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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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Bingham, Sarah. "Colour in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2018. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.766284.
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In early modern England, colour was both a material and a textual preoccupation. However, the polychromatic palette that surrounded English men and women, and the particoloured palette of early modern writers, has thus far received little scholarly attention. This thesis rethinks the culture of colour in England between c. 1580 and c. 1660 to stimulate and enhance critical appreciation of colour in early modern literature. In contradistinction to the monochromatic trend of current cultural histories and early modern research, in this thesis I analyse all colours, situating these within their original socio-cultural contexts to substantiate the significance of colour in a literary text. My contextualised and polychromatic colour-concern offers an alternative method to traditional quantitative or symbolic approaches to colour in literature, as it takes into consideration how colour was experienced during an era that was attentive both to the material qualities and textual existence of colour. This thesis explores five "colourscapes," which include the workplace, household, Church, New World, and theatre, in order to finesse connections between colourful environs and attendant colour-configurations in early modern English literature. Attending to rhetorical instantiations of colour, and to the lived experience of colour as manifested in literature, this thesis offers an analytical lens through which early modern scholars, and literary scholars alike, can approach colour in literature.
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Clark, Douglas Iain. "Theorising the will in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2015. http://digitool.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26032.
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This thesis examines how the faculty of the will was conceptualised in early modern English literature. The attempt to understand its function and purpose was a crucial concern for a vast range of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, largely because of the important role the notion of the will played in the development of classical philosophy and the reformation of Christian theology. Providing a coherent definition of the will, its powers and associated functions in the human subject did, nonetheless, pose a significant problem for many early modern writers. Although scholars have documented the impact that notions of will had in the theology of the period, an analysis of the way in which the will was represented in the drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean England is missing from current academic criticism. This thesis seeks to remedy this gap in scholarship by clarifying the conceptual difficulties involved in theorising the powers of the will in the philosophy of the age, and by demonstrating how these difficulties are represented and played with in the period's drama. This thesis contributes original knowledge to the field of early modern studies by illustrating: the role that notions of will take in shaping the didactic framework of the morality tradition in late sixteenth-century drama; how the will was used to establish and explore notions of malevolence and acts of moral transgression in early modern plays; the part theories of the will played in shaping how notions of death and human fate were signified in early modern texts. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the literary representation of the faculty of the will should be understood to be a vital and essential part of early modern intellectual culture.
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Allen, Lea Knudsen. "Cosmopolite subjectivities and the Mediterranean in early modern England." View abstract/electronic edition; access limited to Brown University users, 2008. 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:3318286.
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Pappa, Joseph. "Carnal reading early modern language and bodies /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2008.
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Barrett, Christine. "Navigating Time: Cartographic Narratives in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10320.
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In the sixteenth century, the cartographic revolution was rapidly changing the experience of everyday life in England. Modes of thinking and inhabiting space (such as astronomy, trigonometry, surveying, and cartography) were advanced and refined, and in England, the map went from rarity to ubiquity in less than seventy years. Navigating Time explores how literary strategies changed in response to this rapid shift in the technology of spatial representation. I consider four epics, the epic being the early modern genre most overtly invested in matters of empire (and thus, in matters of space and history). Building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities, I argue that the epic offers a radical critique of the technological innovations of the cartographic revolution and the menace those innovations posed. Alongside this critique, the early modern epic outlined a new poetics centered on navigation. Epics by Holinshed, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton sought to encompass the representational possibilities of the map, but also to highlight and exceed the map's narrative insufficiency. Holinshed's Chronicles reforms the topography of the city, converting its streets and alleys into historical texts and presenting historiography and mapping as competing interpretive frameworks for urban space. The Faerie Queene redefines genre as the conduct of bodies in space, making it thus impossible to fix Faeryland as a mappable terrain, and asserting the continuous interpretation required by allegory against the compression imposed by the map. Drayton's Poly-Olbion seems at first to be a verbal map of Britain, but the poem quietly insists on the power of literature not to mimic but rather to supplant the world it describes, becoming the terrain a map can only represent. Finally, Milton's Paradise Lost creates a form of navigating without a destination, by transforming history into a geographic expanse that cannot be mapped, only wandered.
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Frazer, P. "Deviant mobility in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.546343.
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Hong, Sara. "Moving Imitation: Performing Piety in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, Boston College, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/644.
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Thesis advisor: Mary T. CraneUsing the rich concept of imitatio as an organizing theme, this study explores the tangibility of faith and a privileging of an affective, embodied religious subjectivity in post-Reformation England. Moving Imitation asserts that literary and devotional concepts of imitatio--as the Humanist activity of translation and as imitatio Christi--were intensely interested in semiotics. Indeed, if the Renaissance was a period in which literary imitatio flourished, advancements in translation theory were not unaccompanied by anxieties--in this case, anxieties about the stability of language itself. Likewise, as iconophilia turned into iconophobia, a similar anxiety about the reliability of signs also characterized the turmoil of the English Reformation. Moving Imitation examines the overlapping qualities of both types of imitatio in order to point out how an important devotional aesthetic in the period involves a type of embodied imitation. The human body's resonance with the humanity of Christ and the pre-Cartesian worldview that saw the human body as fully engaged with what we consider to be more cognitive functions contributed to a privileging of the body as an acceptable sign of true devotion. Beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt's paraphrase of the traditional penitential psalms, Moving Imitation explores the translation of penitence in Wyatt's work, and argues that a focus on David's outward gestures and body lends a firmness to a work that is otherwise anxious about the mutable nature of human words. Chapter two examines the suffering bodies in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments and their enactment of a visible imitatio Christi. Terms such as "members" function in its corporeal and communal senses in Acts and Monuments, for the marks of one's membership in the "true church" are born, literally, on one's members. Although much of Foxe's argumentation includes polemical disputes that seek to shut out a copia of meanings to the words, "This is my body," Foxe as an editor exploits the polysemous nature of the body in its corporeal and communal sensibilities. The performative aspects of martyrdom pave the way to a discussion of what I call transformative imitatio in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Winter's Tale. Although the theater's ability to "body forth" its fiction is a source of anxiety for antitheatricalists, proponents of the stage saw it as a way to defend the theater. Moving Imitation notes that the characterization of the stage's dangers--the ability to move people's affections--articulates an important Reformist desire: that the individual subject should not only be affected, but also be galvanized into devotional imitation. Such interest in action becomes important in Hamlet; if the central dilemma of the play (Hamlet's inability to take action) is considered against a common religious dilemma (how one stirs oneself towards genuine worship) the solutions as well as the problems overlap. Through the statue scene of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare defuses the danger attributed to the stage by animating a potentially idolatrous image with life; in ways that were only hinted at in Hamlet, The Winter's Tale makes use of the lively bodies onstage to suggest that the presumed connection between idolatry and the imitative stage is an unwarranted one, and "to see... life as lively mocked" can help to perform redemption
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
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Ashworth-King, Erin L. Barbour Reid. "The ethics of satire in early modern English literature." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,2593.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009.Title from electronic title page (viewed Oct. 5, 2009). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature." Discipline: English and Comparative Literature; Department/School: English and Comparative Literature.
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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.
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De, Ornellas K. P. "Troping the horse in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.273067.
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Zlatkin, Rachel L. "Remembering Mothers: Representations of Maternity in Early Modern English Literature." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1368014379.
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Johnson, Toria Anne. "'Piteous overthrows' : pity and identity in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4197.
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This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.
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Wright, Myra. "Whores and their metaphors in early modern English drama." Thesis, McGill University, 2010. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86819.
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Several clusters of metaphors were routinely used to represent the sex trade onstage in early modern England. Close philological study of these figures reveals that even the most conventional metaphors for whores and their work were capable of meaning many things at once, especially in the discursive context of the drama. This project follows a practice of reading that admits multiple significations for the words used by characters on the early modern stage. I argue that metaphors are social phenomena with consequences as varied and complex as the human interactions they're meant to describe. Each chapter treats a different set of images: commodities and commercial transactions, buildings and thoroughfares, food and drink, and rhetorical and theatrical ingenuity. Using methods based on the study of conceptual metaphor in the field of cognitive linguistics, I trace the deployment of conventional figures for prostitution in plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. I also introduce occurrences of these metaphors in other genres (news pamphlets, prose narratives, homilies, medical manuals, and so on) to show that they were part of pervasive cultural patterns. The readings below dwell on the figurative associations that were most available to early modern writers as they fashioned prostitute characters for the stage—metaphors commonly taken for granted as literal descriptions of sex work. An understanding of the social force of metaphor begins with the realization that words convey more than any writer, printer, or actor intends. The language of prostitution in the early modern theatre is therefore both common and complex, much like the characters it conjures.Pendant la Renaissance, divers grappes de métaphores étaient utilisées couramment dans les représentations théâtrale de la prostitution en Angleterre. Des études minutieuses philologiques des métaphores pour les putains et leur travail révéler que même les plus conventionnelles pouvaient signifier plusieurs choses à la fois, particulièrement dans le contexte discursif du théâtre. Le projet suit un procédé de lecture qui admet plusieurs significations pour les mots utilisés par des personnages de la Renaissance. Je soutiens que les métaphores sont des phénomènes sociaux qui ont des conséquences aussi variées et complexes que les interactions humaines qu'elles sont censées décrire. Chaque chapitre met en évidence une différente série d'images: les marchandises et transactions commerciales, les bâtiments et les voies urbaines, la nourriture et les boissons, l'ingénuité rhétorique et théâtrale. En utilisant des méthodes basées sur l'étude des métaphores conceptuelles dans le domaine de la linguistique cognitive, je retrace le cortège des figures conventionnelles de prostitution dans les pièces de théâtre de William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, et John Marston. Je signale aussi l'existence de ces métaphores dans d'autres genres littéraires (pamphlets de nouvelles, narratives en prose, homélies, manuels médicaux, etc.) pour démontrer qu'elles faisaient partie des tendances culturelles omniprésentes. Les explications ci-dessous s'entendent sur les associations figurées qui étaiaent les plus à la disposition des écrivains de la Renaissance en façonnant les personnages des prostituées—les métaphores qui étaient souvent considerées comme constituant les descriptions littérales du travail sexuel. Pour bien comprendre la force sociale de la métaphore, il faut realiser d'abord que les mots communiquent beaucoup plus qu'un écrivain, un imprimeur, ou un acteur les destine. La la
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Morris, Robert Blair. "Shakespearean secularizations: endangering beliefs on the early modern stage." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=117007.
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This dissertation sets out to offer a renewed perspective on the participation of Shakespeare's theatre in the secularization of early modern England. It engages with current theories of secularization, in which the pluralization of beliefs is recognized as fuelling secularizing processes, as opposed to longstanding subtraction theories of secularization, which have mistakenly charted a comprehensive decline of belief. While this study acknowledges the historical reality of Shakespeare's involvement in the secularization of the religious landscape of early modernity, it also resists the common reception of his plays as prescient anticipations of much later secularisms. I argue that these retroactive secularist interpretations of the plays have tended to elide the profoundly conflicted responses to secularization in Shakespeare's drama. This dissertation's historical investigation of tolerance, demonism, blasphemy, and love in the plays reveals that while Shakespeare's dramas do often convey an implicit recognition of the possible opportunities that secularization presented, they also represent it as a development that could render humans vulnerable to social and to supernatural harm. The introductory chapter provides an overview of current secularization theory, focusing particularly on Charles Taylor, the most influential proponent of recent developments in our understanding of secularizing processes. In cooperation with other theorists, Taylor has reanimated the idea of secularization by reconceiving of it as an unpredictable and dynamic process, largely driven by the pluralization of beliefs over time. I take up this hypothesis by demonstrating its potential for analyzing tolerance in several of Shakespeare's comedies, as well as more generally as a means of furthering critical debate on Shakespeare and religion. Chapter one is devoted to Shakespeare's theatricalization in Othello of the idea that the devil could make use of the discordant processes of the Reformation, as well as of the innovations of humanism, both pluralizing engines of secularization in the period, in order to infiltrate weakened spiritual communities. Chapter two investigates Shakespeare's response in Macbeth to legislation that prohibited blasphemous swearing in public entertainments. Shakespeare appears to have been inspired by the new bill to write Macbeth in a way that superficially complied with the law, but which nonetheless engaged profoundly with the dispersion of the post-Reformation idea of blasphemy into a secularizing plurality of beliefs, a fragmentation that is enacted in the play with an ambiguous mixture of approval and disapproval. In the final chapter, I consider how in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare recuperates the radicalism of the Franciscan Order's societal and poetic ideals of relational and spiritual love in ways that initially appear to support, but which then ultimately subvert, English Protestantism's tentative investment in matrimonial love as the principal means by which the fraying bonds of the religious and the secular dimensions of Reformed society might be restored. Instead of celebrating a unified representation of Catholic or of Protestant aspirations for marriage, the play concludes by evoking a secularizing plurality of options for belief in matrimony, an impetus which has contributed to the currently widespread, albeit variously experienced, belief in wedded love as the cornerstone of the modern social imaginary.Cette thèse propose une perspective renouvelée sur la participation du théâtre de Shakespeare dans la sécularisation de l'Angleterre pendant la Renaissance. Elle utilise les théories actuelles de la sécularisation, selon lesquelles la pluralisation des croyances est reconnue pour avoir alimenté les processus de sécularisation, contrairement aux théories dites « de soustraction » qui attribuent ceux-ci à une diminution globale de la croyance religieuse. Bien que cette étude reconnaisse la réalité historique de l'implication de Shakespeare dans la sécularisation du climat religieux de la Renaissance, elle résiste également à l'idée populaire que ses pièces anticipaient de façon presciente la laïcité moderne. Je soutiens que ces interprétations rétroactives des pièces de Shakespeare ont eu tendance à élider les réponses en conflit à la sécularisation contenu dans le drame de Shakespeare. Cette enquête historique de la tolérance, du démonisme, de blasphème, et d'amour dans les pièces de Shakespeare révèle que ses drames véhiculaient non seulement la reconnaissance implicite des opportunités que la sécularisation présentait, mais aussi d'un développement capable de rendre les humains plus vulnérables à l'endommagement social et surnaturel. Le chapitre d'introduction fournit une vue d'ensemble de la théorie de la sécularisation actuelle, en se concentrant particulièrement sur Charles Taylor, le partisan le plus influent des développements récents dans notre compréhension des processus de sécularisation. Avec d'autres théoriciens, Taylor a ravivé l'idée de sécularisation en la présentant comme un processus imprévisible et dynamique, conduit principalement par la pluralisation des croyances au fil du temps. J'applique cette hypothèse en démontrant son potentiel pour l'analyse de la tolérance dans plusieurs comédies de Shakespeare, ainsi que plus généralement comme un moyen de faire progresser le débat critique sur Shakespeare et la religion. Le premier chapitre est consacré à Othello où Shakespeare théâtralise l'idée que le diable peut faire usage des processus discordants de la réforme protestante, ainsi que des innovations de l'humanisme, deux instigateurs de la pluralisation séculaire durant cette période, afin d'infiltrer une communauté spirituelle affaiblie. Le deuxième chapitre étudie la réponse de Shakespeare dans Macbeth à la législation interdisant le langage blasphématoire dans les spectacles publics. Ici, Shakespeare décrie le nouveau projet de loi en écrivant d'une manière conforme seulement en apparence à la loi, mais qui en réalité promulgue une dispersion de l'idée post-réforme du blasphème en une pluralité séculaire de croyances, une fragmentation qui est jouée dans la pièce par le biais d'un mélange ambigu d'approbation et de désapprobation. Dans le dernier chapitre, je considère comment, dans Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare s'appuie sur le radicalisme des idéaux sociaux et poétiques de l'ordre Franciscain, particulièrement ceux concernant l'amour relationnel et spirituel, d'une manière qui apparait initialement à le soutenir, mais qui finalement s'insurge contre l'investissement du protestantisme anglais dans l'amour matrimonial comme principal moyen de restauration des dimensions religieuses et séculaires de la société réformée. Au lieu de célébrer une représentation unifiée des aspirations catholiques ou protestantes du mariage, la pièce se termine en évoquant une pluralité d'options pour séculariser la croyance dans le mariage, un élan qui a contribué à faire aujourd'hui de l'amour conjugal, sous toutes ses formes, une fondation de l'imaginaire social moderne.
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Bertram, Benjamin Glenn. "Skepticism and social struggle in early modern England /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1997. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9804020.
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Cairns, Daniel. "As it likes you early modern desire and vestigial impersonal constructions /." Waltham, Mass. : Brandeis University, 2009. http://dcoll.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23236.
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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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Tibbs, Simon John. "Lineages of Turkish power in early modern writing in English." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/571.
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The Ottoman Turks were of England's cultural others perhaps the most widely written about in the early modem period. The texts devoted to them cover a wide range of literary kinds, including history, drama, travel narrative, religious tract, newsbook, and ballad. This thesis concentrates pincipally on history writing and drama,a ddressing the image of the Turks as one of violent power, expressed in their immemorial hostility towards Christians, and in their internal dynastic relationships. The difference of the Turks is closely bound up in early modern writings with their descent, both in relation to distant forbears such as the Saracens and Scythians, and locally within the Ottoman dynasty. In approaching the early modern literature about the Turks as a series of interrelated lineages of power, my main aim has been to trace the relationship between the images of the ancient and modern Ottoman rulers. These two aspects of the early modern sense of the difference of the Turks are signalled by the division of the thesis into two parts, Part One, The Originall of the Turks, addressing ancient lineages, and Part Two The Image of the 0thoman Greatnesse, modern ones.
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Albano, Caterina. "Representations of food and starvation in early modern English drama." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314188.
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Lavery, Hannah. "The development of the impotency poem into early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.489100.
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In this thesis I explore some of the key influences and lines of descent whereby we arrive at the Restoration 'imperfect enjoyment' poem. I demonstrate how the notion of 'influence' as a necessary part of the development of the impotency poem leads to satiric reinterpretation in reference to different cultural and historical contexts. This recognises the tradition's vitality and force, allowing the impotency poem to transgress cultural and linguistic boundaries with ease, and yet maintains a clear focus on the core elements of the original impotency poems.
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Wood, Jennifer Linhart. "Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Theater and Travel Writing." Thesis, The George Washington University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3587221.
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My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. "Sounding" implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. "Otherness" in this study refers to a foreign presence outside of the listening body, as well as to an otherness that is already inherent within. Sounding otherness enacts a bi-directional exchange between a culturally different other and an embodied self; this exchange generates what I term the sonic uncanny, whereby the otherness interior to the self vibrates with sounds of otherness exterior to the body. The sonic uncanny describes how sounds that are perceived as foreign become familiar through the vibratory touch of the soundwave that attunes a body to its sonic environment or soundscape. Sounds of foreign Eastern and New World Indian otherness become part of English and European travelers; at the same time, these travelers sound their own otherness in Indian spaces. Sounding otherness occurs in the travel narratives of Jean de Lèry, Thomas Dallam, Thomas Coryate, and John Smith. Cultural otherness is also sounded by the English through their theatrical representations of New World and Oriental otherness in masques including The Masque of Flowers, and plays like Robert Greene's Alphonsus, respectively; Shakespeare's The Tempest combines elements of East and West into a new sound—"something rich and strange." These dramatic entertainments suggest that the theater, as much as a foreign land, can function as a sonic contact zone.
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Alfar, Cristina León. ""Evil" women : patrilineal fantasies in early modern tragedy /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9455.
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Anderson, David. "Violence against the sacred: tragedy and religion in early modern England." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=32544.
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This dissertation argues that the tragedy of the English Renaissance reflects the religious culture of the era in its depiction of sacrificial violence. It contests New Historicist assumptions about both the relationship between religion and politics, and the relationship between religion and literature, by arguing that the tragedians were reflecting the Girardian sacrificial crisis that characterized martyr executions in the sixteenth century and which was fuelled by uncertainty within the church over the issue of violence. Chapter One develops the historical framework. It begins by surveying the history of Protestant and Catholic martyrdom in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It then traces the doctrine of the persecuted church—the recovered New Testament sense that the true church is necessarily a persecuted minority that suffers for Christ's sake—in various religious writers of the period. The most important of these writers is the martyrologist John Foxe, who fostered an anti-sacrificial strain of Christianity from within the national church. Finally, I discuss how this victim-centred theology disrupted consensus at religious executions, offering an emotional template that the tragedians exploited. Each of the three subsequent chapters is devoted to a different tragedian. Chapter Two discusses William Shakespeare's King Lear, a play which is radical in its sympathy for the sacrificial victim. King Lear shows no particular faith in Christian redemption, but in this very lack of transcendence it demystifies and condemns sacrificial violence. Chapter Three is devoted to John Webster's two tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Here, theNotre thèse soutient l'idée que la tragédie de la renaissance anglaise reflète la culture religieuse de l'époque dans son évocation de la violence sacrificielle. Elle conteste les présupposés du néo-historicisme à l'égard de la relation entre la religion et la politique et entre la religion et la littérature, en proposant que les dramaturges exprimaient à travers leurs tragédies une crise sacrificielle girardienne qui caractérisait les exécutions des martyres au seizième siècle et qui était alimentée par une crise de conscience par rapport à la violence qui s'exprimait au sein même de l'église. Le premier chapitre fait état du contexte historique. Nous nous intéressons d'abord à l'histoire des martyres protestants et catholiques au seizième et au début du dix-septième siècles. Nous détaillons ensuite la doctrine de l'église persécutée, c'est à dire la conviction issue du nouveau testament que la véritable église est nécessairement une minorité persécutée au nom du Christ, au travers des écrits de nombreux écrivains de l'époque. Figure illustre parmi ces écrivains, le martyrologue John Foxe cultivait une tendance anti-sacrificielle au sein de l'église nationale. Nous examinons enfin comment cette théologie centrée sur la victime bouleversa le consensus face aux exécutions religieuses, en présentant un champ émotionnel exploité par les dramaturges tragiques. Chacun des trois chapitres suivants se consacre à un différent dramaturge. Le deuxième chapitre aborde King Lear de Shakespeare qui se distingue précisément par la compassion qui y est manifestée pour la victime sacrificielle. King Lear ne fait preuve d'aucune
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Hartmann, Anna-Maria Regina. "Reading the ancient fable : early modern English mythographers 1590-1650." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610786.
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Giglio, Katheryn M. "Unlettered culture the idea of illiteracy in early modern writing /." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/login?COPT=REJTPTU0NWQmSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=3739.
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Smith, Katherine Jo. "Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry in early modern England." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/95225/.
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This thesis explores the genre of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry and its tradition in early modern English literature. In looking at original poems, translations and receptions of Ovid’s Heroides, I argue that female as well as male writers throughout the early modern period engaged with the tradition of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry. By using case studies advancing chronologically throughout the period, I will also show how female-voiced complaint changes and develops in different historical and literary contexts. Nobody as yet has produced a study looking at a large sample of women writing female-voiced complaint. The criticism around complaint is diffuse, with only a small number of book-length studies which focus on complaint in general as a genre or discourse. There are many articles or chapters on individual complaint poems but not many which compare different female-voiced complaints of the same period, especially those written by women. When female poets write in the genre, the rhetorical trope of Ovidian female-voiced complaint (that the sex of the author is discontinuous with that of the speaker) must be renegotiated. This renegotiation by female poets is often the result of close and learned engagement with the traditions of complaint, both the classical precedents and the receptions and re-imaginations of the genre in early modern England. They are choosing a genre which has a productive potential in being female-voiced but which also has a tradition of male manipulation. However, rather than seeing women writers as existing separately from male writers, I argue that they work in parallel, drawing on the same Ovidian complaint traditions.
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Hill, Alexandra Nicole. ""Bloudy tygrisses" murderous women in early modern English drama and popular literature /." Orlando, Fla. : University of Central Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002727.
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Hoffman, Tiffany. "Virtuous passions: Shakespeare and the culture of shyness in early modern England." Thesis, McGill University, 2014. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=122962.
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The dissertation develops an interdisciplinary account of the psychological and affective state of shyness, and examines representations of the emotion, along with its variant states shame, bashfulness, and modesty, in Shakespeare and in other early English literature. It brings together work from various fields: literature, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, religious studies, classics, and ancient philosophy. It is a literary study, but also considers medical, political, theological, and social tracts. The dissertation begins with an exploration of the classical emotion concept the fear of shame, and finds the roots of shyness in the virtue ethics tradition of Aristotle. It then moves on to examine the influence Aristotle's moral philosophy had on early modern conceptions of shyness, especially as a religious passion associated with conscience. In view of the way new modes of courtesy, social humility, and courtly interaction infiltrated the predominantly male world of civil conversation, the dissertation outlines how the cultural status of shyness shifted throughout the period. As I demonstrate, shyness underwent a radical secularization and went from being widely understood as a religious emotion to a pathological condition linked to melancholy.Chapter one investigates Shakespeare's interest in the gendering of shyness, and argues that the rising prevalence of bashfulness amongst male courtiers contributed to the medicalization of the emotion in the period. The chapter develops an account of Shakespeare's King Henry the Sixth: a figure whose characterization exemplifies the rapid transformation of shyness as it devolved from a virtuous moral and religious passion into one associated with notions of male disease and political immorality. The following chapters, however, reveal a shift in perspective. In Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare questions the early modern pathologization of bashfulness through his endorsement of an Aristotelian account of shyness as a social, ethical, and religious virtue. In these plays the experience of bashfulness operates as a governing emotional force over the advancement of sinful forms of pride and vengeance, and produces a spiritually reformative and transformative effect within the Christian subject. By calling attention to the moral and religious connotations associated with bashfulness throughout its history, the dissertation seeks to counter the medicalization and denigration of shyness currently taking place in the modern world.La présente thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre interdisciplinaire d'une étude psychologique et affective de la timidité. Aussi rend-elle compte, chez Shakespeare et autres premiers littérateurs anglais, des représentations de l'émotion dans ses états de honte, d'embarras et de modestie. Elle fait également appel à plusieurs disciplines: littérature (y compris celle des Anciens), psychologie, neuroscience, sociologie, études religieuses. Elle est assurément une étude littéraire, encore qu'elle s'appuie également sur les apports de la médecine, de la politique, de la théologie et de la sociologie. La thèse débute par une étude sur la crainte de la honte sous l'angle classique et dans la tradition de l'éthique aristotélicienne. Elle enchaîne sur l'influence exercée par la philosophie morale d'Aristote sur les premières conceptions modernes de la timidité, vue essentiellement comme passion religieuse en étroit lien avec la conscience. Par ailleurs, à mesure que s'établissait un nouveau code de bienséances (courtoisie, humilité, courtisanerie), le monde largement masculin et le comportement qui s'ensuivit en furent affectés. D'où un changement de l'état culturel de la timidité au cours de l'époque. C'est dire que la timidité se vit entièrement sécularisée et devint, d'émotion religieuse qu'elle avait été, une condition pathologique causée par une humeur mélancolique.Le premier chapitre a, pour objet, l'intérêt porté par Shakespeare pour la différentiation sexuelle de la timidité. Son constat: la prévalence grandissante de la timidité chez les courtisans mâles eut pour effet, à l'époque, la médicalisation de l'émotion. Le chapitre renvoie au roi Henri VI, personnage qui illustre la transformation religieuse et morale de la timidité en une maladie d'homme immoral et politique. Les chapitres suivants, toutefois, font montre d'une perspective nouvelle. Dans Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice et Measure for Measure, Shakespeare revient sur son idée initiale. Il met en doute la pathogenèse de la timidité pour reprendre le concept aristotélicien de vertu religieuse, éthique et sociale. Dans les pièces citées, un sentiment de timidité apparaît comme un état émotionnel en pleine force maîtresse plutôt que comme la manifestation d'un péché d'orgueil et de vengeance. Il appelle ainsi à une réformation du cœur et de la spiritualité dans une dogmatique chrétienne. Ainsi, par son retour historique aux diverses connotations morales et religieuses liées à l'embarras, la thèse s'emploie ici, dans un renversement du pour au contre, à démythifier l'actuelle et universelle conception de la timidité, tout ensemble gratuite et dénigrante, comme une source profane de stigmatisation médicale.
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Stockton, William H. "Sex, sense, and nonsense the anal erotics of early modern comedy /." [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:3274908.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2960. Adviser: Linda Charnes. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 10, 2008).
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Hill, Alexandra. "BLOUDY TYGRISSES": MURDEROUS WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA AND POPULAR LITERATURE." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2009. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/2281.
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This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and responsibilities of wives and mothers, and debates about marriage, as well as a review of women tried for murder in the Middlesex assize courts between 1558 and 1625. Chapter Three, comprised of four subsections, engages in critical readings of approximately 52 pamphlets, ballads, and plays published in the same period. Individual subsections discuss how traitorous wives, murderous mothers, women who murder in their communities, and punishment and redemption are represented in the narratives. Woodcut illustrations printed in these texts are also examined, and their iconographic contributions to the construction of bad women is discussed. Women who murder in these texts are represented as consummately evil creatures capable of inflicting terrible harm to their families and communities, and are consistently discovered, captured, and executed by their communities for their heinous crimes. Murderous women in early modern popular literature also provided a means for contemporary men and women to explore, confront, and share in the depths of sin, while anticipating their own spiritual salvation. Pamphlets, plays, and broadsides related bawdy, graphic, and violent stories that allow modern readers a glimpse of the popular culture and mental world of Renaissance England.M.A.
Department of Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies
Graduate Studies;
Interdisciplinary Studies MA
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Jeffrey, Anthony Cole. "The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty and Depravity in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062818/.
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This dissertation argues that early modern writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell played a critical role in the transition from the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics. I demonstrate how the Protestant Reformation, with its special emphasis on the depravity of human nature, prompted writers to critique models of aesthetic judgment and experience that depended on high faith in human goodness and rationality. These writers in turn used their literary works to popularize skepticism about the human mind's ability to perceive and appreciate beauty accurately. In doing so, early modern writers helped create an intellectual culture in which aesthetics would emerge as a distinct branch of philosophy.
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Weise, Wendy Suzanne. "Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence in Early Modern English Literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195129.
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In an analysis of literary and historical documents from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence in Early Modern English Literature examines depictions of love, beauty, and desire and identifies within these discourses a rhetoric of violence. It explores how eroticized violence can be deployed to privilege male speakers and silence female voices. It also reveals, by pairing female- and male-authored works that make specific claims to represent gendered experience that early modern writers both recognized the mechanisms of violent representation as literary conventions and realized they could be deployed, exploited, resisted, fashioned to new ends. By integrating feminist psychoanalytic, film and architectural theories with literary analysis, this study demonstrates how spatial topographies in literary works can function as stimuli that provoke desire to turn violent. Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence ultimately identifies how this body of literature constructs and maintains genders and points to violence as a structural principle, bound by the hydraulics of subjectivity and cultural anxieties about gender, class, and literary production. Finally, this study identifies the residue of early modern ideas about desire and violence in the materials of our modern culture.
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Stafford, Brooke Alyson. "Outside England : mobility and early modern Englishness /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9326.
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Ettari, Gary. ""That within which passeth show" : the dialectics of early modern subjectivity /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9383.
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Breuer, Heidi Jo. "Crafting the witch: Gendering magic in medieval and early modern England." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280400.
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This project documents and analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. The prophet becomes the wicked witch. This dissertation explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation. Chapter Two surveys representations of magic in the texts of four authors within the Arthurian canon: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Layamon. These writers gender magic similarly (representing prophecy and certain forms of transformative magic as masculine and healing as feminine) and use gendered figures to mitigate the threat of masculine power posed by the feudal patriarchy present in England and France in the twelfth century. Chapter Three explores representations of two magical characters who appear in a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romances associated with Gawain: the churlish knight and the loathly lady. The authors of these romances privilege gender conventions radically different from those in earlier models and conjure a figure neglected by the earlier writers, the wicked witch. In particular, representations of the witch as a wicked step-mother reflect the anxiety created by expanding space for women (especially mothers) in previously exclusively male arenas of English society. In Chapter Four, I follow the romance tradition into early modern England, studying the work of Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare. For these authors, the wicked witch (alternately represented as temptress or crone) is connected specifically to maternity; the severe anxiety about maternity in these texts is representative of widespread concern about mothers and motherhood in sixteenth-century England. Chapter Five traces the legislative policy governing prosecution of witches in England and offers suggestions about the relationship between legal climates and literary representations of magic. Though prosecution of witchcraft is now extremely rare in the U.S., filmmakers still rely on medieval and Renaissance models to inform their representations of witches. Once she arrived, the witch never left.
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Farabee, Darlene. "Print travels movement and metaphor in the early modern era /." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file, 296 p, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1456289051&sid=3&Fmt=2&clientId=8331&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Duncan, Helga L. "The poetics of degeneration : literature and libertinism in early modern England /." View online version; access limited to Brown University users, 2005. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3174595.
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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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Yeh, Te-Han. "Textual and narrative space in professional dramas in early modern England." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4081/.
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This thesis aims to examine the varied notions of space in early modern play-texts as well as to challenge the assumed text-space relationship that has been the foundation of various scholarly approaches towards early modern theatrical practice, including a Shakespeare-centred historiography and theatre reconstruction carried out by scholars such as Andrew Gurr and Richard Hosley and contemporary editorial practices that appear to reconstruct early modern performances scenographically through annotations and editorial interventions. In order to depart from such Shakespeare-centred and London-biased architectural determinism, the thesis will adopt a repertory approach to the Queen’s Men, a methodology that emphasises the materiality of the play books and an author-function approach to the plays associated with Robert Greene in order to explore the alternatives to a conventional architectural and scenographic theatre reconstruction based primarily on the literary analysis of play-texts. In addition to challenging the assumption of an interchangeable relationship between play-texts, performance and space, this thesis aim to demonstrate how the concept of space within a play-text will be ultimately an issue of dramaturgy, determined and defined by the diverse dramatic forces in this period and the idiosyncratic styles of their narrative.
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Buffey, Emily. "The early modern dream vision (1558-1625) : genre, authorship and tradition." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7360/.
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This thesis offers the first full-length investigation into the reception and influence of the dream vision poem in the early modern period. One of the main aims of this research is to challenge the assumption that the dream vision was no longer an attractive, appreciated or effective form beyond the Middle Ages. This research breaks new ground by demonstrating that the dream vision was not only a popular form in the post-Reformation period, but was a major and enduring means of literary and political expression throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. This thesis is therefore part of an ongoing scholarly attempt to reconfigure the former aesthetic judgements that have dominated scholarship since C. S. Lewis dubbed the sixteenth century as the 'drab age' of English verse. The main focus is upon three writers who have been largely ignored or misunderstood by modern scholarship: Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), Richard Robinson (fl. 1570-1589) and Thomas Andrewe (fl. 1600-1604). Through close analysis of their work, this thesis demonstrates that the dream vision could both inform and was greatly informed by contemporary political, cultural and literary developments, as well as the period's relationship with its literary and historical past.
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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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Zvara, Lynn Scarnati. "Eliza Haywood and Her Rebellious Pen in Early Modern England." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 1999. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu999202295.
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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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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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Gutmann, Sara. "Borders maritime in early modern drama and the English geopolitical imagination, 1575-1625." Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3725922.
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“Borders Maritime” explores how the English imagined maritime geography, politics, and culture from 1575 to 1625. As a zone that is neither land nor sea, the maritime needed to be developed, demarcated, navigated, and policed in order for England to take her place on the international stage as the Empire by the end of the seventeenth century. To do so, traditional forms of sovereignty founded on the land needed to be reimagined from a different elemental perspective, that of the sea. The model of sovereignty inherited from political theology—anthropocentric, legalistic, and religious—is here transformed into a maritime political ecology—nonhuman, imaginative, and elemental. Recent criticism of the development of modern sovereignty out of the middle ages has found ways to displace the biological basis for the definition of life and reach further into the networked world. This includes forms of life such as pirates and power lines, territories and tidal zones. The move to define the maritime likewise requires including unfamiliar forms of life and active natures. It requires acting on the water, thinking like a whirlpool, imagining waves, and navigating islands.
The fifty years under consideration here mark this turn from the land to the sea in the English geopolitical imagination. Since the maritime is a border, an especially destructive and deconstructive one, drama provides an especially suitable vehicle in its own borderline nature—fiction performed in real space with real elements. This dissertation analyzes how the Elizabethan estate entertainments at Kenilworth and Elvetham, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Jacobean court masques by Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniels, and Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher’s tragicomedies The Island Princess and The Sea Voyage perform elemental sovereignty and stage the political ecologies of early modern England.
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Eccleston, Rachel. "“Princely Feminine Graces”: Virtue and Power in Early Modern English and Spanish Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23134.
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This project analyzes the intersections between representations of female sovereignty used to promote and rethink feminine virtue in both early modern English and Spanish advice literature and literary texts published in the decade after Queen Elizabeth I’s death. I suggest that the question of women’s sovereignty prompted by the rise of ruling queens in Spain and England influences the prominence of regal women as models of feminine virtue in advice literature and reconceptualizes feminine virtue as a political discourse, forming a new category I term “princely feminine virtue.” Scholarship analyzing the relationship between advice literature and literary works has not recognized England and Spain’s shared indebtedness to princely models to advise and represent feminine virtue. By examining the interplay between feminine virtue, tropes of sovereignty, and the advisory mode in both types of texts, this project emphasizes the widespread potential for women’s exemplary virtue across the social spectrum. In addition to recasting feminine virtue through a princely lens, these texts reveal a shared vision of how performances of feminine virtue are invested with agency and power.
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Dawson, Lesel. "Sweet poison : the representation of lovesickness in early modern English literature, 1580-1645." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.395021.
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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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Lander, Johnson Bonnie. "Chastity on the early modern English stage, 1611-1649." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7a3235c9-13dd-44dd-9489-60ae42711203.
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‘Chastity on the Early Modern English Stage’ seeks to explain the relationship between tragicomedy’s brief and short-lived English popularity and the royal cult of chastity which spanned exactly the same historical time-frame. This study attempts to define a cultural movement which influenced the political, religious, social, intellectual, aesthetic, and medical fields in the first half of the seventeenth-century and argues that the narrative tropes which structured, and assisted the spread of, the post-Elizabethan cult of chastity were the same tropes governing the tragicomedies so popular in the period. The arguments made for tragicomedy are speculatively extended to all generic forms, with the intention of expanding an area of scholarship still dominated by formalist analysis. By focussing on narrative tropes and locating them within both fictional and non-fictional texts and in the presentation and discussion of significant events (from medical discoveries to liturgical arrangements and royal birthing rituals) this thesis aims to illustrate that the human and cosmic visions articulated by different dramatic genres were as relevant to early modern lives outside the theatre as they were to those within it. Genre is thus less a description of a text’s formal characteristics and more a set of truths governing certain human experiences both in texts and in life. Focussing on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, two plays by John Ford, Caroline court masques and birthing rituals, Milton’s A Maske and a number of non-professional performances (from the Earl of Castlehaven’s trial to William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood), ‘Chastity on the Early Modern English Stage’ describes the four tropes of chastity and their place in tragicomic experience from the death of Elizabeth I to the beheading of Charles I. While Charles’s death and the closure of the theatres are crucial reasons for the abrupt end of the cult of chastity and tragicomedy, this thesis argues that cause must also be attributed to the efforts of pro-Parliamentary and Puritan writers who, throughout the 1630s and 1640s, sought to claim the tropes of chastity for their own rhetoric and cause. Their success resulted in a redefinition of chastity as masculine, individuated, Parliamentarian, Protestant, intellectual, civic and prosaic instead of Catholic, royal, spectacular, feminised, Marian, pietised, and theatrical.