanti obiettivi della tesi è quello di dimostrare come la critica shakespeariana di Hazlitt si discosti da quello che è solitamente conosciuto come “character criticism”, mettendo in luce l’interesse del critico romantico non soltanto per i personaggi, ma anche per la trama e la struttura generale dei drammi, e per le interpretazioni teatrali dei drammi stessi. Il capitolo uno riunisce le recensioni, i saggi, le lezioni e le pubblicazioni che costituiscono il vasto apparato critico shakespeariano di Hazlitt, fornendo un’interessante ed ampia panoramica delle principali fonti della sua critica shakespeariana. I capitoli due e tre presentando un’analisi puntuale delle letture hazlittiane delle quattro grandi tragedie di shakespeare, rispettivamente di Macbeth e Othello, Hamlet e King Lear. Vengono evidenziati gli elementi che permettono di inserire Hazlitt fra i maggiori esponenti del Romanticismo critico inglese e di proporlo come acuto precursore di argomentazioni novecentesche su Shakespeare.The dissertation investigates Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism, focusing mainly on his analysis of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and King Lear. One of the main and most important objectives of the dissertation is that of demonstrating that Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism differs from what is usually known as “character criticism”, underlining the critic’s interest not only for the characters, but also for the plot and the general structure of the plays, and for the theatrical interpretations of the plays themselves. Chapter one collects the reviews, the essays, the lectures and the many publications that constitute Hazlitt’s vast Shakespearean criticism. It provides an interesting and wide overview of the main sources of Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism. Chapters two and three present an accurate analysis of Hazlitt’s readings of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, respectively Macbeth and Othello, Hamlet and King Lear. These chapters bring to light the elements that allow Hazlitt to be included among the major English Romantic critics and that establish him as acute forerunner of twentieth-century Shakespearean theses.
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Hutton-Williams, Francis Brent. "Irish cultural politics, Thomas McGreevy and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1941." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c6fbe4ba-3908-4e45-a012-00fa766cd1eb.
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This thesis analyses the responses of Irish writers and painters to a phase of national self-assertion that had arguably lost its liberating potential. It shows how the exhaustion of revolutionary pressures in Ireland after independence complicates the ties between creative activity and political activism. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship within political theory, literary criticism and art history, I chart an emerging network of literary and artistic techniques that confronts the representational aesthetics of the nation with strategies of paradox, reversal and renewal. My readings of the work of Denis Devlin, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Mainie Jellett, Jack Butler Yeats and, in particular, Thomas McGreevy, provide a means by which to distinguish other cultural possibilities that were imagined and pursued from 1922 to 1941, including McGreevy’s own aspiration to remould 'A Cultural Irish Republic'. The thesis argues that Ireland's political and artistic avant-garde were forcibly divided during this period: two factions that had been split apart by the effects of civil war and censorship. As such it will be preoccupied with a central question: how to sustain cultural strategies of revolutionary significance when the frontier between creative activity and political activism can no longer be straightforwardly crossed.
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Mostert, Linda Ann. "Feminist appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen's "The little mermaid" and the ways in which stereotypes of women are subverted or sustained in selected works." Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/1371.
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According to Lewis Seifert, “Fairy tales are obsessed with femininity … These narratives are concerned above all else with defining what makes women different from men and, more precisely, what is and is not acceptable feminine behaviour” (1996: 175). This study, then, will demonstrate how certain patriarchal ideas associated with fairy tales are disseminated when fairy tale elements are reworked in film, visual art and the novel. The aim of this project, more specifically, is to show how certain stereotypical representations of women endure in works that could be read as feminist appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. Stereotypical representations of women are numerous and may include: depicting females as fitting neatly into what is often called the virgin/whore or Madonna/whore binary opposition; depicting women as being caring and kind, but also passive, submissive and weak; and depicting older women as being sexually unattractive and evil (Goodwin and Fiske 2001:358; Sullivan 2010: 4). It must be said that the list of stereotypes relating to women given here is far from exhaustive.
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Burns, Robert, and n/a. "Transforming folk : innovation and tradition in English folk-rock music." University of Otago. Department of Music, 2008. http://adt.otago.ac.nz./public/adt-NZDU20080701.132922.
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From a mixed methodology perspective that includes ethnology, musicology and cultural anthropology, I argue that, despite initial detachment from folk revivalism, English folk-rock has moved closer to aspects of tradition and historical status and has embraced a revivalist stance similar to that of the folk revivals that occurred earlier in the twentieth century. Whereas revivalism often rejects manifestations of mass culture and modernity, I also argue that the early combinations of folk music and rock music demonstrated that aspects of preservation and commercialisation have always co-existed within this hybrid musical style. English folk-rock, a former progressive rock music style, has emerged in the post-punk era as a world music style that appeals to a broad spectrum of music fans and this audience does not regard issues such as maintenance of authenticity and tradition as key factors in the preservation process.
Rock music has remained a stimulus for further change in folk music and has enabled English folk-rock to become regarded as popular music by a new audience with diverse musical tastes. When folk music was adapted into rock settings, the result represented a particular identity for folk music at that time. In a similar way, as folk music continues to be amalgamated with rock and other popular music styles, or is performed in musical settings representing new cultures and ethnicities now present in the United Kingdom, it becomes updated and relevant to new audiences. From this perspective, I propose that growth in the popularity of British folk music since the early 1970s can be linked to its performance as English folk-rock, to its connections with culture and music industry marketing and promotion techniques, and to its inclusion as a 1990s festival component presented to audiences as part of what is promoted as world music. Popularity of folk music presented at world music festivals has stimulated significant growth in folk music audiences since the mid-1990s and consequently the UK is experiencing a new phase of revivalism - the third folk revival.
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Cho-Tak, Byong Eun. "The emergence and development of Browning's auditor." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1991. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc332703/.
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By presenting the auditor as a unifying principle that links Browning's earliest works to his dramatic monologues, this dissertation enhances the importance of the ever-ignored experimental works in developing the dramatic monologue technique. An exploration of the emergence and development of the auditor has an additional, but never ancillary, effect of proclaiming the originality and inventiveness of Browning's dramatic technique.
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Moore, Lindsay Emory. "The Laureates’ Lens: Exposing the Development of Literary History and Literary Criticism From Beneath the Dunce Cap." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc822784/.
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In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.
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Tanner, Jane Hinkle. "Sharing the Light: Feminine Power in Tudor and Stuart Comedy." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278551/.
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Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, feature women who have no public power, but who find opportunities for varying degrees of power in the private or domestic setting.
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McKenzie, Hope Bussey. "The Craft of the Old English Glossator: Latin Hymns in the Anglo-Saxon Hymnarium." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1991. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc332508/.
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The ten hymns of this study cover such overlapping categories as doctrine, solemn occasions in the rites of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and hymns prescribed in the Regularis concordia for the "little hours" of the daily office, as well as a historical overview from the fourth to the early tenth centuries.
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Mair, Olivia. "Merchants and mercantile culture in later medieval Italian and English literature." University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2006. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2006.0088.
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[Truncated abstract] The later medieval Western European economy was shaped by a marked increase in commerce and rapid urbanisation. The commercialisation of later medieval society is the background to this research, whose focus is the ways in which later medieval Italian and English literature registers and responds to the expanding marketplace and the rise of an urban mercantile class. What began as an investigation of the representation of merchants and business in a selection of this literature has become an attempt to address broader questions about the later medieval economy in relation to literary and artistic production. This study is therefore concerned not just with merchants and their activities in literature, but also the way economic developments are manifested in narrative. Issues such as the moral position and social function of the merchant are addressed, alongside bigger economic issues such as value and exchange in literature, and to some extent, the position of the writer and artist in a commercialised economy. The study is primarily literary, but it adopts a cross-disciplinary method, drawing on economic and social history, literary criticism, art history and sociology. It begins with an assessment of the broader socio-economic context, focusing on ecclesiastical and social responses to the growth of … This chapter discusses the thirteenth-century Floris and Blauncheflur (c. 1250), and the late fourteenth-century Sir Amadace, Sir Launfal, Octavian and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in relation to the commercialised economy and with reference to late medieval thought concerning value, exchange and the role and function of merchants. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1380s) is the subject of the third and final chapter, “Narrative and Economics in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer treats commerce and merchants with a complexity very close to Boccaccio’s approach to commerce. Both writers are acutely aware of the corruption to which merchants are susceptible, and of the many accusations levelled at merchants and their activities, but they do not necessarily perpetuate them. Rather than discussing exclusively the tales that deal extensively with merchants and commerce, or that told by the Merchantpilgrim, this discussion of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the Knight’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale and the way they relate to broader ideas about the exchange and the production of narrative in the Canterbury Tales as a whole.
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Murray, Jessica. ""Notes for the Manual Assembly"." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1157616/.
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A collection of poems that seeks the balance between imagination and reality that Wallace Stevens calls for in art, with a preface exploring Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just through the work of two contemporary poets.
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Regetz, Timothy. "Lollardy and Eschatology: English Literature c. 1380-1430." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404582/.
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In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.
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Collins, Margo. "Wayward Women, Virtuous Violence: Feminine Violence in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2474/.
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This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in order to maintain social boundaries, particularly sexual and economic ones, and that writers of the period drew upon this tradition of acceptable feminine violence in order to create the figure of the violent woman as a necessary agent of social control. One such figure is Violenta, the heroine of Delarivier Manley's novella The Wife's Resentment (1720), who murders and dismembers her bigamous husband. At her trial, Violenta is condemned to death "notwithstanding the Pity of the People" and "the Intercession of the Ladies," who believe that although the "unexampled Cruelty [Violenta] committed afterwards on the dead Body" was excessive, the murder itself is not inexcusable given her husband's bigamy. My research draws upon diverse archival materials, such as conduct manuals, criminal biographies, and legal records, in order to provide a contextual grounding for the interpretation of literary works by women. Moving between contemporary accounts of feminine violence and discussions of pertinent literary works by Eliza Haywood, Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Jane Wiseman, the dissertation examines issues of interpersonal violence and communal violence committed by women.
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Oh, Seiwoong. "The Scholarly Trickster in Jacobean Drama: Characterology and Culture." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1993. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278216/.
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Whereas scholarly malcontents and naifs in late Renaissance drama represent the actual notion of university graduates during the time period, scholarly tricksters have an obscure social origin. Moreover, their lack of motive in participating in the plays' events, their ambivalent value structures, and their conflicting dramatic roles as tricksters, reformers, justices, and heroes pose a serious diffculty to literary critics who attempt to define them. By examining the Western dramatic tradition, this study first proposes that the scholarly tricksters have their origins in both the Vice in early Tudor plays and the witty slave in classical comedy. By incorporating historical, cultural, anthropological, and psychological studies, this essay also demonstrates that the scholarly tricksters are each a Jacobean version of the archetypal trickster, who is usually associated with solitary habits, motiveless intrusion, and a double function as selfish buffoon and cultural hero. Finally, this study shows that their ambivalent value structures reflect the nature of rhetorical training in Renaissance schools.
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Duncan, Dawn E. (Dawn Elaine). "Language and Identity in Post-1800 Irish Drama." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc277916/.
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Using a sociolinguistic and post-colonial approach, I analyze Irish dramas that speak about language and its connection to national identity. In order to provide a systematic and wide-ranging study, I have selected plays written at approximately fifty-year intervals and performed before Irish audiences contemporary to their writing. The writers selected represent various aspects of Irish society--religiously, economically, and geographically--and arguably may be considered the outstanding theatrical Irish voices of their respective generations. Examining works by Alicia LeFanu, Dion Boucicault, W.B. Yeats, and Brian Friel, I argue that the way each of these playwrights deals with language and identity demonstrates successful resistance to the destruction of Irish identity by the dominant language power. The work of J. A. Laponce and Ronald Wardhaugh informs my language dominance theory. Briefly, when one language pushes aside another language, the cultural identity begins to shift. The literature of a nation provides evidence of the shifting perception. Drama, because of its performance qualities, provides the most complex and complete literary evidence. The effect of the performed text upon the audience validates a cultural reception beyond what would be possible with isolated readers. Following a theoretical introduction, I analyze the plays in chronological order. Alicia LeFanu's The Sons of Erin; or, Modern Sentiment (1812) gently pleads for equal treatment in a united Britain. Dion Boucicault's three Irish plays, especially The Colleen Bawn (1860) but also Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) and The Shaughraun (1875), satirically conceal rebellious nationalist tendencies under the cloak of melodrama. W. B. Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1899) reveals his romantic hope for healing the national identity through the powers of language. However, The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) reveal an increasing distrust of language to mythically heal Ireland. Brian Friel's Translations (1980), supported by The Communication Cord (1982) and Making History (1988), demonstrates a post-colonial move to manipulate history in order to tell the Irish side of a British story, constructing in the process an Irish identity that is postnational.
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Bender, Ashley Brookner. "Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2009. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12081/.
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This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control of a character's props often accords a person control of the character to whom the props belong. Props consequently make visual the relationships of power and subjugation that exist among characters. The severed body parts, bodies, miniature portraits, and containers of these plays are the mechanisms by which characters attempt to differentiate themselves from others. The characters deploy objects as proof of their identities-for example, when the women in Behn's Rover circulate miniatures of themselves-yet other characters must also interpret these objects. The props, and therefore the characters' identities, are at all times vulnerable to misinterpretation. Much as the props' meanings are often disputed, so too are characters' private identities often at odds with their public personae. The boundaries of selfhood that the characters wish to protect are made vulnerable by the objects that they use to shore up those boundaries. When read in relation to the characters who move them, props reveal the negotiated process of individuation. In doing so, they emphasize the correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic worth. They are a measure of how well characters perform gender and class rolls, thereby demonstrating the importance of external signifiers in the legitimation of England's subjects, even as they expose "legitimacy" as a social construction.
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Walther, James T. "Imagining The Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2592/.
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William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.
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TAYLOR, SHAWN. "SPEED AND RESOLUTION IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL REPRODUCIBILITY." VCU Scholars Compass, 2015. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/3888.
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The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, a YouTube clip from Jurassic park, and the super bowl halftime show. A search engines assistance with biographic memory helps our bodies survive new atmospheres and weigh the gravities that exist around the versions of an objects materiality. Communication has moved from our vocal chords, to swipes and taps of our thumbs on a screen that predicts the weather, accesses the hidden, invisible, and withdrawn information from the objects around us, and still ducks up what we are trying to say. This txt was written on a tablet returned to stock settings and embedded with content to mine the experience in which mediated technology creates, communicates and obscures new forms of language. Life in a new event horizon — a dimensional dualism that finds us competing for genetic and mimetic survival — we are now functioning as different types of humans.
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Hawkins, Emma B. "Gender, Power, and Language in Anglo-Saxon Poetry." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278983/.
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Many Old English poems reflect the Anglo-Saxon writers's interest in who could exercise power and how language could be used to signal a position of power or powerlessness. In previous Old English studies, the prevailing critical attitude has been to associate the exercise of power with sex—the distinction between males and females based upon biological and physiological differences—or with sex-oriented social roles or sphere of operation. Scholarship of the last twenty years has just begun to explore the connection between power and gender-coded traits, attributes which initially were tied to the heroic code and were primarily male-oriented. By the eighth and ninth centuries, the period in which most of the extant Old English poetry was probably composed, these qualities had become disassociated from biological sex but retained their gender affiliations. A re-examination of "The Dream of the Rood," "The Wanderer," "The Husband's Message," "The Wife's Lament," "Wulf and Eadwacer" and Beowulf confirms that the poets used gender-coded language to indicate which poetic characters, female as well as male, held positions of power and powerlessness. A status of power or powerlessness was signalled by the exercise of particular gendered traits that were open for assumption by men and women. Powerful individuals were depicted with masculine-coded language affiliated with honor, mastery, aggression, victory, bravery, independence, martial prowess, assertiveness, physical strength, verbal acuteness, firmness or hardness, and respect from others. Conversely, the powerless were described with non-masculine or feminine-coded language suggesting dishonor, subservience, passivity, defeat, cowardice, dependence, defenselessness, lack of volition, softness or indecisiveness, and lack of respect from others. Once attained, neither status was permanent; women and men trafficked back and forth between the two. Depending upon the circumstances, members of both sexes could experience reversals of fortunes which would necessitate moving from one category to the other, on more than one occasion in a lifetime.
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Hirsch, Brett Daniel. "Werewolves and women with whiskers : figures of estrangement in early modern English drama and culture." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0175.
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Each chapter of Werewolves and Women with Whiskers: Figures of Estrangement in Early Modern English Drama and Culture explores a particular figure of fascination and fear in the early modern English imagination: in one it is owls, in another bearded women, in a third werewolves, and in yet another Jews. Drawing on instances from drama and other cultural forms, this thesis seeks to examine each of these phenomena in terms of their estrangement. There is a symbolic appositeness in each of these figures, whether in estranged and estranging minority groups, such as Catholics, Jesuits, Jews, Puritans, Italians, the Irish, and the Scots; or in transgressive behaviours, such as cross-dressing and gender trouble, infidelity and apostasy, intemperate passion and unnatural desire. Essentially unfixed and unstable, these emblematic figures are indicative of cultural uncertainty and therefore are easily adapted to suit changing political, religious, and social climates. However, adaptability and fluidity come at a price, since figures of difference have an uncomfortable way of transforming themselves into figures of resemblance. Thus, this thesis argues, each of these figuresowls, bearded women, werewolves, Jewsoccupies an undefined and undefinable space on the precarious boundary between the usual and the unusual, between the strange and the strangely familiar, and, most strangely and paradoxically of all, between us and them.
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Lam, Chou I. "A descriptive study of how culture-specific terms are glossed in a Chinese translation of Angels and Demons." Thesis, University of Macau, 2012. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2586620.
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Leissner, Debra Holt. "The Gender of Time in the Eighteenth-century English Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278321/.
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This study takes a structuralist approach to the development of the novel, arguing that eighteenth-century writers build progressive narrative by rendering abstract, then conflating, literary theories of gendered time that originate in the Renaissance with seventeenth-century scientific theories of motion. I argue that writers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century generate and regulate progress-as-product in their narratives through gendered constructions of time that corresponded to the generation and regulation of economic, political, and social progress brought about by developing capitalism.
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Treacy, Susan. "English Devotional Song of the Seventeenth Century in Printed Collections from 1638 to 1693: A Study of Music and Culture." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1986. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331253/.
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Seventeenth-century England witnessed profound historical, theological, and musical changes. A king was overthrown and executed; religion was practiced fervently and disputed hotly; and English musicians fell under the influence of the Italian stile nuovo. Many devotional songs were printed, among them those which reveal influences of this style. These English-texted sacred songs for one to three solo voices with continuo--not based upon a previously- composed hymn or psalm tune—are emphasized in this dissertation. Chapter One treats definitions, past neglect of the genre by scholars, and the problem of ambiguous terminology. Chapter Two is an examination of how religion and politics affected musical life, the hiatus from liturgical music from 1644 to 1660 causing composers to contribute to the flourishing of devotional music for home worship and recreation. Different modes of seventeenth-century devotional life are discussed in Chapter Three. Chapter Four provides documentation for use of devotional music, diaries and memoirs of the period revealing the use of several publications considered in this study. Baroque musical aesthetics applied to devotional song and its raising of the affections towards God are discussed in Chapter Five. Chapter Six traces the influence of Italian monody and sacred concerto on English devotional song. The earliest compositions by an Englishman working in the stile nuovo are Henry Lawes' 1638 hymn tunes with continuo. Collections of two- and three-voice compositions by Child, the Lawes brothers, Wilson, and Porter, published from 1639 to 1657, comprise Chapter Seven, as well as early devotional works of Locke. Chapter Eight treats Restoration devotional song-- compositions for one to three voices and continuo, mostly of a more secular and dramatic style than works discussed in earlier. The outstanding English Baroque composers--Locke, Humfrey, Blow, and Purcell--are represented, and the apex of this style is found in the latest seventeenth-century publication of devotional song, Henry Playford's Harmonia sacra, (1688, 1693).
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Harris, Candice R. (Candice Rae). "The Decline of the Country-House Poem in England: A Study in the History of Ideas." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331572/.
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This study discusses the evolution of the English country-house poem from its inception by Ben Jonson in "To Penshurst" to the present. It shows that in addition to stylistic and thematic borrowings primarily from Horace and Martial, traditional English values associated with the great hall and comitatus ideal helped define features of the English country-house poem, to which Jonson added the metonymical use of architecture.
In the Jonsonian country-house poem, the country estate, exemplified by Penshurst, is a microcosm of the ideal English social organization characterized by interdependence, simplicity, service, hospitality, and balance between the active and contemplative life. Those poems which depart from the Jonsonian ideal are characterized by disequilibrium between the active and contemplative life, resulting in the predominance of artifice, subordination of nature, and isolation of art from the community, as exemplified by Thomas Carew's "To Saxham" and Richard Lovelace's "Amyntor's Grove."
Architectural features of the English country house are examined to explain the absence of the Jonsonian country-house poem in the eighteenth century. The building tradition praised by Jonson gradually gave way to aesthetic considerations fostered by the professional architect and Palladian architecture, architectural patronage by the middle class, and change in identity of the country house as center of an interdependent community.
The country-house poem was revived by W. B. Yeats in his poems in praise of Coole Park. In them Yeats reaffirms Jonsonian values. In contrast to the poems of Yeats, the country-house poems of Sacheverell Sitwell and John Hollander convey a sense of irretrievable loss of the Jonsonian ideal and isolation of the poet.
Changing social patterns, ethical values, and aesthetics threaten the survival of the country-house poem, although the ideal continues to reflect a basic longing of humanity for a pastoral retreat where life is simple and innocent.
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Jackson, Lisa Hartsell. "Wandering Women: Sexual and Social Stigma in the Mid-Victorian Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2572/.
Full textAbstract:
The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following list of characteristics: she is a literal or figurative orphan, is genteelly poor or of the working class, is pursued by a rogue who offers financial security in return for sexual favors; this sexual liaison, unsanctified by marriage, causes her to be stigmatized in the eyes of society; and her stigmatization results in expulsion from society and enforced wandering through a literal or figurative wilderness. There are three variations of this archetype: the child-woman as represented by the titular heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Little Nell of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the sexual deviant as represented by Miss Wade of Dickens' Little Dorrit; and the fallen woman as represented by the titular heroine of Thomas Hardy' Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hetty Sorrel of George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Lady Dedlock of Dickens' Bleak House. Although the Wandering Woman's journey may resemble a variation of the bildungsroman tradition, it is not, because unlike male characters in this genre, women have limited opportunities. Wandering Women always carry a stigma because of their "illicit" sexual relationship, are isolated because of this, and never experience a sense of fun or adventure during their journey. The Wandering Woman suffers permanent damage to her reputation, as well as to her emotional welfare, because she has been unable to conform to archaic, unrealistic modes of behavior. Her story is not, then, a type of coming of age story, but is, rather, the story of the end of an age.
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Nelson, Nancy Susan. "Heroism and Failure in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: the Ideal and the Real within the Comitatus." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1989. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc332044/.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation discusses the complicated relationship (known as the comitatus) of kings and followers as presented in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. The anonymous poets of the age celebrated the ideals of their culture but consistently portrayed the real behavior of the characters within their works. Other studies have examined the ideals of the comitatus in general terms while referring to the poetry as a body of work, or they have discussed them in particular terms while referring to one or two poems in detail. This study is both broader and deeper in scope than are the earlier works. In a number of poems I have identified the heroic ideals and examined the poetic treatment of those ideals. In order to establish the necessary background, Chapter I reviews the historical sources, such as Tacitus, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the work of modern historians. Chapter II discusses such attributes of the king as wisdom, courage, and generosity. Chapter III examines the role of aristocratic women within the society. Chapter IV describes the proper behavior of followers, primarily their loyalty in return for treasures earlier bestowed. Chapter V discusses perversions and failures of the ideal. The dissertation concludes that, contrary to the view that Anglo-Saxon literature idealized the culture, the poets presented a reasonably realistic picture of their age. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry celebrates ideals of behavior which, even when they can be attained, are not successful in the real world of political life.
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Poston, Craig A. (Craig Alan). "The Problematic British Romantic Hero(ine): the Giaour, Mathilda, and Evelina." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278684/.
Full textAbstract:
Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different and more sentimental hero. Byron seems to play off the reader's expectations of the "Byronic hero" with an ambiguous hero whose character reflects the Romantic aesthetic of indeterminacy. Through the accretive structure of The Giaour, Byron creates a hero of competing component characteristics, a focus he also gives to his heroines. Chapters 4 and 5 address works that are traditionally considered eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Mathilda and Evelina, both epistolary works, present their heroines as worldly innocents who are beset by aggressive males. Yet their subtext suggests that these girls aggressively maneuver the men in their lives. Mathilda and Evelina create a tension between the expected and the radical to energize the reader's imagination.
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Koenig, Gregory R. (Gregory Robert). "The Relationship of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, 1588-1590: An Episode in the Development of English Prose Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500802/.
Full textAbstract:
Robert Greene began collaborating with Thomas Nashe as English prose was turning away from the style and subject matter of Lyly's Euphues (1578) and Sidney's Arcadia (1590). When Greene and Nashe came together in London, the two writers appear to have set the tone for the pamphleteers who would establish the realistic tradition that contributed to the development of the novel. Greene's Menaphon (1589) may be a satire representing his abandonment of courtly fiction. The influence of the Marprelate controversy is reflected in Greene's appeals to the pragmatic character of the emerging literate middle class. Greene's Vision (1592) appears to be Greene's affirmation of his critical philosophy at a point of stress in the authors' relationship.
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Ridley, Sarah Elizabeth. ""That Every Christian May Be Suited": Isaac Watts's Hymns in the Writings of Early Mohegan Writers, Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc984204/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis considers how Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, Mohegan writers in Early America, used the hymns of English hymnodist, Isaac Watts. Each chapter traces how either Samson Occom or Joseph Johnson's adapted Isaac Watts's hymns for Native communities and how these texts are sites of affective sovereignty.
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Jeffrey, Anthony Cole. "The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty and Depravity in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062818/.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation argues that early modern writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell played a critical role in the transition from the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics. I demonstrate how the Protestant Reformation, with its special emphasis on the depravity of human nature, prompted writers to critique models of aesthetic judgment and experience that depended on high faith in human goodness and rationality. These writers in turn used their literary works to popularize skepticism about the human mind's ability to perceive and appreciate beauty accurately. In doing so, early modern writers helped create an intellectual culture in which aesthetics would emerge as a distinct branch of philosophy.
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Hall, Karen Peta. "Discovering the lost race story : writing science fiction, writing temporality." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0216.
Full textAbstract:
Genres are constituted, implicitly and explicitly, through their construction of the past. Genres continually reconstitute themselves, as authors, producers and, most importantly, readers situate texts in relation to one another; each text implies a reader who will locate the text on a spectrum of previously developed generic characteristics. Though science fiction appears to be a genre concerned with the future, I argue that the persistent presence of lost race stories where the contemporary world and groups of people thought to exist only in the past intersect in science fiction demonstrates that the past is crucial in the operation of the genre. By tracing the origins and evolution of the lost race story from late nineteenth-century novels through the early twentieth-century American pulp science fiction magazines to novel-length narratives, and narrative series, at the end of the twentieth century, this thesis shows how the consistent presence, and varied uses, of lost race stories in science fiction complicates previous critical narratives of the history and definitions of science fiction.
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Chan, Tzu-Ying. "John Playford's The Division Violin: Improvisation and Variation Practice in English Violin Music of the Seventeenth Century." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1011780/.
Full textAbstract:
English publisher John Playford (1623-1686/1687) first published his "The Division Violin: Containing a Collection of Divisions Upon Several Grounds for the Treble-Violin" in 1684. The first edition of this violin collection contains 26 written-out examples of improvisation, serving as a living snapshot of the performance practice of the time. This research is based on the second edition, which Playford had expanded into 30 pieces for the violin, published in 1685. The purpose of this study is to investigate the art of improvisation in England during the late 17th century, focusing on Playford's "The Division Violin." The dissertation first surveys the development of English violin music in the 17th century. Then, the dissertation traces eight selected 16th-century Italian diminution manuals. This will help readers understand the progression of the Italian diminution and improvisation practice in the 16th century and how it relates to the English division of the 17th century. Finally, based on a thorough research of the 17th-century improvisatory style and rhetorical approach, the author of this study provides performance suggestions on "Mr. Farinell's Ground," No. 5 from "The Division Violin."