Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English poetry'
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Leduc, Natalie. "Dissensus and Poetry: The Poet as Activist in Experimental English-Canadian Poetry." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/38773.
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Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.
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Updegraff, Derek Kramer Johanna Ingrid. ""Fore ðære mærðe mod astige" two new perspectives on the Old English Gifts of men /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri--Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5623.
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The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 6, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Johanna Kramer. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Hickman, Ben. "John Ashbery and English Poetry." Thesis, University of Kent, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.504659.
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Cavill, Paul. "Maxims in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1996. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11063/.
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The focus of the thesis is on maxims and gnomes in Old English poetry, but the occasional occurrence of these forms of expression in Old English prose and in other Old Germanic literature is also given attention, particularly in the earlier chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 are general, investigating a wide range of material to see how and why maxims were used, then to define the forms, and distinguish them from proverbs. The conclusions of these chapters are that maxims are ‘nomic’, they organise experience in a conventional, authoritative fashion. They are also ‘proverbial’ in the sense of being recognisable and repeatable, but they do not have the fixed form of proverbs. Chapters 4 to 7 are more specific in their focus, applying techniques from formulaic theory, paroemiology and the sociology of knowledge to the material so as to better understand how maxims are used in their contexts in the poems, and to appreciate the nature and function of the Maxims collections. The conclusions reached here are that the maxims in Beowulf 183b-88 are integral to the poem, that maxims in The Battle of Maldon show how the poet manipulated the social functions of the form for his own purposes, that there is virtually no paganism in Old English maxims, and that the Maxims poems outline and illustrate an Anglo-Saxon world view. The main contribution of the thesis is that it goes beyond traditional commentary in analysing the purpose and function of maxims. It does not merely focus on individual poems, but attempts to deal with a limited aspect of the Old English oral and literary tradition. The primary aim is to understand the general procedures of the poets in using maxims and compiling compendia of them, and then to apply insights gained from theoretical approaches to the specifics of poems.
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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/.
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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.
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Williams, Todd Owen. "Poetic Renewal and Reparation in the Classroom: Poetry Therapy, Psychoanalysis, and Pedagogy with Three Victorian Poets." [Kent, Ohio] : Kent State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=kent1194103428.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2007.Title from author submission page (viewed Sept. 14, 2009 ) Advisor: Mark Bracher. Keywords: poetry therapy, psychoanalysis, Victorian poetry, pre-Raphaelite. Includes bibliographical references (p. )
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Cairns, Daniel. "As it likes you early modern desire and vestigial impersonal constructions /." Waltham, Mass. : Brandeis University, 2009. http://dcoll.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23236.
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Brown, Raymond David. "Apo koinou in Old English poetry /." The Ohio State University, 1990. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487684245465626.
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Momma, H. "The composition of Old English poetry /." Cambridge [GB] : Cambridge university press, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb366995688.
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Malby, Mark Edward. "Hong Kong poetry a comparison of the developmental experience of Chinese writers writing in English and native speakers of English writing in English and their works /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B38725496.
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Eichel, Andrew Timothy. "Translating Anglo-Saxon poetry : foreignized translations of "The seafarer" and "The wanderer" /." View online, 2009. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211131566903.pdf.
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Jenks, Tom. "Digital technology and innovative poetry." Thesis, Edge Hill University, 2018. http://repository.edgehill.ac.uk/10086/.
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This is a thesis investigating the use of digital technology in creative writing, with a focus on innovative poetry. Three research areas explore this through theory, practice and reflection. These are preceded by an introduction to digital poetry, including an overview of the field. Chapter 1 describes the use of digital technology in appropriative writing, using digital methods to collect and re-organise text from social media to produce two books. Appropriative, allegorical or conceptual writing is discussed in relation to these books and more generally. This discussion includes reflections on the ethics of appropriative methodologies, with reference to writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Chapter 2 explores the possibilities of digital technology for procedurally transforming existing texts to produce new ones. Two creative projects are discussed, the first using spreadsheets to transform by mechanistic word substitution and the second using databases to transform by reduction and ‘writing through’. These are contextualised and discussed in relation to the work of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, the Oulipo and others. Chapter 3 investigates permutational and combinatory works and the use of machine methods to introduce programmatic randomness. A range of online works are described premised on aleatory selection from lists. The poetics of chance is discussed in relation to digital and non-digital combinatory works including Raymond Queneau, Alison Knowles and Nick Montfort. The human-machine dynamic is viewed as collaborative rather than competitive, with the machine envisaged as an adjunct to rather than an alternative to human practice. Processual methods are regarded as having most value when combined with non-processual and non-schematic elements. Originality is considered as a valid concept for procedural works, residing at the level of ideas and design. The procedural works discussed in the thesis are contextualised within a broader personal poetics of inclusivity, playfulness and humour.
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Pan, Lina. "Poetic Labor: Meaning and Matter in Robert Frost's Poetry." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1401.
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This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will interest those who seek a serious and thoughtful challenge to Modernist literary trends that prevail even today.
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Terry, Richard Gordon. "Studies in English burlesque poetry, 1663-1785." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1989. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250956.
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Simpkins, Scott Keith. "The semiotic dilemma of English romantic poetry /." Access abstract and link to full text, 1986. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.library.utulsa.edu/dissertations/fullcit/8611951.
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Loxley, James William Stanislas. "Royalist poetry in the English Civil War." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.319509.
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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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Grummitt, Elaine Jennifer. "Heraldic imagery in seventeenth-century English poetry." Thesis, Durham University, 2000. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4333/.
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The significance of heraldic references in literature has been the subject of both antiquarian interest and recent scholarship. In the field of seventeenth-century poetry, there exists a small body of published work concerned with the use of heraldry by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Jolin Cleveland. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the existence and significance of heraldic references in a wider range of seventeenth-century verse and poetry. It eschews assumptions regarding the use of heraldry by, or with reference to, a narrow social elite, and examines heraldic references published in broadsheets and used in songs, as well as in the privately- circulated manuscripts of the nobility. Chapter One offers a critical examination of a range of current scholarship concerned with heraldic readings of literature. Chapter Two demonstrates that formal heraldic references, affirming or celebrating their subject’s identity, were used in diverse genres, including dedicatory verses, encomia, epitaphs, elegies, epithalamia and anagrams. Chapter Three determines the social implications of the use of heraldry, with particular reference to epic and satirical verse, arguing that heraldic references in this period develop beyond their traditional, chivalric associations. Chapter Four discusses those works that include heraldic references as expressions of authority or political power, and considers their use in different contexts to affirm or undermine the position of individuals and groups within society. Chapter Five establishes the use of heraldry within religious or spiritual poetry and addresses whether its vocabulary was regarded as an expression of particular Christian values. Chapter Six explores the engagement of women writers with heraldry and considers how far their use of the language offered a challenge to the prevailing patriarchal culture. The Conclusion draws attention to the significance of the evolution of heraldry from the seventeenth century to the present day.
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Reynolds, Matthew Osmund Royle. "English poetry and European nationalism, 1830-1870." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364175.
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Howard, William Scott. "Fantastic surmise : seventeenth-century English elegies, elegiac modes, and the historical imagination from Donne to Philips /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9527.
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Weaver, Sarah Anne. "Fossil poetry : Tennyson and Victorian philology." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708871.
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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.
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Xu, Xiaofan. "A poet's country : landscape and nationhood in T.S. Eliot's post-conversion poetry and politics." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/49120/.
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The thesis contributes to the knowledge on modernist national identity in the transnational context, with a primary focus on the agency of the rural landscape in the identity-making process. It engages with the post-conversion works of T. S. Eliot, investigates his ruralism in relation to the metropolitan and cosmopolitan aspects of modernism, and situates it within the context of late modernism where an idealised representation of rurality is exploited by various ideologies including fascism and imperialism. By drawing upon insights from transnational modernism and latest theoretical advances on cosmopolitanism, the thesis reveals through the case of Eliot that representations of rurality, local allegiances and rootedness can be emancipatory and coextensive with cosmopolitan projects. My investigation begins by examining the ruralist elements in Eliot’s poetry, pageant and translations during the decade of his conversion to the Anglican Church in 1927, and demonstrates how an emphasis on roots, inheritance and rural living is at once occasioned by and constitutes part of the cosmopolitan condition. The discussion of rootedness is then carried forward to its moral implications, namely its accused complicity with the fascist discourse of the 1930s. A reading of Eliot’s interwar play alongside texts from British surrealism reveals that the vocabulary of ‘Blood and Soil’ used as a fascist slogan can also feed into an alternative literary imagination, one that is devolutionary and anti-nationalist. The argument proceeds to Eliot’s wartime works and reveals how a transnational identity—again channelled through representations of rurality—intervenes into and resists the imperialist spatial ordering of the centre and the periphery. All these discussions of the transnational facets of Eliot’s modernist ruralism prompt a reconsideration of the widely-made association between land-writing and reactionary politics, which the thesis challenges by showing that seeds of modernity and resistance are nonetheless meted out by representations of rurality and local roots.
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Malby, Mark Edward. "Hong Kong poetry: a comparison of the developmental experience of Chinese writers writing in English andnative speakers of English writing in English and their works." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B38725496.
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Rybak, Charles A. "Human Rooms." Cincinnati, Ohio : University of Cincinnati, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=ucin1052328743.
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Ransom, Emily Ann. "Fingerprints of Thomas More's Epigrammata on English Poetry." NCSU, 2009. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11122009-145232/.
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Thomas Moreâs Latin epigrams, published with the second edition of Utopia in 1518, were apparently widely read both among contemporary European intellectuals and during the subsequent development of English poetry. With a humble audacity that could engage Classical authors in a Christian posture, More cultivated a literary climate that could retain the earthiness of the middle ages in dialogue with the ancients, and is more responsible for the ensuing expansion of vernacular poetry than perhaps any other Henrican author. This thesis probes the Classical influences and Humanist practices at work in the epigrams, explores their contemporary reception on the continent, and traces their legacy among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets.
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Spalding, Mary Caroline. "The Middle English charters of Christ." Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan Library, 2006. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;view=toc;idno=AFW1075.0001.001.
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McCaffery, Richard. "Poets as legislators : self, nation and possibility in World War Two Scottish poetry." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7049/.
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This thesis is the first sustained critical and sociological reappraisal of the poetry produced by Scottish poets who came of age during World War Two and a selection of those who were old enough to have experienced the previous conflict whilst still responding in their art to World War Two. This thesis carves out a critical space for World War Two poetry beyond the poetry of pity and loss espoused by poets of World War One. It also takes into account the conditions and circumstances that mark out Scottish poetry of this conflict from English poetry of the same era, for programmatic, political, poetic and linguistic reasons as well as re-configuring the definition of World War Two poetry to encompass the experience of women poets. At the core of this thesis lies the idea that the Scottish poetry of World War Two was committed to something more than anti-fascism. These poets did not simply oppose a tyrannical, fascist force in their work, they were also developing ways in which their work and art could contribute to a better post-war Scottish society and in many ways espousing both internationalism and proto-transnationalism as well as anti-imperialism. All of these poets contributed in both practical and intellectual ways to post-war Scottish society. In this, this thesis takes its lead from Alice Templeton’s literary theory of a war poetry of ‘possibility’ that transcends both the trauma, witness and outrage of reactions to war. The cumulative effect of the work of these poets is a legislative and educational impact made on society, that poets could have a say in their work on how post-war society could be reconstructed in fairer and more equitable ways. This poetry is both modernist and romantic in the sense that it desires a change and sees life and potential that is being denied by imperial super-powers and structures while it invests the poet with an empowered voice. From the home-front to the front-line, diverse avenues of experience are treated as being of vital importance. The first chapter of this thesis explores the Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica and a number of folk songs by Hamish Henderson, to show his unique commitment to post-war Scotland in his folk-song work. Chapter two compares and contrasts the work of Alexander and Tom Scott, showing their range of reaction from the epic to the highly personal elegy. The thesis then moves into an analysis both of George Campbell Hay’s war poetry, which sympathised with the native Arab populations during the desert war, and the work of Sorley MacLean, who found his political certainties shaken. From this point the thesis explores the anti-heroic work of Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch as well as the political and personal reasons for refusal of conscription expounded by Douglas Young and Norman MacCaig. The thesis closes with a discussion of women’s experience and poetry of World War Two, and an in-depth a look at the major influential figures on the poets of this time, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir. Between these figures we shall see a range of experiences, but each poet is united in their struggle, dramatized in their work, for a better post-War Scotland, a drive which this thesis explores and discusses for the first time in detail.
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Taher-Kermani, Reza. "The Persian 'presence' in nineteenth-century English poetry." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.658568.
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This thesis examines the 'presence' of Persia' in nineteenth-century English poetry. The focus is not on translations of Persian poetry as such, but on the ways in which knowledge of Persia, derived from a variety of sources including classical and biblical texts, history, and travel-writing, entered into English poetry in the period. Such knowledge may shape the structure of a poem, or Its verbal texture, and may do so at different levels of intensity and significance. This complex phenomenon cannot fully be covered by the term 'influence'; the term 'presence' encompasses a variety of . literary engagements including translation, imitation, interpretation, representation, conscious allusion, and indirect borrowing. The methodology of the thesis is neither that of conventional literary history, in which questions of influence and intertextuality are of primary concern, nor of cultural history, in which literature is seen as part of a broader analysis of the history of ideas. While recognising the importance of recent cross-cultural theories, notably Edward Said's Orientalism, it does not follow ,any theoretical model in its analysis of the poetic adaptation and appropriation of Persian stories, themes, and tropes. The poems themselves, whether considered in categories or as individual works, are the object of attention; particular emphasis is laid on elements that might be less 'visible' to English readers who lack knowledge of Persian literature in its original forms. The aim is to define the nature, and degree, of 'Persian-ness' in nineteenth-century English poetry. The term itself has multiple and shifting associations, but one strong connecting thread may be discerned in the poems discussed: the persistence, through a period in which British encounters with 'modem' Persia were increasing in the areas of diplomacy and trade, and in which knowledge of the country's history, language, and culture was becoming more exact and more detailed, of a fantasised 'Persia', or Persian 'imaginary', compounded of ancient and in some cases mythic elements. Structurally the thesis moves from context to text, and from general to specific: it begins with the provision of necessary contextual information about Anglo-Persian contacts before the nineteenth century, moves on to survey and classify the 'Persian tendency' in poetry of the period, and then offers case-studies of three central works: Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (1853), Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat ofOmar Khayyam (1859), and Robert Browning's Ferishtah's Fancies (1884).
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Waller, Benjamin. "Metaphorical Space and Enclosure in Old English Poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/17893.
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While the political and social spaces of Old English literature are fairly well understood, this project examines the conceptual spaces in Old English poetry. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a richly metaphorical understanding of the world, not merely in the sense of artistically ornamental metaphor, but in Lakoff and Johnson's sense of conceptual metaphor, which reflects the structures of thought through which a culture understands their world. Three domains exhibit developed systems of conceptual metaphor for the Anglo-Saxons: the self, death, and the world. First, the Anglo-Saxon self is composed of four distinct entities--body, mind, soul, and a life-force--which each behave independently as they compete for control in poems like The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Soul and Body. Second, death for the Anglo-Saxon is expressed through a number of metaphors involving the status or placement of the body: removal to a distant place; separation of the body and the soul; location down on or within the earth; and the loss of life as a possession. Predominance of a particular metaphor contributes to the effects of individual poems, from The Fates of the Apostles and Beowulf to The Battle of Maldon and The Wife's Lament. Third, the Anglo-Saxon world is a large structure like a building, with its three primary components--heaven, hell, and earth--each themselves presented as building-like structures. Old English poetry, including native versions of Genesis, reveal heaven to be a protective Anglo-Saxon hall, while hell is a cold prison. The earth, in poems like Christ II and Guthlac B, is either a wide plain or a comforting house. Christ I connects these worlds through gates, including Mary, characterized as a wall-door. Finally, the apocalyptic Christ III employs metaphorical spaces for all three conceptual domains treated in this study but dramatizes their breakdown even as it reveals spatial enclosure the overarching structure of metaphorical concepts in Old English poetry.
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Runstedler, Curtis Thomas. "Alchemy and exemplary narrative in Middle English poetry." Thesis, Durham University, 2018. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12593/.
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This thesis examines the role of alchemy in Middle English poetry from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, particularly how these poems present themselves as exemplary narratives to raise moral points about human behaviour, fallibility, and alchemical experimentation. The introduction suggests the compatibility between the emergence of the vernacular exemplum and the development of alchemical practice and literature in late medieval England. I follow J. Allan Mitchell’s ‘ethics of exemplarity’ for reading the alchemical poems in this study, extending his reading of Middle English poetry to understand the exemplary and ethical values of alchemy in poetry, which in turn helps the reader to understand the good of alchemical examples in medieval literature. Reading these alchemical poems as exemplary reassesses the role of alchemy in medieval literature and provides new ways of thinking about the exemplum as a literary framework or device in Middle English poems containing alchemy. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the history of alchemy in the classical world, particularly its connection to metallurgical techniques and early theoretical developments, through to its transmission into the Arabic world before reaching late medieval Europe. The second chapter continues this history, focussing on the development of alchemy in medieval England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I examine the importance and impact of several key alchemical figures or poets who write about alchemy including Roger Bacon, William Langland, Thomas Norton, and George Ripley, as well as discussing the legal and societal responses to alchemical practice in England. These chapters contextualise the role of alchemy in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry, and explore the growing interest in writing vernacular alchemical poetry. The third chapter concentrates on John Gower’s use of alchemy in the Confessio amantis, in which it is presented as a model for ideal yet unattainable labour. Following R.F. Yeager’s reading of Gower’s ‘new exemplum’ in the Confessio amantis ̧ I suggest that Gower’s alchemical section follows this new, emerging style of vernacular exemplary writing and can also be read on its own as an exemplary narrative, which recognises alchemical failure as a post-lapsarian decline and a sign of human shortcomings. In the fourth chapter, I examine Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, linking it to Gower’s use of the ‘new exemplum’ in the previous chapter to show how alchemy can be used within an exemplary framework to make points about moral blindness and human fallibility. The Canon’s Yeoman’s unreliability and dubious nature as a narrator suggest Chaucer’s subversion of the exemplary format, yet he still uses alchemy and exemplary narrative for moral purposes. The fifth chapter of this dissertation examines an alchemical version of John Lydgate’s The Churl and the Bird found in Harley MS 2407. Following Joel Fredell’s reading of the poem and Mitchell’s exemplary reading of Lydgate’s poem, I discuss the anonymous author’s use of alchemy as subject matter within the poem, particularly its presentation as an exemplum and how these added alchemical stanzas affect its exemplary reading. The sixth and final chapter focusses upon two fifteenth-century Middle English alchemical dialogues: one between Morienus and Merlin, and the other between Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves. Through the dialogue form, the characters in these poems collaborate in their alchemical pursuits, forming the moral examples that are consistent throughout the works studied in this dissertation. These identify the ‘right path’ to moral well-being and healthy living as well as successful alchemical practice and experimentation.
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Henderson, Dave. "The medieval English begging poem." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5580.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008.The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on June 8, 2009) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Letcher, Valerie Helen. "A view of Herrick's poetic world and its values: with some reference to his fairy poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004773.
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From the preface: Herrick was a prolific poet, and a remarkably consistent one. Hesperides encompasses a lifelong collection of poems on themes as diverse as serious reflections on life's brevity and the playful examination of the minutely imagined world of the fairies, yet his vision of life remains coherent. My purpose in this study is to try to see ·Herrick's secular work in its unity and as a whole, without claiming to consider every aspect of his secular poetry. (I have not attempted, for example, to consider his classical sources.) As my interest lies mainly in his values and vision, my emphasis is on theme and tone, and the way they indicate his conception of life. For this reason, I only occasionally consider Herrick's poetic techniques, such as his versification and language, and there are no detailed analyses of individual poems which examine them from every angle. In addition, I am almost entirely concerned here with Hesperides , the secular poetry, and not with Herrick's religious verse, which is collected under the title of His Noble Numbers. (Although Herrick calls his book Hesperides: or The Works both Humane and Divine, the arrangement within is clearly a division into Hesperides, the secular poetry, and His Noble Numbers, the religious verse.)
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O'Neill, Helen Josephine. "Once preferred, now peripheral : the place of poetry in the teaching of English in the New Zealand curriculum for year 9, 10 and 11 students : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, The University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand /." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Culture, Literature and Society, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/950.
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A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his (or her) feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn't ... . It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel. e. e. cummings: 'A Poet's Advice'. (1-3, 27-28) Fifty years ago poetry was a key element in the English programme in most secondary schools. Today it is marginalised, with many teachers avoiding teaching poetry as far as possible. The consequence is a cycle of disadvantage whereby many students, never having studied, let alone attempted to write a poem in school, leave without having encountered literature at its most intense and concentrated. Since the study of poetry can also be avoided almost entirely in university English departments, such students will, in their turn, when they themselves become educators of the next generation, similarly avoid teaching poetry. This thesis investigates the pedagogical and curricular contexts within which English has been taught in New Zealand since 1945, and within which poetry has become increasingly marginal. Surveys of and interviews with students past and present, teachers and teacher-educators enable me to identify a range of reasons why this has happened, and a cycle of deprivation has developed. The thesis also identifies, however, ways in which the cycle of deprivation can be broken, and the teaching of poetry made central to the teaching of written, oral and visual language in accordance with the principles of the current New Zealand curriculum for the teaching of English.
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Watson, Katherine. "The genius and construction of our Saxon poetry: old and middle English verse." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2010. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/29224.
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Today, 'Anglo-Saxon origins, even in the educated or culturally Iiterate mind, remain a blank: nothing happened before 1066' 1. T. A. Shippey makes the point that the Anglo-Saxon world 'has no presence at all in modern life' ,2 particularly in contrast to the powerful presence of both the Viking World and the Arthurian one.3 England failed to retain or develop a flag, anthem, national symbology, etc., even in an era of violent European nationalism'.4 Why did England fail to develop an origin myth? Shippey suggests that England 'forfeited' its national identity in the nineteenth century, when 'the developing and potentially powerful image of Anglo-Saxon origins was sacrificed', and 'Englishness became an unwelcome political stance within the ''three kingdoms" of Britain and Ireland, as tending to exclude the non-English among Queen Victoria's subjects'; while 'the "invention" of Scottish, Welsh and lrish tradition was encouraged as compensation for progressive loss of independence and erosion of the Celtic anguages' .5 Walter Scott and many others 'created an image of co-operative British history which played a major part in reconciling contemporary Britons to British politics and the English language' .6
My aim is to examine this phenomenon in relation to England's literature, specifically its poetry. The forfeiture of Anglo-Saxon origins is apparent in the history of English poetry today, but the genesis of this history is located not in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth, in Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry. The present work examines the mechanisms which led to the omission of Old English poetry from Warton's History, and how this omission has affected the way we think about the origins of English poetry today.
Specifically, it is still widely held that English poetry began with Chaucer, and that there was a gap in poetry produced in England, between the 'Saxon' poetry produced by the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest, and the 'English' poetry which emerged - transformed by French prosody- two centuries or so after the Conquest. For this reason, the particular focus of the present work will be on poetry produced during the late Anglo-Saxon and Early Middle English periods, and how the prosody of that poetry has been theorised, both in the early nineteenth century, when it was first noticed, and today. As David Matthews has explained, the idea of Middle English was not invented until the 1870s, and 'even when scholars began agreeing' that there was a middle between Saxon and English, 'they did not agree on where exactly it occurred'. In these 'conditions of uncertainty', he argues, 'different ideologies could stake
different claims' .7
Although Matthews refers to the question of where the English language began, the same conditions of uncertainty applied to literature, and the question of where English poetry began has still not been resolved unanimously today. This 'diversity' of texts is still troubling to theorists today. For instance, it is still widely held that the Anglo-Saxons did not use rhyme. (This issue is a major focus of Part 3.)
The thesis of this work is that Old English verse did not die: there is no discontinuity of verse forms occurring at the time of the Norman Conquest. The dissertation presents a substantial reconsideration of a classic controversy, providing fresh perspective, in a context of reception histories relating to national and cultural identity, and with particular focus on developing ideas about prosody in medieval English verse. It presents Old and Middle English verse texts in a new way, collecting in appendices a comprehensive set of verse pieces from both periods which combine the use of alliteration and rhyme.
The approach taken focuses on the reception of early English verse and offers an analytical account of critical opinion across three centuries, tracking primary material and providing historical analysis of how critical views developed and influenced each other over a long period. There is an examination of the commonly held view that there is a break in the tradition of English poetry at the end of the Old English period and that when English poetry resumes, after a gap of a couple of centuries, its poetic forms are derived from French rather than earlier English models. In particular Old English poetry has been seen as based solely on alliteration and Middle English poetry on rhyme. An obvious problem with this view is the existence of a substantial body of alliterative poetry in the later Middle English period which has obvious similarities to Old English alliterative poetry. The processes by which the notion of a discontinuity between Old and Middle English poetry developed are explained, in particular how a tendency to ignore rhyme in Old English and explain away alliteration in Middle English has contributed to the development of this notion.
Part 1 traces the beginnings of commentary about Old English verse in the eighteenth century, when the understanding of Old English verse was uncertain and it was generally taken to be Danish in character, amounting to a refusal to regard it as English at all. The most influential text of the period, Warton's History of English Poetry, set the beginnings of English poetry at the Conquest.
Part 2 focuses on the growing understanding of Old English and Middle English verse in the early nineteenth century, characterised particularly by conflict between the scholars involved, and argues that the work of the influential antiquarian Thomas Wright recapitulated and fostered the old eighteenth-century position.
However, the main work of the dissertation is carried out in Part 3, which presents criticisms of the persistence in the twentieth century of the model of discontinuity and the idea of the 'death' of English verse at the hands of the Normans. It is shown that rhyme was present in Old English poetry and that the alliterative poetry of the Middle English period follows from an Old English tradition; and a case is made that Lawman should not be seen as a man who had lost the secret of Old English verse. lt is further demonstrated that even the key figure, J.P. Oakden, who began by assuming the death of alliterative verse, had to acknowledge ultimately that native English alliterative fom1s did not die.
Since it is the thesis of this dissertation that there is no significant boundary between Old and Middle English verse, the terms 'Old English' and 'Middle English' become problematic. In general I have used the term 'Old English' as it is generally used, to refer to the body of vernacular verse produced in England prior to the Norman Conquest, but the terms 'Saxon' and' Anglo-Saxon' sometimes refer to verse produced up until the thirteenth century.
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Karadas, Firat. "Imagination, Metaphor And Mythopoeia In The Poetry Of Three Major English Romantic Poets." Phd thesis, METU, 2007. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12608579/index.pdf.
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This thesis studies metaphor, myth and their imaginative aspects in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. The thesis argues that a comprehensive understanding of metaphor and myth cannot be done in the works of these poets without seeing them as faces of the same coin, and taking into consideration the role of the creating subject and its imagination in their production. Relying on Kantian, Romantic, and modern Neo-Kantian ideas of imagination, metaphor and myth, the study tries to indicate that imagination is an inherently metaphorizing and mythologizing faculty because the act of perception is an act of giving form to natural phenomena and seeing similitude in dissimilitude, which are basically metaphorical and mythological acts. In its form-giving activity the imagination of the speaking subjects of the poems studied in this thesis sees objects of nature as spiritual, animate or divine beings and thus transforms them into the alien territory of myth. This thesis analyzes myth and metaphor mainly in two regards: first, myth and metaphor are handled as inborn aspects of imagination and perception, and the interaction between nature and imagination are presented as the origin of all mythologysecond, to show how myth is something that is re-created time and again by poetic imagination, Romantic mythography and re-creation of precursor mythologies are analyzed. In both regards, poetic imagination appears as a formative power that constructs, defamiliarizes and re-creates via mythologization and metaphorization.
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Haraldsson, Kim. "The Poetic Classroom : Teaching Poetry in English Language Courses in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för lärarutbildning (LUT), 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-15732.
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This study aims at shedding some light on teachers’ attitudes and views on poetry as a part of English language studies. More specifically, it intends to explore whether there is support for the generally preconceived idea that poetry’s role in today’s language studies has diminished. This essay presents previous research regarding the development of poetry teaching in classrooms and the importance of reading poetry. Thereafter it includes a smaller qualitative survey, which was sent out to teachers in Swedish upper secondary schools, on their views concerning poetry and its incorporation in their courses, as well as reasons behind their choices. Although the study did not receive enough answers to warrant general conclusions on how teachers in Halland view poetry, the results do show tendencies toward a view of poetry as being strenuous to work with due to students’ resistance and negative attitudes. Moreover, that poetry is one area of English language studies that the majority of teachers view as less important. Furthermore, the results reveal that a teacher’s personal interest in poetry, or lack of interest, affects the amount of time and focus placed on poetry in the classrooms.
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McGrane, Paul Steven. "The genesis of Clough's poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:18be6cf8-b6fd-469e-8c88-5a1ae59b56ac.
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This thesis examines the early poetry of Clough, written between 1830 and 1841, in the light of the information about his personal and intellectual life provided by published and unpublished manuscripts, essays, letters and diaries. More specifically, it sets out to determine the degree to which the seeds (thematic and formal) of Clough’s more mature work can be discerned in the earlier. Chapter One discusses the influence of Clough’s childhood reading, and particularly the heroic ideal as encouraged by his mother. It traces the way this developed, particularly under the historical ideas of Thomas Arnold and the Liberal Anglicans, and the fatalistic moral problems this created. Chapter Three considers Clough’s responses to the Oxford Movement. It teases out those elements that attracted Clough and those he came to reject, particularly in the light of Tractarian ideas about reserve, in relation to poetry, truth and personal behaviour. Chapters Two and Four provide chronological, text-by-text accounts of the Rugby and Balliol poems respectively, offering judgments about influences, dates and sources, and interpretations in the light of Chapters One and Three respectively. Chapter Two argues that much of the Rugby poetry reflects an escapist lament for the past and a failure of will to restore it. Chapter Three argues that Clough’s engagement with Tractarian ideas about reserved truth provides the key context for many of these poems. Chapter Five traces the way in which Clough’s early poetics, derived from Wordsworth via Thomas Arnold, were gradually replaced by his more mature, ambiguous approach which also emerged from his encounters with Tractarian reserve. Two appendices collect ten poems and poetic fragments omitted from Mulhauser’s standard edition; three additional variant texts for poems included by Mulhauser; and four previously unpublished letters to Clough from his friend WilliamTylden.
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Van, Zant Melissa G. "Partnering with poetry: poetry in American education standards from 1971-2010." Diss., Kansas State University, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/38219.
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Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Curriculum and Instruction
F. Todd Goodson
American education is increasingly driven by standards and high-stakes tests. This creates a dynamic in which curricular content addressed in the standards will be subjected to high-stakes tests while that not addressed in the standards risks being ignored. Such a dynamic threatens poetry—a subject whose strength resides in its ambiguity instead of one correct answer. The literature review establishes poetry as an important area of study for K-12 students and explores how the Standards Movement has affected poetry instruction in other English-speaking countries. This research used context-sensitive textual analysis to examine the treatment of poetry in American English language arts standards from 1971 to 2010 as demonstrated in the following three documents: (1) Representative Performance Objectives for High School English written by the Tri-University Project in 1971, (2) Standards for the English Language Arts written by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association in 1996, and (3) the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts written in 2010. Context-sensitive textual analysis (Huckin, 1992) presumes that the contexts in which texts are written and read impact their meanings. The study describes those impacts, their implications, and suggestions for continued study.
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Holmgren, Michele J. "Native muses and national poetry, nineteenth-century Irish-Canadian poets." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq28493.pdf.
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Curdy, Averill. "From the lost correspondence : poems /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3164499.
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Hildebrandt, Leonore S. "A Small Discovery." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2004. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/HildebrandtLS2004.pdf.
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Daniels, Rosemary. "Women's place in men's poetry: The creation of a beata femina in women's poetry of the eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/29093.
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This dissertation examines a group of female writers in the eighteenth century, the Countess of Winchilsea, Sarah Fyge, Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Anna Barbauld, who reconfigured elements of an authoritative generic mode, the georgic. In undertaking this reconfiguration these women developed their own distinctive tradition of verse which I describe as a portrayal of a beata femina . The poetry of the beata femina acknowledges the separate sphere to which eighteenth-century mores restricted women and privileges the life of that sphere. Thus the narrative of the beatus vir is not figured as an appeal to rural retirement so much as a gendered escape from a male dominated world into a female life of the mind. The traditional affirmation of the georgic labour of the estate is transformed into a testimony of domestic labour. The country-house poem is rewritten to celebrate the women who give it life, while the topographical survey is reordered as a means for women to survey their own narratives.
However, the most significant way in which these women establish a sense of a beata femina within georgically inflected verse is through their employment of time. Women's poetry in this mode self-consciously rejects both the seasonal cycles and sense of historic progression associated with the georgic. Instead, women describe short periods of time within their quotidian lives in which they experience pleasure, connect to nature or other women, and, often, achieve transcendent experiences which seem to stand outside time.
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Brigatti, Federico. "The Old English Judith : sources, analysis and context." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.340760.
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Khan, Nosheen. "Women's poetry of the First World War." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1986. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66938/.
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This thesis seeks to study women's poetic response to the First World War a hitherto neglected area of the literature inspired by the war. It attempts to retrieve from oblivion the experience of the muted half of society as rendered in verse and document as far as possible the full range of the poetic impact the war made upon female sensibility. It is thematic in structure and concentrates upon the more recurrent of attitudes and beliefs which surface in women's war writings. The thematic structure was adopted to cover as wide a range as possible of the ways the historical experience could be met and interpreted in literature. This study takes into account the work of the established writers of the period as well as the amateur versifiers who made war their subject. The first chapter discusses verse which defines the nature of war as apprehended by the female consciousness. Chapter Two examines the poets' use of religious concept and image to lend meaning and purpose to an event entirely at variance with the ideals employed to explain it. The third chapter considers the exploitation of the perennial poetic subject of nature to interpret war by accommodating it into the language and thought of an apparently alien literary tradition. War as it impinged upon the consciousness of people on the Home Front is discussed in Chapter Four; it is partly concerned with revising the calumnious images of women in war time as set out by the soldier poets. Chapter Five looks into the writing of those women who wrote out of their experience of working in the various organisations which were an integral part of the machinery of warfare. War as an experience of suffering - suffering peculiar to the female - defines Chapter Six. The purpose of this study has been to suggest the variety of literary responses to the First World War by those who, at great cost, produce the primal munition of war - men - with which their destinies are inextricably ,linked. As part of a response to a particular historical event, the literary interpretation of which has conditioned modern war consciousness, women's war poetry is not without relevance for it adds a new dimension to the established canon of war literature and correspondingly a new vista to understanding the truth of war.
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Williamson, Paul. "The metaphysical basis of mid eighteenth-century English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314489.
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Sharma, Manish. "Movement and space as metaphor in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.620160.
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Cavell, Megan Colleen. "Representations of weaving and binding in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610453.
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馮陳善奇 and Sydney S. K. Fung. "The poetry of Han-shan in English: a culturalapproach." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2001. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31224386.
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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.
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