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Martin, Julia School of English UNSW. "Self and subject in eighteenth century diaries." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English, 2002. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/18787.
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This thesis investigates new ways of reading eighteenth century British diaries and argues that these narratives do not necessarily rely upon the idea of the self as a single, unitary source of meaning. This contradicts what has traditionally been viewed as the very essence of autobiography (Gusdorf, 1954; Olney, 1980, 1988). Close readings of the diaries of John Wesley, Mrs Housman, James Boswell and Hannah Ball (all written between 1720 and 1795) show that they construct 'generalised', rather than 'unique' subjects of narrative. The self is seen to be an amalgam of common characteristic more than being a core of psychological impulses. In order to understand the 'generalised' rather than 'unique' subject found in these diaries, this thesis surveys and uses reading strategies informed by theories that can accommodate fragmented narrative forms like diaries. It also investigates the religious and philosophical underpinnings of eighteenth century autobiographical narratives to determine how the self, and consciousness, were popularly perceived in the period known as the Enlightenment (c. 1690-1810). As they are often marked by missing pages, deletions and heavy editing, careful strategies are required in order to 'read with' eighteenth century diary narratives (Sandoval, 1981; Huff, 2000; Raoul, 2001). This practice invites an engagement with philosophical debates about 'self'-the living human being who writes the diary, and the 'subject'-the 'I' produced by narrative. The thesis argues that more than any other type of written narrative, diaries demand an acknowledgement that the subject of narrative does refer to a self that lives in day-to-day relations. Not to acknowledge this is to 'write off experience altogether' (Probyn,1991:111) and exclude the political dimensions of autobiography from the analysis. The thesis concludes that by seeking to answer the questions of 'What am I?' and 'What are we?' rather than the Romantic or psychological question of 'Who am I?', eighteenth century diary narratives create complex relationships between time, subjective and narrative that transcend most theorisations of autobiography to date. This presents an exciting direction forward for a field of scholarship that has been overly concerned with defining its limitations.
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Shannon, Josephine E. "From discourse to the couch : the obscured self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary narrative." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34533.
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Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression.I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.
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Guthrie, Neil. "A thousand wrecks! : rakes' progresses in some eighteenth century English novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b08473d6-9cae-4a14-b7a7-3e40cf7bb283.
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This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).
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Moore, Paul Henry. "Death in the eighteenth-century novel, 1740-1800." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5def918a-a899-4650-8850-efcacf3f4bf1.
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This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.
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Ahern, Stephen. "Between duty and desire : sentimental agency in British prose fiction of the later eighteenth century." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0027/NQ50101.pdf.
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Collins, Margo. "Wayward Women, Virtuous Violence: Feminine Violence in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2474/.
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This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in order to maintain social boundaries, particularly sexual and economic ones, and that writers of the period drew upon this tradition of acceptable feminine violence in order to create the figure of the violent woman as a necessary agent of social control. One such figure is Violenta, the heroine of Delarivier Manley's novella The Wife's Resentment (1720), who murders and dismembers her bigamous husband. At her trial, Violenta is condemned to death "notwithstanding the Pity of the People" and "the Intercession of the Ladies," who believe that although the "unexampled Cruelty [Violenta] committed afterwards on the dead Body" was excessive, the murder itself is not inexcusable given her husband's bigamy. My research draws upon diverse archival materials, such as conduct manuals, criminal biographies, and legal records, in order to provide a contextual grounding for the interpretation of literary works by women. Moving between contemporary accounts of feminine violence and discussions of pertinent literary works by Eliza Haywood, Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Jane Wiseman, the dissertation examines issues of interpersonal violence and communal violence committed by women.
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Hone, Joseph. "The end of the line : literature and party politics at the accession of Queen Anne." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d847a561-130a-42f0-b78f-2463e9e65535.
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This thesis provides the first full-length account of the political and cultural significance of the accession of Queen Anne. It offers a critical reassessment of the politics of the royal image across a spectrum of texts, events, and artefacts - from panegyrics, newspapers, sermons, royal progresses, and processions to medals, coins, and playing cards. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of party politics to the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century. This thesis nuances that assumption by arguing: (1) that the principal focus of partisan texts was competing representations of monarchy; and (2) that the explosion of partisanship at the start of the eighteenth century was triggered by unrest about the royal succession. Anne was the last protestant Stuart. She had no surviving children. This thesis explores how authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and a great many lesser known and anonymous writers and propagandists conceptualized the end of the Stuart dynasty. Anne's accession forced writers to conjecture on the future succession. There were two rival claimants to the throne after Anne's death: the protestant Electress Sophia of Hanover and Anne's Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward. Sophia's claim was statutory, James's hereditary. Factions emerged in support of both claimants. Almost all topical writing took a stance on the issue. Many sided with the government, supporting Hanover. Yet some writers favoured the illegal but hereditary claim of James Francis Edward; they had to express support in covert ways. This succession crisis triggered not only printed polemic, but also swathes of clandestine manuscript literature circulating in the Jacobite underground. The government took a hard line on Jacobite writers and printers; this thesis documents both their persecution and the techniques they used to evade the law. The thesis concludes by suggesting that this oppositional literary culture only disintegrated after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, and the consequent settlement of the Hanoverian succession, in late 1716. After this point, royal succession ceased to be a major source of political discontent.
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Bender, Ashley Brookner. "Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2009. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12081/.
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This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control of a character's props often accords a person control of the character to whom the props belong. Props consequently make visual the relationships of power and subjugation that exist among characters. The severed body parts, bodies, miniature portraits, and containers of these plays are the mechanisms by which characters attempt to differentiate themselves from others. The characters deploy objects as proof of their identities-for example, when the women in Behn's Rover circulate miniatures of themselves-yet other characters must also interpret these objects. The props, and therefore the characters' identities, are at all times vulnerable to misinterpretation. Much as the props' meanings are often disputed, so too are characters' private identities often at odds with their public personae. The boundaries of selfhood that the characters wish to protect are made vulnerable by the objects that they use to shore up those boundaries. When read in relation to the characters who move them, props reveal the negotiated process of individuation. In doing so, they emphasize the correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic worth. They are a measure of how well characters perform gender and class rolls, thereby demonstrating the importance of external signifiers in the legitimation of England's subjects, even as they expose "legitimacy" as a social construction.
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Moore, Lindsay Emory. "The Laureates’ Lens: Exposing the Development of Literary History and Literary Criticism From Beneath the Dunce Cap." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc822784/.
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In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.
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CONNERY, BRIAN ARTHUR. "AN AMBITION TO BE HEARD IN A CROWD: MAD HEROES AND THE SATIRIST IN THE WORKS OF JONATHAN SWIFT (ALIENATION, DOUBLE-BIND)." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/183857.
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In Swift's works, both heroes and madmen are characterized by supra-normal aspiration, imagination, individuality, and pride, and the mad hero becomes an effective emblem for the chaos arising when individual vision challenges traditional authority in religion, politics, and literature. Swift's view of madness as the willful perversion of reason tends to be traditional, though his sense of its pervasiveness creates a subversive skepticism. Consistently throughout his works, Swift posits conscience as the only safeguard against the madness of pride. Swift views the traditional hero as subversive, typically portraying him as mad while presenting the sane man as unheroic. As the Tale-teller argues, the traditonal hero is a successful madman. Swift's later works demonstrate that madness and heroism often coincide because of the mutually reinforcing relationship between power and ego, and he asserts that the will to power, manifested in the heroic imposition of one's will upon others, is a form of madness. As an alternative to the asocial and amoral traditional hero, Swift promotes a moderate hero in the figures of the Church of England Man, the Examiner, and the Drapier: the one just man, motivated by Roman and Christian virtue, in a mad society. But even the vir bonus remains susceptible to challenges of authority, for in a mad and corrupt society his singular vision cannot appeal to common sense. Moreover, if he becomes powerful, he risks madness, and if he retreats from madness, he becomes impotent. As a consequence of this double bind, the satirist himself suffers a profound alienation. Swift recognizes that by engaging in the controversies of his age, he himself becomes liable to charges of the madness of pride. Even as he harangues the world, his recognition of the heroic conceit in establishing himself as satirist is evident in the self-satire of A Modest Proposal and the verses on his death. Similarly, the self-portraits in his poetry and Gulliver's Travels demonstrate his conscience at work as he satirizes his own indignation and reforming urges, striving thereby to maintain a modicum of humility and thus sanity, and, in laughing with the reader, striving to maintain common sense as well.
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Rumbold, Kate Louise. "All the men and women merely players : quoting Shakespeare in the mid-eighteenth-century novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670136.
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Grovier, Kelly. "Walking Stewart & the making of Romantic imagination." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670203.
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Wood, Laura Thomason. "Change of Condition: Women's Rhetorical Strategies on Marriage, 1710-1756." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2005. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4921/.
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This dissertation examines ways in which women constructed and criticized matrimony both before and after their own marriages. Social historians have argued for the rise of companionacy in the eighteenth century without paying attention to women's accounts of the fears and uncertainties surrounding the prospect of marriage. I argue that having more latitude to choose a husband did not diminish the enormous impact that the choice would have on the rest of a woman's life; if anything, choice might increase that impact. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Mulso Chapone, Mary Delany, and Eliza Haywood recorded their anxieties about and their criticisms of marriage in public and private writings from the early years of the century into the 1750s. They often elide their own complex backgrounds in favor of generalized policy statements on what constitutes a good marriage. These women promote an ideal of marriage based on respect and similarity of character, suggesting that friendship is more honest, and durable than romantic love. This definition of ideal marriage enables these women to argue for more egalitarian marital relationships without overtly calling for a change in the wife's traditional role. The advancement of this ideal of companionacy gave women a means of promoting gender equality in marriage at a time when they considered marriage risky but socially and economically necessary.
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Abunasser, Rima Jamil. "Corporate Christians and Terrible Turks: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Representation of Empire in the Early British Travel Narrative, 1630 - 1780." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4444/.
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This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in the work of scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan and Edward Said. This critical gap has left early travel narratives by Sir Francis Moore, Jonathan Harris, Penelope Aubin, and others largely neglected. These early writers, I argue, adapted the conventions of the travel narrative while relying on the authority of contemporary commercial practices. The early English travelers modified contemporary conventions of aesthetic representation by formulating their descriptions of non-European cultures in terms of the economic and political conventions and rivalries of the early eighteenth century. Early English travel literature, I demonstrate, functioned as a politically motivated medium that served both as a marker of authenticity, justifying the colonial and imperial ventures that would flourish in the nineteenth century, and as a forum for experimentation with English notions of gender and narrative authority.
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Angel-Cann, Lauryn. "Stretched Out on Her Grave: Pathological Attitudes Toward Death in British Fiction 1788-1909." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4271/.
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Nineteenth-century British fiction is often dismissed as necrophillic or obsessed with death. While the label of necrophilia is an apt description of the fetishistic representations of dead women prevalent at the end of the century, it is too narrow to fit literature produced earlier in the century. This is not to say that abnormal attitudes toward death are only a feature of the late nineteenth century. In fact, pathological attitudes toward death abound in the literature, but the relationship between the deceased and the survivor is not always sexual in nature. Rather, there is a clear shift in attitudes, from the chaste death fantasy, or attraction to the idea of death, prevalent in Gothic works, to the destructive, stagnant mourning visible in mid-century texts, and culminating in the perverse sexualization of dead women at the turn of the century. This literary shift is most likely attributable to the concurrent changes in attitudes toward sex and death. As sex became more acceptable, more public, via the channels of scientific discourse, death became a less acceptable idea. This “denial of death” is a direct reaction to the religious uncertainties brought about by industrialization. As scientists and industrialists uncovered increasing evidence against a literal interpretation of the Bible, more people began to doubt the nature of God and the existence of an afterlife. If there was no God, then there was no heaven, which raised questions about what happened to the soul after death. With the certainty of an afterlife gone, death became mysterious, something to fear, and the passing of loved ones was doubly-mourned as their fate was now uncertain.
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Tankard, Paul 1956. "In full possession of the present moment : Samuel Johnson, reading and the everyday." Monash University, English Dept, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8952.
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Frazier, Dustin M. "A Saxon state : Anglo-Saxonism and the English nation, 1703-1805." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4146.
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For the past century, medievalism studies generally and Anglo-Saxonism studies in particular have largely dismissed the eighteenth century as a dark period in English interest in the Anglo-Saxons. Recent scholarship has tended to elide Anglo-Saxon studies with Old English studies and consequently has overlooked contributions from fields such as archaeology, art history and political philosophy. This thesis provides the first re-examination of scholarly, antiquarian and popular Anglo-Saxonism in eighteenth-century England and argues that, far from disappearing, interest in Anglo-Saxon culture and history permeated British culture and made significant contributions to contemporary formulations and expressions of Englishness and English national, legal and cultural identities. Each chapter examines a different category of Anglo-Saxonist production or activity, as those categories would be distributed across current scholarship, in order to explore the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons were understood and deployed in the construction of contemporary cultural- historiographical narratives. The first three chapters contain, respectively, a review of the achievements of the ‘Oxford school' of Saxonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; antiquarian Anglo-Saxon studies by members of the Society of Antiquaries of London and their correspondents; and historiographical presentations of the Anglo-Saxons in local, county and national histories. Chapters four and five examine the appearance of the Anglo-Saxons in visual and dramatic art, and the role of Anglo-Saxonist legal and juridical language in eighteenth-century politics, with reference to discoveries resulting from the academic and antiquarian research outlined in chapters one to three. It is my contention that Anglo-Saxonism came to serve as a unifying ideology of origins for English citizens concerned with national history, and political and social institutions. As a popular as well as scholarly ideology, Anglo-Saxonism also came to define English national character and values, an English identity recognised and celebrated as such both at home and abroad.
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Poston, Craig A. (Craig Alan). "The Problematic British Romantic Hero(ine): the Giaour, Mathilda, and Evelina." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278684/.
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Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different and more sentimental hero. Byron seems to play off the reader's expectations of the "Byronic hero" with an ambiguous hero whose character reflects the Romantic aesthetic of indeterminacy. Through the accretive structure of The Giaour, Byron creates a hero of competing component characteristics, a focus he also gives to his heroines. Chapters 4 and 5 address works that are traditionally considered eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Mathilda and Evelina, both epistolary works, present their heroines as worldly innocents who are beset by aggressive males. Yet their subtext suggests that these girls aggressively maneuver the men in their lives. Mathilda and Evelina create a tension between the expected and the radical to energize the reader's imagination.
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Sutton, Peter David. "'The trade of application' : political and social appropriations of Ben Jonson, 1660-1776." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16547.
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This thesis is an analysis of the manner in which the persona and works of Ben Jonson were appropriated – between the Restoration, in 1660, and the retirement of David Garrick, in 1776 – to reflect the political and social concerns of the age. Unlike previous studies, rather than primarily focusing on the stage history of Jonson, I analyse a wide range of sources – produced both within and outwith the theatre – in order to explore, across a variety of media, a breadth of material which appropriates the playwright and his works. I shall consider in my first main chapter the appropriations of Jonson within the Restoration court, in particular noting the assimilation of the playwright's work to what might be styled a proto-Tory ideology, as well as the way in which his plays could mirror the destabilising effects of the king's romantic liaisons. In my second chapter, I explore the moral reformation at the turn of the eighteenth century, in which we can see appropriations of Jonson which cast his works as being primarily didactic. The third chapter moves the narrative of the thesis into the years of the premiership of Sir Robert Walpole. I shall consider the way in which the playwright's works – especially The Alchemist and Eastward Ho! – were seen as being especially relevant to an age of speculation and mercantile endeavour, as well as examining the manner in which the figures of Sejanus and Volpone were appropriated to mock the increasingly unpopular premier. In the final chapter, I shall offer an analysis of Garrick's seminal portrayal of Drugger in the contexts of the political philosophy of the mid-eighteenth century, considering the manner in which it was interpreted alongside the character's further appropriations by Francis Gentleman. The thesis concludes by exploring political appropriations of Jonson up to the present day.
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Viegas, Shéllida Fernanda da Collina 1978. "A extraordinária e irresoluta história da trajetória de Roxana e Moll Flanders." [s.n.], 2011. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270173.
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Orientador: Suzi Frankl SperberTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
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Resumo: Como é possível o mesmo autor, na mesma época, escrever dois romances com a mesma temática e dar-lhes tratamento tão distinto? Essa é a pergunta que intriga os leitores de Defoe ao ler duas das suas principais obras literárias, Moll Flanders (1722) e Roxana (1724), e é também a pergunta que norteou esta pesquisa. Para responder a isso, estudamos a história da leitura, o surgimento e a popularização do romance, a história dos direitos autorais e a influência do público leitor na produção de romances. Isso porque ambas as obras de Defoe tiveram várias edições ao longo do séc. XVIII que se diferenciavam das primeiras tiragens. Visando estabelecer algumas hipóteses para explicar os motivos que levaram os editores a alterar os finais das obras, foram analisadas, nesses romances, as figuras da prostituta, amante, esposa e mãe e a condição da mulher na Inglaterra pré-Revolução Industrial, sem perder de vista a questão da edição e da recepção
Abstract: To what extent is it possible that an author over the same decade had written two novels about the same central theme, but from and with different perspectives? The readers of Daniel Defoe are right to raise this issue after reading Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). This research sets about answering such questions. To this end, I used Defoe's novels to take a close look at the history of reading, the creation and popularity of the novel, copyright implications and the influence of the reader in the production of novels. After all, both novels underwent a series of different editions throughout the eighteenth century. To formulate a working hypothesis to outline the reasons that allowed such changes in editions, I analyzed the figures of the prostitute, lover, wife and mother and the condition of women in pre-Industrial Revolution England in both novels
Doutorado
Literatura Geral e Comparada
Doutor em Teoria e História Literária
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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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Volz, Jessica A. "Vision, fiction and depiction : the forms and functions of visuality in the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4438.
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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.
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Johnson, Nancy E. (Nancy Edna) 1956. "The "equivocal spirit" of law : property, agency and the contract in the English Jacobin novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=29054.
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In the 1790s, the English Jacobin novelists became vital participants in the fiery debates over natural and civil rights. Energized by the success of the American Revolution and inspired by the calls for l'egalite, la liberte, la surete, and la propriete in France, the Jacobin authors contributed their narratives to the British campaigns for reform of parliament and extension of the franchise. In this dissertation, I argue that the Jacobin novel furnishes crucial insights into the development of a theory of juridical rights in the late eighteenth century. Working in the early modern traditions of contract theory, writers such as Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin embraced the concept of inalienable natural rights. In their novels, they identified the critical role property played in determining the individual's relationship to the law, and they celebrated the emergence of a new kind of citizen distinguished by economic independence, inalienable rights and political agency. But they also offered an important critique of contractarian thought. The Jacobins' narratives revealed the exclusion of certain segments of the population from participation in government formed by contract. Their analyses of the origins of political authority and the constitution of the legal subject render the Jacobin novel a critical component of the history of juridical rights.
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Egan, Grace. "Corresponding forms : aspects of the eighteenth-century letter." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1b22283d-1b7b-46bc-8bbe-fdda16b20323.
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My thesis investigates the dialogic aspects and literary qualities ascribed to letters during the long eighteenth century. In part this involves documenting the correspondence between letters and other genres, such as the novel. Being in correspondence encouraged writers such as Burney and Johnson to express the relationship between sender and recipient in interesting ways. I posit that the letter offered a sophisticated means for writers, including those in Richardson's circle, to represent speech and thought, and mimic (with varying degrees of indirection), that of others. I consider the editorial habits and typographical conventions that governed letter-writing during the period, honing in on Richardson's contributions. I link his claim that letters were written 'to the Moment' with broader tropes of 'occasional' style, and show how this manifests in letters' intricate modulations of tense and person. Chapter 1 details the conventions that prevailed in letters of the period, and their interactions with irony and innovation. I compare convention in the epistolary novels of Smollett and Richardson, and look at closure in the Johnson-Thrale correspondence. Chapter 2 demonstrates that various methods of combining one's voice with others were utilized in letters (such as those of the Burney family), including some that took advantage of the epistolary form and its reputation as 'talking on paper'. Chapter 3 shows the role of mimesis in maintaining the dialogic structure of letters, and links it to contemporary theories of sympathy and sentiment. Chapters 4 and 5 apply the findings about epistolary tradition, polyphony and sentimentalism to the letters of Sterne and Burns. In them, there is a mixture of sentiment and irony, and of individual and 'correspondent' styles. The conclusion discusses the editing of letters, both in situ and in preparation for publication. The twin ideals of spontaneity and sincerity, I conclude, have influenced the way we choose to edit letters in scholarly publications.
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Henderson, Felicity 1973. "Erudite satire in seventeenth-century England." Monash University, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/7999.
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Chaudhuri, Rosinka. "Orientalist themes and English verse in nineteenth-century India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:737ba2e1-99f4-4abb-ac87-4e344be4d15c.
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This thesis demonstrates how a specific tradition of English poetry written by Indians in the nineteenth-century borrowed its subject matter from Orientalist research into Indian antiquity, and its style and forms from the English poetic tradition. After an examination of the political, historical and social motivations that resulted in the birth of colonial poetry in India, the poets dealt with comprise Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31), the first Indian poet writing in English ; Kasiprasad Ghosh (1809-73), the first Bengali Hindu to write English verse; and Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73), who converted to Christianity in the hope of reaching England and becoming a great 'English' poet. A subsequent chapter examines the Dutt Family Album (London, 1870) in the changing political context of the latter half of the century. In the Conclusion it is shown how the advent of Modernism in England, and the birth of an active nationalism in India, finally brought about the end of all aspects of what is here called 'Orientalist' verse. This area has not been dealt with comprehensively by critics; only one book, Lotika Basu's Indian Writers of English Verse (1933), exists on this subject to date. This thesis, besides filling the gaps that exist in the knowledge available in this area, also brings an additional insight to bear on the current debate on colonialism and literature. After Said's Orientalism (1978), a spate of theoretical work has been published on literary studies and colonial power in British India. Without restricting the argument to the constraints of the Saidian model, this study addresses the issues raised by these works, showing that a subtler reading is possible, through the medium of this poetry, of the interaction that took place in India between the production of literature and colonialism. In particular, this thesis demonstrates that although Orientalist poetry was in many ways derivative, it also evinces an active and developing response to the imposition of British culture upon India.
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Dufresne, Virginie. "De Versailles à Clarens : nature et politique dans les jardins littéraires de l'âge classique." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99589.
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During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French garden history witnesses the triumph and then the decline of the French formal garden, to which succeeds the fashion of landscape gardening of foreign inspiration. Integrating and nourishing this debate, the literary texts of that period enable to grasp the stakes that it brings up. The garden notably lends itself to the expression of an emerging sentiment of nature, as well it also serves that of a political thought enlightened by new ideas. Effectively, the treatment that these texts give to the garden is a witness to the revival that installs itself in the way of conceiving nature, and the relation that nature holds with man and the art of the gardens. The garden's topic and scenography are a testimony of changes that in turn affect its imaginary and that of the walk. Finally, the critical discourse exploits the analogy that establishes itself between the art of the gardens and the exercise of power, polarizing the debate around the political metaphor.
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Geissler, Christopher Michael. "'Die schwarze Ware' : transatlantic slavery and abolitionism in German writing, 1789-1871." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610465.
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Monette, Isabelle. "Récritures de récits criminels en France sous l'Ancien Régime." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79966.
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Three original stories are the basis for our study of rewriting during the French Ancien Regime: the story of Thibaud de la Jacquiere, that of the "sorcier Gaufridy" and that of the Marquise de Ganges, which Sade will rewrite as a novel. Having all originated from a "canard", they appear in the 1679 edition of the Histoires tragiques of Francois de Rosset, and two of them can also be found in Francois Gayot de Pitaval's Causes celebres. Each of these stories was rewritten by different authors at least three times. Using Gerard Genette's theory of the narrative, we will analyse the processes of transformation that the rewriting operates in the text, as well as the changes it imposes to its original meaning. The number of rewritings of each text---up to five for the Marquise de Gange---is a testament to the importance of textual reappropriation as much as it shows the relevance of a study which brings to light the role of rewriting in the survival of these stories.
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Cox, Octavia. "Pope's poetic legacy, 1744-1830." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:236ec8eb-4d21-43c6-b4eb-8c7b349447ef.
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Jerome McGann observes that 'Deceptive apparitions haunt romantic writing'. This thesis investigates one such haunting apparition; it analyses the ways in which selected eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets engage with the poetry of Alexander Pope. The received view of "Romantic" anti-Popeanism is expressed in comments such as that of William Hazlitt's 'I do not think there is any point of sympathy between Pope and the Lake School: on the contrary, I know there is an antipathy between them'. There is plenty of evidence to suggest some Romantic writers had an aversion to the previous literary age. In a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in March 1819, for example, Keats reviews a play by mocking that it 'was bad even in comparison with ... the Augustan age'. Pope had been the pre-eminent figure of Augustan poetry. Hence, the argument runs, Pope was rejected wholesale by Romantic poets. Such an understanding of literary history is, however, too dogmatic. Rather than accepting the view that the progression from Pope's era to the Romantic period involved a sudden pivot in taste, I explore how Popean poetic principles filtered into the development of his successors' literary aesthetics and ideas about poetry. The central questions I ask are how, and in what ways, Pope's successors used Pope's poetry to formulate their own poetic visions. I address these questions in four main chapters. In the first, I analyse Joseph Warton's An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. I show that Warton's Essay on Pope should not be taken as a denigration of Pope's poetic achievement, and suggest ways in which Pope's work permeates his, and his brother Thomas', poetry. In the second, I examine the response to Pope's Iliad, a text which prompted conflicting reactions among his successors. In particular, I appraise William Cowper's response to Pope's translation, not only as contained in his prose discussion of it, but also as revealed by his own translation. My third chapter considers ways in which Wordsworth plays with Pope's poetic legacy, and acknowledges Pope's contribution to the formulation of his own ideas of what constitutes good poetry. In the final chapter, I illustrate that even in the poetry of Keats - who, at times, vociferously rejects Pope as a mere handicraftsman - there is a sympathy in song between brother-poets. Literary criticism has often stressed the prominence of authors such as Lord Byron, Erasmus Darwin and George Crabbe in Pope's poetic reception and legacy. Yet Pope haunts other writers in subtler, but no less compelling, ways. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge observes, in Biographia Literaria, 'many ... formed ... their notions of poetry, from the writings of Mr. Pope'. What I try to give colour to here are some of the ways in which subsequent 'notions of poetry' were 'formed' from 'the writings of Mr. Pope'.
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Ganofsky, Marine. "Night in eighteenth-century French libertine fiction (1730-1789)." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610662.
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Scott, Linda Kane. "The Inheritance Novel: The Power of Strict Settlement Language in Clarissa, Evelina and Pride and Prejudice." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/ScottLK.pdf.
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Bending, Lucy. "The representation of bodily pain in late nineteenth-century English culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:751a567b-8260-4dfc-8e9e-904b7e1da20f.
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This dissertation presents a study of the ways in which concepts of pain were treated across a broad range of late Victorian writing, placing literary texts alongside sermons, medical textbooks and campaigning leaflets, in order to suggest a pattern of representation and evasion to be perceived throughout the different texts assembled. In the first two chapters I establish the cultural and historical background to physical suffering in the late nineteenth century, as the Christian paradigm for suffering (the subject of the first chapter) lost its pre-eminance to that of medicine (Chapter Two). The next two chapters are concerned with the problem of the expressibility of pain. In Chapter Three I argue that despite popular belief, voiced most clearly by Virginia Woolf, that 'there is no language for pain', sufferers find language that is both metaphorical and directly referential to express their bodily suffering. Chapter Four takes up the cultural restrictions placed on the expression of pain, using the acrimonious debate over vivisection that arose at the end of the century. Bringing together the prolific texts of both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists, I display the possibilities and limitations of particular literary forms, arguing, for example, that language appropriate to medical textbooks proved to be too shocking in books with a wider circulation. The final chapter is concerned with the ways in which pain was schematised in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I explore the basis of belief in pain as a shared, cross-cultural phenomenon and make the case, using the examples of invertebrate neurology, fire-walking and tattooing, that the understanding of pain is sharply affected by class, gender, race and supposed degree of criminality, despite the fact that pain is often invoked as a marker of shared human identity.
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Dixon, Marzena M. "The structure and rhetoric of twentieth-century British children's fantasy." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14858.
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This thesis discusses twentieth century children's fantasy fiction. The writers whose creative output is dealt with include Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Pat O'Shea, Peter Dickinson, T.H.White, Lloyd Alexander and, to a lesser extent, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien. These authors have been chosen because their books, whilst being of a broadly similar nature, nevertheless have a sufficient diversity to illustrate well many different important aspects of children's fantasy. Chapter I examines the sources of modern fantasy, presents the attitudes of different authors towards borrowing from traditional sources and their reasons for doing so, and looks at the changing interpretation of myths. Chapter II talks about the presentation of the primary and secondary worlds and the ways in which they interact. It also discusses the characters' attitudes towards magic. Chapter III looks at the presentation of magic, examines the traditional fairy-tale conventions and their implementation in modern fantasies, and discusses the concepts of evil, time, and the laws governing fantasy worlds. Chapter IV deals with the methods of narration and the figure of the narrator. It presents briefly the prevailing plot patterns, discusses the use of different kinds of language, and the ideas of pan-determinism and prophecy. The concluding chapter considers the main subjects and aims of children's fantasy, the reasons why the genre is so popular, and its successes and failures.
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Borschel, Audrey Leonard. "Development of English song within the musical establishment of Vauxhall Gardens, 1745-1784." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26033.
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This document provides a brief history of Vauxhall Gardens and an overview of its musical achievements under the proprietorship of Jonathan Tyers and his sons during the 1745-1784 period when Thomas Arne (1710-1778) and James Hook (1746-1827) served as music directors. Vauxhall Gardens provided an extraordinary environment for the development and nurturing of solo songs in the eighteenth century. Here the native British composers' talents were encouraged and displayed to capacity audiences of patrons who often came from privileged ranks of society. The largely anonymous poems of the songs were based on classical, pastoral, patriotic, Caledonian, drinking or hunting themes. The songs ranged from simple, folk-like ballads in binary structures to phenomenally virtuosic pieces which often included several sections.
During the early years of vocal performances at Vauxhall (c. 1745-1760), the emphasis was on delivery of texts, sung to easily remembered melodies with little ornamentation and few florid passages. However, the coloratura style of Italian opera was assimilated and anglicized by Thomas Arne, his contemporaries, and later by James Hook.
In the 1770's and 1780's, composers continued to refine all the forms and styles that had been popular since the 1740's; this developmental
process was mainly technical. Vauxhall songs were composed with orchestral accompaniment and incorporated the techniques of the
Mannheim school. All the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and orchestral devices of the era were available to the British composers, and they borrowed freely from each other and from the continental masters. While certain forms evolved more clearly in the 1770's and 1780's, such as the rondo, major changes were not observed in the poetry.
Vocal music at Vauxhall Gardens occupies a position in history as a steppingstone toward mass culture. Vauxhall ballads were printed in annual collections and single sheets by a vigorous publishing industry. When the Industrial Revolution caused the middle class to splinter into further groupings toward the end of the eighteenth century, the new lower middle class shunned the artistic pleasures of the upper classes and developed its own entertainments, which resulted in a permanent separation of popular and classical musical cultures, as well as the decline of Vauxhall GardensArts, Faculty of
Music, School of
Accompanied by cassette in Special Collections
Graduate
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Leskinen, Saara. "Reliable knowledge of exotic marvels of nature in sixteenth-century French and English texts." Thesis, Warburg Institute, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.564418.
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Polak, Victoria. "Religious and moral concepts in the eighteenth-century German novel of sensibility : from Christian Fürchtegott Gellert's 'Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G+' to the end of the 1770s." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/13391.
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In my introduction I analyse the state of research in my subject. No detailed study of the subject has been conducted in recent years, hence there exists no work which takes account of recent conclusions in the examination of Sensibility in its entirety. I, therefore, consider it important to trace the origins of a movement in European culture. I draw attention to possible influences from philosophy and psychology which have tended to be neglected in favour of too exclusive emphasis on Empfindsamkeit as secularised Pietism. The main part of my thesis is devoted to detailed interpretation of five novels covering a period 1747 to 1776. This study yields various conclusions. In the novel as a genre, as in theoretical works on Empfindsamkeit, there is no polarity between the Enlightenment and Sensibility. Each of the novelists analysed is concerned to proclaim the necessity of achieving a balance between reason and emotion. In the novels of Gellert and La Roche this is explicitly stated in the form of moral instruction to the reader, while the fate of the heroes of Goethe and Miller perhaps suggests indirectly that such an equilibrium might be desirable. In particular the earlier authors I study equate moderation in feeling with virtue. Here these novelists advocate only feeling in the cause of virtue, while at the same time arguing that those who are capable of "true feeling" are by definition virtuous. In the sphere of religion, all novelists show a tendency to regard Christianity as a matter of emotion on the one hand and of practical ethics on the other. While there was a shift in emphasis from Tugendempfindsamkeit to the cultivation of feeling for its own sake, perceptions of the nature of religions and virtue remained constant.
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Mills, Rebecca May. "'Thanks for that elegant defense' : polemical prose and poetry by women in the early eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d98a502d-97b4-4dd2-b5e6-1f8c432b5cb7.
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The end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth saw many women writers from numerous social ranks, political affiliations and religious denominations reading, writing, circulating and publishing polemical prose and poetry in defence of their sex. During this surge of protofeminist activity, many of these women decried 'Customs Tyranny' by advocating a more egalitarian status for themselves, especially in regard to marriage, education and religion. This thesis, then, is a socio-historic study of the lives and writings of several polemical women writers, namely, Mary Astell (1666-1731), Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) and Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731). It also considers how and why protofeminism evolved in the late seventeenth century and reached a climax between 1694, when Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and 1710, when Chudleigh published Essays upon Several Subjects. Until now, scholars of early women writers have labelled Astell the foremost English feminist of her day. Consequently, many of her contemporary protofeminist writers have been neglected. By contextualizing their lives and texts within the political and literary activity at the turn of the eighteenth century, this thesis ultimately argues that women polemicists, such as Chudleigh and Thomas, who followed Astell into print, were not merely echoes and disciples. Rather, they furthered the evolution and secularization of a genre that anticipates feminism proper, which began to develop in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to uncover and rediscover the personal and professional details of these women's lives their class, education, friendships and patronage relationships this thesis relied heavily upon material evidence such as letters, parish records, legal records, prison records and wills. As a result, it combines feminist, materialist inclinations with traditional methodology, such as historical and archival research.
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Emig, Rainer. "The end of modernism in English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c02149d4-6f3b-4368-b20e-d8e669514ccf.
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'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.
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Nielson, James. "Elizabethan realisms : reading prose from the end of the century." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74597.
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This thesis basically has a twofold aim: on the one hand, to make a somewhat neglected body of Renaissance prose more readable, by adding, in a punctual and miscellaneous manner, to our historical, philological and thematic understanding of it and by examining it in the light of some of our current theoretical preoccupations; and, on the other hand, to problematize the "realistic" rubric assigned to these works and to do so by cultivating a more thoroughgoing textual realism on the part of readers.These works, traditionally grouped together because of the interaction of their authors at the end of the 16th century, include Robert Greene's "cony-catching" and "confessional" pamphlets, the texts of the controversy between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, and Harvey's manuscript drafts, as well as more familiar works such as Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller.
The theoretical issue of "the real" as a textual effect has been divided up according to the three nominal categories of persons, places and things, but the thesis falls methodologically into two halves. The opening chapters aim at reintroducing the figures of Greene, Nashe and Harvey, and exploring the quasi-genres of confession, invective and rough draft as exemplary models of the textual construction of a realistic person. They also attempt an alternative form of reading which is an amalgam of cento, summary, close reading, theoretical aside, and running commentary. In the second half, microreadings of the Marprelate Tracts, the cony-catching pamphlets, and texts by Nashe are used to shed light on theoretical issues of textual "place" such as the rhetorical construction of "presence" and metaphorical "movement." Once the relationship between premodern and postmodern textuality has been sketched, the final chapter offers a critique of the unreflexive academic practice of doing "readings," and argues for a new literalism and the self-subversion of the figurative in an "extrarhetorical" reading of Nashe's Lenten Stuffe.
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Staton, Maria S. "Christianity in American Indian plays, 1760s-1850s." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1364944.
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The main purpose of this study is to prove that the view on the American Indians, as it is presented in the plays, is determined by two dissimilar sets of values: those related to Christianity and those associated with democracy. The Christian ideals of mercy and benevolence are counterbalanced by the democratic values of freedom and patriotism in such a way that secular ideals in many cases supersede the religious ones. To achieve the purpose of the dissertation, I sifted the plays for a list of notions related to Christianity and, using textual evidence, demonstrated that these notions were not confined to particular pieces but systematically appeared in a significant number of plays. This method allowed me to make a claim that the motif of Christianity was one of the leading ones, yet it was systematically set against another major recurrent subject—the values of democracy. I also established the types of clerical characters in the plays and discovered their common characteristic—the ultimate bankruptcy of their ideals. This finding supported the main conclusion of this study: in the plays under discussion, Christianity was presented as no longer the only valid system of beliefs and was strongly contested by the outlook of democracy.I discovered that the motif of Christianity in the American Indian plays reveals itself in three ways: in the superiority of Christian civilization over Indian lifestyle, in the characterization of Indians within the framework of Christian morality, and in the importance of Christian clergy in the plays. None of these three topics, however, gets an unequivocal interpretation. First, the notion of Christian corruption is distinctly manifest. Second, the Indian heroes and heroines demonstrate important civic virtues: desire for freedom and willingness to sacrifice themselves for their land. Third, since the representation of the clerics varies from saintliness to villainy, the only thing they have in common is the impracticability and incredulity of the ideas they preach. More fundamental truths, it is suggested, should be sought outside of Christianity, and the newly found values should be not so much of a "Christian" as of "democratic" quality.Department of English
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De, Bruin-Molé Megen. "Frankenfiction : monstrous adaptations and Gothic histories in twenty-first-century remix culture." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2017. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/106947/.
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In the twenty-first century, the remix, the mashup, and the reboot have come to dominate Western popular culture. Consumed by popular audiences on an unprecedented scale, but often derided by critics and academics, these texts are the ‘monsters’ of our age—hybrid creations that lurk at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Like monsters, they offer audiences the thrill of transgression in a safe and familiar format, mainstreaming the self-reflexive irony and cultural iconoclasm of postmodern art. Like other popular texts before them, remixes, mashups, and reboots are often read by critics as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. This is especially true within the institutions such remixes seem to attack most directly: the heritage industry, high art, adaptation studies, and copyright law. With this context in mind, in this thesis I explore the boundaries and connections between remix culture and its ‘others’ (adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, postmodernism), asking how strong or tenuous they are in practice. I do so by examining remix culture’s most ‘monstrous’ texts: Frankenfictions, or commercial narratives that insert fantastical monsters (zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc.) into classic literature and popular historical contexts. Frankenfiction is monstrous not only because of the fantastical monsters it contains, but because of its place at the margins of both remix and more established modes of appropriation. Too engaged with tradition for some, and not traditional enough for others, Frankenfiction is a bestselling genre that nevertheless remains peripheral to academic discussion. This thesis aims to address that gap in scholarship, analysing Frankenfiction’s engagement with monstrosity (chapter one), parody (chapter two), popular historiography (chapter three), and models of authorial originality (chapter four). Throughout this analysis, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains a touchstone, serving as an ideal metaphor for the nature of contemporary remix culture.
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Sun, Christine Yunn-Yu. "The construction of "Chinese" cultural identity : English-language writing by Australian and other authors with Chinese ancestry." Monash University, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, 2004. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/5438.
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Jackson, Simon John. "The literary and musical activities of the Herbert family." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283892.
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Ranum, Benedikte Torkelsdatter. "Typecast Victorians : uses of biblical typology in late nineteenth-century literature." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2007.
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This thesis examines the literary uses of biblical typology in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It aims to show how late Victorian writers, having opted out of the orthodox Christian beliefs of the age, were still writing from within a cultural discourse shaped by, and based upon, such faith. Covering works as diverse as Sartor Resartus, De Profundis, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, and discussing writers who range from Mary Augusta Ward via Hardy to Strindberg and Dostoevsky, my contention is that these writers not only used the structure, terminology, and imagery of biblical typology to express their religious doubts, but that they 'reclaimed' what was strictly seen as a mode of exegesis and transformed it into a richly suggestive signifying system. Through this reconstructed mode of expression, they could offer to their readers ideas of a new 'religion' or, at least, a possible way out of the despair caused by the ultimate failure of Christian faith. The thesis is presented in three parts, the first of which briefly details the various available definitions of biblical typology itself. Following this, each sub-section of Part One traces a different aspect of late Victorian typology usage. Parts Two and Three deal with what I claim to be the two major strains of the late nineteenth century's secular use of typology - those concerned, respectively, with the 'imitation of' or 'association with' biblical types in their relation to literary characters. The changes made to the traditional biblical typology by late Victorian writers, as examined in this thesis, brought the biblical anti-type closer to the Jungian archetype, just as it brought the Nineteenth Century closer to our twentieth-century view of our religious and textual inheritance.
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Stacey, Robert David. "The transformed pastoral in recent English-Canadian literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23359.
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This thesis examines the use of the pastoral form in recent Canadian literature. As the pastoral constitutes a literary site where a concern for landscape converges with a search for community, it has been employed as a myth in nationalist discourses whose functioning depend heavily on symbolized landscapes and idealized social types. The philosophical basis of the pastoral is the classical opposition between nature and culture. For this reason, its representations are often coded as 'natural'. To this extent, the pastoral participates in a hegemonic myth-making system, constituting a limited semiotic field in which certain representations are privileged while others are negated. Following Marx and Barthes, the thesis contends that an attack the nature/culture opposition is essential to undermining the hegemony of the myth-making process. In the context of nationalism, a pastoral can articulate a critique of dominant a 'naturalized' representations when it questions its own use of the nature/culture opposition.
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Hill, Colin. "The modern-realist movement in English-Canadian fiction, 1919-1950." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19471.
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This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.
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Jones, Suzanne Barbara. "French imports : English translations of Molière, 1663-1732." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8d86ee12-54ab-48b3-9c47-e946e1c7851f.
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This thesis explores the first English translations of Molière's works published between 1663 and 1732 by writers that include John Dryden, Edward Ravenscroft, Aphra Behn, and Henry Fielding. It challenges the idea that the translators straightforwardly plagiarized the French plays and instead argues that their work demonstrates engagement with the dramatic impact and satirical drive of the source texts. It asks how far the process of anglicization required careful examination of the plays' initial French national context. The first part of the thesis presents three fundamental angles of interrogation addressing how the translators dealt with the form of the dramatic works according to theoretical and practical principles. It considers translators' responses to conventions of plot formation, translation methods, and prosody. The chapters are underpinned by comparative assessments of contextual theoretical writings in French and English in order to examine the plays in the light of the evolving theatrical tastes and literary practices occasioned by cross-Channel communication. The second part takes an alternative approach to assessing the earliest translations of Molière. Its four chapters are based on close analysis of culturally significant lexical terms which evoke comically contentious social themes. This enquiry charts the changes in translation-choices over the decades covered by the thesis corpus. The themes addressed, however, were relevant throughout the period in both France and England: marital discord caused by anxieties surrounding cuckoldry and gallantry, the problems of zealous religious ostentation, the dubious professional standing of medical practitioners, and bourgeois social pretension. This part assesses how the key terms in translation were chosen to resonate within the new semantic fields in English, a target language which was coming into close contact with new French terms.
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Nyambi, Oliver. "Nation in crisis : alternative literary representations of Zimbabwe Post-2000." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85652.
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Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The last decade in Zimbabwe was characterised by an unprecedented economic and political crisis. As the crisis threatened to destabilise the political status quo, it prompted in governmental circles the perceived 'need‘ for political containment. The ensuing attempts to regulate the expressive sphere, censor alternative historiographies of the crisis and promote monolithic and self-serving perceptions of the crisis presented a real danger of the distortion of information about the situation. Representing the crisis therefore occupies a contested and discursive space in debates about the Zimbabwean crisis. It is important to explore the nature of cultural interventions in the urgent process of re-inscribing the crisis and extending what is known about Zimbabwe‘s so-called 'lost decade‘. The study analyses literary responses to state-imposed restrictions on information about the state of Zimbabwean society during the post-2000 economic and political crisis which reached the public sphere, with particular reference to creative literature by Zimbabwean authors published during the period 2000 to 2010. The primary concern of this thesis is to examine the efficacy of post-2000 Zimbabwean literature as constituting a significant archive of the present and also as sites for the articulation of dissenting views – alternative perspectives assessing, questioning and challenging the state‘s grand narrative of the crisis. Like most African literatures, Zimbabwean literature relates (directly and indirectly) to definite historical forces and processes underpinning the social, cultural and political production of space. The study mainly invokes Maria Pia Lara‘s theory about the ―moral texture‖ and disclosive nature of narratives by marginalised groups in order to explore the various ways through which such narratives revise hegemonically distorted representations of themselves and construct more inclusive discourses about the crisis. A key finding in this study is that through particular modes of representation, most of the literary works put a spotlight on some of the major talking points in the political and socio-economic debate about the post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis, while at the same time extending the contours of the debate beyond what is agreeable to the powerful. This potential in literary works to deconstruct and transform dominant elitist narratives of the crisis and offering instead, alternative and more representative narratives of the excluded groups‘ experiences, is made possible by their affective appeal. This affective dimension stems from the intimate and experiential nature of the narratives of these affected groups. However, another important finding in this study has been the advent of a distinct canon of hegemonic texts which covertly (and sometimes overtly) legitimate the state narrative of the crisis. The thesis ends with a suggestion that future scholarly enquiries look set to focus more closely on the contribution of creative literature to discourses on democratisation in contemporary Zimbabwe.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die afgelope dekade in Zimbabwe is gekenmerk deur ‗n ongekende ekonomiese en politiese krisis. Terwyl die krisis gedreig het om die politieke status quo omver te werp, het dit die ‗noodsaak‘ van politieke insluiting aangedui. Die daaropvolgende pogings om die ruimte vir openbaarmaking te reguleer, alternatiewe optekenings van gebeure te sensureer en ook om monolitiese, self-bevredigende waarnemings van die krisis te bevorder, het 'n wesenlike gevaar van distorsie van inligting i.v.m. die krisis meegebring. Voorstellings van die krisis vind sigself dus in 'n gekontesteerde en diskursiewe ruimte in debatte aangaande die Zimbabwiese krisis. Dit is gevolglik belangrik om die aard van kulturele intervensies in die dringende proses om die krisis te hervertolk te ondersoek asook om kennis van Zimbabwe se sogenaamde 'verlore dekade‘ uit te brei. Die studie analiseer literêre reaksies op staats-geïniseerde inkortings van inligting aangaande die sosiale toestand in Zimbabwe gedurende die post-2000 ekonomiese en politiese krisis wat sulke informasie uit die openbare sfeer weerhou het, met spesifieke verwysing na skeppende literatuur deur Zimbabwiese skrywers wat tussen 2000 en 2010 gepubliseer is. Die belangrikste doelwit van hierdie tesis is om die doeltreffendheid van post-2000 Zimbabwiese letterkunde as konstituering van 'n alternatiewe Zimbabwiese 'argief van die huidige‘ en ook as ruimte vir die artikulering van teenstemme – alternatiewe perspektiewe wat die staat se 'groot narratief‘ aangaande die krisis bevraagteken – te ondersoek. Soos met die meeste ander Afrika-letterkundes is daar in hierdie literatuur 'n verband (direk en/of indirek) met herkenbare historiese kragte en prosesse wat die sosiale, kulturele en politiese ruimtes tot stand bring. Die studie maak in die ondersoek veral gebruik van Maria Pia Lara se teorie aangaande die 'morele tekstuur‘ en openbaringsvermoë van narratiewe aangaande gemarginaliseerde groepe ten einde die verskillende maniere waarop sulke narratiewe hegemoniese distorsies in 'offisiële‘ voorstellings van hulself 'oorskryf‘ om meer inklusiewe diskoerse van die krisis daar te stel, na te vors. 'n Kernbevinding van die studie is dat, d.m.v. van spesifieke tipe voorstellings, die meeste van die letterkundige werke wat hier ondersoek word, 'n soeklig plaas op verskeie van die belangrikste kwessies in die politieke en sosio-ekonomiese debatte oor die Zimbabwiese krisis, terwyl dit terselfdertyd die kontoere van die debat uitbrei verby die grense van wat vir die maghebbers gemaklik is. Die potensieel van letterkundige werke om oorheersende, elitistiese narratiewe oor die krisis te dekonstrueer en te omvorm, word moontlik gemaak deur hul affektiewe potensiaal. Hierdie affektiewe dimensie word ontketen deur die intieme en ervaringsgewortelde geaardheid van die narratiewe van die geaffekteerde groepe. Nietemin is 'n ander belangrike bevinding van hierdie studie dat daar 'n onderskeibare kanon van hegemoniese tekste bestaan wat op verskuilde (en soms ook openlike) maniere die staatsnarratief anngaande die krisis legitimeer. Die tesis sluit af met die voorstel dat toekomstige vakkundige studies meer spesifiek sou kon fokus op die bydrae van kreatiewe skryfwerk tot die demokratisering van kontemporêre Zimbabwe.
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Ellis, Jeanne. "Past (pre)occupations, present (dis)locations : the nineteenth century restoried in texts from/about South Africa, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/96012.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on the 'restorying‘ of British settler colonialism in a range of texts that negotiate the intricacies of post-settler afterlives in the postcolonial contexts of South Africa, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In this, I do not undertake a sustained, programmatic comparative reading in order to deliver a set of answers based on insights achieved into the current state of post-settler colonial identities. Rather, I approach the study as an open-ended exploration by reading a combination of texts of various kinds – novels, poetry, drama, films and installation art – from and about these different geographical and historical contexts, structured as a sequence of four chapters, each with a distinct theoretical ensemble specific to the (pre)occupations of the settler colonial past and the linked senses of (dis)location in the present that emerge from the primary texts combined in each case. Since this project is informed by my location as a South African researcher, the cluster of primary texts in every chapter always includes one or more South African texts as pivotal to the juxtapositional dynamics such a reading attempts. By placing this study of the textual afterlives of settler colonialism undertaken from a South African perspective within the ambit of neo-Victorian studies, it is my intention to contribute to the growing body of critical and theoretical work emerging from this interdisciplinary field and to introduce to it a set of primary texts that will extend the parameters of its productive intersections with colonial and postcolonial studies.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis bestudeer die 'restorying' van Britse setlaar-kolonialisme in ‘n groep tekste wat die verwikkeldheid van post-setlaar 'afterlives' in the post-koloniale kontekste van Suid Afrika, Kanada, Australië en Aotearoa Nieu-Seeland vervat. Hiermee onderneem ek nie ‘n volgehoue, programmatiese vergelykende interpretasie met die oog daarop om die huidige stand van post-setlaar koloniale identiteite tot ‘n stel antwoorde te reduseer nie. Ek benader die studie eerder as ‘n verkenning van moontlikhede gegenereer deur die lees van ‘n kombinasie van verskillende tekste – romans, gedigte, drama, films en installasie kuns – wat hulle oorsprong in hierdie verkillende geografiese en historiese kontekste het, asook daaroor handel. Gevolglik bestaan die studie uit vier hoofstukke wat elkeen die (pre)okkupasies van die setlaar-koloniale verlede en die gepaardgaande gevoel van (dis)lokasie in die hede, soos tevoorskyn gebring deur die kombinasie van primere tekste, aan die hand van ‘n toepaslike teoretiese ensemble bespreek. Aangesien die projek uit my posisie as Suid Afrikaanse navorser spruit, en ‘n jukstaposisionele dinamiek grondliggend aan my leesbenadering is, betrek ek telkens een of meer Suid Afrikaanse tekste by die groep primere tekste wat die basis van elke hoofstuk vorm. Deur hierdie studie van die tekstuele 'afterlives' van setlaar-kolonialisme, wat vanuit ‘n Suid Afrikaanse perspektief onderneem word, binne die raamwerk van neo-Viktoriaanse studies te plaas, beoog ek om by te dra tot die korpus van kritiese en teoretiese werk van hierdie interdisiplinere veld. Deur die toevoeging van die betrokke groep primere tekste word die area waar hierdie veld met koloniale en post-koloniale studies oorvleuel verbreed.