Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Epic literature, Irish – History and criticism'
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Turner, Kerry Lynn. "Pagan Nostalgia and Anti-Clerical Hostility in Medieval Irish Literature." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1008344167.
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Turner, Robert Charles Grey. "Counterfeit culture : truth and authenticity in the American prose epic since 1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709455.
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Maxedon, Tom. "A course portfolio, what is "Irishness?" : surveying Ireland's struggle to define a unified national identity, depicted in the country's literature from 1801-present." Virtual Press, 1996. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1027119.
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The purpose of this creative project was to advance scholarship in areas suffering a lack of attention by Ball State University. Exploring a broader scope of Irish writing than most theses would cover, this project could easily be incorporated by other universities which share Ball State's departmental impotence with regard to Irish literary studies. I chose a time frame of two-hundred years to focus attention for this course.My directed readings from my project chairperson and my research at the Dublin Writers Museum led me to the design of this hypothetical course in contemporary Irish Literary Studies. I chose texts from 1801-Present which examine the varied cultural assumptions that various sects of the Irish citizenry hold, as depicted in their literature. What I found is that as time progresses, the emphasis toward violent preservation of cultural identity increases literally. This portfolio maps out those assumptions via Irish literature.Department of English
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Naraghi, Akhtar. "The images of women in western and eastern epic literature : an analysis in three major epics, The Shahnameh, The Iliad and The Odyssey." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=70325.
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The central thesis of this work is twofold: (1) contrary to the images perpetuated in works of criticism, there exists no sustained misogyny in the text of exemplar epics by Ferdowsi and Homer, or antagonism toward women rooted in the poets' attitude, and (2) using the principle of androcentric (rather than gynocentric) feminist literary theory we have tried to prove the existence of a "systematic inconsistency" in the roles and images assigned to the women of The Shahnameh, the Iliad, and Odyssey. We have identified the presence of a double structure concerning the question of women. Instead of endlessly praising the female characters, or fully condemning the portrayal of such figures, we have instead tried to turn the issues around and examined opposed aspects in female roles and images. We have examined the conflict of opposites and the systematic inconsistency within each text in which a double structure splits the female image in two directions: one force is represented by exalted, praiseworthy, and positive images endowing women with powerful characteristics such as prowess, courage, wisdom, insight, fearlessness, and a host of other attributes. Yet within the same text, the same woman, through another force, is not only relegated to a subservient role, but also finds imposed upon her the condition of not being taken seriously, severe handicaps regarding her full integration in the social fabric of the story, and not being allowed to use her considerable abilities. Within this paradoxical double structure, it is not that one structure eventually cancels out the other, rather the coexistence of both structures in the same work results in the readers' suspension between the conclusions each of them separately urges.The dichotomy in the characterization of women in epic literature is not limited to a single culture; a consistent thread runs through the universal inconsistency in the make-up of women in epic. The thread runs across the border between the East and the West, wherever that border may be drawn on the map geographically, historically, or culturally.
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Machado-Matheson, Anna-Maria. "Madness as penance in medieval Gaelic sources : a study of biblical and hagiographical influences on the depiction of Suibne, Lailoken and Mór of Munster." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609646.
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Macbeth, Georgia School of Theatre Film & Dance UNSW. "A Plurality of Identities: Ulster Protestantism in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Theatre, Film and Dance, 1999. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/33257.
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This thesis examines the ways in which Ulster Protestant identity has been explored in contemporary Northern Irish drama. The insecurity of the political and cultural status of Ulster Protestants from the Home Rule Crises up until Partition led to the construction and maintenance of a distinct and unified Ulster Protestant identity. This identity was defined by concepts such as loyalty, industriousness and ???Britishness???. It was also defined by a perceived opposite ??? the Catholicism, disloyalty and ???Irishness??? of the Republic. When the Orange State began to fragment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so did notions of this singular Ulster Protestant identity. With the onset of the Troubles in 1969 came a parallel questioning and subversion of this identity in Northern Irish drama. This was a process which started with Sam Thompson???s Over the Bridge in 1960, but which began in earnest with Stewart Parker???s Spokesong in 1975. This thesis examines Parker???s approach and subsequent approaches by other dramatists to the question of Ulster Protestant identity. It begins with the antithetical pronouncements of Field Day Theatre Company, which were based in an inherently Northern Nationalist ideology. Here, the Ulster Protestant community was largely ignored or essentialised. Against this Northern Nationalist ideology represented by Field Day have come broadly revisionist approaches, reflecting the broader cultural context of this thesis. Ulster Protestant identity has been explored through issues of history and myth, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. More recent explorations of Ulster Protestantism have also added to this diversity by presenting the little acknowledged viewpoint of extreme loyalism. Dramatists examined in this thesis include Stewart Parker, Christina Reid, Frank McGuinness, Bill Morrison, Ron Hutchinson, Marie Jones, Graham Reid, Robin Glendinning and Gary Mitchell. The work of Charabanc Theatre Company is also discussed. What results from their efforts is a diverse and complex Ulster Protestant community. This thesis argues that the concept of a singular Ulster Protestant identity, defined by its loyalty and Britishness, is fragmented, leading to a plurality of Ulster Protestant identities.
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Hopper, Keith. "Imagining otherwise : Neil Jordan's counter-narratives." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669873.
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Dixon, Marzena M. "The structure and rhetoric of twentieth-century British children's fantasy." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14858.
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This thesis discusses twentieth century children's fantasy fiction. The writers whose creative output is dealt with include Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Pat O'Shea, Peter Dickinson, T.H.White, Lloyd Alexander and, to a lesser extent, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien. These authors have been chosen because their books, whilst being of a broadly similar nature, nevertheless have a sufficient diversity to illustrate well many different important aspects of children's fantasy. Chapter I examines the sources of modern fantasy, presents the attitudes of different authors towards borrowing from traditional sources and their reasons for doing so, and looks at the changing interpretation of myths. Chapter II talks about the presentation of the primary and secondary worlds and the ways in which they interact. It also discusses the characters' attitudes towards magic. Chapter III looks at the presentation of magic, examines the traditional fairy-tale conventions and their implementation in modern fantasies, and discusses the concepts of evil, time, and the laws governing fantasy worlds. Chapter IV deals with the methods of narration and the figure of the narrator. It presents briefly the prevailing plot patterns, discusses the use of different kinds of language, and the ideas of pan-determinism and prophecy. The concluding chapter considers the main subjects and aims of children's fantasy, the reasons why the genre is so popular, and its successes and failures.
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Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.
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Walters, Coenraad Hendrik. "Vervreemding, patronaat en tuiskoms : die Gilgamesj-epos vir Afrikaanse kinderlesers." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86499.
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Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest recorded story known to humanity. It has a long and complex textual history. The final version of the epic, generally known as the standard version, was produced about 1200 B.C. in the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian by a priest and scribe named Sin-leqi-unninni. The cuneiform tablets upon which the epic was recorded, were rediscovered during the nineteenth century when European archaeologists started digging in the ancient cities of the Middle East, especially Nineveh. Since then the story has been translated into many languages; several English translations have been published. Some of these translations of the epic maintain epic poetic form, others are in prose, and there are a number of versions for children. At the moment no complete version exists in Afrikaans. This thesis presents a translation of parts from Geraldine McCaughrean's English children's version, which was published in 2002. McCaughrean adapts the structure of the standard version, clearly a strategy to make her text exciting for modern readers. The theoretical insights of André Lefevere and Lawrence Venuti form the paradigm for the translation process. Lefevere sees translation as one of a number of rewriting techniques. The detail of such a rewriting is determined by the poetics of the target culture, the patronage which enables such a translation to exist, and the ideological framework within which the rewriting develops. Venuti distinguishes between two translational approaches: a domesticating translation adapts the translation to the target culture and creates the impression with readers that they are reading an original text; foreignising translation makes the readers aware that they are reading a text from another culture. The opportunities and limitations of children's literature and translation for children are explored. Specific attention is given to taboo topics, as a number of these appears in the Gilgamesh Epic. The writers of the children's versions have solved these problems in different ingenious ways. Annotations shed light on the translational challenges and the decisions of the translator. Finally the whole project is evaluated and suggestions for further research are made.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die Gilgamesj-epos is die mensdom se oudste opgetekende verhaal. Dit het ‘n lang en komplekse ontstaansgeskiedenis. Die finale variant van die epos, wat algemeen bekend staan as die standaardweergawe, is ongeveer 1200 v.C. in Babiloniese Akkadies geskryf deur ‘n skriba-priester genaamd Sin-leqi-unninni. Die spykerskriftablette waarop dit opgeteken is, is gedurende die negentiende eeu herontdek tydens argeologiese opgrawings van die verwoeste antieke stede in die Midde-Ooste, veral Nineve. Sedertdien is die verhaal in verskeie tale vertaal; daar bestaan etlike vertalings in Engels. Hierdie vertalings van die epos word soms aangebied as epiese gedig, in ander gevalle in prosavorm, en daar bestaan ook ‘n paar verskillende weergawes vir kinders. Daar bestaan tans egter geen volledige weergawe in Afrikaans nie. Hierdie tesis bied ‘n vertaling van dele uit een van die Engelse kinderweergawes, dié van Geraldine McCaughrean, wat in 2002 verskyn het. McCaughrean pas die struktuur van die standaardweergawe aan, ‘n duidelike strategie om haar teks vir hedendaagse lesers opwindend te maak. Die teoretiese insigte van André Lefevere en Lawrence Venuti vorm die raamwerk vir die vertaalproses. Lefevere beskou vertaling as een van ‘n hele aantal tegnieke van herskrywing. Die besonderhede van so ‘n herskrywing word bepaal deur die poetika van die doelkultuur, die patronaat wat die herskrywing moontlik maak, en die ideologiese raamwerk waarbinne die herskrywing ontstaan. Venuti onderskei tussen twee vertaalbenaderings: ‘n domestikerende vertaling pas die vertaalde teks sterk aan by die doelkultuur sodat lesers van die vertaling onder die indruk gebring word dat hulle ‘n oorspronklike teks lees; en vervreemdende vertaling, waarin die lesers bewus is dat hulle ‘n teks uit ‘n ander kultuur lees. Die moontlikhede en beperkinge van kinderliteratuur en vertalings vir kinderlesers word ondersoek. Spesifieke aandag word geskenk aan taboe-onderwerpe, waarvan ‘n hele paar in die Gilgamesj-epos voorkom, en hoe die skeppers van die kinderweergawes hierdie probleme opgelos het. Annotasies belig die vertaaluitdagings en die vertaler se keuses. Ten slotte word die projek as geheel geëvalueer en voorstelle vir verdere navorsing verskaf.
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Sipley, Tristan Hardy 1980. "Second nature: Literature, capital and the built environment, 1848--1938." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10911.
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x, 255 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation examines transatlantic, and especially American, literary responses to urban and industrial change from the 1840s through the 1930s. It combines cultural materialist theory with environmental history in order to investigate the interrelationship of literature, economy, and biophysical systems. In lieu of a traditional ecocritical focus on wilderness preservation and the accompanying literary mode of nature writing, I bring attention to reforms of the "built environment" and to the related category of social problem fiction, including narratives of documentary realism, urban naturalism, and politically-oriented utopianism. The novels and short stories of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and Mike Gold offer an alternative history of environmental writing, one that foregrounds the interaction between nature and labor. Through a strategy of "literal reading" I connect the representation of particular environments in the work of these authors to the historical situation of actual spaces, including the western Massachusetts forest of Melville's "Tartarus of Maids," the Virginia factory town of Davis's Iron Mills, the Midwestern hinterland of Sinclair's The Jungle, and the New York City ghetto of Gold's Jews without Money. Even as these texts foreground the class basis of environmental hazard, they simultaneously display an ambivalence toward the physical world, wavering between pastoral celebrations and gothic vilifications of nature, and condemning ecological destruction even as they naturalize the very socio-economic forces responsible for such calamity. Following Raymond Williams, I argue that these contradictory treatments of nature have a basis in the historical relationship between capitalist society and the material world. Fiction struggles to contain or resolve its implication in the very culture that destroys the land base it celebrates. Thus, the formal fissures and the anxious eruptions of nature in fiction relate dialectically to the contradictory position of the ecosystem itself within the regime of industrial capital. However, for all of this ambivalence, transatlantic social reform fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century provides a model for an environmentally-oriented critical realist aesthetic, an aesthetic that retains suspicion toward representational transparency, and yet simultaneously asserts the didactic, ethical, and political functions of literature.
Committee in charge: William Rossi, Chairperson, English; Henry Wonham, Member, English; Enrique Lima, Member, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; John Foster, Outside Member, Sociology
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Clark, Amy Ruth Wilson. "Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl novels: Contemporary subversive tales." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2006. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2986.
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Drawing especially on Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg, this thesis argues that Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl novels, through their depiction of the cyborg and their use of metafiction, intertextuality, and irony, subvert binaries and hierarchies that cause social injustice. Chapter one argues that Colfer's characters disrupt the oppressive binary opposition between innocence and experience that characterizes children's literature. Chapter two argues that Colfer's fairy hierarchy satirizes the human hierarchy. Chapter three argues that Colfer's cyborg, by disrupting the boundary between machine and organism, breaches the wall around the pervasive garden hierarchy of childhood innocence. Chapter four argues against the traditional textual hierarchies which classify children's literature as inferior, and which give adult writers power over child readers.
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Schubert, Layla A. Olin 1975. "Material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10909.
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x, 208 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.The scattered instances depicting material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry should be regarded as a group. This phenomenon occurs in Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Husband's Message. Comparative examples of material literature can be found on the Ruthwell Cross and the Franks Casket. This study examines material literature in these three poems, comparing their depictions of material literature to actual examples. Poems depicting material literature bring the relationship between man and object into dramatic play, using the object's point of view to bear witness to the truth of distant or intensely personal events. Material literature is depicted in a love poem, The Husband's Message, when a prosopopoeic runestick vouches for the sincerity of its master, in the heroic epic Beowulf when an ancient, inscribed sword is the impetus to give an account of the biblical flood, and is also implied in the devotional poem The Dream of the Rood, as two crosses both pre-and-post dating the poem bear texts similar to portions of the poem. The study concludes by examining the relationship between material anxiety and the character of Weland in Beowulf, Deor, Alfred's Consolation of Philosophy, and Waldere A & B. Concern with materiality in Anglo-Saxon poetry manifests in myriad ways: prosopopoeic riddles, both heroic and devotional passages directly assailing the value of the material, personification of objects, and in depictions of material literature. This concern manifests as a material anxiety. Weland tames the material and twists and shapes it, re-affirming the supremacy of mankind in a material world.
Committee in charge: Martha Bayless, Chairperson, English; James Earl, Member, English; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology
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Roy, Sneharika. "The Migrating Epic Muse : conventions, Contraventions, and Complicities in the Transnational Epics of Herman Melville, Derek Walcott, and Amitav Ghosh." Thesis, Paris 3, 2013. http://www.theses.fr/2013PA030108.
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Cette thèse propose une lecture croisée des épopées traditionnelles et postcoloniales dans un cadre transculturel. Une analyse comparée de Moby Dick de Herman Melville, Omeros de Derek Walcott et la trilogie de l’Ibis d’Amitav Ghosh nous permet de cerner spécificités de l’épopée moderne postcoloniale. Celle-ci s’inscrit dans la lignée des épopées traditionnelles d’Homère, Virgile, Arioste, Camões et Milton, tout en rivalisant avec elles. Les épopées traditionnelles et modernes ont recours à des conventions qui esthétisent l’expérience collective comme les comparaisons épiques, la généalogie présentée sous forme de prophétie et la mise en abyme ekphrastique. L’épopée traditionnelle met en avant la vision d’une société unifiée grâce à des conjonctions harmonieuses entre le trope et la diégèse, des continuités généalogiques entre l’ancêtre et le descendant ainsi que des associations autoréflexives ekphrastiques entre l’histoire impériale et le texte qui la glorifie. Dans cette perspective, la spécificité de l’épopée postcoloniale semble résider dans l’articulation ambivalente de la condition postcoloniale. Ainsi, chez Melville, Walcott et Ghosh, le style héroï-comique contrebalance les comparaisons épiques opérant des transfigurations héroïques. De même, de nouvelles affiliations hybrides forgées par les personnages coexistent avec des généalogies discontinues, sans en combler toutes les lacunes créées par le déracinement et la violence coloniale. Cette vision équivoque trouve son expression la plus franche dans les séquences ekphrastiques où les textes sont confrontés au choix impossible entre commémoration de l’expérience et regard critique vis-à-vis d’elleThis thesis offers collocational readings of traditional and postcolonial epics in transcultural frameworks. It investigates the specificities of modern postcolonial epic through a comparative analysis of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. It explores how these works emulate, but also rival, the traditional epics of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Camões, and Milton. Both traditional and postcolonial epic rely on generic conventions in order to aestheticize collective experience, setting it against the natural world (via epic similes), against history and imperial destiny (via genealogy and prophecy), and against the epic work itself (via ekphrasis). However, traditional epic emphasizes a unified worldview, characterized by harmonious conjunctions between trope and diegesis, genealogical continuities between ancestor and descendant, and self-reflexive ekphrastic associations between imperial history and the epic text commissioned to glorify it. From this perspective, the specificity of postcolonial epic can be formulated in terms of its ambivalent articulation of the postcolonial condition. In the works of Melville, Walcott, and Ghosh, tropes of heroic transfiguration are held in check by the mock-heroic, while empowering self-adopted hybrid affiliations co-exist, but cannot entirely compensate for, discontinuous genealogies marked by displacement, deracination, and colonial violence. This ambivalence finds its most powerful expression in the ekphrastic sequences where the postcolonial texts are most directly confronted with the impossible choice between commemorating experience and being critical of such commemoration
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Mercurio, Jeremiah Romano. "Fantasy as a mode in British and Irish literary decadence, 1885–1925." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1964.
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This Ph. D. thesis investigates the use of fantasy by British and Irish 'Decadent' authors and illustrators, including Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, 'Vernon Lee' (Violet Paget), Ernest Dowson, and Charles Ricketts. Furthermore, this study demonstrates why fantasy was an apposite form for literary Decadence, which is defined in this thesis as a supra-generic mode characterized by its anti-mimetic impulse, its view of language as autonomous and artificial, its frequent use of parody and pastiche, and its transgression of boundaries between art forms. Literary Decadence in the United Kingdom derives its view of autonomous language from Anglo-German Romantic philology and literature, consequently being distinguished from French Decadence by its resistance to realism and Naturalism, which assume language's power to signify the 'real world'. Understanding language to be inorganic, Decadent writers blithely countermand notions of linguistic fitness and employ devices such as catachresis, paradox, and tautology, which in turn emphasize the self-referentiality of Decadent texts. Fantasy furthers the Decadent argument about language because works of fantasy bear no specific relationship to 'reality'; they can express anything evocable within language, as J.R.R. Tolkien demonstrates with his example of "the green sun" (a phrase that can exist independent of the sun's actually being green). The thesis argues that fantasy's usefulness in underscoring arguments about linguistic autonomy explains its widespread presence in Decadent prose and visual art, especially in genres that had become associated with realism and Naturalism, such as the novel (Chapter 1), the short story (Chapter 3), drama (Chapter 4), and textual illustration (Chapter 2). The thesis also analyzes Decadents' use of a wholly non-realistic genre, the fairy tale (see Chapter 5), in order to delineate the consequences of their use of fantasy for the construction of character and gender within their texts.
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Witen, Michelle Lynn. "Perceiving in registers : the condition of absolute music in James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669882.
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Hutton-Williams, Francis Brent. "Irish cultural politics, Thomas McGreevy and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1941." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c6fbe4ba-3908-4e45-a012-00fa766cd1eb.
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This thesis analyses the responses of Irish writers and painters to a phase of national self-assertion that had arguably lost its liberating potential. It shows how the exhaustion of revolutionary pressures in Ireland after independence complicates the ties between creative activity and political activism. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship within political theory, literary criticism and art history, I chart an emerging network of literary and artistic techniques that confronts the representational aesthetics of the nation with strategies of paradox, reversal and renewal. My readings of the work of Denis Devlin, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Mainie Jellett, Jack Butler Yeats and, in particular, Thomas McGreevy, provide a means by which to distinguish other cultural possibilities that were imagined and pursued from 1922 to 1941, including McGreevy’s own aspiration to remould 'A Cultural Irish Republic'. The thesis argues that Ireland's political and artistic avant-garde were forcibly divided during this period: two factions that had been split apart by the effects of civil war and censorship. As such it will be preoccupied with a central question: how to sustain cultural strategies of revolutionary significance when the frontier between creative activity and political activism can no longer be straightforwardly crossed.
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Hanan, Rachel Ann 1978. "Words in the world: The place of literature in Early Modern England." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11156.
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ix, 268 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number."Words in the World" details the ways that the place of rhetoric and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changes in response to the transition from natural philosophy to Cartesian mechanism. In so doing, it also offers a constructive challenge to today's environmental literary criticism, challenging environmental literary critics' preoccupation with themes of nature and, by extension, with representational language. Reading authors from Thomas More to Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson through changes in physics, cartography, botany, and zoology, "Words in the World" argues that literature occupies an increasingly separate place from the real world. "Place" in this context refers to spatiotemporal dimensions, taxonomic affiliations, and the relationships between literature and the physical world. George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), for instance, limits the way that rhetoric is part of the world to the ways that it can be numbered (meter, rhyme scheme, and so forth); metaphor and other tropes, however, are duplicitous. In contrast, for an earlier era of natural philosophers, tropes were the grammar of the universe. "Words in the World" culminates with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621/1651), in which the product of literature's split from the physical world is literary melancholy. Turning to today's environmental literary criticism, the dissertation thus historicizes ecocriticism's nostalgic melancholy for the extratextual physical world. Indeed, Early Modern authors' inquiries into the place of literature and the relationships between that place and the physical world in terms of literary forms and structures, suggests the importance of ecoformalism to Early Modern scholarship. In particular, this dissertation argues that Early Modern authors treat literary structures as types of performative language. This dissertation revises the standard histories of Early Modern developments in rhetoric and of the literary text, and it provides new insight into the materiality of literary form.
Committee in charge: Lisa Freinkel, Chairperson, English; William Rossi, Member, English; George Rowe, Member, English; Ted Toadvine, Outside Member, Philosophy
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Kaplan, Stacey Meredith 1973. "The modern(ist) short form: Containing class in early 20th century literature and film." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10574.
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ix, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.My dissertation analyzes the overlooked short works of authors and auteurs who do not fit comfortably into the conventional category of modernism due to their subtly experimental aesthetics: the versatile British author Vita Sackville-West, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen, and the British emigrant filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. I focus on the years 1920-1923 to gain an alternative understanding of modernism's annus mirabulus and the years immediately preceding and following it. My first chapter studies the most critically disregarded author of the project: Sackville-West. Her 1922 volume of short stories The Heir: A Love Story deserves attention for its examination of social hierarchies. Although her stories ridicule characters regardless of their class background, those who attempt to change their class status, especially when not sanctioned by heredity, are treated with the greatest contempt. The volume, with the reinforcement of the contracted short form, advocates staying within given class boundaries. The second chapter analyzes social structures in Bowen's first book of short stories, Encounters (1922). Like Sackville-West, Bowen's use of the short form complements her interest in how class hierarchies can confine characters. Bowen's portraits of classed encounters and of characters' encounters with class reveal a sense of anxiety over being confined by social status and a sense of displacement over breaking out of class groups, exposing how class divisions accentuate feelings of alienation and instability. The last chapter examines Chaplin's final short films: "The Idle Class" (1921), "Pay Day (1922), and "The Pilgrim" (1923). While placing Chaplin among the modernists complicates the canon in a positive way, it also reduces the complexity of this man and his art. Chaplin is neither a pyrotechnic modernist nor a traditional sentimentalist. Additionally, Chaplin's shorts are neither socially liberal nor conservative. Rather, Chaplin's short films flirt with experimental techniques and progressive class politics, presenting multiple perspectives on the thematic of social hierarchies. But, in the end, his films reinforce rather than overthrow traditional artistic forms and hierarchical ideas. Studying these artists elucidates how the contracted space of the short form produces the perfect room to present a nuanced portrayal of class.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Michael Aronson, Member, English; Mark Quigley, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
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Malamis, Daniel Scott Christos. "The justice of Dikê on the forms and significance of dispute settlement by arbitration in the Iliad." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002162.
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This thesis explores the forms and significance of dispute settlement by arbitration, or ‘δίκη’, in the Iliad. I take as my focus the ‘storm simile’ of Iliad XVI: 384-393, which describes Zeus’ theodical reaction to corruption within the δίκη-court, and the ‘shield trial’ of Iliad XVIII: 498-508, which presents a detailed picture of such a court in action, and compare the forms and conception of arbitration that emerge from these two ecphrastic passages with those found in the narrative body of the poem. Analysing the terminology and procedures associated with dispute settlement in the Iliad, I explore the evidence for the development of an ‘ideology of δίκη’, that valorises arbitrated settlement as a solution to conflict, and that identifies δίκη as a procedure and a civic institution with an objective standard of fairness: the foundation of a civic concept of ‘justice’. I argue that this ideology is fully articulated in the storm simile and the shield trial, as well as Hesiod’s Works and Days, but that it is also detectable in the narrative body of the Iliad. I further argue that the poet of the Iliad employs references to this ideology, through the narrative media of speech and ecphrasis, to prompt and direct his audience’s evaluation of the nature and outcome of the poem’s central conflict: the dispute of Achilles and Agamemnon.
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Sturgeon, Sinéad. "Law & literature in the writings of Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, and James Clarence Mangan." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711601.
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Wardell, Kathryn Brenna. "The rake's progress: Masculinities on stage and screen." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11457.
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viii, 261 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.My dissertation analyzes the rake, the libertine male, a figure whose liminal masculinity and transgressive appetites work both to stabilize and unsettle hegemony in the texts in which he appears. The rake may seem no more than a sexy bad boy, unconnected to wider social, political, and economic concerns. However, my project reveals his central role in reflecting, even shaping, anxieties and desires regarding gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. I chart the rake's progress from his origins in the Restoration era to the early twenty-first century. Chapter II examines William Wycherley's comedy The Country Wife in concert with John Dryden's Marriage à la Mode and Aphra Behn's The Rover to analyze the rake's emergence in seventeenth-century theatre and show that his transgression of borders real and figurative plays out the anxieties and aspirations of an emerging British empire. Chapter III uses John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, a satiric interrogation of consumerism and criminality, to chart the rake in eighteenth-century British theatre as Britain's investment in global capitalism and imperialism increased. My discussion of Opera is framed by Richard Steele's early-century sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers and Hannah Cowley's late-century The Belle's Stratagem, a fusion of sentiment and wit. Chapter IV hinges the project's theatre and film sections, analyzing Oscar Wilde's fin-de-siècle comedy The Importance of Being Earnest as a culmination of generations of theatre rakes and an anticipation of the film rakes of the modern and post-modern eras. Dion Boucicault's mid-century London Assurance is used to set up Wilde's queering of the rake figure Chapter V brings the rake to a new medium, film, and a new nation, the United States, as the figure catalyzes American tension over race and gender in early twentieth-century films such as Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat, George Melford's The Sheik, and Ernest Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise. My final chapter reads contemporary films, including Jenniphr Goodman's The Tao of Steve, Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz's About a Boy, and Gore Verbinski's trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean for Disney Studios, to assess the ways in which millennial western masculinity is in stasis.
Committee in charge: Dianne Dugaw, Co-Chair; Priscilla Ovalle, Co-Chair; Kathleen Karlyn; John Schmor
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Najar, Daronkolae Esmaeil. "Pam Gems: Rethinking Her Life and the Impact of Her Plays on British Stage." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1523487108676837.
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McIntyre, James Stuart. "Written Into the landscape : Latin epic and the landmarks of literary reception." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/543.
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Landscape in Roman literature is manifest with symbolic potential: in particular, Vergil and Ovid respond to ideologically loaded representations of abundance in nature that signal the dawn of the Augustan golden age. Vergil's Eclogues foreground a locus amoenus landscape which articulates both the hopes of the new age as well as the political upheaval that accompanied the new political regime; Ovid uses the same topography in order to suggest the arbitrary and capricious use of power within a deceptively idyllic landscape. Moreover, for Latin poets, depictions of landscape are themselves sites for poetic reflection as evidenced by the discussion of landscape ecphrases in Horace's Ars Poetica. My thesis focuses upon the depiction and refiguration of the locus amoenus landscape in the post-Augustan epics of the first century AD: Lucan's Bellum Civile, Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, Statius' Thebaid and Silius Italicus' Punica. Landscape in these poems retains the moral, political and metapoetic force evident in the Augustan archetypes. However, I suggest that Lucan's Neronian Bellum Civile fundamentally refigures the landscapes of Latin epic poetry, inscribing the locus amoenus with the nefas of civil war in such a manner that it redefines the perception of landscape in the succeeding Flavian poets. Lucan perverts the landscape, making the locus horridus, a landscape of horror, fear and disgust, the predominant landscape of Latin epic; consequently, the poems of Valerius, Statius and Silius engage with Lucan's refiguration of landscape as a means of expressing the horror of civil war. In the first part of my thesis I examine archetypal landscapes, including those of the Augustan poets and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Taking an approach which engages with literary reception theory and the concept of the â horizon of expectationâ as a framework within which literary topographies can be understood as articulating a response to the thematics of civil war, in the second part of my thesis I demonstrate the manner in which landscapes represent a coherent and paradigmatic response to Lucan's imposition of his civil war narrative within the literary landscape of Roman literature.
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Flint, Angela. "The influence of contemporary events and circumstances on Virgil's characterization of Aeneas." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10019/1540.
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Costa, Lilian Nunes da 1985. "Gêneros poéticos na comédia de Plauto = traços de uma poética plautina imanente." [s.n.], 2014. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270793.
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Orientador: Isabella Tardin CardosoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T06:53:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Costa_LilianNunesda_D.pdf: 2914692 bytes, checksum: 7790a7f30cd6441d68b56c4fb18a7cf8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014
Resumo: A obra do comediógrafo romano Tito Mácio Plauto (c. 254 ¿ 184 a.C.) é marcada pela presença dos gêneros trágico, épico e mesmo lírico em determinadas passagens, que têm sido identificadas por diversos critérios, como menção, alusão e associação por paralelos formais. Estudos teóricos sobre "mescla" ou "cruzamento de gêneros" vêm se desenvolvendo ao menos desde a proposição do conceito de "Kreuzung der Gattungen" por W. Kroll (Studien zum Verständnis der römischen Literatur, 1924). No entanto, estudiosos como A. Barchiesi ("The crossing", 2001) passam a questionar premissas do trabalho do filólogo alemão, que tomava a "miscigenação" como "decadência" da cultura literária helenística e romana. Em nossa pesquisa sobre as mesclas genéricas na comédia plautina, também nos afastamos da perspectiva de W. Kroll e não propomos, como ponto de partida, que as peças que abrigam outros gêneros resultem necessariamente em híbridos. Na verdade, preferimos uma abordagem como a de S. J. Harrison, que lida com a noção de "generic enrichment" (Generic enrichment in Vergil and Horace, 2007). A sistematização da presença de outros gêneros poéticos no corpus de Plauto selecionado (a peça Cativos, bem como passagens de Báquides, O cabo, O soldado fanfarrão, dentre outras) nos interessa no sentido de explorar o quanto a comédia é enriquecida precisamente por meio de elementos perceptíveis pelo público plautino como "alheios" a esse gênero. Assim, nosso método envolve a identificação de aspectos (temáticos e formais) sob os quais esses gêneros aparecem ou transparecem, bem como uma reflexão sobre a possibilidade de, a partir da observação das convenções poéticas com que ele brinca em seus textos, pensar em uma poética imanente em Plauto
Abstract: The presence of the tragic, the epic, and even the lyric genre in the work of the Roman comic poet Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 ¿ 184 BC) has been already noted in the field of classical studies. Among the various criteria used in the identification of those poetic genres there is not only direct mention of elements of the works pertaining to them, but also (thematic or formal) allusion to such elements. Theoretical studies about "genres miscellany" or "genres crossing" have been developed at least since the proposition of the concept of "Kreuzung der Gattungen" by W. Kroll (Studien zum Verständnis der römischen Literatur, 1924). However, scholars such as A. Barchiesi ("The crossing", 2001) now question premises from Kroll¿s work, which considered the "miscegenation" as a "decadence" on the Hellenistic and Roman literary cultures. The present research does not assume Kroll¿s perspective, i.e. it does not presuppose that the plays in which the presence of other genres is evinced are necessarily hybrids. Rather, it favors an approach like that of S. J. Harrison, which deals with the notion of "generic enrichment" (Generic enrichment in Vergil and Horace, 2007). While systematizing such a presence of different poetic genres in the selected Plautine corpus (the play Captiui, as well as passages from Bacchides, Miles gloriosus, Rudens, among others) this study intends to appreciate to what extent comedy is enriched precisely by the elements perceived by the plautine public as extraneous to this genre. The method is based on the identification of (thematic and formal) aspects under which such genres emerge as the play goes on. The observation of the poetic conventions with which the Roman dramatist plays in his texts may also provide a reflexion on an imanent poetics in Plautus
Doutorado
Linguistica
Doutora em Linguística
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O'Farrell, Kevin. "Joyce after Nietzsche : irony and the will to truth." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3de0686a-b70f-433c-ae20-9de7d554b08e.
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This thesis explores and evaluates the work of James Joyce using the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. It does so not only by examining Joyce's knowledge of Nietzsche's writings, but also through demonstrating how effectively they can illuminate Joyce's themes and techniques, and aid in a general reconceptualisation of his literary project. My analysis draws on several of Nietzsche's key concepts - perspectivism, ressentiment, the will to power - and applies them to Joyce's work. The main idea I use however is the will to truth. I argue that Joyce's primary concern as an artist was the depiction of what he saw as the truth of contemporary existence, in Dublin and more generally. This aim determines his technē, the origin and form of his work of art. Various manifestations of irony, a key element of Joyce's technique, help illustrate the importance of this will to truth. This understanding of his work eliminates the false division between form and content and through an emphasis on Joyce's artistry and philosophy, rather than the historical context in which he wrote (that is, on the author rather than the man), allows for a truly critical assessment. The five chapters that follow my introduction are chronologically ordered. They examine the early works, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially Ulysses, in considerable detail and from various angles. Though careful to respect the individuality of each, my analyses find a common thread of realism uniting the three major works of prose fiction; beginning with the French naturalism of the short stories, moving on to a new development of perspectival irony and a unique mode of allegory in his first novel, and ending in what Joyce called 'the new realism' of his epic. My study then explains how and why realism is problematised in the later chapters of Ulysses as the will to truth comes to question itself. The thesis concludes with an assessment of Finnegans Wake, considering how it marks a radical departure from Joyce's earlier practice, and why I regard it a failure.
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McCann, Michael Charles 1959. "Occult Invention: The Rebirth of Rhetorical Heuresis in Early Modern British Literature from Chapman to Swift." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12081.
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xiv, 234 p. : ill.The twentieth-century project of American rhetorician Kenneth Burke, grounded in a magic-based theory of language, reveals a path to the origins of what I am going to call occult invention. The occult, which I define as a symbol set of natural terms derived from supernatural terms, employs a method of heuresis based on a metaphor-like process I call analogic extension. Traditional invention fell from use shortly after the Liberal Arts reforms of Peter Ramus, around 1550. Occult invention emerged nearly simultaneously, when Early Modern British authors began using occult symbols as tropes in what I refer to as the Occult Mode. I use six of these authors--George Chapman, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift--as examples of how occult invention arises. In appropriating occult symbolism, authors in the Occult Mode began using the invention methods of the occult arts of magic, alchemy, astrology, and cabala to derive new meanings, transform language, develop characters and plots, and reorient social perspectives. As we learn in tracking Burke's project, occult invention combines the principles of Aristotle's rhetoric and metaphysics with the techniques and principles of the occult arts. Occult invention fell from use around the end of the eighteenth century, but its rhetorical influence reemerged through the work of Burke. In this study I seek to contextualize and explicate some of the literary sources and rhetorical implications of occult invention as an emergent field for further research.
Committee in charge: Dianne Dugaw， Co-Chairperson； John T. Gage， Co-Chairperson； Kenneth Calhoon， Member； Steven Shankman， Member； Jeffrey Librett，Outside Member
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Kay, Simon Michael Gorniak. "Literary, political and historical approaches to Virgil's Aeneid in early modern France." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/13837.
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This thesis examines the increasing sophistication of sixteenth-century French literary engagement with Virgil's Aeneid. It argues that successive forms of engagement with the Aeneid should be viewed as a single process that gradually adopts increasingly complex literary strategies. It does this through a series of four different forms of literary engagement with the Aeneid: translation, continuation, rejection and reconciliation. The increasing sophistication of these forms reflects the writers' desire to interact with the original Aeneid as political epic and Roman foundation narrative, and with the political, religious and literary contexts of early modern France. The first chapter compares the methods of and motivations behind all of the sixteenth-century translations of the Aeneid into French; it thus demonstrates shifts in successive translators' interpretations of Virgil's work, and of its application to sixteenth-century France. The next three chapters each analyse adaptation of Virgil's poem in a major French literary work. Firstly, Ronsard's Franciade is analysed as an example of French foundation epic that simultaneously draws upon and rejects Virgil's narrative. Ronsard's poem is read in the light of Mapheo Vegio's “Thirteenth Book” of the Aeneid, or Supplementum, which continues Virgil's narrative and carries it over into a Christian context. Next, Agrippa d'Aubigné's response to Virgilian epic in Les Tragiques is shown to have been mediated by Lucan's Pharsalia and its anti- epic and anti-imperialist interpretation of the Aeneid. D'Aubigné's inversion of Virgil is highlighted through comparison of attitudes to death and resurrection in Les Tragiques, the Aeneid and Vegio's Antoniad. Finally, Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas' combination, in La Sepmaine and La Seconde Sepmaine of the hexameral structure of Genesis with Virgil's narrative of reconciliation after civil war is shown to represent the most sophisticated understanding of and most complex interaction with the Aeneid in sixteenth-century France.
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Ferber, Ben. "The Hothouse and Dynamic Equilibrium in the Works of Harold Pinter." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1306506345.
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Habel, Chad Sean, and chad habel@gmail com. "Ancestral Narratives in History and Fiction: Transforming Identities." Flinders University. Humanities, 2006. http://catalogue.flinders.edu.au./local/adt/public/adt-SFU20071108.133216.
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This thesis is an exploration of ancestral narratives in the fiction of Thomas Keneally and Christopher Koch. Initially, ancestry in literature creates an historical relationship which articulates the link between the past and the present. In this sense ancestry functions as a type of cultural memory where various issues of inheritance can be negotiated. However, the real value of ancestral narratives lies in their power to aid in the construction of both personal and communal identities. They have the potential to transform these identities, to transgress natural boundaries and to reshape conventional identities in the light of historical experience.
For Keneally, ancestral narratives depict national forbears who narrate the nation into being. His earlier fictions present ancestors of the nation within a mythic and symbolic framework to outline Australian national identity. This identity is static, oppositional, and characterized by the delineation of boundaries which set nations apart from one another. However, Keneallys more recent work transforms this conventional construction of national identity. It depicts an Irish-Australian diasporic identity which is hyphenated and transgressive: it transcends the conventional notion of nations as separate entities pitted against one another. In this way Keneallys ancestral narratives enact the potential for transforming identity through ancestral narrative.
On the other hand, Kochs work is primarily concerned with the intergenerational trauma causes by losing or forgetting ones ancestral narrative. His novels are concerned with male gender identity and the fragmentation which characterizes a self-destructive idea of maleness. While Keneallys characters recover their lost ancestries in an effort to reshape their idea of what it is to be Australian, Kochs main protagonist lives in ignorance of his ancestors life. He is thus unable to take the opportunity to transform his masculinity due to the pervasive cultural amnesia surrounding his family history and its role in Tasmanias past.
While Keneally and Koch depict different outcomes in their fictional ancestral narratives they are both deeply concerned with the potential to transform national and gender identities through ancestry.
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Crowell, Ellen Margaret. "Aristocratic drag : the dandy in Irish and Southern fiction." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/12765.
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Nagy, Szerdi. "Girl guides : towards a model of female guides in ancient epic." Thesis, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/1123.
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Numerous ancient epics and their heroes share certain characteristics. Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell, among others, developed these characteristics into hero models. In their models, it is mentioned that many heroes undergo a katabasis or a figurative death and resurrection. The presence of a female guide in the hero’s descent into the Underworld has been largely neglected in Classical scholarship, despite the fact that the study of epic has been for some time a largely saturated field. It will be this aspect of the epic that I intend to examine. I will be examining a selection of female guides and
will create a model consisting of their similarities loosely based on those models of Raglan and Campbell. I will be examining the role of female guides in various epics; namely, the Gilgamesh Epic (Siduri), the Odyssey (Circe), and the Aeneid (the Sibyl) and in a later chapter, those in the Argonautica (Medea) and the Pharsalia (Erichtho). In addition to these guides, I shall be examining one guide that does not come from epic, Ariadne. The female guides I shall be examining appear in two forms, either as a literal guide who descends with the hero into the Underworld, or as a figurative guide who provides assistance from a distance through advice or instruction. One of the reasons why I feel that this topic is of importance is the socio-historical context in which these texts were
written, times and places when women played a largely inferior and subservient role to men. The fictional literary guides seem to be representing strong and independent women. I find this to be remarkable considering the times that these texts were written in. The analysis of these female guides will conclude with a compilation of the similarities they share that shall form the basis for my own female guide model. My model will be established in two consecutive steps: first the female guides Siduri, Circe and the Sibyl will be examined and a preliminary model established. In addition, I will try and prove a common ancestry for them. Secondly, I will test my preliminary model on Medea, Erichtho and Ariadne. As a result, I will propose a final model comprising all the female guides dealt with in my dissertation. This model will be my contribution to scholarship on epic literature from a Comparative approach.Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.
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Stobie, Melissa Lauren. "Mise Eire : national and personal identity in two recent Irish memoirs." Thesis, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/3252.
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Chapter One will outline the way I will be using the constructs of "national" and "personal"
identity, and will then move on to provide a brief contextual setting for the creation and
importance of certain literary conventions of Irish topography and character, in particular by
examining the cultural nationalism in Yeats's poems. In doing so, I will outline the metaphor
of evolution which is crucial in this dissertation, and will examine some of the ethical
implications of employing this metaphor. Chapter Two will examine the 1996 memoir
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, outline McCourt's employment of various stock Irish
tropes, and show how this leads to a conflation of "personal" and "national" identity, to the
detriment of the memoir. Chapter Three will turn to critique Are You Somebody?, the
memoir by Nuala O'Faolain which was also published in 1996. I will argue that, in contrast
to Angela 's Ashes, Are You Somebody? offers a constructive fusion of both kinds of identity national
and personal. In Chapter Four, I will compare and contrast key issues in the texts, in
relation to their both being memoirs of (Irish) national significance, published at the same
time in a changing Ireland, and I will conclude by arguing that the process of invention which
is necessary for the writing of a memoir is equally necessary for the creation of a national
identity.Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.
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Hynes, Colleen Anne 1978. ""Strangers in the house": twentieth century revisions of Irish literary and cultural identity." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/3383.
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This thesis, Strangers in the House, illuminates how "strangers in the house"--unconventional women, Travellers, emigrants and immigrants--have made significant contributions to the evolving traditions of Irish literature and culture. I trace the literary and creative contributions of groups that were silenced during the early twentieth-century nation-building project to review the impact of the Irish Revival, from the politics of Arthur Griffith and Eamon de Valera to the writings of Yeats, Gregory and Synge, on the establishment of an "authentic" Irish identity. I draw on scholarship that establishes Ireland as a postcolonial nation, suggesting that contemporary identity is closely linked to the national, religious and gender expectations reinforced during the periods of colonialism and decolonization. My scholarship considers individuals who continue to be peripheral in the "reimagining" of what it means to be Irish in a post-Celtic Tiger, E.U. Ireland.
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Glisson, Silas Nease. "Cultural nationalism and colonialism in nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction." Thesis, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/16852.
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This thesis will explore how writers of nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction,
namely short stories and novels, used their works to express the social, cultural, and political
events of the period. My thesis will employ a New Historicist approach to discuss the effects
of colonialism on the writings, as well as archetypal criticism to analyse the mythic origins of
the relevant metaphors. The structuralism of Tzvetan Todorov will be used to discuss the
notion of the works' appeal as supernatural or possibly realistic works. The theory of
Mikhail Bakhtin is used to discuss the writers' linguistic choices because such theory focuses
on how language can lead to conflicts amongst social groups.
The introduction is followed by Chapter One, "Ireland as England's Fantasy." This
chapter discusses Ireland's literary stereotype as a fantasyland. The chapter also gives an
overview of Ireland's history of occupation and then contrasts the bucolic, magical Ireland of
fiction and the bleak social conditions of much of nineteenth-century Ireland.
Chapter Two, "Mythic Origins", analyses the use of myth in nineteenth-century horror
stories. The chapter discusses the merging of Christianity and Celtic myth; I then discuss the
early Irish belief in evil spirits in myths that eventually inspired horror literature.
Chapter Three, "Church versus Big House, Unionist versus Nationalist," analyses
how the conflicts of Church/Irish Catholicism vs. Big House/Anglo-Irish landlordism, proBritish
Unionist vs. pro-Irish Nationalist are manifested in the tales. In this chapter, I argue
that many Anglo-Irish writers present stern anti-Catholic attitudes, while both Anglo-Irish
and Catholic writers use the genre as political propaganda. Yet the authors tend to display
Home Rule or anti-Home Rule attitudes rather than religious loyalties in their stories.
The final chapter of the thesis, "A Heteroglossia of British and Irish Linguistic and
Literary Forms," deals with the use of language and national literary styles in Irish literature
of this period. I discuss Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia and its applications to the Irish
novel; such a discussion because nineteenth-century Ireland was linguistically Balkanised,
with Irish Gaelic, Hibemo-English, and British English all in use. This chapter is followed by
a conclusion.English
M. Lit. et Phil. (English)
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Johnson, Amy R. "Stranger in the Room: Illuminating Female Identity Through Irish Drama." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/918.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2007.Title from screen (viewed on May 23, 2007) Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-83)
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Van, Heerden Helga Dieta. "L'Inferno e Ugone d'Alvernia: analisi morfologica di un testo cavalleresco e analisi comparativa di Alcuni inferni." Thesis, 1987. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/25828.
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A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, for the degree of master of Arts.This thesis examines a medieval text which forms part of Italian chevalric literature i.e. The story of Ugone d'Alvernia. Its original name was Huon d'Auvergne. Firstly the text will be examined from the historic angle and then from a more scientific point of view. It shows how the original "chanson de geste", written in French was brought by the French "jongleurs" into Italy and became initialized, producing a unique phenomenon, a linguistic mixture known as franco-venetian. This literature played a decisive part in the diffusion of the stories surrounding Charlemagne. Huon d'Auvergne was elaborated and extended by Andrea da Barberino (c. 1370-1432) and called La Storia di Ugone d' Alvernia (The story of Ugone Of Alvernia). Various descents into Hell are then examined , from both the classic and the Christian point of view. This examination leads on to the comparison of the two "Inferni" described by Andrea da Barberino in his two works La Storia di Ugone d' Alvernia and in Guerino il Meschino with the descent described by Dante in his Inferno. A morphological analysis of the text is then undertaken. It applies the theory propounded and used by Propp in his morphological analysis of some Russian fairy tales. According to the theory there are thirty-one "functions" which can be applied in such an analysis
Andrew Chakane 2018
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""I step through origins": different forms of piety in Seamus Heaney's poetry." 2009. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5893886.
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Bishop, Christopher Damien Clifford. "Literature and society in tenth-Century Wessex." Phd thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/150472.
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Goussias, Giannoula. "Heroes and heroic life in the Iliad and Akritic folk-song." Thesis, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/115948.
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"Byron's Don Juan and nationalism." Thesis, 2010. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b6074834.
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Firstly in digression Byron presents a national reality which gradually displaces his cherished cosmopolitan ideals. Among many other pressing problems of his day, political renegades, the paradox of scientific innovations, the rise of intellectual ladies and the commoditization of marriage and family constitute the tangible part of Byron's domestic recalling. With retrospective commentaries Byron fulfills the act of imagining native land; and in this regard nationalism is the spiritual support of the expatriate existence.I propose to comprehend the perceptive gap by focusing on Don Juan which best contextualizes Byron in the flow of historicity with the dimension of nationalism. I intend to delve into three structural units of Don Juan---digression, narrative, a lyric song---to argue that Byronic contradictions manifest nationalism in its multiple contingencies.
In conclusion Don Juan reveals that Byron's participation in the modern historicity of nationalism involves three dimensions---residual cosmopolitan ideals, English national consciousness and the independence of the oppressed nations. Don Juan embodies a historical magnetic field where Byron's existence actualizes the potential conflict of the modernity.
Secondly by reading Don Juan as the quest romance of the individual initiation, I bring the narrative into scrutiny and argue that the hero's transformation involves an implicit evolution of the national identification. In terms of subjective consciousness, nationalism embodies the mature vision of masculine selfhood. Don Juan's encounter with both female and male characters, through his repeated border-crossing, illuminates a metaphorical process from rejection to embrace of native roots, from negation to affirmation of national bonds Juan's rite of passage---sexual initiation, surviving shipwreck, the trial of the exotic love and battlefield and diplomacy---transmits a national subjectivity which corresponds to the Byronic existence of mobility.
The dissertation explores the discrepancy between critical reception towards Byron as a Romantic poet in contemporary Romantic scholarship and in Chinese historical evaluation (with certain reference to the European Continent). Byronic contradictions pose a problem to Romantic scholars who are engaged to interpret the interplay between Byron the man and Byron the poet. They share the view that Byron succeeds in manipulating his own personal image to promote his poetical visibility and tend to doubt if his poems could stand alone without the reference to his letters and journals. In China, as in many other countries of European Continent and Asia, Byron is often viewed in a more positive way as the very name has become a byword for liberal nationalism and the rebellion against tyranny
Thirdly 'Isles of Greece' adds an alternative yet prospective dimension to perceive the tension between national anxiety and modernity. In English context its meanings vary as the contextual focus shifts from poetical to socio-biographical and to existential level. The theme of the national independence is complicated by its negative elements such as the identity of the songster. In the Chinese context, 'the Isles of Greece' initiates and embodies a myth-making process as it gives vent to the anxiety of modernity faced by Chinese people in the opening of the twentieth century. The individual shaping of the 'Isles' by three Chinese intellectual pioneers symbolizes the simultaneous awakening of Chinese national consciousness and individual consciousness. The extended reading of Byron by Lu Xun, together with his reworking, voices the existential dilemma of modern enlighteners. His invocation of 'Mara poets' is prophetic of the modern intellectuals who possess both vision and willpower to eradicate ignorance and public apathy.
Gu, Yao.
Adviser: Ching Yuet May.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-01, Section: A, page: .
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-173).
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Abstract also in Chinese.
43
Davis, Victoria Ann. "Restating a parochial vision: a reconsideration of Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O'Brien, and Brendan Behan." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/1532.
Full text
44
Selepe, Thapelo 1956. "Towards the African theory of literary production : perspectives on the Sosotho novel." Thesis, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/17709.
Full textAbstract:
Critical studies and creative works in the Sesotho novel have made some of the
important contributions in Sesotho literary history in particular, and African literary
history in general. However, such contribution has been dictated by a particular
history and an ideology. The world-view in literary practice that emerged from that
history is the one that tends to divorce literature, literary study and language from
society. Consequently, this study identifies this practice as a problem that needs
to be addressed.
This study argues from this perspective that literature, literary study and language
should be re-established as integral parts in a manner that pedagogical practice
would translate into positive social practices. To realise this ideal the study
approaches the study of the Sesotho novel from the perspective of literary
production. The theory of literary production insists that literature is a form of
social production. This argument becomes even more pertinent to the study of the
novel, which is viewed as having profound elements of realism that mirror society.
A consideration of the Sesotho novel as a form of literary production that is linked
to other forms of social production immediately leads to the question of the
development of the Sesotho novel. The possibilities that are identified include
external influence and internal evolution in the development of the Sesotho novel.
These possibilities also have a bearing on the study of the Sesotho novel in
particular and the study of the African novel in general.
In order to pursue the argument to its logical conclusion, the development of the
Sesotho novel is divided into three periods: 1900-1930; 1930-1960 and the 1960s-
1990s. Each of these periods demonstrates a particular ideological leaning that is
akin to the material conditions of each period. Taking this trend as a pattern in the
development of the Sesotho novel, this study advocates an approach that links
literature and literary studies to society.African Languages
D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)
45
Hoffman, Nancy Marie. "Mysticism and allegory in Porphyry's De antro nympharum." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/25784.
Full textAbstract:
This report examines Porphyry’s De antro nympharum and its eclectic mixture of philosophy, allegory, and mysticism in the form of a Homeric commentary. The paper situates Porphyry’s commentary in the broader tradition of Homeric interpretation with special attention to Stoic exegesis and Platonic views on poetry and myth. It also contextualizes Porphyry’s philosophy in terms of the mystery cults, particularly Mithraism, that had grown very popular by Porphyry’s time. The paper argues that Porphyry devised a practice of reading intended to promote a level of philosophical contemplation beyond the level of rational discourse, in keeping with the Neoplatonic philosophy of his teacher, Plotinus, and that this practice is especially evident in the De antro nympharum.text