Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English language Early modern'
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Pappa, Joseph. "Carnal reading early modern language and bodies /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2008.
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Farley, Stuart. "Copious voices in early modern English writing." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11904.
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This thesis takes as its object of study a certain strand of Early Modern English writing characterised by its cornucopian invention, immethodical structure, and creatively exuberant, often chaotic, means of expression. It takes as its point of departure the Erasmian theory of ‘copia' (rhetorical abundance), expanding upon it freely in order to formulate new and independent notions of copious vernacular writing as it is practised in 16th- and 17th-century contexts. Throughout I argue for the continuity and pervasiveness of the pursuit of linguistic plenitude, in contrast to a prevailing belief that the outpouring of 'words' and 'things' started to dissipate in the transition from one century (16th) to the next (17th). The writers to be discussed are Thomas Nashe, Robert Burton, John Taylor the ‘Water-Poet', and Sir Thomas Urquhart. Each of the genres in which these writers operate–prose-poetry, the essay, the pamphlet, and the universal language–emerge either toward the end of the 16th century or during the course of the 17th century, and so can be said to take copious writing in new and experimental directions not fully accounted for in the current scholarship. My contribution to the literature lies principally in its focus on the emergence of these literary forms in an Early Modern English context, with an emphasis on the role played by copiousness of expression in their stylistic development and how they in turn develop the practice of copia.
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Sheen, Ding-Taou. "The historical development of reciprocal pronouns in middle English with selected early modern English comparisons." Virtual Press, 1988. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/558329.
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In Modern English, EACH OTHER and ONE ANOTHER are morphologically fixed as reciprocal compound pronouns. The reciprocal construction has been developed and used in every period of the English language. The main purpose of this study, nevertheless, was to investigate the ways to express the notion of reciprocity in Middle English and Early Modern English.The morphological analyses of the citations demonstrate that Middle English employed a great variety of head words and phrases than does Modern English in reciprocal structures. EACH, EITHER, EVERY, and ONE most frequently appear as head words of Middle English reciprocal construction, and OTHER usually occurs as a subsequent elements. OTHER, however, may also serve as the head word. Middle English also permits EACH MAN, ILLC MANN, EACH ONE, ILLC ONE, EVERY MAN, EVERY ONE, and THE ONE to function as head phrases. In Early Modem English, Malory employs various structures in his writings, but he prefers EITHER, EITHER OF (US, YOU, THEM) as the head of reciprocal patterns. Shakespeare, nevertheless, more frequently uses ONE as the head word.In Middle English, according to the data, the reciprocal sequence (EACH, EITHER, ONE) / OTHER stands in subject position in twenty examples between c. 1200 - c.1450. Rarely, however, do the pronouns function as a compound subject (subject / complement). The underlying structure of the sentence pattern SOV, nevertheless, is SVO. The need to rhyme, therefore, may cause the change of the word order in the period.(EACH, EITHER, EVERY, ONE, OTHER) may be compounded with the pronoun OTHER in forty examples between c. 1285 - c.1513, but the sequence most frequentlyoccur as direct / indirect object. (EACH, EITHER, EVERY, ONE, OTHER) + OTHER functions as object of preposition in four examples between c.1328 - c.1440.The modem usage of EACH OTHER as a compound object is established in Early Modern English learned, imaginative texts, and the use of ONE ANOTHER as the compound direct object and object of preposition are being established in that period.Since the rules for compounding reciprocal pronouns and for their morpho-syntatic features were not restrictly established before the time of Shakespeare, OTHER could function as an uninflected, separable pronoun in Middle English. In position except modification. the development of OTHER as a nominal occured after Middle English except where the head word is ONE. In Modem English, OTHER must be used as a nominal if the reciprocal pronouns are not compounded.Department of English
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Gubbels, Katherine Gertrude. ""An uncouth love": queering processes in medieval and early modern romances." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/509.
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Most scholars of the romance genre can think of any number of examples in which the tale's hero or heroine finds him- or herself caught up in a rather comic episode resulting from either mistaken identity, cross-dressing, or the "mis-directed" sexual liaisons resulting there-from. At times it seems as if everyone is doomed to stumble across at least a brief period of gendered or sexual confusion as a result of these tropes, a momentary digression into the realm of queer transgression. My project builds off the work of medieval scholar, Tison Pugh, and contends that the protagonist must undergo this brief, contained period of sexual and/or gendered transgression as a kind of requirement or steppingstone necessary in order to eventually achieve his or her goal, most often in these cases, acceptance within the chivalric court and/or heteronormative coupling. In this way, these texts demarcate sexual and gender transgression as not only essential to, but also a very part of, a larger heteronormative paradigm. The presence of these queer transgressions, is not separate, nor oppositional to the overarching heteronormative, chivalric plot, but rather an indispensable part of it. In this way, the tales seem to allow for a temporary suspension of prototypical norms as a means to ultimately reinforce and re-inscribe these exact hierarchies.
My project thus not only illustrates another way of reading the genre of romance, but also examines the notion of a medieval or early modern "queer" subjectivity. I use the work of a number of medieval- and early modern- sexuality scholars (Carolyn Dinshaw, Karma Lochrie, and Valerie Traub, to name a few) to examine four canonical texts (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's "The Tale of Sir Gareth," Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Sidney's The Old Arcadia), and consider to what extent the queer episodes presented therein actually subvert or conform to the larger heteronormative paradigms of that particular culture. There are many examples of medieval and early modern texts in which temporary, controlled transgression is not only endorsed, but encouraged as a means of diffusing rebellious desire, a "getting it out of the system," if you will. The extent to which such controlled transgressions remain contained, however, is debatable. In allowing a period of controlled transgression, one admits that the very act of deviancy and its containment are intrinsically important to the larger power structure. Although these tales present queer transgressions as demons to be exorcised, this exorcism, this period of release, is ultimately part of the larger quest goal; rather than oppositional to the heteronormative ideal, these queer transgressions are an important component of such a model, interwoven and essential to the overall quest.
This topic also engages with a number of issues related to queer and feminist theories, most specifically those posited by Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. For example, when a character switches from his previous normative role to the period of controlled transgression described here, he surely does not abandon his position within the normative sphere entirely, nor does he adopt his new deviant role completely. Rather, his state is that of in-betweeness. During this period he is both Self and Other, pursuing quests in an attempt to be assimilated into heteronormative structures of the chivalric ideal, but also temporarily assuming the "queer," marginalized subject position. Such characters do not move from heteronormative to queer and back again, but rather occupy a space in which they are both heteronormative and queer. Therefore, their time of "controlled transgression" essentially shakes the foundation of binary-based identification as a whole. That is, since such characters occupy a kind of hybrid space between heteronormative and queer roles, they serve as proof that the binaries of Self and Other are not binaries at all, but rather points on a continuum. I argue that even if the "transgression" embraced by these characters is temporary and within a "controlled" environment, it is nonetheless subversive as the mere presence of a character who is both Self and Other threatens to break down this system of hierarchies as a whole.
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Li, Yuting. "Early Cantonese transliterations as a phonological basis for modern Hong Kong English." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2019. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/710.
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The research question of this dissertation is whether the early Cantonese-English contact provides a phonological basis to the development of Hong Kong English (HKE henceforth). The dissertation provides an affirmative answer by studying four Cantonese-English bilingual dictionaries in the mid 19th and early 20th centuries. The empirical evidence from the four bilingual dictionaries reveals three types of phenomena: inheritance, stabilization, and deviation. The phenomenon of inheritance refers to the phonological features discovered in the early Cantonese-English contact that have persisted in modern HKE. The phenomenon of stabilization includes the phonological features of the early Cantonese-English contact that are fortified and regularized in modern HKE. The phenomenon of deviation indicates certain phonological features of the early Cantonese-English contact differ from those of modern HKE. The findings of the dissertation fill two research gaps in the literature of HKE. One research gap is the omission of the English acquisition patterns for average Hongkongers before mass English-language education was implemented in the 1970s. For the Hongkongers who had no access to formal schools, the Cantonese-English bilingual dictionaries were used as the learning materials in self-study or private schools. The other research gap is the lack of a historical perspective into the variations of modern HKE phonology. Most of the studies on HKE are synchronic in nature and fail to realize that the variations may be derived from the two different English acquisition patterns in history. This dissertation reveals that the phonology of the functional bilinguals in HKE (the HKE speakers who could use English for various formal and informal needs) might be influenced by the phonological features of inheritance and stabilization discovered in the early Cantonese-English contact. The findings establish the historical connections behind modern HKE phonology, enhancing the recognition of HKE as an autonomous New English Variety. This enables HKE to be the symbol of solidarity for Hongkongers. This dissertation investigates the historical data from the Cantonese-English bilingual dictionaries that remain largely unstudied for a long time. Transformed into a retrievable dataset, the historical data can be used for linguistic theorizing.
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Leverton, Tara Juliette Corinna. "A rotten and dead body : disabled villainy on the early modern stage." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13118.
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Includes bibliographical references.Analysing the different ways in which the persistent trope of the disabled villain manifests on the early modern stage is, I believe, necessary work. There has been no extended scholarly account of this phenomenon; analyses of the fictional disabled villain have generally served as side arguments to larger discussions regarding the placement of disability in cultural consciousness.
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Lambert, James Schroder. "Unspeakable joy : rejoicing in early modern England." Diss., University of Iowa, 2012. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1348.
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My dissertation, Unspeakable Joy: Rejoicing in Early Modern England, claims that the act of rejoicing--expressing religious joy--was a crucial rhetorical element of literary works in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England. The expression of religious joy in literature functioned as a sign of belief and sanctification in English Protestant theology, and became the emotive articulation of a hopeful union between earthly passion and an anticipated heavenly feeling. By taking into account the historical-theological definitions of joy in the reformed tradition, I offer new readings of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century texts, including the Sidney Psalms, Donne's sermons, Spenser's Epithalamion, Richard Rogers's spiritual diaries, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. I suggest that much of early modern poetics stems from a desire, on behalf of writers, to articulate the ineffable joy so often described by sermons and tracts. By establishing Renaissance emotional expression as a source of religious epistemology and negotiating the cognitive and constructive understandings of emotion, I show that religious rejoicing in Elizabethan Protestantism consists of a series of emotive speech acts designed to imitate the hoped-for joys of heaven. Finally, these readings emphasize the ways in which rejoicing not only functions as a reaffirmation of belief in and commitment to the state church but also becomes the primary agent for spiritual affect by bestowing grace on an individual believer.
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Dodson, Sandra. "Towards a modernist aesthetic : dialectical modes of representation in the early modern novel." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21943.
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Bibliography: pages 156-163.This thesis contests the widely-held view that literary modernism is a late manifestation of the romantic-symbolist tradition, arguing that the modern novel's self-reflexive preoccupation with the materiality of language is incompatible with the essentialist premises of romantic-symbolist aesthetics. It also takes issue with the critical argument that modernism is the product of a conflict between the logocentric modes of symbolism and literary realism. Its central contention is that in its early stages modernism is defined by a deconstructive dialectic between a logocentric symbolist mode which gestures to a realm of meaning beyond language, and an ex-centric allegorical mode, which has its home in differential structures of representation. Chapter one discusses the origin of the symbol-allegory dialectic in the domain of romantic aesthetics; distinguishes modernist allegory from romantic and pre-romantic allegorical modes; and transposes the symbol-allegory dialectic into a post- structuralist theoretical framework. It demonstrates the affinity of symbol with the philosophical paradigms of Hegelian Erinnerung, the Lacanian Imaginary, and the presencing mode of the sign in Western metaphysics; and the affinity of allegory with the paradigms of Hegelian Gedachtnis (de Man's disjunctive "thinking memory"), the Lacanian Symbolic, and Derridean archi-ecriture. Building upon this theoretical ground, the next three chapters examine the representational features of three seminal early modern novels: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, demonstrating in each case how a discursive allegorical mode implicitly demystifies a symbolist rhetoric of "pure figuration" supposedly divested of referential function. Each chapter also represents a variation on the symbol- allegory problematic. Chapter two explores the relation of Conrad's early work to the aesthetic tradition of the sublime, arguing that in Lord Jim Conrad moves beyond a traditional literary sublime predicated on an elusive realm of meaning beyond language to an infinitely textual modernist sublime which exposes the discursive status of meaning and subjectivity. Chapter three demonstrates the affinity of Proustian voluntary and involuntary memory with the Hegelian categories of Gedachtnis and Erinnerung, and further, with the Lacanian concepts of Eros (Imaginary) and Law (Symbolic). It shows that involuntary memory is always already inhabited by the differential structures of voluntary memory, always already caught in the temporal predicament that is for Lacan and Derrida the definitive condition of desire and writing. Chapter four focuses on the relation between allegory, irony and authorial subjectivity in A Portrait. It demonstrates that the allegorisation of the· autobiographical subject in A Portrait crucially affects the modality of irony in the text, rendering obsolete conventional rhetoric of irony predicated on a coherent, non-discursive authorial subjectivity. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the representational issues involved in the shift from early to high modernist aesthetics. It cites Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake as exemplary high modernist texts, and demonstrates that in both novels the dialectic between symbol and allegory falls away, and the sublime, intertextual form of allegory predominates.
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Chaghafi, Elisabeth Leila. "Early modern literary afterlives." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c46edf04-50ed-4fc0-8d4f-74dfdfdb470e.
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My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.
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Slagle, Judith Bailey. "Review of Women as Translators in Early Modern England, by Deborah Uman." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2014. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/3215.
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Georgecink, Susan Hrach. "Practices of writing : early modern metaphors of literacy and the function of composition, past and present /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9389.
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Lupo, Marian. "Incorporating ability rhetorics of early modern English business and administrative communication /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1149093694.
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Row-Heyveld, Lindsey Dawn. "Dissembling Disability: Performances of the Non-Standard Body in Early Modern England." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4906.
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The fear of able-bodied people pretending to be disabled was rampant in early modern England. Thieves were reputed to feign impairment in order to con charity out of well-meaning Christians. People told stories about these deceptive rogues in widely circulated prose pamphlets, sung about them in popular ballads, and even recorded their purported actions in laws passed to curb their counterfeiting. Feigned disability was especially prevalent--and potent--on the stage. Over thirty plays feature one or more able-bodied characters performing physical impairment. This dissertation examines the theatrical tradition of dissembling disability and argues that it played a central role in the cultural creation of disability as a category of identity. On the stage, playwrights teased out stereotypes about the non-standard body, specifically the popular notion that disability was always both deeply pitiful and, simultaneously, dangerously criminal and counterfeit. Fears of false disability, which surged during the English Reformation, demanded a policing of boundaries between able-bodied and disabled persons and inspired the first legal definition of disability in England. Rather than resolving the issue of physical difference, as the legal and religious authorities attempted to do, the theater revealed and reveled in the myriad complications of the non-standard body. The many plays that feature performances of dissembling disability use the trope to interrogate issues of epistemological proof, ask theological questions about charity and virtue, and, especially, explore the relationship between the body and identity. Fraudulent disability also had important literary uses as well; playwrights employed this handy theatrical instrument to construct character, to solve narrative problems, to draw attention to the manufactured theatricality of their dramas, and, often, to critique the practices of the commercial theater. Expanding beyond the medical perspectives offered by the few studies that have considered early modern disability, I argue that these performances emerge out of a complex network of literary, religious, and social concerns. For all that fraudulent disability may have been itself a type of fraud, trumped up by the state, the church, and the theater for their own diverse ends, it still wielded enormous influence in shaping notions of the non-standard body that are still current.
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Decamp, Eleanor Sian. "Performing barbers, surgeons and barber-surgeons in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:42cdcea1-56b8-4d3d-961f-d2a3e7fa0d13.
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This study addresses the problem critics have faced in identifying contemporary perceptions of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon in early modernity by examining the literature, predominantly the drama, from the period. The name ‘barber-surgeon’ is not given formally to any character in extant early modern plays; only within the dialogue or during stage business is a character labelled the barber-surgeon. Barbers and surgeons are simultaneously separate and doubled-up characters. The differences and cross-pollinations between their practices play out across the literature and tell us not just about their cultural, civic and occupational histories but also about how we interpret patterns in language, onomastics, dramaturgy, materiality, acoustics and semiology. Accordingly, the argument in this study is structured thematically and focuses on the elements of performance, moving from discussions of names to discussions of settings and props, disguises, stage directions and semiotics, and from sound effects and music, to voices and rhetorical turns. In doing so, it questions what it means in early modernity to have a developed literary identity, or be deprived of one. The barber-surgeon is a trope in early modern literature because he has a tangible social impact and an historical meaning derived from his barbery and surgery roots, and consequently a richly allusive idiom which exerted attraction for audiences. But the figure of the barber-surgeon can also be a trope in investigating how representation works. An aesthetic of doubleness, which this study finds to be diversely constructed, prevails in barbers’, surgeons’ and barber-surgeons’ literary conception, and the barber-surgeon in the popular imagination is created from opposing cultural stereotypes. The literature from the period demonstrates why a guild union of barbers and surgeons was never harmonious: they are opposing dramaturgical as well as medical figures. This study has a wide-ranging literary corpus, including early modern play texts, ballads, pamphlets, guild records, dictionaries, inventories, medical treatises and archaeological material, and contributes to the critical endeavours of the medical humanities, cultural materialists, theatre historians and linguists.
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Daigle, Erica Nicole. "Reconciling matter and spirit: the Galenic brain in early modern literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2009. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/286.
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This project asserts that in works by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne and Aemilia Lanyer, early modern knowledge of Galenic brain physiology is an essential part of Renaissance formulations of identity. As the accepted residence of the soul, the Galenic brain is a place where important questions about subjectivity can be addressed, and my project reads references to the brain in early modern literature as confluences of anatomical knowledge and Christian theories of spiritual identity. These readings uncover a more nuanced picture of the early modern subject as a complex union of flesh and spirit.
I begin with an in depth overview of the legacy of Renaissance Galenism. I then read Galenic brain theories that are influential in the early modern texts in my study. This discussion progresses through my reading of the reconciliation of Galenic medicine with Christian doctrine that occurs over several centuries. Chapter two is a focused analysis of how Edmund Spenser constructs the character of Prince Arthur as a compromise between current medical and Christian ideas. I argue that in a critically popular passage in Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene, contemporary theories of the brain ventricles contribute to a anatomical definition of Christian temperance and that attempts to account for the complexity of Prince Arthur's behavior. In chapter three, I read Richard's famous prison speech in act 5, scene 5 of Richard II as a theory of his cognition, or the process by which his behavior becomes manifest, and I argue that this reveals the interdependent relationship between early modern personality and the physical body it inhabits. In my chapter on John Donne's poem "The Crosse," I argue that Donne deliberately departs from accepted anatomies of the cranial sutures in order to assert spiritual causation that maintains and disciplines the passions. Finally, in my concluding chapter on Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judeaeorum, I argue that Lanyer constructs a female brain that requires the masculine dominance of God's grace in a highly sexualized relationship, and that her model mirrors patriarchal physiological models of women.
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Lee, Joshua Seth. "WHITHERSOEVER THOU GOEST: THE DISCOURSES OF EXILE IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE." UKnowledge, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/15.
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Exile is, as Edward Said so eloquently put it, “the perilous territory of not-belonging.” Exiled peoples operate on the margins of their native culture: part of it, but excluded from it permanently or temporarily. Broadly speaking, my project explores the impact of exile on English literature of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. English exiles appear frequently in literary studies of the period, but little attention has thus far been focused on the effect of exile itself on late medieval and early modern authors. Historical studies on exile have been more prevalent and engaging. My project builds on this work and contributes new and groundbreaking investigations into the literary reflections of these important topics, mapping the influence of exile on trans-Reformation English literature.
My dissertation identifies and defines a new, critical lens focusing on later medieval and early modern literature. I call this lens the “mind of exile,” a cognitive phenomenon that influences textual structure, and metaphorical usage, as well as shapes individual and national identities. It contributes new theories regarding the development of polemic as a genre and their contribution to the development of the “nation-state” idea that occurred in the sixteenth century. It identifies a new genre I call polemic chronicle, which adopts and deploys the conventions of chronicle in order to declare a personal and/or national identity. Lastly, it contributes new scholarship to Spenser studies by building on established scholarship exploring the hybrid identity of Edmund Spenser. To these studies, I add fresh critical readings of A View of the State of Ireland and Colin Clouts Comes Home Againe. Both texts represent, I argue, proto-colonial literature influenced by Spenser’s mind of exile that explore England’s new position at the end of the sixteenth century as a burgeoning imperial power.
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Johnston, Bronwyn. "The devil in the detail : demons and demonology on the early modern English stage." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:22f15265-f121-44bc-89c1-974a62a3f911.
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"The Devil in the Detail" explores the rationality of magical belief on the early modern English stage. I examine how demons and demonic magic were depicted in the theatre, arguing that playwrights ascribed a sense of realism to the devil’s methods. In explaining the devil's modus operandi and exposing the limitations of his magic, the stage validates supernatural belief and depicts the devil’s craft as plausible. More broadly, this thesis is situated within the ongoing debate over the relationship between magic and scientific thought in early modern Europe, confirming that demonology was not an irrational superstition but a valid pre-science. Set against a background of witch persecution and the widespread belief that demons were a material reality, the devil was both the subject of prevalent intellectual inquiry and a popular figure on the early modern English stage, featuring in at least fifty-two plays between 1509 and 1638. Underpinning this particular brand of entertainment is a cohesive and consistent ontological framework that dictated the extent to which the devil could - and could not - operate in the material world, entirely in keeping with the dominant demonological thought of the time. "The Devil in the Detail" focuses on seven devil plays: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (c.1590), Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1590), John of Bordeaux (c.1590), Jonson's The Devil is an Ass (1616), Dekker, Ford and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton (1621), Brome and Heywood's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611). In each chapter, I demonstrate how these texts both adhere to orthodox demonology and emphasise the devil’s humanlike qualities. The final chapter presents the case for demonism in The Tempest.
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Seahorn, Christal R. "Fighting Words| The Discourse of War in Early Modern Drama and Military Handbooks." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3687704.
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This dissertation analyzes war discourse in sixteenth-century military handbooks and history plays with a focus on formal performances of martial rhetoric and the informal language used to rally audiences and justify war. Chapter One uses Rhetorical Genre Studies to classify the pre-battle oration as a social genre with common structures and themes, familiar not only to exhorting commanders and their soldiers but also to the general Renaissance populace. Establishing the pre-battle speech as a highly-conventionalized, even ritualized form of oratory, Chapter Two argues that performances of the genre are social actions in which audience familiarity elevates the speech act. This heightened valuation raises anticipation for the rhetorical moment and helps transform events like Elizabeth's Tilbury Speech and Henry V's Agincourt address into transcendent hero narratives. Chapter Three dissects formal justifications of war in William Shakespeare's Henry V and George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar. The chapter demonstrates a playwright's ability either to persuade an audience of legitimate cause, even in the face of possible war crimes, by systematically leading viewers through the rules of Just Cause Theory or to complicate legitimacy assumptions by disrupting the expected framework and destabilizing the systematic narrative.
The final two chapters examine informal motives in the trope of martial masculinity and in figurative language descriptions of war. Conducting a character analysis of official and surrogate martial commanders in Shakespeare's 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, Chapter Four evaluates recurrent themes of effeminacy in the manuals. It connects anxieties about masculinity to questions of patriarchal power and uncertainties about sociocultural transitions occuring within an English society that at once idealized peace and vilified it as emasculating. Using Cognitive Metaphor Theory, Chapter Five uncovers similar anxieties embedded in the figurative expressions used to describe war in which warfare is conceptualized as natural and unpredictable, but England's men lack the knowledge and training to keep the country ordered and war-ready. This study advocates for an increased literary-historical awareness of war discourse and gives explicit evidence for connecting the treatises to early modern literature, an assumption that remains as-yet unproven by prevailing scholarship.
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Valley, Leslie Ann. "Replacing the Priest: Tradition, Politics, and Religion in Early Modern Irish Drama." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2009. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1856.
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By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland's identity was continually pulled between its loyalties to Catholicism and British imperialism. In response to this conflict of identity, W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory argued the need for an Irish theatre that was demonstrative of the Irish people, returning to the literary traditions to the Celtic heritage. What resulted was a questioning of religion and politics in Ireland, specifically the Catholic Church and its priests. Yeat's own drama removed the priests from the stage and replaced them with characters demonstrative of those literary traditions, establishing what he called a "new priesthood". In response to this removal, Yeat's contemporaries such as J. M. Synge and Bernard Shaw evolved his vision, creating a criticism and, ultimately, a rejection of Irish priests. In doing so, these playwrights created depictions of absent, ineffectual, and pagan priests that have endured throughout the twentieth century.
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Miele, Benjamin Charles. ""God's spies": reading, revelation, and the poetics of surveillance in early modern England." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6212.
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"God's Spies": Reading, Revelation, and the Poetics of Surveillance in Early Modern England
The recent material turn in humanities scholarship has yielded fascinating and insightful research in roughly the past decade, especially in the fields of book history and the history of reading. Scholars of material culture have researched the concrete particulars of book production, the places books were sold, and the conditions in which they were read. This dissertation focuses on the clandestine aspects of early modern English material culture, with particular emphasis on the secret spaces in which reading occurred. Early modern English monarchs cultivated a culture of surveillance in an effort to eliminate illicit religious texts, which combined with changes to the conditions in which texts were read to encourage more private and secretive reading habits. Ultimately, technological, religious, and political change became epistemological as readers increasingly applied a hermeneutics of surveillance to the texts they approached, reading for hidden meaning and for total interpretive control of a text. Writers of imaginative fiction staged scenes of what I call textual surveillance in their works, transforming the hermeneutics of surveillance into a poetics of surveillance that scrutinized the validity of this interpretive strategy and explored how these material, religious, and political changes warped the way readers interpreted, thought, and perceived reality.
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Coleman, Judith Claire. "Holy vessels, tyrants, fools, and blind men : performing antinomianism and transgressive agency in English drama, 1450-1671." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1571.
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Over four chapters, this study extends and focuses recent critical work on religious sects in literature to examine five plays and one theatrical prose work from the late medieval period through the late seventeenth century in England. Specifically, this study charts the appearance and conduct of antinomians, or those whose faith in Christ is the sole guide for their actions and who eschew all outward behavioral constraints. Antinomianism is, in some ways, a logical step for newly empowered individual believers with no direct mediator between themselves and the Word, but it represents a dangerous potential for religious and social anarchy. For some of the characters I consider, antinomianism has been mapped onto them by modern literary critics precisely because their transgressive agency is so frightening to their contemporaries. For others, antinomianism is depicted as a positive mode of interacting with the unenlightened, but it is clear that these figures are allowed privilege outside the reach of mainstream believers. A negative parody of these normal believers is also represented in my project, and these characters' buffoonish misinterpretations and selfish motives negate any positive reading of their "liberating" antinomian belief.
All of these characters--whether positive, negative, or even truly antinomian at all--reveal a key anxiety about personal belief and the well-being of civic and religious society in the mercurial landscape of pre- and post-Reformation England and the atmosphere of social and religious uncertainty that preceded the English Civil War. As such, an attention to the interconnections between the works under primary study and those circulating in the culture at the time is crucial to accurately identifying and understanding the myriad shades of religious belief that populate the pages of literature and polemics alike. In part, my project works to create a more complete and nuanced picture of the religious and literary landscapes of early modern England.
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Basso, Ann McCauley. "Bel-Imperia: The (Early) Modern Woman in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy." Scholar Commons, 2006. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3776.
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At the heart of Thomas Kyd's revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy lies an arranged marriage around which all of the other action revolves. Bel-Imperia of Spain has been betrothed against her will to Prince Balthazar of Portugal, but she is no ordinary woman, and she has plans of her own. Bel-Imperia's unwillingness to participate in the arranged marriage is indicative of the rise of the companionate marriage; it represents a rejection of the arranged marriage that dominated upper class society in earlier years.
This study seeks to throw light upon early modern attitudes towards marriage, focusing particularly on the arranged marriage, the companionate marriage, and the state marriage. Additionally, it examines the role of woman as peace-weaver, a practice that dates back as far as the Beowulf manuscript. Using historical as well as literary sources to delineate these forms, I apply this information to a study of the play itself, with an emphasis on its performative value. Since the proposed marriage dictates all of the action of the play, an analysis of the bartered bride, Bel-Imperia, is of particular importance. This essay examines her character in depth as well as her relationships with Andrea and Horatio, who love her; with Lorenzo, the King, and her father, who seek to exploit her; and with Hieronimo, who becomes her partner in revenge. Additionally, I contrast her with Isabella, one of only two other female characters in the play and conclude by delineating how my analysis would affect a performance of the play and by "directing" a hypothetical interpretation of The Spanish Tragedy.
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Palander-Collin, Minna. "Grammaticalization and social embedding : I think and methinks in middle and early modern English /." Helsinki : Société néophilologique, 1999. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb391303963.
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Stanev, Mariane. "On Record: Soundscapes as Metaphor and Physical Manifestation of Memory in Early Holocaust Novels and Contemporary Criticism." FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1907.
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This thesis compares two perspectives on the production of Holocaust memory: a novel that leads up to The Holocaust in Britain and one that reflects the hindsight perspective of a liberator in the Soviet Union. The novels are Virginia Woolf’s BETWEEN THE ACTS and Vasily Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE. The analysis offers a locus of analysis for the diasporic literary energy created by the catastrophe in the 20th and 21st centuries. The project offers a theorized standpoint on the role of literature on official historical archives. Proposing a method through which contemporary readers can engage the diasporic event of The Holocaust, the project adopts both the extended metaphor and literal expression of soundscapes. Soundscapes encompass the immaterial processes of memorialization and the literal sonic textures developed in Holocaust novels. The critical perspective incorporates contemporary notions of narratology, archival practices, and cultural manifestations of language into the notion of literary ethnomusicology.
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Rosario, Deborah Hope. "Milton and material culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:45542c8d-0049-49cf-8d19-6d206195d9a7.
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In contradistinction to critical trends which have rendered Milton’s thought disembodied, this thesis studies how seventeenth-century material culture informed Milton’s poetry and prose at the epistemic level and by suggesting a palette of forms for literary play. The first chapter explores the early modern culture of fruit. At the epistemic level, practices of fruit cultivation and consumption inform Milton’s imagination and his vocabulary, thereby connecting their historic-material lives with their symbolic ones. Milton further turns commonplace gestures of fruit consumption into narrative devices that frame discussions of agency, aspiration, sinful and right practice. The second chapter examines two floral catalogues to discover how they find shape through the epistemologies of flowers, ceremony, and decorative arts. Here material culture shapes literary convention, as one catalogue is found to secret ceremonial consolation in its natural ingenuousness, while the other’s delight in human physicality upsets the distinctions between inner virtue and outer ornament, faith and rite. In the third chapter, urban epistemologies of light, darkness, movement, and space are examined through urban phenomena: skyline, suburbs, highways, theft, and waterways. By interpellating contemporary debates, these categories anatomise fallen character, intent, action, and their consequences. Milton’s instinctive distaste for urban nuisances is interesting in this Republican figure and is subversive of some ideologies of the text. Discursive and material aspects meet again in the fourth chapter in a discussion of his graphic presentations of geography on the page. Usually prone to analyses of textual knowledge, they are also informed by the embodiment of knowledge as material object. Milton’s search for a fitting cartographic aesthetic for the Biblical narrative and for the rhetoric of his characters leads him to an increasing consciousness of the ideologies energising these material forms. The fifth chapter explores Milton’s engagement with forms of armour and weapons. Military preferences for speed and mobility over armour help Milton explore the difference between unfallen and fallen being. Milton also uses his inescapably proleptic knowledge of arms and armour as a field of imaginative play for representations that are both anachronistic and typological. These lead to a discussion of imitation in the mythic imagination. In each of these studies, we witness Milton’s consciousness of his temporal and proleptic location, and his attempts to marry the temporal and the pan- or atemporal. In the conclusion I suggest that Milton’s simultaneous courting of the atemporal while he is drawn to or draws on temporal material culture imply an incarnational aesthetic.
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Smith-Laing, Tim. "Variorum vitae : Theseus and the arts of mythography in Medieval and early modern Europe." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0f4305c6-3c62-4f89-a3b2-d8204893fdfb.
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This thesis offers an approach to the history of mythographical discourse through the figure of Theseus and his appearances in texts from England, Italy and France. Analysing a range of poetic, historical, and allegorical works that feature Theseus alongside their classical and contemporary intertexts, it is a study of the conceptions of Greco-Roman mythology prevalent in European literature from 1300-1600. Focusing on mythology’s pervasive presence as a background to medieval and early modern literary and intellectual culture, it draws attention to the fragmentary, fluid and polymorphous nature of mythology in relation to its use for different purposes in a wide range of texts. The first impact of this study is to draw attention to the distinction between mythology and mythography, as a means of focusing on the full range of interpretative processes associated with the ancient myths in their textual forms. Returning attention to the processes by which writers and readers came to know the Greco-Roman myths, it widens the commonly accepted critical definition of ‘mythography’ to include any writing of or on mythology, while restricting ‘mythology’ to its abstract sense, meaning a traditional collection of tales that exceeds any one text. This distinction allows the analyses of the study’s primary texts to display the full range of interpretative processes and possibilities involved in rewriting mythology, and to outline a spectrum of linked but distinctive mythographical genres that define those possibilities. Breaking down into two parts of three chapters each, the thesis examines Theseus’ appearances across these mythographical genres, first in the period from 1300 to the birth of print, and then from the birth of print up to 1600. Taking as its primary texts works by Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate and William Shakespeare along with their classical intertexts, it situates each of them in regard to their multiple defining contexts. Paying close attention to the European traditions of commentary, translation and response to classical sources, it shows mythographical discourse as a vibrant aspect of medieval and early modern literary culture, equally embedded in classical traditions and contemporary traditions that transcended national and linguistic boundaries.
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Bellis, Joanna Ruth. "Language, literature, and the Hundred Years War, 1337-1600." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609852.
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Sager, Jenny Emma. ""The strategy with cunning shows" : the aesthetics of spectacle in the plays of Robert Greene." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:af29d412-c285-46e4-953c-43eac3e86f13.
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This is the first full-scale study of Robert Greene’s drama, offering a new interpretation of the dramatic oeuvre of one Shakespeare’s most neglected literary predecessors. Recent criticism has emphasised Greene’s pioneering role as an author of Elizabethan romance. Yet, in contrast to the numerous prose works which were printed during his life time, his drama, which was printed posthumously, has received little attention. Greene’s plays are visually magnificent: madmen wander on stage waving the severed limbs of their victims (Orlando Furioso, c. 1591), the dead are resurrected (James IV, c. 1590), tyrants gruesomely mutilate their subjects (Selimus, c. 1591-4), extravagant stage properties such as the mysterious brazen head prophesy to the audience (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, c. 1589), and sinners are swallowed into hell accompanied by fireworks (A Looking Glass for London and England, c. 1588). This thesis will examine the way in which these stage images evoke astonishment, which in turn encourages the audience to contemplate their symbolic significance. The triumph of Greene’s drama is not one of effects over affect; it lies in the interaction between effect and affect. My principal objective in this thesis is to develop a methodological strategy which will allow critics of non-Shakespearean plays, which frequently lack a substantial performance tradition, to study drama through the lens of performance. Engaging purposively with anachronism as an enabling mode of linking old and new, this thesis will draw analogies between the early modern stage and modern cinema in order to emphasise the relevance of early modern drama to today’s ocularcentric world, a relevance that more historical theoretical approaches would seek to deny. My opening chapter will try to establish Greene’s dramatic canon and assess the critical reception of Greene’s plays. Drawing on material from Greene’s entire oeuvre, Chapter Two will outline my methodological and conceptual approach. This chapter will include an extended analysis of Friar Bacon’s discussion of the ‘strategy with cunning shows’ in John of Bordeaux (JB. 735). Launching into detailed studies of specific spectacles, Chapter Three focuses on Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s collaborative effort, the biblical drama A Looking Glass for London and England. During the play, Prophet Jonah is ‘cast out of the whale’s belly upon the stage’ (LG. IV.i.1460-1). Focusing on this stage spectacle, this chapter seeks to emphasise the commercial appeal of this biblical drama. Examining another stage property, Chapter Four will explore the melodramatic and sensational potential of the tomb stage property in Greene’s James IV. Examining the apparent tension between the play’s two presenters, I will demonstrate that Bohan, a cynical Scot, and Oberon, the King of the Fairies, proffer two distinct, but not mutually exclusive, ways of conceiving of and interpreting theatrical spectacle. Completing my study of spectacular stage properties, Chapter Five examines the symbolic significance of the brazen head, which appears in two of Greene’s plays: Alphonsus, King of Aragon and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. In both plays, the brazen head becomes an object of excessive or supreme devotion as either a religious idol or a secular deity. The brazen head is perceived as monstrous not simply because it is a source of horror or astonishment but because it represents the misplaced veneration or worship of something other than God. Turning away from stage properties, my final two chapters look at how Greene exploited specific stage conventions. Directing my attention towards Greene’s Orlando Furioso (c. 1591), I will argue that the figure of Orlando Furioso bequeathed an enduring legacy to early modern theatrical discourse, contributing to the convention of the mad poet, which would be replicated and parodied by a new generation of dramatists. Orlando’s behaviour, which rapidly alternates between that of a madman and that of a poet, forces the audience to contemplate the link between the mania of the mentally ill and the melancholia of the creative genius. Ridiculing the concept of furor poeticus, Greene’s play interrogates the belief that great writers are divinely inspired by God through ecstatic revelation. My final chapter will explore the aesthetics of violence in Selimus. A relatively recent addition to the Greene canon, Selimus depicts the rise of an anti-hero amidst a cycle of brutal violence. My reading of this play posits Selimus as a surrogate playwright, arguing that the semiotics of dismemberment allows Greene to interrogate the concept of artistic autonomy. Widespread indifference to Greene’s work has facilitated critical blindness to the powerful aesthetic appeal of spectacle in early modern drama. This reassessment of Robert Greene’s dramatic oeuvre offers a new perspective on the aesthetics of spectacle in early modern drama.
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Doyle, Kerry Delaney. "Agnostos Dei: staging Catholicism and the anti-sectarian aesthetic in early-Stuart England." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1589.
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My dissertation, Agnostos Dei: Staging Catholicism and the Anti-Sectarian Aesthetic in Early-Stuart England, traces over four chapters the emergence of a literary counter-aesthetic to the increasingly violent sectarianism of Post-Reformation England. I focus primarily on popular plays that dramatize the destabilizing effects of radical beliefs on a society, whether small town or royal court, culminating in blood and exile. I argue that the plays' destructive conflicts and redemptive moments suggest the potential worth of cross-sectarian belief and ritual. In doing so, John Fletcher's The Faithfull Shepherdess (1608), William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII (1613), Dekker, Ford, and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton (1621), and John Ford's `Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629) participate in an aesthetic that rejects the disunity promoted by radical sectarians and revises the rhetoric of English Protestantism. Kings James and Charles promoted, ultimately unsuccessfully, a via media (middle way) for the Church of England, seeking reunification of divergent Christian sects. At the same time, these works used the theatre as a space of free play to consider the possibility of ecumenical success in fictionalized worlds removed from the clashing rhetoric of real kings and clergy.
My project responds to the revitalized return to religion in the scholarship of early modern England, which has included a renewed interest in the English Catholic experience and a reconsideration of the variety of believers within the nation, loosely grouped into categories like Puritans and High Church Anglicans. My work presents a correlative- and counter-narrative to these well-established readings. I consider the historical and literary analogues of the plays and the contemporary religiopolitical realities of the times of their staging. Rather than attempting to discover crypto-sectarian messages in the tales or intentions of the playwrights behind them, I argue that such categorizations can reduce and obscure the broader, ecumenical implications of these works. In speaking to a range of sectarian audiences, these playwrights exceed the limitations of clear affiliation to address a wider Christian possibility.
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Porter, Alison. "An early start to French literacy : learning the spoken and written word simultaneously in English primary schools." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2014. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/374731/.
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The Primary MFL curriculum (DfE, 2013: 1-3) calls for the development of reading and writing in a foreign language in primary schools. Specific attainment targets refer to “accurate reading aloud for understanding” and the ability to “describe people, places, things and actions orally and in writing” (DfE, 2013: 2). Research, however, has shown both the teaching and learning of MFL literacy to be most problematic. Observation-derived evidence noted that writing was the “least developed skill” in primary MFL provision (Ofsted, 2011: 10, 25) and that written work tended to provide consolidation and support for oral learning (Cable, Driscoll, Mitchell, Sing, Cremin, Earl, Eyres, Holmes, Martin & Heins, 2010: 87). Meanwhile, empirical evidence holds that a lack achievement and motivation in school-based language learning is a reflection of limited progression in second language literacy and decoding (Erler, 2003; Macaro & Erler, 2008; 2011). Despite these findings, research has yet to identify teaching and learning approaches which could shape pedagogical practice and deliver the “substantial progress” that the curriculum expects (DfE, 2013: 2). This action research study, conducted over 23 weeks, presents an empirically-derived, principled and systematic approach to teaching MFL literacy and oracy simultaneously. Qualitative and quantitative data, collected throughout the intervention and at pre-, post- and delayed post-test allowed for both detailed statistical analyses of learning outcomes and the exploration of the learning process. The study finds that, in this beginner learner setting, MFL oracy is not disrupted by the simultaneous introduction of MFL literacy. It notes that both L1 reading age and verbal working memory proficiency are highly influential in L2 oracy and literacy learning but reports that learners across the L1 ability range can participate in L2 learning and make meaningful progress. It further suggests that the development of L2 sound/spelling links (through systematic phonics instruction) is slow and that familiar words are more likely to be successfully recoded. These findings together ii with evidence of an ever-dominant L1, support an argument for an early start to MFL literacy.
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Denton, Megan. "Beyond Reason: Madness in the English Revenge Tragedy." VCU Scholars Compass, 2013. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/554.
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This paper explores the depiction and function of madness on the Renaissance stage, specifically its development as trope of the English revenge tragedy from its Elizabethan conception to its Jacobean advent through a representative engagement of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Madness in these plays selectively departs from popular conceptions and archetypal formulas to create an uncertain dramatic space which allows its sufferers to walk moral lines and liminal paths unavailable to the sane. “Madness” is responsible for and a response to vision; where the revenger is driven to the edge of madness by a lapse in morality only visible to him, madness provides a lens to correct the injustice. It is the tool that allows them to escape convention, decorum and even the law to rout a moral cancer, and, in this capacity, is enabling rather than disabling.
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Phelps, Paul Chandler. "'Wounded Harts' : metaphor and desire in the epic-romances of Tasso, Sidney, and Spenser." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6314229f-2797-4727-91c8-64265a16f6b3.
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If we consider the representation of the body in the epic-romances of Torquato Tasso, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, certain instances of wounding and laceration emerge as crucial turning points in the development of their respective narratives: Clorinda’s redemptive mutilation, Parthenia’s blood-drenched pallor, Amavia’s disquieting suicide, Venus’s insatiable orifice, Amoret’s “perfect hole.” This thesis affords a detailed comparative study of such passages, contending that the wound assumed a critical metaphoric dimension in sixteenth-century epic-romance literature, particularly in relation to the perceived association between body condition and erotic desire. Along with its function as a marker of martial valor and somatic sacredness, the wound, I argue, increasingly is designated in these epic-romances as an interiorizing apparatus, one liable to accrue at any instance into a surplus of unanticipated meaning. As such, the wound becomes an emblem in these texts of what I call the phenomenology of desire—the equation of consummation and loss—as well as the aesthetic and metaphoric mechanism by which these writers seek to overcome it. The four chapters of this thesis constitute individual but cumulative points of response to the problem of thinking about desire as a type of wound. For Tasso, a wound poses a challenge to physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity, but its remarkable capacity for aestheticization also allows Tasso to envision it as a synthesizer of sacred and erotic affects. For Sidney, the prospect that a wound could define a body as courageous or pathetic, as sacred or corrupt, became both politically and socially troubling, and the New Arcadia, I argue, proleptically attempts to defend Sidney against interpretations of wounds that register them as manifestations of corrupt desire. For Spenser, body fracture and erotic wounding are analogic (indeed, almost indistinguishable), and The Faerie Queene investigates the prospect that confusing these analogies can become an empowering, even revelatory experience. In each of these epic-romances, a wound serves both a literal and a figurative function and, in this way, is established as the foremost image by which these writers imagine strength and mutilation, affect and heroism, epic and romance as being inextricably bound.
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Cowhey, Maureen R. ""Sweet Beginning but Unsavoury End": The Change in Popularity of Shakespeare's Poetry." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1297.
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William Shakespeare is arguably the most famous and influential author in modern history. His plays make up a literary canon that has been translated into every language, is constantly being reproduced on the stage and on film and has persisted in popularity for centuries. Yet, Shakespeare’s first and most popular text is not a play, but the narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. The text that launched Shakespeare into popularity and gave rise to this cultural icon was a poem, rather than a play. But despite its initial success, Venus and Adonis is not a central feature of the modern literary canon and Shakespeare’s original role as a poet has been overshadowed by his achievements in theatre. This paper sets out to explore what happened to Shakespeare’s legacy in poetry by examining the commercial history and aesthetic form of two of Shakespeare’s poems: Venus and Adonis and the sonnets. I will address how the dramatic literary canon was created and why it revolves around Shakespeare as solely a playwright.
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Rundell, Katherine. "'And I am re-begot' : the textual afterlives of John Donne." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:52dab99b-93f6-46dd-8cdd-b3ec6fcc4d8b.
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This thesis is a cultural history of the textual afterlives and poetic appropriations of John Donne's verse. I use print and manuscript miscellanies, hitherto unstudied commonplace books, letters, diaries and seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism to ask, who was reading Donne and in what physical forms? By looking at allusive strategies and reading practices of the time, I demonstrate how many different Donnes can be identified when we strip away modern notions of what 'Donne' is and seek multiple afterlives. I nuance the idea of Donne as a determinedly coterie poet, suggesting his print presence might have looked to his early audience like a strategic writer who had not, despite Izaak Walton's narrative, closed off the possibility of public authorship. I find there was a period of radical re-appropriation and re-reading of Donne in the seventeenth and eighteenth century: Donne was as a guiding influence to canonical poets. Rochester is perhaps the poet whose voice most vividly recalls Donne's swaggering persona and intricately-constructed rendering of apparent spontaneity. Katherine Philips's verse makes sophisticated use of Donne's voice in her intimate quasi-erotic verse; I contrast this with the voice of her poems written for state occasions to show how Donne becomes a resource for self-revelation. Dryden offers a sustained critical vision of Donne: although, as the primary mercenary proponent of mass popular literature, he may seem initially wholly unDonnean, I show how his verse both explicitly and obliquely negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the dual critique and celebration in Pope's versification of Donne's Satyres, and at the Dunciad, to see where the limits of allusion come up against Pope's cacophonous multiplicity of voices. These four poets take different threads from Donne's canon to different ends and, in so doing, create different Donnes.
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Vikström, Niclas. "The House of Stewart as Agent of Language Change : A Historical Sociolinguistic Corpus Analysis of Register Variation and Language Change in the Stewart Letters (1504-1669)." Thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för språkstudier, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-128379.
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The present project set out to explore whether or not the members of one of the most powerful families in history functioned as agents of language change. Using the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC), the present project examines and discusses linguistic conservatism and innovation in relation to the historical movement towards a Standard English. This is done by scrutinising six members of the house of Stewart that can be found in the PCEEC following theories and frameworks pertaining to the scientific discipline of sociohistorical linguistics. The findings of the present study suggest that the house of Stewart appears to have been in the vanguard of language change in several respects.
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Jenkins, Bethan Mair. "Concepts of Prydeindod (Britishness) in 18th century Anglo-Welsh Writing : with special reference to the works of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:02c515c0-7f80-468b-b63c-97ead68fb2f1.
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This thesis presents an analysis of the English-language work of three Welsh writers during the eighteenth century, spanning the period of the 1750s to 1794. During this period, the British state consolidated its power following the last of the significant internal uprisings in 1745, and attempted to create a British nation with internal unity. Such a unity entailed a renegotiation of older national identities as subjects attempted to partake of multiple identities simultaneously. In Wales, the manifestation of multiple identities was especially clear, as the language of the state did not accord with the mother tongue of the majority of Welshmen. Though Welsh literati had written in English since before the Act of Union (1536), choosing to write in English becomes more interesting for the critic during such a time of change. Previously, these works have been treated as aberrations, or literary curiosities less worthy of note than the Welsh-language productions of the same authors. This thesis argues that, instead, they should be analysed as offering an insight into these authors’ conception of Britain, and their place within the state and the new nation, both in the choice of language and the topics considered. As a theoretical basis for these analyses, I consider the concept of Prydeindod from the work of philosopher J.R. Jones, as distinct from the idea of Britishness, and as a way of complicating Anglocentric or binary discussions of Britishness. This in turn informs readings of the English-language productions of Welsh writers in the eighteenth century, and shows that their negotiations of new identities are not as forthright as has previously been assumed.
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McCann, Michael Charles 1959. "Occult Invention: The Rebirth of Rhetorical Heuresis in Early Modern British Literature from Chapman to Swift." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12081.
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xiv, 234 p. : ill.The twentieth-century project of American rhetorician Kenneth Burke, grounded in a magic-based theory of language, reveals a path to the origins of what I am going to call occult invention. The occult, which I define as a symbol set of natural terms derived from supernatural terms, employs a method of heuresis based on a metaphor-like process I call analogic extension. Traditional invention fell from use shortly after the Liberal Arts reforms of Peter Ramus, around 1550. Occult invention emerged nearly simultaneously, when Early Modern British authors began using occult symbols as tropes in what I refer to as the Occult Mode. I use six of these authors--George Chapman, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift--as examples of how occult invention arises. In appropriating occult symbolism, authors in the Occult Mode began using the invention methods of the occult arts of magic, alchemy, astrology, and cabala to derive new meanings, transform language, develop characters and plots, and reorient social perspectives. As we learn in tracking Burke's project, occult invention combines the principles of Aristotle's rhetoric and metaphysics with the techniques and principles of the occult arts. Occult invention fell from use around the end of the eighteenth century, but its rhetorical influence reemerged through the work of Burke. In this study I seek to contextualize and explicate some of the literary sources and rhetorical implications of occult invention as an emergent field for further research.
Committee in charge: Dianne Dugaw， Co-Chairperson； John T. Gage， Co-Chairperson； Kenneth Calhoon， Member； Steven Shankman， Member； Jeffrey Librett，Outside Member
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Dunn, Abigail. "The depiction of the widow in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:366c6541-25b7-4cb7-a5f1-8889d3b4c1d9.
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This thesis examines the depiction of the widow by men and women in novels and short stories written between 1842 and 1913. The representation of the widow is analysed in the context of dominant views about widowhood at the time, such as those expressed in the writings of politician and statesman, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-1796). These ideas are set out in chapter I. The first chapter also examines the social reality of widowhood in nineteenth-century Germany. In the first chapter of the thesis Hippel argues that real widows are superfluous beings and men’s second-hand goods, but they were also perceived by theologians and moralists of the time as a threat due to their ungoverned lust. Many nineteenth-century widows internalised the idea espoused by Hippel and felt alienated and invisible. In German fiction, however, male writers in the works discussed repeat the latter theory that once deprived of their husbands widows are sexually voracious. In the works written by men, the figure of the widow is generally presented as a dangerous sexual predator. Female authors, however, highlight the invisibility of the widow and portray her as a figure alienated from society and her family. Henriette Hanke is the first author to be examined in chapter II. Her novel, Die Wittwen (1842), portrays five widows, who range from the self-sacrificing Lucie von Gardemer, to the liberated and financially independent Frau von Kleist. Hanke depicts widowhood as a process of education for her two key widows, Lucie von Gardemer and Franzisca Weihland. They must learn to love the right man, and at the end of the story they revert from widowhood to marriage. Fourteen years later, the first version of Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55) was published. Chapter III explores the way in which Keller portrays the threatening sexuality of his widow Judith and emphasises her power to destabilise the narrator. Chapters IV and V also focus on the widow as a predatory and dangerous figure, as exemplified in works by Paul Heyse, Eduard Grisebach, C. F. Meyer and Arthur Schnitzler. In chapter VI Hedwig Dohm presents a contrast to the dominant representations of widowhood in her story Werde, die du bist! (1896). Dohm challenges prevalent stereotypes of the widow, though with limited success. Gabriele Reuter, the final author to be discussed, reverts to male stereotypes of the widow in her stories. This chapter thus shows that women writers are not always more positive, or original, in their representation of the widow. The thesis as a whole demonstrates the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the widow in nineteenth-century German fiction. She is a figure to be at best re-educated and at worst to be feared and guarded against. She is a cynical man-trap in Heyse’s and Grisebach’s stories, a murderess in Meyer’s story, and an incestuous mother in Schnitzler’s texts. Hanke and Dohm, themselves both widows, show from the inside what it is like to be a widow in such a society.
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Eward-Mangione, Angela. "Decolonizing Shakespeare: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Three Adaptations of Three Plays by William Shakespeare." Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5628.
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What role did identification play in the motives, processes, and products of select post-colonial authors who "wrote back" to William Shakespeare and colonialism? How did post-colonial counter-discursive metatheatre function to make select post-colonial adaptations creative and critical texts? In answer to these questions, this dissertation proposes that counter-discursive metatheatre resituates post-colonial plays as criticism of Shakespeare's plays. As particular post-colonial authors identify with marginalized Shakespearean characters and aim to amplify their conflicts from the perspective of a dominated culture, they interpret themes of race, gender, and colonialism in Othello (1604), Antony and Cleopatra (1608), and The Tempest (1611) as explicit problems. This dissertation combines post-colonial theory and other literary theory, particularly by Kenneth Burke, to propose a rhetoric of motives for post-colonial authors who "write back" to Shakespeare through the use of counter-discursive metatheatre. This dissertation, therefore, describes and analyzes how and why the plays of Murray Carlin, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott function both creatively and critically, adapting Shakespeare's plays, and foregrounding post-colonial criticism of his plays.
Chapter One analyzes Murray Carlin's motivations for adapting Othello and using the framing narrative of Not Now, Sweet Desdemona (1967) to explicitly critique the conflicts of race, gender, and colonialism in Othello. Chapter Two treats why and how Aimé Césaire adapts The Tempest in 1969, illustrating his explicit critique of Prospero and Caliban as the colonizer and the colonized, exposing Prospero's insistence on controlling the sexuality of his subjects, and, therefore, arguing that race, gender, and colonialism operate concomitantly in the play. Chapter Three analyzes A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983) as both a critique and an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra, demonstrating how Walcott's framing narrative critiques the notion of a universal "Cleopatra," even one of an "infinite variety," and also evaluates Antony as a character who is marginalized by his Roman culture. The conclusion of this dissertation avers that in "writing back" to Shakespeare, these authors foreground and reframe post-colonial criticism, successfully dismantling the colonial structures that have kept their interpretations, and the subjects of their interpretations, marginalized.
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Benedict, Mark Russell. "The Ministry of Passion and Meditation: Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares and the Adaptation of Continental Influences." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2010. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/79.
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In his most popular prose work, Mary Magdalens Funeral Teares (1591), English Jesuit Robert Southwell adapts the Mary Magdalene tradition by incorporating the meditative practices of St. Ignatius Loyola coupled with the Petrarchan language of poetry. Thus, he creates a prose work that ministered to Catholic souls, appealed to Protestant audiences, and initiated the literature of tears in England. Southwell readapts the traditional image of Mary Magdalene for a Catholic Early Modern audience by utilizing the techniques of Jesuit meditation, which later flourished in the weeper texts of Richard Crashaw and George Herbert. His vividly imagined scenes also employ the Petrarchan and Ovidian language of longing and absence and coincide with both traditional and mystic early church writers such as Bernard and Augustine. Through this combination, Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares resonated with Catholics deprived of both ministry and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. These contributions solidify Southwell’s place as a pivotal figure in the religious and literary contexts of Early Modern England.
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Vikström, Niclas. "“[E]en strict offensive och defensive alliance” and “the danger this King and the 2 Queens were in” : News Reporting in Early Modern Swedish and English Diplomatic Correspondence." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-147378.
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The study of early cross-linguistic diplomatic epistolography was first introduced in Brownlees' (2012) comparative study of Italian and English personal newsletters. Given the field’s young age and the strong need for both further research and the retrieving of new, untranscribed and unanalysed data, the present study set out to help move this field forward by examining, at both a textual superstructure and semantic macrostructural level, two sets of unchartered diplomatic newsletters which representatives at foreign courts despatched back to their respective home countries. The first set of original manuscripts comprises periodical newsletters which Baron Christer Bonde, the Swedish ambassador-extraordinary to England, wrote to Charles X, King of Sweden, between 1655-6, whereas the second set consists of letters sent in 1680 by John Robinson, England’s chargé d’affaires in Sweden, to Sir Leoline Jenkins, Secretary of State for the Northern Department of England. The analysis has shown that whereas the textual superstructures of the two diplomats’ correspondences remain similarly robust, the instantiating semantic macrostructures display not only stylistic and compositional, but also narrative, variation.
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Bates, Catherine. "Courtship and courtliness : studies in Elizabethan courtly language and literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1989. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7d87cb87-8146-4d47-a19e-4cc9aee21467.
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In its current sense, courting means 'wooing'; but its original meaning was 'residing at court'. The amorous sense of the word developed from a purely social sense in most major European languages around the turn of the sixteenth century, a time when, according to some historians, Western states were gradually moving toward the genesis of absolutism and the establishment of courts as symbols and agents of centralised monarchical power. This study examines the shift in meaning of the words courtship and to court, seeking the origins of courtship in court society, with particular reference to the court and literature of the Elizabethan period. Chapter 1 charts the traditional association between courts and love, first in the historiography of 'courtly love', and then in historical and sociological accounts of court society. Recent studies have questioned the quasi- Marxist notion that the amorous practices of the court and the 'bourgeois' ideals of harmonious, fruitful marriage were antithetical, and this thesis examines whether the development of 'romantic love' has a courtly as well as a bourgeois provenance. Chapter 2 conducts a lexical study of the semantic change of the verb to court in French, Italian, and English, with an extended synchronic analysis of the word in Elizabethan literature. Chapter 3 goes on to diversify the functional classification required by semantic analysis and considers the implications of courtship as a social, literary and rhetorical act in the works of Lyly and Sidney. It considers the 'humanist' dilemma of a language that was aimed primarily at seduction, and suggests that, in the largely discursive mode of the courtly questione d'amore, courtship could be condoned as a verbalisation of love, and a postponement of the satisfaction of desire. Chapter 4 then moves away from the distinction between humanist and courtly concerns, to examine the practice of courtship at the court of Elizabeth I. It focuses on allegorical representations of Desire in courtly pageants, and suggests that the ambiguities inherent in the 'legitimised' Desire of Elizabethan shows exemplify the situation of poets and courtiers who found themselves at the court of a female sovereign. In chapter 5 discussions of the equivocation inveterate to courtly texts leads to a study of The Faerie Queene, and specifically to Spenser's presentation of courtship and courtly society in the imperialist themes of Book II and their apparent subversion in Book VI. The study concludes with a brief appraisal of Spenser's Amoretti as a model for the kind of courtship that has been under review.
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Lilja, Sara. "Gender-Related Terms in English Depositions, Examinations and Journals, 1670–1720." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala : Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis : Universitetsbiblioketet [distributör], 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-7508.
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Brereton, Mary Catherine. "Philosophic historiography in the eighteenth century in Britain and France." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e134dabe-301d-4e81-a282-8c2204499fbb.
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The subject of this thesis is the by now traditional grouping of certain innovative works of historiography produced in eighteenth-century Britain and France; namely the historical works of Voltaire, and the historical writings of the philosophes; and, in Britain, the histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. This thesis gives a historical and expository analysis of the individual strategies of literary self-fashioning and generic appropriation which underlie this impression of resemblance. It particularly demonstrates that the major characteristics of the contemporary vision of philosophic historiography – the idea of a European history of manners or l’esprit humain, and the insistence on the rejection of the practices of the érudits – which have become incorporated within scholarly definitions of ‘Enlightenment historiography’, are well-established generic tropes, adapted and affected in France as in Britain, by authors of diverse ambitions. The invitation to assume inauthentic connections contained within the practice of philosophic historiography is shown to be embraced by Gibbon, in a notable literary challenge to the paradigms of intellectual history. This study contrasts the textual evidence of these authors’ experience of literary, personal, and political challenges regarding the definition of their role as public, intellectual writers, to the acquired image of an ideal of ‘Enlightenment writing’. It considers the Frenchness of philosophie, and the potential Britishness of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. As part of its wider analysis of the practice of intellectual writing with a historical focus, its scope includes the writings of British clerics and writers on religion; of French academicians; and of the late philosophe Volney, and Shelley his interpreter. The major conclusion of this thesis is that eighteenth-century British and French history writing does not support any synthesis of an Enlightenment historical philosophy, narrative, or method; while it is suggested that one of the costs of the construct of ‘Enlightenment’, has been the illusion of familiarity with eighteenth-century intellectual culture, in France as well as Britain.
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Friedmann, Miriam. "Early modern English fairs." E-thesis Full text (Hebrew University users only), 1997. http://shemer.mslib.huji.ac.il/dissertations/H/JMS/001497172.pdf.
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Munoz, Victoria Marie. "A Tempestuous Romance: Chivalry, Literature, and Anglo-Spanish Politics, 1578-1624." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1479905568694913.
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Jones, Melissa J. "Early modern pornographies." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3278243.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3870. Adviser: Linda Charnes. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 8, 2008).
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Hodder, Mike. "Petrarch in English : political, cultural and religious filters in the translation of the 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta' and 'Triumphi' from Geoffrey Chaucer to J.M. Synge." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:49cdf913-cd2a-48c6-bf1e-533052018285.
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This thesis is concerned with one key aspect of the reception of the vernacular poetry of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), namely translations and imitations of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf) and Triumphi in English. It aims to provide a more comprehensive survey of the vernacular Petrarch’s legacy to English literature than is currently available, with a particular focus on some hitherto critically neglected texts and authors. It also seeks to ascertain to what degree the socio-historical phenomena of religion, politics, and culture have influenced the translations and imitations in question. The approach has been both chronological and comparative. This strategy will demonstrate with greater clarity the monumental effect of the Elizabethan Reformation on the English reception of Petrarch. It proposes a solution to the problem of the long gap between Geoffrey Chaucer’s re-writing of Rvf 132 and the imitations of Wyatt and Surrey framed in the context of Chaucer’s sophisticated imitative strategy (Chapter I). A fresh reading of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is offered which highlights the author’s misgivings about the dangers of textual misinterpretation, a concern he shared with Petrarch (Chapter II). The analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion in the same chapter reveals a hitherto undetected Ovidian subtext to Petrarch’s Rvf 190. Chapter III deals with two English versions of the Triumphi: I propose a date for Lord Morley’s translation which suggests it may be the first post- Chaucerian English engagement with Petrarch; new evidence is brought to light which identifies the edition of Petrarch used by William Fowler as the source text for his Triumphs of Petrarcke. The fourth chapter constitutes the most extensive investigation to date of J. M. Synge’s engagement with the Rvf, and deals with the question of translation as subversion. On the theoretical front, it demonstrates how Synge’s use of “folk-speech” challenges Venuti’s binary foreignising/domesticating system of translation categorisation.
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Pearson, Meg Forbes. "Spectacle in early modern English drama." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/3780.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2006.Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Collins, Nicholas J. "Forming the nation : early modern England and modern Ireland." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/77249/.
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Previous work links early modern England with modern Ireland solely through the figure of Shakespeare. This thesis broadens the connection to early modern literature more generally, and examines the deeper cultural tie between the two temporo-geographical spaces. In forming nations, writers in the two periods adopt the same strategies; England and Ireland as nation-states emerge into modernity in the same manner because they share a cradle of modernity, characterised by widespread cultural production. The respective polities of Elizabethan England and the Irish Republic are shaped by the same forces: modern Ireland is not merely postcolonial, but is post-early modern England. Without a positive engagement with early modern England, there is no modern Ireland. In five chapters I examine different formal arrangements that are rewritten through literary culture. The relationship between mothers and daughters in James Stephens and Eavan Boland is central to Irish modernity through the motif of maternity, as with Queen Elizabeth I. Fathers and sons in Pádraic Pearse, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and in John McGahern are reorganised into fraternal relationships at the foundation of Ireland’s modernity alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-5) and King Lear (1605-6; 1609). Ghosts are the ideal figure of the sovereign, descending from Hamlet into J. M. Synge, Joyce’s ‘Hades’ and John Banville. Additionally, bodies are the most alienating form, yet provide the surest path to personal sovereignty from Volpone (performed 1605-6; published 1607) to Troilus and Cressida (1602), through to Samuel Beckett and Edna O’Brien. Finally, a national poet emerges from the nationalised land in the dance of John Davies’ Orchestra (1596) and W. B. Yeats, as in the digging of Hamlet (1600-1) and Seamus Heaney. We have long known about early modern writers’ importance to the shape of the nation, and here those ideas are updated. They now show how modern Irish writers’ contribution to the Republic’s polity forms through their English forebears several centuries earlier; the literary form of the nations gives rise to authors’ sovereignty – authors who in English script the modern Irish nation. Note on the Text When citing William Shakespeare I use the latest Arden editions, but I do not footnote references; instead I cite in parentheses in the main text. Occasionally I have used a different Shakespearean text, which has been signalled in the notes. Standard systems of reference have been adopted for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Joyce’s Ulysses. I parenthetically cite line numbers for poems, rather than increase the number of notes. For prose and for drama, aside from Shakespeare, notes are used. Notes are reset for each chapter.