Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English poetry Early modern'
To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: English poetry Early modern.
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'English poetry Early modern.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Cairns, Daniel. "As it likes you early modern desire and vestigial impersonal constructions /." Waltham, Mass. : Brandeis University, 2009. http://dcoll.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23236.
Full text
2
Smith, Katherine Jo. "Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry in early modern England." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/95225/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the genre of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry and its tradition in early modern English literature. In looking at original poems, translations and receptions of Ovid’s Heroides, I argue that female as well as male writers throughout the early modern period engaged with the tradition of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry. By using case studies advancing chronologically throughout the period, I will also show how female-voiced complaint changes and develops in different historical and literary contexts. Nobody as yet has produced a study looking at a large sample of women writing female-voiced complaint. The criticism around complaint is diffuse, with only a small number of book-length studies which focus on complaint in general as a genre or discourse. There are many articles or chapters on individual complaint poems but not many which compare different female-voiced complaints of the same period, especially those written by women. When female poets write in the genre, the rhetorical trope of Ovidian female-voiced complaint (that the sex of the author is discontinuous with that of the speaker) must be renegotiated. This renegotiation by female poets is often the result of close and learned engagement with the traditions of complaint, both the classical precedents and the receptions and re-imaginations of the genre in early modern England. They are choosing a genre which has a productive potential in being female-voiced but which also has a tradition of male manipulation. However, rather than seeing women writers as existing separately from male writers, I argue that they work in parallel, drawing on the same Ovidian complaint traditions.
3
Clarke, Joseph Kelly. "The Praeceptor Amoris in English Renaissance Lyric Poetry: One Aspect of the Poet's Voice." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1985. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331007/.
Full textAbstract:
This study focuses on the praeceptor amoris, or teacher of love, as that persona appears in English poetry between 1500 and 1660. Some attention is given to the background, especially Ovid and his Art of Love. A study of the medieval praeceptor indicates that ideas of love took three main courses: a bawdy strain most evident in Goliardic verse and later in the libertine poetry of Donne and the Cavaliers; a short-lived strain of mutual affection important in England principally with Spenser; and the love known as courtly love, which is traced to England through Dante and Petrarch and which is the subject of most English love poetry. In England, the praeceptor is examined according to three functions he performs: defining love, propounding a philosophy about it, and giving advice. Through examining the praeceptor, poets are seen to define love according to the division between body and soul, with the tendency to return to older definitions in force since the troubadours. The poets as a group never agree what love is. Philosophies given by the praeceptor follow the same division and are physically or spiritually oriented. The rise and fall of Platonism in English poetry is examined through the praeceptor amoris who teaches it, as is the rise of libertinism. Shakespeare and Donne are seen to have attempted a reconciliation of the physical and spiritual. Advice, the major function of the praeceptor, is widely variegated. It includes moral suasion, advice on how to court, how to start an affair, how to maintain one, how to end one, and how to cure oneself of love. Advice also includes warnings. The study concludes that English poets stayed with older ideas of love but added new dimensions to the praeceptor amoris, such as adding definition and philosophical discussion to what Ovid had done. They also added to the use of persona as speaker, particularly with Donne's dramatic monologues.
4
McCarthy, Erin Ann. "“Get me the Lyricke Poets”: Poetry and Print in Early Modern England." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1338379173.
Full text
5
Dawkins, Thom. "Rejoice in Tribulations: The Afflictive Poetics of Early Modern Religious Poetry." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1562630899327406.
Full text
6
Gaw, Cynthia. "Freedom in George Herbert's 'The Temple'." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683068.
Full text
7
Wong, Alexander Tsiong. "Aspects of the kiss-poem 1450-1700 : the neo-Latin basium genre and its influence on early modern British verse." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708782.
Full text
8
Cowhey, Maureen R. ""Sweet Beginning but Unsavoury End": The Change in Popularity of Shakespeare's Poetry." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1297.
Full textAbstract:
William Shakespeare is arguably the most famous and influential author in modern history. His plays make up a literary canon that has been translated into every language, is constantly being reproduced on the stage and on film and has persisted in popularity for centuries. Yet, Shakespeare’s first and most popular text is not a play, but the narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. The text that launched Shakespeare into popularity and gave rise to this cultural icon was a poem, rather than a play. But despite its initial success, Venus and Adonis is not a central feature of the modern literary canon and Shakespeare’s original role as a poet has been overshadowed by his achievements in theatre. This paper sets out to explore what happened to Shakespeare’s legacy in poetry by examining the commercial history and aesthetic form of two of Shakespeare’s poems: Venus and Adonis and the sonnets. I will address how the dramatic literary canon was created and why it revolves around Shakespeare as solely a playwright.
9
Naylor, Amanda. "'Rich and strange' : encountering early modern poetry in the subject of English : a study of the reading and reception of Renaissance poetry by teachers and students in England." Thesis, University of York, 2014. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/7604/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis presents a study of the perceptions of students, teachers, lecturers and examiners of the reading and reception of early modern poetry in the subject of English, in England. The opening chapters provide a context for the current reading and reception of early modern poetry by examining three key historical periods in the development of attitudes towards early modern poetry within the subject of English. The historical periods examined are; the English Renaissance, the end of the nineteenth century and current educational contexts. The attitudes of key theorists such as Sidney (1595/2004) and Brooks (1947/1968) are explored, along with writings on the pedagogy of poetry and early modern poetry. The research strategy for this study is presented in the following two chapters. Sixteen in-depth interviews were collected from four groups of participants; students, teachers, lecturers and examiners. The group of sixteen participants was chosen as a group of experts, in that they were familiar with the poetry in an educational context and felt confident in discussing their perceptions of early modern poetry. Analysis of the data follows from discussions of the methodology and leads to findings about the various strands of the participants’ perceptions of early modern poetry. The elements of perception that are explored are; the ways in which participants interpreted early modern poetry, what participants perceived as significant in the poetry and what was identified by them as the particular qualities or characteristics they viewed as specific to early modern poetry. Discussion of the participants’ perceptions makes links with theoretical debates regarding perceptions of early modern poetry within the subject of English. In conclusion, recommendations for professional practice are made and an argument presented for raising the status of early modern poetry, particularly in the secondary sector and within teacher training, in the subject of English.
10
St, Clair-Kendall S. G. (Stella Gwendolen). "Narrative Form and Mediaeval Continuity In The Percy Folio Manuscript: A Study Of Selected Poems." University of Sydney, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/6143.
Full textAbstract:
Doctor of Philosophy(PhD)Revised September, 2007
This study examines the continuity of mediaeval literary tradition in selected rhymed narrative verse. These verses were composed for entertainment at various times prior to 1648. At or shortly before this date, they were collected into The Percy Folio: BL. Add. MS. 27,879. Selected texts with an Historical or Romance topic are examined from two points of view: modification of source material and modification of traditional narrative stylistic structure. First, an early historical poem is analysed to establish a possible paradigm of the conventions governing the mediaeval manipulation of fact or source material into a pleasing narrative. Other texts are compared with the result of this analysis and it is found that twenty paradigmatic items appear to summarize early convention as their presence in other poems is consistent — no text agreeing with less than twelve. The second step is the presentation of the results of an analysis of some fifty mediaeval Romances. This was undertaken in order to delineate clearly selected motifemic formulae inherent in the composition of these popular narratives. It is shown that these motifemes, found in the Romances, are also present in the historical texts of The Percy Folio. The findings, derived from both strands of investigation, are that mediaeval continuity exists in the texts studied. The factors which actually comprise this ‘mediaeval continuity’ are isolated: it is then seen that rather than discard tradition as society grew further and further from the early circumstances that gave rise to it, later poets have chosen to contrive modifications designed to fit new requirements as they arise. Such modifications, however, are always within the established conventional framework. In short, no text examined failed to echo tradition, and mediaeval continuity is an important feature of the popular rhymed narrative in 1648 and The Percy Folio.
11
Hacksley, Timothy Christopher. "A critical edition of the poems of Henry Vaux (c. 1559-1587) in MS. Folger Bd with STC 22957." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://eprints.ru.ac.za/1704/.
Full text
12
Benedict, Mark Russell. "The Ministry of Passion and Meditation: Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares and the Adaptation of Continental Influences." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2010. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/79.
Full textAbstract:
In his most popular prose work, Mary Magdalens Funeral Teares (1591), English Jesuit Robert Southwell adapts the Mary Magdalene tradition by incorporating the meditative practices of St. Ignatius Loyola coupled with the Petrarchan language of poetry. Thus, he creates a prose work that ministered to Catholic souls, appealed to Protestant audiences, and initiated the literature of tears in England. Southwell readapts the traditional image of Mary Magdalene for a Catholic Early Modern audience by utilizing the techniques of Jesuit meditation, which later flourished in the weeper texts of Richard Crashaw and George Herbert. His vividly imagined scenes also employ the Petrarchan and Ovidian language of longing and absence and coincide with both traditional and mystic early church writers such as Bernard and Augustine. Through this combination, Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares resonated with Catholics deprived of both ministry and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. These contributions solidify Southwell’s place as a pivotal figure in the religious and literary contexts of Early Modern England.
13
Gardner, Corinna. "The just figure shape, harmony and proportion in a selection of Andrew Marvell's lyrics." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002273.
Full textAbstract:
The phrase "the just Figure" - a quotation from Upon Appleton House - is the central theme of this thesis as it aptly describes Marvell's repeated use of shape, harmony and proportion to suggest morality and virtue. The poet's concern with geometrical imagery is conveyed by the word "figure", which also is another term for a metaphor or conceit. The word "just" suggests not only moral appropriateness, but also mathematical exactness or fit. The thesis consists of five chapters, each dealing with an aspect of the imagery of shape and form which pervades so many of Marvell's lyrics. The first chapter, "Moral Geometry", deals with the way in which Marvell uses the imagery of lines, angles and curves. In some poems the lines are curved, as in Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borrow, where the graceful downward curved line of the hill conveys Fairfacian humility. Symmetry and circularity are discussed in the second chapter. The poet uses the perfect shape of the circle to depict objects which convey a moral significance. Similarly, several of the lyrics are themselves quasi-circular with their closing lines echoing their openings. Chapter Three deals with liquid spheres. Marvell explores the nature, shape and texture of tears in poems such as Eyes and Tears and Mourning; and in On a Drop of Dew uses the shape of the dew drop to suggest the perfection of the heavenly realm from which it has been parted. In several of the lyrics, Marvell places a frame around his poems to create an enclosed world in which his poetic creations exist. These enclosed, or framed, worlds are discussed in Chapter Four. The final chapter, "Beyond The Frame", describes how some of the lyrics suggest a move from the world within to the world beyond the frame of the poem.This can either be a movement from confinement to release, or from the seen world to worlds unseen. Shape, harmony and proportion are the qualities which Marvell uses to convey morality and humility and a vision of the world based on what is, in the various senses of the word, "just".
14
Pölzer-Nawroth, Jule [Verfasser], and Peter Paul [Akademischer Betreuer] Schnierer. "Creating Identity and Uniting a Nation - The Development of the Water Motif from Ancient Greek Bucolic to Early Modern English Pastoral Poetry / Jule Pölzer-Nawroth ; Betreuer: Peter Paul Schnierer." Heidelberg : Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, 2020. http://d-nb.info/1205071989/34.
Full text
15
Auger, Peter. "British responses to Du Bartas' Semaines, 1584-1641." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:be0f89c2-c2e4-482d-ac8f-e867985ff72e.
Full textAbstract:
The reception of the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas' Semaines (1578, 1584 et seq.) is an important episode in early modern literary history for understanding relations between Scottish, English and French literature, interactions between contemporary reading and writing practices, and developments in divine poetry. This thesis surveys translations (Part I), allusions and quotations in prose (Part II) and verse imitations (Part III) from the period when English translations of the Semaines were being printed in order to identify historical trends in how readers absorbed and adapted the poems. Early translations show that the Semaines quickly acquired political and diplomatic affiliations, particularly at the Jacobean Scottish Court, which persisted in subsequent decades (Chapter 1). William Scott's treatise The Model of Poesy (c. 1599) and translations indicate how attractive the Semaines' combination of humanist learning and sacred rhetoric was, but the poems' potential appeal was only realized once Josuah Sylvester's Devine Weeks (1605 et seq.) finally made the complete work available in English (Chapter 2). Different communities of readers developed in early modern England and Scotland once this edition became available (Chapter 3), and we can observe how individuals marked, copied out, quoted and appropriated passages from their copies of the poems in ways dependent on textual and authorial circumstances (Chapter 4). The Semaines, both in French and in Sylvester's translation, were used as a stylistic model in late-Elizabethan playtexts and Zachary Boyd's Zions Flowers (Chapter 5), and inspired Jacobean poems that help us to assess Du Bartas' influence on early modern poetry (Chapter 6). The great variety of responses to the Semaines demonstrates new ways that intertextuality was a constituent feature of vernacular religious literature that was being read and written in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.
16
Allsopp, Niall. "Turncoat poets of the English Revolution." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:72c956c3-ec8b-4b07-ad91-a05b0e72fd39.
Full textAbstract:
Edmund Waller, William Davenant, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley were royalist poets who changed sides following the English Revolution, attracted to Cromwellian military power, and the reforming aims of the Independents. This thesis contributes to existing scholarship by showing that the poets engaged strongly with theories of allegiance, self-consciously returning to first principles - the natures of sovereignty and obligation - to develop a concept of allegiance that was contingent and transferrable. Their crucial influence was Hobbes. Hobbes collapsed partisan perspectives into a general theory of sovereignty constituted by a de facto protective and coercive power; this was grounded on a psychological analysis of humans' restless appetite for power. The poets' approach to Hobbes was crucially mediated by Machiavelli, who provided a less abstract account of the relationship between individual agency and collective institutions, and whose concept of virtù offered a model for how restless ambition could be harnessed to political order. An introductory chapter sketches out the intellectual background to this body of theory and reflects on the methods used to show how the poets dramatized it in their works. Chapter two considers the disintegration of Waller's courtly poetry under the pressure of civil war, and his resulting turn to rationalist theory. Chapters three and four focus on the immediate aftermath of the revolution, considering the synthesis of Hobbes' and Machiavelli's theories of military power ventured by Davenant, and the influence of Davenant's ideas on Marvell's Machiavellianism. Chapter five focuses on Cowley and his more religiously-inflected account of Hobbesian psychology and political obligations. Chapter six asks how the poets responded to the Restoration of Charles II, and in particular charts their influence on the younger poet John Dryden. With their emphasis on materialist psychology, the turncoat poets abandoned allegory in favour of a mode of dramatization which observed the contingent circumstances in which allegiances could be generated, dissolved, and transferred. They possessed a political conservatism, but a conceptual radicalism which presented a serious challenge to Anglican and constitutionalist discourses of Stuart monarchy.
17
White, Edmund C. "The concept of discipline : poetry, rhetoric, and the Church in the works of John Milton." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:53045aa1-8ed3-4b24-b561-65fc03afaf13.
Full textAbstract:
Discipline was an enduring concept in the works of John Milton (1608-1674), yet its meaning shifted over the course of his career: initially he held that it denoted ecclesiastical order, but gradually he turned to representing it as self-willed pious action. My thesis examines this transformation by analysing Milton’s complex engagement in two distinct periods: the 1640s and the 1660s-70s. In Of Reformation (1641), Milton echoed popular contemporary demands for a reformation of church discipline, but also asserted through radical literary experimentation that poetry could discipline the nation too (Chapter 1). Reflecting his dislike for intolerant Presbyterians in Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, the two versions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643 and 1644) reconsider discipline as a moral imperative for all men, rooted in domestic liberty (Chapter 2). Although written long after this period, the long poetry that Milton composed after the Restoration reveals his continued interrogation of the concept. The invocations of the term ‘discipline’ by Milton’s angels in Paradise Lost (1667) sought to encourage dissenting readers to faithfulness and co-operation (Chapter 3). Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671) advance the concept in the language of ‘piety,’ emphasising that ‘pious hearts’ are the precondition for godly action in opposition to contemporary Anglican ‘holy living’ (Chapter 4). In analysing Milton’s shifting concept of discipline, my thesis contributes to scholarship by showing his sensitivity to contemporary mainstream religious ideas, outlining the Christian—as opposed to republican or Stoic—notions of praxis that informed his ethics, and emphasising the disciplinary aspect of his doctrinal thought. Overall, it holds that in discipline, as word and concept, Milton expressed his faith in the capacity of writing to change its reader, morally and spiritually.
18
Archer, Harriet. "The mirror for magistrates, 1559-1610 : transmission, appropriation and the poetics of historiography." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f908cf17-e70a-4449-b2fa-84f24961b3c0.
Full textAbstract:
The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s and expanded and revised between 1559 and 1610, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset and Richard Niccols extended the Mirror’s scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the 1587 edition of the original text with Higgins’s ancient British and Roman complaint collections profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. However, while there has been a recent resurgence of critical interest in the editions of 1559 and its 1563 ‘Second Part’, the later additions are still largely neglected and disparaged, and the transmission of the original text beyond 1563 has never been fully explored. Without an understanding of this transmission and expansion, the importance of the Mirror to sixteenth-century intellectual culture is dramatically distorted. Higgins, Blenerhasset and Niccols’s contributions are invaluable witnesses to how verse history was conceptualised, written and read across the period, and to the way in which the Mirror tradition was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical scepticism. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes right across the Mirror’s history. This thesis provides a comprehensive reassessment of the Mirror’s expansion, transmission, and appropriation between 1559 and 1610, focusing in particular on Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s work. By comparing editions and tracing editorial revisions, the changing contexts and attitudes which shaped the early texts’ development are explored. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s contributions are analysed against this backdrop for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with the early editions. A broad reading of the themes and concerns of these recensions, rather than the limited approach which has characterised previous scholarship, takes account of their depth and variety, and provides a new understanding of the extent of the Mirror’s influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.
19
Faull, Lionel Peter. "Robert Herrick's self-presentation in Hesperides and his Noble numbers." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002250.
Full textAbstract:
Literature has tended to be cut from the moorings of its authorial origins under the influential literary criticism of the past forty years. This thesis is an attempt to re-moor a work of literature to its authorial origins; particularly a work of literature in which the author-poet‘s self-referential markers are so overtly and persistently present as is the case in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. Although there is a significant overlap between the real-life Herrick and the Hesperidean Herrick, the two figures cannot be regarded as identical. Instead, Herrick‘s deployment of specific genres and not of others, his chosen conventions for ordering a collection of miscellaneous poems, and his adoption of certain conventional poetic stances provide him with a semi-fictionalised way of declaring who he understands himself to be and how he wants himself to be understood. At the same time, the rich classical mythological associations of Herrick‘s title, Hesperides, declare his status as an inheritor of the classical literary tradition, whose hallmark during the Renaissance was the melding of classical, Christian and secular associations into new and complexly polyvalent literary works. For example, Herrick‘s appropriation of the classical mythological figure of Hercules provides him with both a narrative way and an allegorical way of reconciling the so-called secular, or profane poetry of Hesperides with the so-called religious, or divine poetry of Noble Numbers. In Noble Numbers, Herrick reveals new facets of his self-presentation to the reader, whilst also making explicit the theological congruencies between the two works. Herrick‘s religious self-presentation demonstrates his expansive scholarly interests, as well his instinct to include, rather than to exclude, the religious beliefs of others within his syncretistic sense-of-self. Finally, the placement of Noble Numbers after Hesperides is not a signal that Herrick privileged the former, or took his religion less seriously than he did his love for classical poetry, but rather that in Herrick‘s understanding of his world, man‘s fleeting glimpses of God in the secular sphere give way to a fuller comprehension of Him in the divine sphere.
20
Bucknell, Clare. "Poetic genre and economic thought in the long eighteenth century : three case studies." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:71e97b4d-c009-487c-8efb-fdb71eefa080.
Full textAbstract:
During the eighteenth century, the dominant rhetorical and explanatory power of civic humanism was gradually challenged by the rise of a new organising language in political economy. Political economic thought permitted radically different descriptions of what laudable private and public behaviour might be: it proposed that self-interest was often more beneficial to society at large than public-mindedness; that luxury had its uses and might not be a threat to liberty and political integrity; that landownership was no particular guarantee of virtue or disinterest; and that there was nothing inherently superior about frugality and self-sufficiency. These new ideas about civil society formed the intellectual basis of a large body of verse written during the long eighteenth century (at mid-century in particular), in which poets engaged enthusiastically with political economic arguments and defences of commercial activity, and celebrated the wealth and plenty of Britain as a modern trading nation. The work of my thesis is to examine a contradiction in the way in which these political economic ideas were handled. Forward-looking and confident poetry on public themes did not develop pioneering forms to suit the modernity of its outlook: instead, poets articulated such themes in verse by appropriating and reframing traditional genres, which in some cases involved engaging with inherited moral values and philosophical preferences entirely at odds with the intellectual material in hand. This inventive kind of generic revision is the central interest of the thesis. It aims to describe a number of problematic meeting points between new political economic thought and handed-down poetic formulae, and it will focus attention on some of the ways in which poets manipulated the forms and tropes they inherited in order to manage – and make the most of – the resulting contradictions.
21
Friedmann, Miriam. "Early modern English fairs." E-thesis Full text (Hebrew University users only), 1997. http://shemer.mslib.huji.ac.il/dissertations/H/JMS/001497172.pdf.
Full text
22
Kershaw, Alison. "The poetic of the Cosmic Christ in Thomas Traherne's 'The Kingdom of God'." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2006. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2006.0085.
Full textAbstract:
[Truncated abstract] In this thesis I examine the poetics of Thomas Traherne’s often over-looked Christology through a reading of The Kingdom of God. This work, probably written in the early 1670s, was not discovered until 1997, and not published until 2005. To date, no extended studies of the work have been published. It is my argument that Traherne develops an expansive and energetic poetic expressive of the theme of the ‘Cosmic Christ’ in which Christ is understood to be the source, the sustaining life, cohesive bond, and redemptive goal, of the universe, and his body to encompass all things. While the term ‘Cosmic Christ’ is largely of 20th century origin, its application to Traherne is defended on the grounds that it describes not so much a modern theology, as an ancient theology rediscovered in the context of an expanding cosmology. Cosmic Christology lies, according to Joseph Sittler,“tightly enfolded in the Church’s innermost heart and memory,” and its unfolding in Traherne’s Kingdom of God is accomplished through the knitting together of an essentially Patristic and Pauline Christology with the discoveries and speculations of seventeenth century science: from the infinity of the universe to the workings of atoms. … The thesis concludes with a distillation of Traherne’s Christic poetic The Word Incarnate. The terms put forward by Cosmic Christology are used to explicate Traherne’s intrepid poetic. In his most remarkable passages, Traherne employs language not only as a rhetorical tool at the service of theological reasoning, but to directly body forth his sense of Christ at the centre of world and self. He promises to “rend the Vail” and to reveal “the secrets of the most holy place.” Scorning more “Timorous Spirits,” he undertakes to communicate and “consider it all.”
23
Jones, Melissa J. "Early modern pornographies." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3278243.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3870. Adviser: Linda Charnes. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 8, 2008).
24
Pearson, Meg Forbes. "Spectacle in early modern English drama." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/3780.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2006.Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
25
Brooks, Scott A. "To move, to please, and to teach : the new poetry and the new music, and the works of Edmund Spenser and John Milton, 1579-1674." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5034.
Full textAbstract:
By examining Renaissance criticism both literary and musical, framed in the context of the contemporaneous obsession with the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, among others, this thesis identifies the parallels in poetic and musical practices of the time that coalesce to form a unified idea about the poet-as-singer, and his role in society. Edmund Spenser and John Milton, who both, in various ways, lived in periods of upheaval, identified themselves as the poet-singer, and comprehending their poetry in the context of this idea is essential to a fuller appreciation thereof. The first chapter addresses the role that the study of rhetoric and the power of oratory played in shaping attitudes about poetry, and how the importance of sound, of an innate musicality to poetry, was pivotal in the turn from quantitative to accentual-syllabic verse. In addition, the philosophical idea of music, inherited from antiquity, is explained in order elucidate the significance of “artifice” and “proportion”. With this as a backdrop, the chapters following examine first the work of Spenser, and then of Milton, demonstrating the central role that music played in the composition of their verse. Also significant, in the case of Milton, is the revolution undertaken by the Florentine Camerata around the turn of the seventeenth century, which culminated in the birth of opera. The sources employed by this group of scholars and artists are identical to those which shaped the idea of the poet-as-singer, and analysing their works in tandem yields new insights into those poems which are considered among the finest achievements in English literature.
26
Collins, Nicholas J. "Forming the nation : early modern England and modern Ireland." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/77249/.
Full textAbstract:
Previous work links early modern England with modern Ireland solely through the figure of Shakespeare. This thesis broadens the connection to early modern literature more generally, and examines the deeper cultural tie between the two temporo-geographical spaces. In forming nations, writers in the two periods adopt the same strategies; England and Ireland as nation-states emerge into modernity in the same manner because they share a cradle of modernity, characterised by widespread cultural production. The respective polities of Elizabethan England and the Irish Republic are shaped by the same forces: modern Ireland is not merely postcolonial, but is post-early modern England. Without a positive engagement with early modern England, there is no modern Ireland. In five chapters I examine different formal arrangements that are rewritten through literary culture. The relationship between mothers and daughters in James Stephens and Eavan Boland is central to Irish modernity through the motif of maternity, as with Queen Elizabeth I. Fathers and sons in Pádraic Pearse, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and in John McGahern are reorganised into fraternal relationships at the foundation of Ireland’s modernity alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-5) and King Lear (1605-6; 1609). Ghosts are the ideal figure of the sovereign, descending from Hamlet into J. M. Synge, Joyce’s ‘Hades’ and John Banville. Additionally, bodies are the most alienating form, yet provide the surest path to personal sovereignty from Volpone (performed 1605-6; published 1607) to Troilus and Cressida (1602), through to Samuel Beckett and Edna O’Brien. Finally, a national poet emerges from the nationalised land in the dance of John Davies’ Orchestra (1596) and W. B. Yeats, as in the digging of Hamlet (1600-1) and Seamus Heaney. We have long known about early modern writers’ importance to the shape of the nation, and here those ideas are updated. They now show how modern Irish writers’ contribution to the Republic’s polity forms through their English forebears several centuries earlier; the literary form of the nations gives rise to authors’ sovereignty – authors who in English script the modern Irish nation. Note on the Text When citing William Shakespeare I use the latest Arden editions, but I do not footnote references; instead I cite in parentheses in the main text. Occasionally I have used a different Shakespearean text, which has been signalled in the notes. Standard systems of reference have been adopted for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Joyce’s Ulysses. I parenthetically cite line numbers for poems, rather than increase the number of notes. For prose and for drama, aside from Shakespeare, notes are used. Notes are reset for each chapter.
27
Quint, Arlo. "Nine New Poets: An Anthology by Arlo Quint." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2004. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/QuintA2004.pdf.
Full text
28
Farley, Stuart. "Copious voices in early modern English writing." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11904.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis takes as its object of study a certain strand of Early Modern English writing characterised by its cornucopian invention, immethodical structure, and creatively exuberant, often chaotic, means of expression. It takes as its point of departure the Erasmian theory of ‘copia' (rhetorical abundance), expanding upon it freely in order to formulate new and independent notions of copious vernacular writing as it is practised in 16th- and 17th-century contexts. Throughout I argue for the continuity and pervasiveness of the pursuit of linguistic plenitude, in contrast to a prevailing belief that the outpouring of 'words' and 'things' started to dissipate in the transition from one century (16th) to the next (17th). The writers to be discussed are Thomas Nashe, Robert Burton, John Taylor the ‘Water-Poet', and Sir Thomas Urquhart. Each of the genres in which these writers operate–prose-poetry, the essay, the pamphlet, and the universal language–emerge either toward the end of the 16th century or during the course of the 17th century, and so can be said to take copious writing in new and experimental directions not fully accounted for in the current scholarship. My contribution to the literature lies principally in its focus on the emergence of these literary forms in an Early Modern English context, with an emphasis on the role played by copiousness of expression in their stylistic development and how they in turn develop the practice of copia.
29
Gurney, David William. "Education and the early modern English separatists." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10007378/.
Full textAbstract:
This study reassesses the significance of education in the lives and thinking of the early modern English Separatists. For this purpose, 'early modern' is construed as the period from the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 to the outbreak of the First Civil War in 1642. ,The thesis first describes the origins, nature and development of Separatism during this period, and then sets the study in context by delineating the nature of education in those eight or so decades. In order to facilitate the handling of the material germane to the study, the leading original proponents of the distinctive Separatist ideology are considered in chapters three and four. Chapter three deals with the three men who in the late Tudor years set the parameters for the subsequent groVV'ch of a comprehensive and self-consistent Separatist philosophy. Chapter four examines the contributions of the 1 7 most prominent men who built on their work in the early Stuart period. The very fact of their prominence, however, entails the likelihood that they were better-educated than the majority of their fellowbelievers, and perhaps to that extent unrepresentative of them. The resulting possible distortion is therefore corrected by investigating the educational levels of 52 Separatist prisoners in London gaols at the turn of the ninth and tenth decades of the sixteenth century. Past work in this field has tended to a minimalist interpretation of the available evidence. This thesis concludes that both the educational achievements of the first early modern English religious Separatists, and their attitudes to education, have been underestimated. It seeks to correct this misrepresentation with a judgement more closely corresponding to the evidence yielded by an objective review of the facts.
30
Khalifa, Abdelwahab Ali. "Problems of translation of modern Arabic poetry into English." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.441806.
Full text
31
Sinar, Rebecca. "A history of English reflexives : from Old English into Early Modern English." Thesis, University of York, 2006. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/11018/.
Full text
32
Allen, Lea Knudsen. "Cosmopolite subjectivities and the Mediterranean in early modern England." View abstract/electronic edition; access limited to Brown University users, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3318286.
Full text
33
Campbell, Alexandra. "Archipelagic poetics : ecology in modern Scottish and Irish poetry." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/9102/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines a range of poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Modernist period to the present day, who take the relationship between humans, poetry and the natural world as a primary point of concern. Through precise, materially attentive engagements with the coastal, littoral, and oceanic dimensions of place, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Jen Hadfield, respectively turn towards the vibrant space of the Atlantic archipelago in order to contemplate new modes of relation that are able to contend with the ecological and political questions engendered by environmental crises. Across their works, the archipelago emerges as a physical and critical site of poetic relation through which poets consider new pluralised, devolved, and ‘entangled’ relationships with place. Derived from the geographic term for ‘[a]ny sea, or sheet of water, in which there are numerous islands’, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ has recently gained critical attention within Scottish and Irish studies due to its ability to re-orientate the critical axis away from purely Anglocentric discourses. Encompassing a range of spatial frames from bioregion to biosphere, islands to oceans, and temporal scales from deep pasts to deep futures, the poets considered here turn to the archipelago as a means of reckoning with the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene poses about the relationships between humans and the environment. Crucially, through a series of comparative readings, the project presents fresh advancements in ecocritical scholarship, with regards to the rise of material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the ‘Blue Humanities’.
34
Loeb, Andrew. "Subjectivity and Music in Early Modern English Drama." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32129.
Full textAbstract:
Music in the early modern world was an art form fraught with tensions. Writers from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines engaged in a vibrant debate about the value of hearing and playing music, which could be seen as a useful tool for the refinement of the individual or a dangerous liability, capable of compelling inappropriate thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.
This study analyzes music on the early modern stage and its relation to emerging ideas about subjectivity. Early modern philosophies of music, I demonstrate, are concerned with the stability of the body, the soul, and the humours and spirits that unite them, along with the individual’s capacity for autonomy and agency. In the theatre, I argue, music is frequently deployed as a strategy for experimenting with ways of imagining and performing selfhood. On one hand, it can facilitate self-fashioning, acting as a marker for such characteristics as class and spiritual condition; on the other, it can be disruptive to identity and the capacity for agency and autonomy, since music was understood as both penetrative and transformative, facilitating the disruption of one self by an other.
Chapter 1, “Meanings of Music in Early Modern England,” surveys a range of early modern texts on music to demonstrate their concerns with both the performance of the self and the threat of its dissolution. Chapter 2, “Many Sorts of Music in Twelfth Night and The Roaring Girl,” examines music’s role as an imaginative strategy for improvising an unstable, hybrid gender identity, an alternative subject-position from which to speak and act in ways ordinarily denied to women. Chapter 3, “Music, Magic, and Community in Early Modern Witchcraft Plays,” explores witches’ uses of music to establish a sense of communal identity and to magically disrupt the communities from which they have been excluded. Finally, Chapter 4, “Noise, the City, and the Subject in Epicoene” makes a case for understanding Morose’s fear of noise in terms of early modern ideas about music, reading noise as a radical instability representative of new ways of fashioning selves in a rapidly expanding urban environment.
35
Jung, Jessica. "Truth and honesty in early modern English drama." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.493076.
Full textAbstract:
'Truth' and 'honesty' were two terms that were distinctly gendered in Renaissance England. For women, 'honesty' had developed a meaning synonymous with chastity. Male 'honesty', alternately, suggested honourable and befitting words and actions. Women were also perceived as less likely than men to be telling the truth. My focus in this thesis is on a point of convergence for these two complex terms: when female characters in contemporary drama are falsely accused of dishonesty.
36
Bingham, Sarah. "Colour in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2018. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.766284.
Full textAbstract:
In early modern England, colour was both a material and a textual preoccupation. However, the polychromatic palette that surrounded English men and women, and the particoloured palette of early modern writers, has thus far received little scholarly attention. This thesis rethinks the culture of colour in England between c. 1580 and c. 1660 to stimulate and enhance critical appreciation of colour in early modern literature. In contradistinction to the monochromatic trend of current cultural histories and early modern research, in this thesis I analyse all colours, situating these within their original socio-cultural contexts to substantiate the significance of colour in a literary text. My contextualised and polychromatic colour-concern offers an alternative method to traditional quantitative or symbolic approaches to colour in literature, as it takes into consideration how colour was experienced during an era that was attentive both to the material qualities and textual existence of colour. This thesis explores five "colourscapes," which include the workplace, household, Church, New World, and theatre, in order to finesse connections between colourful environs and attendant colour-configurations in early modern English literature. Attending to rhetorical instantiations of colour, and to the lived experience of colour as manifested in literature, this thesis offers an analytical lens through which early modern scholars, and literary scholars alike, can approach colour in literature.
37
Kelly, Denise. "Time in early modern English theatre and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.695382.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the emergence of the theatre in England as significantly congruent with the horological evolutions of the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. It examines the cultural texture of England's shifting notion of time, and demonstrates that the theatre was not simply an event that occurred within time, but a powerful cultural institution that actively deployed it. Through an exploration of the works of playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, John Fletcher, Robert Green, Margaret Cavendish, and William Davenant, and an engagement with a range of theoretical paradigms, this thesis resituates early modern England and the theatre in the horological narrative and establishes the theatre as a significant time-keeping institution.
38
Clark, Douglas Iain. "Theorising the will in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2015. http://digitool.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26032.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines how the faculty of the will was conceptualised in early modern English literature. The attempt to understand its function and purpose was a crucial concern for a vast range of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, largely because of the important role the notion of the will played in the development of classical philosophy and the reformation of Christian theology. Providing a coherent definition of the will, its powers and associated functions in the human subject did, nonetheless, pose a significant problem for many early modern writers. Although scholars have documented the impact that notions of will had in the theology of the period, an analysis of the way in which the will was represented in the drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean England is missing from current academic criticism. This thesis seeks to remedy this gap in scholarship by clarifying the conceptual difficulties involved in theorising the powers of the will in the philosophy of the age, and by demonstrating how these difficulties are represented and played with in the period's drama. This thesis contributes original knowledge to the field of early modern studies by illustrating: the role that notions of will take in shaping the didactic framework of the morality tradition in late sixteenth-century drama; how the will was used to establish and explore notions of malevolence and acts of moral transgression in early modern plays; the part theories of the will played in shaping how notions of death and human fate were signified in early modern texts. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the literary representation of the faculty of the will should be understood to be a vital and essential part of early modern intellectual culture.
39
Smith, Michael Bennet 1979. "Disparate measures: Poetry, form, and value in early modern England." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11182.
Full textAbstract:
xi, 198 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.In early modern England the word "measure" had a number of different but related meanings, with clear connections between physical measurements and the measurement of the self (ethics), of poetry (prosody), of literary form (genre), and of capital (economics). In this dissertation I analyze forms of measure in early modern literary texts and argue that measure-making and measure-breaking are always fraught with anxiety because they entail ideological consequences for emerging national, ethical, and economic realities. Chapter I is an analysis of the fourth circle of Dante's Inferno . In this hell Dante portrays a nightmare of mis-measurement in which failure to value wealth properly not only threatens to infect one's ethical well-being but also contaminates language, poetry, and eventually the universe itself. These anxieties, I argue, are associated with a massive shift in conceptions of measurement in Europe in the late medieval period. Chapter II is an analysis of the lyric poems of Thomas Wyatt, who regularly describes his psychological position as "out of measure," by which he means intemperate or subject to excessive feeling. I investigate this self-indictment in terms of the long-standing critical contention that Wyatt's prosody is "out of measure," and I argue that formal and psychological expressions of measure are ultimately inseparable. In Chapter III I argue that in Book II of the Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser figures ethical progress as a course between vicious extremes, and anxieties about measure are thus expressed formally as a struggle between generic forms, in which measured control of the self and measured poetic composition are finally the same challenge Finally, in my reading of Troilus and Cressida I argue that Shakespeare portrays persons as commodities who are constantly aware of their own values and anxious about their "price." Measurement in this play thus constitutes a system of valuation in which persons attempt to manipulate their own value through mechanisms of comparison and through praise or dispraise, and the failure to measure properly evinces the same anxieties endemic to Dante's fourth circle, where it threatens to infect the whole world.
Committee in charge: George Rowe, Chairperson, English; Benjamin Saunders, Member, English; Lisa Freinkel, Member, English; Leah Middlebrook, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
40
Pappa, Joseph. "Carnal reading early modern language and bodies /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2008.
Find full text
41
Alfar, Cristina León. ""Evil" women : patrilineal fantasies in early modern tragedy /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9455.
Full text
42
Jones, Philip. "Rewriting the Atlantic archipelago : modern British poetry at the coast." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/51877/.
Full textAbstract:
Despite a so-called ‘oceanic turn’, there has been relatively little attention paid to literary representations of the shoreline as a specific material and cultural site. This thesis examines how modern British poets respond to and represent the coastline in their work, with particular emphasis on notions of place and geographic scale. Whilst looking at the use of the archipelago in recent cultural and literary studies of British and Irish writing, this thesis argues for a more refined and complex sense of the archipelagic, one which responds to the needs and demands of an increasingly global and interconnected world. To better understand this relationship between text and coastal landscape, the project draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, as well as Edward Casey’s investigations into the future of place and Philip E. Steinberg’s reconceptualisation of ocean spaces. In engaging with ideas of place in a newly intense period of globalisation, this thesis contends that a critical desire to focus on disruptions of linear spatial and temporal scales must still negotiate residual notions of bounded communities and national identities. The archipelago emerges both as a site of rupture and interconnection. In attending to these different levels of geographic experience, the thesis also demonstrates how notions of scale must respond to more than spatial distance, becoming attentive to how a variety of emotional and psychological experiences become frayed and disrupted within the shifts between the local, national and planetary. In the poetry of Peter Riley, Wendy Mulford, Robert Hampson, Matt Simpson and Robert Minhinnick, the shore emerges as an ambivalent and fluid terrain but one, nonetheless, in possession of its own social and cultural histories.
43
Chaghafi, Elisabeth Leila. "Early modern literary afterlives." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c46edf04-50ed-4fc0-8d4f-74dfdfdb470e.
Full textAbstract:
My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.
44
Georganta, Konstantina. "Modern mimesis : encounters between British and Greek poetry, 1922-1952." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1196/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis considers the crisis in the portrayal of national spaces and national identities, insecure in the multiplicity of their cultural roots and thus diasporic and hybrid, from 1922, a year marked for its importance in the disintegration of imperial Britain and in the positioning of Greece on the threshold of its European literary Modernist inheritance, until 1952, the year of Louis MacNeice’s observations of Greece in his poetry collection Ten Burnt Offerings. The boundaries of cultures, states, religious beliefs and genders are considered in the figures of T.S. Eliot’s Mr. Eugenides, C.P. Cavafy’s Myris, Kostes Palamas’s Phemius, W. B. Yeats’s Crazy Jane and Demetrios Capetanakis’s Greek Orlando and the Greek space is explored as John Lehmann’s Mediterranean home and Louis MacNeice’s Easter gathering. The opening chapter considers the bardic performance of Yeats and Palamas’s poetic alter-egos and their respective progress towards a fusion with the feminine and a battle with the modern. Smyrna, an area of contention for British imperial and Greek irredentist claims raising questions about the stability of national states and national identities, is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 in the way it informed the construction of identities in Eliot’s The Waste Land and Cavafy’s poetry, respectively. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the literary encounter between Capetanakis and Lehmann, a pair that advanced the dissemination of modern Greek poetry in Britain. The final chapter of the thesis examines MacNeice’s poetry and radio features inspired by Greece in an effort to explore how the imagining of Greece has developed both visually and metaphorically in the post-war years.
45
Gray, Sophie. "Conjurer laureates : reading early modern magicians with Derrida." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2013. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/18193/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis uses the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to propose a performative method of close reading, which it uses to explore the relationship between language and identity in early modern literary representations of magicians. It addresses the common assumptions we make about the authority and stability of language by exploring the tensions that arise as the magicians attempt to use performative language to realise impossible ambitions of absolute power, knowledge and self presence. The texts studied are a combination of prose and drama from 1512 to 1607. They are read in light of Derrida’s engagement with speech act theory in ‘Signature Event Context’ and ‘Limited Inc a b c . . .’ , and also other related work of his on the performative foundations of literature and the law, including ‘Before the Law’, ‘The Law of Genre’, and ‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations’ of Authority’. The final chapter also takes in Aporias. The magicians’ trajectories are followed in three chapters. The first is on the founding violences of their authoritative identities. Working with Derrida’s accounts of the law, it begins by describing how the foundation of authority is self-authorizing and therefore performative. It then explores how performative pacts, deals and contracts with the devil are used to establish and authorize the magicians and their supernatural worlds. This metatextual authority is reflected in the magician’s own ambitions for the certainty and stability of absolute power and knowledge. Using the early modern sense of ‘perform’ as to complete, carry out or make something, the second chapter focuses upon materiality and embodiment as attempts to stabilise or fix performative utterances. Fake suicide notes and contracts written in blood are analysed to demonstrate the slip and drift equally at work in the structures of writing and signatures. In addition, Friar Bacon’s enormous brass head with its promise of ‘sound aphorisms’ is discussed as an alternative example of the misinformed urge to embody certainty. The final chapter addresses why almost all the stories of magicians, good and bad, end with their deaths. Following Derrida’s Aporias, death is represented as the ultimate opening limit, which undermines all attempts at certainty and self-presence. This leads to discussion of the other’s role in identity and, it follows, death. The magicians’ ends are compared, with particular focus on the sense of a coming event in the final scene of Doctor Faustus. The use of Derrida’s work to engage with early modern texts responds to a significant gap in the field. It offers original, contemporary insight into traditional themes of power, language and identity that are usually approached from a historicist perspective. The critical-creative close reading describes and carries out by the thesis suggests an exciting way to performatively respond to literature of the past, bearing witness to it but also transforming it into something new.
46
Corrigan, Nora L. Dessen Alan C. "English commoners and communities on the early modern stage." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,837.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007.Title from electronic title page (viewed Dec. 18, 2007). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature." Discipline: English; Department/School: English.
47
Wright, Myra. "Whores and their metaphors in early modern English drama." Thesis, McGill University, 2010. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86819.
Full textAbstract:
Several clusters of metaphors were routinely used to represent the sex trade onstage in early modern England. Close philological study of these figures reveals that even the most conventional metaphors for whores and their work were capable of meaning many things at once, especially in the discursive context of the drama. This project follows a practice of reading that admits multiple significations for the words used by characters on the early modern stage. I argue that metaphors are social phenomena with consequences as varied and complex as the human interactions they're meant to describe. Each chapter treats a different set of images: commodities and commercial transactions, buildings and thoroughfares, food and drink, and rhetorical and theatrical ingenuity. Using methods based on the study of conceptual metaphor in the field of cognitive linguistics, I trace the deployment of conventional figures for prostitution in plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. I also introduce occurrences of these metaphors in other genres (news pamphlets, prose narratives, homilies, medical manuals, and so on) to show that they were part of pervasive cultural patterns. The readings below dwell on the figurative associations that were most available to early modern writers as they fashioned prostitute characters for the stage—metaphors commonly taken for granted as literal descriptions of sex work. An understanding of the social force of metaphor begins with the realization that words convey more than any writer, printer, or actor intends. The language of prostitution in the early modern theatre is therefore both common and complex, much like the characters it conjures.Pendant la Renaissance, divers grappes de métaphores étaient utilisées couramment dans les représentations théâtrale de la prostitution en Angleterre. Des études minutieuses philologiques des métaphores pour les putains et leur travail révéler que même les plus conventionnelles pouvaient signifier plusieurs choses à la fois, particulièrement dans le contexte discursif du théâtre. Le projet suit un procédé de lecture qui admet plusieurs significations pour les mots utilisés par des personnages de la Renaissance. Je soutiens que les métaphores sont des phénomènes sociaux qui ont des conséquences aussi variées et complexes que les interactions humaines qu'elles sont censées décrire. Chaque chapitre met en évidence une différente série d'images: les marchandises et transactions commerciales, les bâtiments et les voies urbaines, la nourriture et les boissons, l'ingénuité rhétorique et théâtrale. En utilisant des méthodes basées sur l'étude des métaphores conceptuelles dans le domaine de la linguistique cognitive, je retrace le cortège des figures conventionnelles de prostitution dans les pièces de théâtre de William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, et John Marston. Je signale aussi l'existence de ces métaphores dans d'autres genres littéraires (pamphlets de nouvelles, narratives en prose, homélies, manuels médicaux, etc.) pour démontrer qu'elles faisaient partie des tendances culturelles omniprésentes. Les explications ci-dessous s'entendent sur les associations figurées qui étaiaent les plus à la disposition des écrivains de la Renaissance en façonnant les personnages des prostituées—les métaphores qui étaient souvent considerées comme constituant les descriptions littérales du travail sexuel. Pour bien comprendre la force sociale de la métaphore, il faut realiser d'abord que les mots communiquent beaucoup plus qu'un écrivain, un imprimeur, ou un acteur les destine. La la
48
Frazer, P. "Deviant mobility in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.546343.
Full text
49
Barrett, Christine. "Navigating Time: Cartographic Narratives in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10320.
Full textAbstract:
In the sixteenth century, the cartographic revolution was rapidly changing the experience of everyday life in England. Modes of thinking and inhabiting space (such as astronomy, trigonometry, surveying, and cartography) were advanced and refined, and in England, the map went from rarity to ubiquity in less than seventy years. Navigating Time explores how literary strategies changed in response to this rapid shift in the technology of spatial representation. I consider four epics, the epic being the early modern genre most overtly invested in matters of empire (and thus, in matters of space and history). Building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities, I argue that the epic offers a radical critique of the technological innovations of the cartographic revolution and the menace those innovations posed. Alongside this critique, the early modern epic outlined a new poetics centered on navigation. Epics by Holinshed, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton sought to encompass the representational possibilities of the map, but also to highlight and exceed the map's narrative insufficiency. Holinshed's Chronicles reforms the topography of the city, converting its streets and alleys into historical texts and presenting historiography and mapping as competing interpretive frameworks for urban space. The Faerie Queene redefines genre as the conduct of bodies in space, making it thus impossible to fix Faeryland as a mappable terrain, and asserting the continuous interpretation required by allegory against the compression imposed by the map. Drayton's Poly-Olbion seems at first to be a verbal map of Britain, but the poem quietly insists on the power of literature not to mimic but rather to supplant the world it describes, becoming the terrain a map can only represent. Finally, Milton's Paradise Lost creates a form of navigating without a destination, by transforming history into a geographic expanse that cannot be mapped, only wandered.
50
Hong, Sara. "Moving Imitation: Performing Piety in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, Boston College, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/644.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis advisor: Mary T. CraneUsing the rich concept of imitatio as an organizing theme, this study explores the tangibility of faith and a privileging of an affective, embodied religious subjectivity in post-Reformation England. Moving Imitation asserts that literary and devotional concepts of imitatio--as the Humanist activity of translation and as imitatio Christi--were intensely interested in semiotics. Indeed, if the Renaissance was a period in which literary imitatio flourished, advancements in translation theory were not unaccompanied by anxieties--in this case, anxieties about the stability of language itself. Likewise, as iconophilia turned into iconophobia, a similar anxiety about the reliability of signs also characterized the turmoil of the English Reformation. Moving Imitation examines the overlapping qualities of both types of imitatio in order to point out how an important devotional aesthetic in the period involves a type of embodied imitation. The human body's resonance with the humanity of Christ and the pre-Cartesian worldview that saw the human body as fully engaged with what we consider to be more cognitive functions contributed to a privileging of the body as an acceptable sign of true devotion. Beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt's paraphrase of the traditional penitential psalms, Moving Imitation explores the translation of penitence in Wyatt's work, and argues that a focus on David's outward gestures and body lends a firmness to a work that is otherwise anxious about the mutable nature of human words. Chapter two examines the suffering bodies in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments and their enactment of a visible imitatio Christi. Terms such as "members" function in its corporeal and communal senses in Acts and Monuments, for the marks of one's membership in the "true church" are born, literally, on one's members. Although much of Foxe's argumentation includes polemical disputes that seek to shut out a copia of meanings to the words, "This is my body," Foxe as an editor exploits the polysemous nature of the body in its corporeal and communal sensibilities. The performative aspects of martyrdom pave the way to a discussion of what I call transformative imitatio in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Winter's Tale. Although the theater's ability to "body forth" its fiction is a source of anxiety for antitheatricalists, proponents of the stage saw it as a way to defend the theater. Moving Imitation notes that the characterization of the stage's dangers--the ability to move people's affections--articulates an important Reformist desire: that the individual subject should not only be affected, but also be galvanized into devotional imitation. Such interest in action becomes important in Hamlet; if the central dilemma of the play (Hamlet's inability to take action) is considered against a common religious dilemma (how one stirs oneself towards genuine worship) the solutions as well as the problems overlap. Through the statue scene of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare defuses the danger attributed to the stage by animating a potentially idolatrous image with life; in ways that were only hinted at in Hamlet, The Winter's Tale makes use of the lively bodies onstage to suggest that the presumed connection between idolatry and the imitative stage is an unwarranted one, and "to see... life as lively mocked" can help to perform redemption
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English