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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literary history'
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Hooks, Karin L. "Literary Retrospectives: The 1890s and the Reconstruction of American Literary History." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1338301078.
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Hardwick, Joseph Brian. "Romans et theses : french "existentialist" fiction, literary history and literary modernism /." St. Lucia, Qld, 2002. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe16410.pdf.
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Seyed, Farian Sabahi. "The Literacy Corps in Pahlavi Iran (1963-1979) : political, social and literary implications." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.343520.
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Snyder, Jane. "Literary Continuities/Imperative Education." W&M ScholarWorks, 2018. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1550153843.
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Literary Continuities: British Books and the Britishness of Their Early American Readers People get their worldview from what they read. in a reading-saturated society such as 18th-century America, the most popular books determined the public consciousness. as such, the origin of these books must be carefully examined. Herein lies the question of whose books and ideas were popularized. According to quantitative analysis of primary evidence gathered from private and public library collections as well as booksellers' advertisements and inventories, the majority of books read in 18th-century America could be considered British more than American. Before, during, and after the American Revolution the most popular and highly culturally valued books were still British. This explains the continued Britishness of Americans even after they declared and won political independence. Few scholars consider the implication of the origin of early American ideas, particularly in the study of popular books, leading to a common misconception about the rate at which American society became wholly American. Imperative Education: The Politics of Reading and Advice in Colonial American Colleges Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth were all founded in some iteration before the American Revolution. Amazingly, these colleges are rarely studied collectively. Even more individualized is the discussion of their early college libraries. These book collections determined the range of knowledge available to students, so the people who decided which books were included had a great deal of power over the colleges. Library benefactors across the American colonies and from institution to institution had quite similar reasons for donating certain books. This commonality can be called imperative education, a scheme through which books were donated to consciously further the donor's value system and assign it as truth. Such a structure means the nine colonial colleges were pieces of one movement rather than polarized individual entities fighting religious representation wars as they are often misrepresented. Their charters and founding documents back up the universality of imperative education. The general idea that students' reading habits needed to be strictly controlled is also apparent in controversies surrounding several of the institutions in their early years.
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Greene, Richard Thomas. "Mary Leapor : a problem of literary history." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.306589.
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Hawes, Ben. "Yeat's versions of literary history, 1896-1903." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1983/915a643d-f367-4025-8ab7-fc64cc1f18ab.
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This study examines the critical prose written by William Butler Yeats in the period 1896-1903, and identifies the evolution within it of a mode of literary history. I concentrate on Ideas of Good and Evil, and on the selected edition Poems of Spenser. The introduction examines notions of golden ages and of original fracture, and the insertion of these tropes into a variety of literary histories. I consider some of the aims and problems of literary history as a genre, and the peculiar solutions offered by Yeats's approaches. I give particular attention to Yeats's alternation between two views of poetry: as evading time, and as forming the significant history of nations. The first chapter examines those essays in Ideas of Good and Evil written earliest. I consider the essays on Blake first, because Blake was the most significant influence on the writing of Yeats's idiosyncratic literary histories. I proceed to the essays on Shelley, on a new age of imaginative community, and on magic. The second chapter demonstrates how Yeats's ideals and ideas became modified in more practical considerations of audience, poetic rhythm and theatrical convention, and I identify the new kinds of literary history in the essays on Morris and Shakespeare, which are concerned with fracture, limitation and the loss of unmediated access to timeless imaginative resources. The third chapter briefly examines Yeats's very early imitations of Edmund Spenser, and then considers the uses of literary history in Yeats's edition of Spenser. The final chapter identifies Yeats's later returns to Spenser, and shows how the earlier modes of literary history governed subsequent adaptations. My conclusion summarises the advantages and limitations of Yeatsian literary history, and place my study into the context of Yeats's whole career, comparing these literary histories with A Vision
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Bondarchuk, Julia. "Ukrainian-English literary dialogue: history, state, prospects." Thesis, Київський національний університет технологій та дизайну, 2021. https://er.knutd.edu.ua/handle/123456789/18494.
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Simpson, Nigel. "Post-structuralism and history." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.282616.
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Vallis, Gina. "Finding fault : history and the extra-literary novel /." Diss., Digital Dissertations Database. Restricted to UC campuses, 2004. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Bergman, Jenni. "The significant other : a literary history of elves." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2010. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55478/.
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This thesis is an analysis and literary history of the human-sized elf as a Significant Other. It argues that this character is in direct relation to humans while also situated beyond the boundaries of what is human, familiar, and same, and acts as a supernatural double that defines these boundaries. The first chapter relates the origin of the word elf and the creature's characteristics in the Germanic regions of Europe. Chapter 2 discusses similar beings in Celtic sources and the establishment of a realm in which they dwell. The development of Faerie, primarily in French sources, is further examined in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 scrutinises the application of the words elf and fairy to a diminutive being, here referred to as the Insignificant Other. Chapter 5 assesses the demise of the diminutive being and re-establishment of the human-sized elf. Because of his paramount influence, the central section of the thesis (chapters 6-9) is devoted to the Elves of J. R. R. Tolkien. This section begins by analysing the descriptions of Tolkien's Elves in order to evaluate his debt to earlier traditions. Chapter 7 assesses the status of Elves in Middle-Earth, while chapter 8 scrutinises the presentation of gender. Chapter 9 discusses the Dark-Elves and their place in Tolkien's developing ideas about Elves. The final section examines Tolkien's influence and the current status of the elf. Chapter 10 focuses on four recent narratives that identify human-sized fairies in comics and film. Chapter 12 investigates the popularity of the Tolkienian elf in modern Fantasy fiction, while the final chapter locates the elf as Significant Other in contemporary popular culture and media.
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Connell, Liam. "Rewriting the nation : nationalist interventions in literary history." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2000. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.324204.
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Koopman, Jennifer. "Redeeming romanticism : George MacDonald, Percy Shelley, and literary history." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102805.
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This dissertation examines George MacDonald's preoccupation with his literary predecessor Percy Shelley. While eminently Victorian in many ways, MacDonald was equally a late Romantic, who was inspired by the Romantic poets and positioned himself as the heir to their radical tradition. While he channeled their visionary ardor, he also made it his duty to correct what he saw as their flaws. I read MacDonald through the figure of Shelley, with whom MacDonald seems to have personally identified, but to whose atheism MacDonald, a devout believer, objected. MacDonald's fascination with Shelley works its way into his fiction, which mythologizes literary history, offering fables about the transmission of the literary spirit down through the generations. Throughout his work, MacDonald resurrects Shelley in various guises, idealizing and reshaping Shelley into an image that is startlingly like MacDonald himself. This project contributes to MacDonald scholarship by offering a new approach to his work. It positions MacDonald, who is often portrayed as an ahistorical myth-maker, in an explicitly historical light, revealing him as a Victorian mythographer who was deeply invested in questions of literary criticism and historical succession.Chapter 1 introduces MacDonald's concern with literary genealogy, and discusses how his work as a literary critic and historian idealizes Shefey. Chapter 2 examines how MacDonald's Phantastes portrays literary history as romantic quest, featuring Shelley as a heroic but fallen knight, and opening questions about literary fatherhood. Chapter 3 interprets the gothic tale "The Cruel Painter" as a myth about the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, in which MacDonald rewrites the story of Shelley's involvement with Mary Godwin and her father William Godwin. Chapter 4 considers Sir Gibbie and Donal Grant, works in which MacDonald explicitly critiques Shelley, and implicitly positions himself as the savior of the English literary tradition. Chapter 5 investigates MacDonald's later works, The Flight of the Shadow and Lilith, in which Shelley---and evil itself---become more complex entities. Throughout the dissertation, particular attention is given to the issue of repeating history vs. redeeming history, a tension that is reflected in MacDonald's use of vampire imagery to portray the unredeemed past.
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Rosenquist, Rodney. "The modernist latecomer : literary history, canonicity and the market." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.407191.
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Marriott, Laurence J. "Literary naturalism 1865-1940 : its history, influences and legacy." Thesis, University of Northampton, 2002. http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/2959/.
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This thesis examines the emergence of literary Naturalism in France from its beginnings in the fiction and letters of the Goncourt brothers, the positivist philosophy of Auguste Cornte, and the literary criticism of Hippolyte Tame. It then tracks the history and reception of naturalistic fiction in England. The second half concentrates on the rise of Naturalism as an American fictional form, from its beginnings in the 1890s through to critical acceptance and success in the first decade of the twentieth century. It then examines the reasons for the comparative success of American Naturalism at a time when naturalistic writing in Europe had become outdated. Literary criticism has been periodised throughout in order to demonstrate its influence on the canon and on the formation of genre. Chapter 1 emphasises that the thesis concentrates on literary history rather than on textual criticism, it also suggests a cultural materialist subtext in that the struggles faced by early naturalistic writers were often the result of opposition from reactionary politicians and Church groups rather than from literary critics. Chapter 2 has two purposes: first, it explicates the genesis of literary Naturalism in nineteenth-century France and puts it into a historical perspective. Second, it explores the way in which genre has influenced the way that critics and readers have perceived Naturalism as a development of the novel. It also examines the way in which Zola perceived genre and how he emphasised the importance of the novel as a social tool. Chapter 3 demonstrates the ways in which English writers developed their own form of naturalistic fiction, but lost momentum towards the end of the nineteenth century. It explores the difference between French and English attitudes towards fiction and suggests that different aesthetic values may be the key to these differences. Chapter 4 introduces early reactions to the fledgling American naturalist writers and the reactions of contemporary critics, such as Howells and James. It also emphasises the importance of Frank Norris’s theoretical views on the future of the American novel and presents an overview of the influence of journalistic writing on fiction and the conflicts that this entailed. Chapter 5 focuses on the literary aesthetics found in the works of Norris and Dreiser and presents case studies of Sister Carrie and The Octopus. This chapter argues that The Octopus, in particular, should be read as a novel of aesthetics, and is Norris’s most cogent statement of his theoretical stance on literature and criticism. Chapter 6 explores the growth of Naturalism as an American form. American writers adopted the broad philosophies of European Naturalism, and this chapter examines how they incorporated those ideas into an American cultural matrix that departed from the European model. The conclusion argues that Progressivism and the general will for reform were catalysts for the success of American literary Naturalism, and that the romantic language of naturalism lent itself to a national literature which dealt with such issues. Naturalistic techniques and perspectives were ideally suited to later novels of protest; therefore, the genre was able to persist in an adapted form well into the 1930s
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Stuckey, Amanda. "Reading Bodies: Disability and American Literary History, 1789-1889." W&M ScholarWorks, 2017. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1499450073.
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This dissertation brings the field of critical disability studies to bear on organizational paradigms of nineteenth-century American literature. “Reading Bodies” intervenes in these fields with the claim that the book in a variety of formats, publications, and circulations acts as a disciplinary tool that seeks to arrange physical and mental characteristics and capacities into the category of disability. This project moves beyond examining representations of disability to demonstrate that the same social, cultural, and political forces that generated literary movements and outpourings – such as nationalism, displacement of Native peoples, slavery, and state-sanctioned violence – also generated material conditions of impairment that formal literary conventions sought to consolidate as “disability.” Individuals and communities reading, writing, and responding to the genres of seduction, historical fiction, slave narrative, Civil War poetry, and children’s literature both deployed and challenged formal literary conventions to model or defy normative and deviant behaviors. The formal characteristics and aesthetic concerns of the field of American literature, I find, are products of larger social processes that both cause impairment and that communicate and mark constructions of disability into and onto reading and non-reading publics. as social and literary forces coalesced the category “disability,” often those populations most vulnerable to impairment responded by challenging, resisting, or completely renovating the conventions and categories of textual and bodily behavior. In a variety of interactions with the book, nineteenth-century women, Native Americans, African Americans, wounded soldiers, and children offer alternative intersectional perspectives and possibilities for what it means to produce literature and for what it means to inhabit a body. Those works considered literary outliers both in their day and in contemporary critical assessments, such as Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808), the Life of Black Hawk (1833), and midcentury children’s books printed for sight-impaired readers, reveal the normative underpinnings of literary and bodily taxonomies.
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Wallis, Lesley Ann. "History, politics and tradition : a study of the history workshop 1956-1979." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.369414.
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Moore, Lindsay Emory. "The Laureates’ Lens: Exposing the Development of Literary History and Literary Criticism From Beneath the Dunce Cap." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc822784/.
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In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.
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Albu-Mohammed, Raheem Rashid Mnayit. "Making the past : the concepts of literary history and literary tradition in the works of Thomas Gray." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/3362.
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This study explores Thomas Gray’s concepts of literary history, tradition, and the past. It proffers critical examinations of Gray’s literary and historical thoughts, illustrating the extent of the complexity of the mid‐century cultural and intellectual climate in which Gray and his contemporaries were writing. It shows the aesthetic, cultural, and political dimensions of canonicity in the course of examining the ideological motivation behind Gray’s literary history. Though much of Gray’s poetry is private and written for a narrow literary circle, his literary history seems engaged with issues of public concerns. Gray’s literary history must not be understood as a mere objective scholarly study, but as an ideological narrative invented to promote specific national and cultural agendas. Though Gray’s plan for his History of English Poetry was inspired directly by Pope’s scheme of writing a history of English poetry, Gray’s historiography represents a challenge to Pope’s most fundamental “neo‐classical” premises of canonicity in that it aligns English literary poetry back to the literary tradition of ancient Britain and resituates the English literary canon in an entirely different theoretical framework. Gray reworked Pope’s historical scheme to suits the need of the political and intellectual agendas of his own time: the national need for a distinctive cultural identity, which was promoted by and led to the emergence of a more national and less partisan atmosphere. Gray’s comprehensive project of literary history charts the birth and development of what he views as an English “high‐cultural” tradition, whose origins he attributes to the classical and Celtic antiquity. In Gray’s view, this tradition reaches its peak with the rise of Elizabethan literary culture; a culture which was later challenged by the “French” model which dominated British literary culture from the Restoration to Gray’s time. Gray’s literary history is to be examined in this study in relation to the concept of canonformation. Gray’s historiographical study of literary culture of ancient Britain, his historicization of Chaucerian and medieval texts, his celebration of Elizabethan literary culture, and his polemical attack on “neo‐classical” literary ideals intend to relocate the process of canon‐formation within a “pure” source of national literary heritage, something which provides cultural momentum for the emergence of a historiography and an aesthetics promoting Gray’s idea of the continuity of tradition. As is the case in his poetry, the concept of cultural continuity is also central to Gray’s literary history, and permeates through his periodization, historicism, criticism, and his concept of the transformation of tradition.
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Birdsall, Stephanie. "Meaning and the literary text." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=24076.
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Often debates over literary meaning can get swept up into larger discussions about social significance, political responsibilities, identity struggles and deification of cultural objects. Literary meaning becomes, in these deliberations, not just a theoretical entity but a powerful social force. All of these queries, however, inasmuch as the literary enterprise is a part of human interaction, are dependent on the brute fact of communication. Any notion of literary meaning must ultimately rest upon a concept of meaning that explains, or attempts to explain, how communication is possible. This, in turn, leads down the dark path into human psychology and the relationships of our minds to the world around us. This thesis will attempt to explore various viewpoints about the connections between thought, language, and literature and to argue that these connections necessitate more attention than has been paid to them by literary theorists.
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Loveland, Jeff. "Rhetoric and natural history : Buffon in polemical and literary context /." Oxford : Voltaire Foundation, 2001. http://www.gbv.de/dms/goettingen/32877135X.pdf.
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Whitehead, C. S. "A literary history of the Third Programme 1946 to 1970." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.371778.
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Prescott, Sarah Helen. "Feminist literary history and British women novelists of the 1720s." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.361324.
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Marsden, Stevie L. "The Saltire Society Literary Awards, 1936-2015 : a cultural history." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/24749.
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This thesis presents a history of the Saltire Society Literary Awards and examines their status and role within Scotland’s literary and publishing culture. The Society was founded at a critical inter-war period during which Scottish writers, artists and cultural commentators were re-imagining Scotland’s political and cultural identity. The Society, therefore, was a product of this reformative era in Scotland’s modern history. The Society’s identity and position within this inter- and post-war reformation is reflected in the Literary Awards, which are a means by which the Society attempts to accomplish some of its constitutional aims. The purpose of this thesis is three-fold. Firstly, it has filled a conspicuous gap in modern Scottish cultural history by offering a historically accurate description of the founding of the Saltire Society in 1936 and the development of the Society’s Literary Awards up until 2015. Secondly, this thesis demonstrates how the Society’s Literary Awards function in relation to key critical discourses pertinent to contemporary book award culture, such as forms of capital, national identity and gender. Finally, this thesis proffers an in-depth analysis of book award judgment culture. Through an analysis of the linguistic and social interactions between Saltire Society Literary Award judges, this thesis is the first study of its kind which considers exactly how literary award judging panels facilitate the judgement process. What this thesis reveals is how, despite often being plagued by problems regarding finances and personnel, the Society’s Literary Awards have endured as a key feature of Scottish literary and publishing culture, so much so that they are now the only series of awards dedicated to awarding Scottish fiction, non-fiction, poetry and first books, as well as academic history and research books. Due to the persistence and enthusiasm of the Society’s administrators and literary award judges the awards have continued to thrive and evolve to accommodate developments and demands within Scottish literary culture.
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Woudstra, Ruth. "Truth, history and representation in Margaret Atwoods' Alias Grace." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7417.
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Bibliography: leaves 53.In the Introduction of this minor dissertation, Margaret Atwood as a post-modern writer and her interest in fictional autobiographies are considered, particularly with regard to memory, the formation of self-identity and amnesia. Parallels are drawn between Surfacing and Cat's Eye as fictional works. and Alias Grace, which is based on the life of a historical person. The novel Alias Grace alternates between first- and third-person accounts, and reflects Atwood's preoccupation with narrative techniques. The definition of post-modernism is regarded, as well as Atwood's own acknowledgements in her ""Author's Afterword"" on how she proceeds to write this fictional autobiography. Her focus on mental illnesses is given perspective in a brief discussion on different sorts of memory loss. These manifestations affect the concept of truth, which is explored in the first section of the dissertation. This section draws on the unreliability of Grace's first-person accounts and the question of whether she is fabricating the truth or has simply forgotten crucial moments of her past. The reader is also constantly made aware that Grace attempts to ensure better conditions for herself in the penitentiary, and she will therefore not disclose any information that might be damaging to her character. That which she discloses partly depends on her relationship in terms of trust with Doctor Jordan. A few episodes where Grace loses consciousness are reviewed, as well as instances where she exposes her literary background and her ability to change words or ideas in texts that she has read. It is concluded at the end of the first section that the truth eludes the reader. With this in mind, it is examined in the second section that the issue of truth is complicated, and even undermined, by the gender and class inequity of the patriarchal society in which Grace, Mary and Nancy are instrumentalised and exploited. The relationship between Grace and Mary is explored in order to demonstrate the happy memories that are relevant in Grace's present, where her past remains illusive. The reader is also drawn into these cheerful experiences, and takes Mary's presence for granted until the neuro-hypnotic seance, during which Grace's double consciousness is revealed. Her 'friend' Mary is exposed as a facet of Grace's own personality. Class oppression is explored further through the characters of Nancy and Mrs Humphrey, who are trapped in a vicious circle that Grace escapes by engaging in the creative activity of quilt-making. In this way she is able to express her solidarity with Mary and Nancy as victims of patriarchal injustice. In the Conclusion an overview of the question of truth is given and it is demonstrated how truth is inseparable from the issues of class and gender relations. The lack of traditional closure in Alias Grace is explored briefly. Grace's camaraderie and solidarity with her two friends, as well as her retelling of the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden through her tapestry work, is shown to be a transgressive agency that marks the greater significance of the novel.
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McGoldrick, Lynne. "The literary manuscripts and literary patronage of the Beauchamp and Neville families in the Late Middle Ages, 1390-1500." Thesis, Northumbria University, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.354372.
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Schillinger, Stephen. "Common representations : Jack Straw and literary history as cultural history on the early modern stage /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9363.
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Grylls, Catherine Jane. "The other end of history : three women writers and the romance." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18828.
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The genre of the romance has a long and complex history, encompassing a diversity of literary forms. In this dissertation, I focus on the sub-genre of the domestic romance and on the ways in which this form has represented the problematics of gender as they are constructed within the home and family under patriarchy. I examine the notion of the dichotomy between public and private worlds and the demarcation of these zones as gendered, as domains of masculine and feminine activity respectively. This opposition is a consequence of the development of the middle-class family unit in England attendant on the emergence of capitalism from the late sixteenth century onwards, which resulted in a gendered division of labour. The domestic romance bears the traces of these historical processes as it negotiates the position of women as wives and mothers in domestic worlds ordered by patriarchy. I trace these mediations through three texts. Wuthering Heights, I argue, enacts a bold disruption of the organisation of the unregulated libidinal energy of its protagonists Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. The restoration of domestic harmony at the text's closure is an uneasy one. The Thorn Birds is situated within the mass literary culture peculiar to the twentieth century. Working from within the limitations and formulae of the contemporary romantic 'bestseller', the text offers multiple examples of female discontent and of acts of rebellion by women against the structures and practices constraining their lives, but these rebellions are circumscribed and contained by the text's endorsement of the figure of the 'proper woman - the dutiful wife and mother - as the realisation of femininity. Possession relocates the romance within the framework of academic theoretical discourse, addressing questions of the patriarchal construction of the feminine informed by the new conceptual and narrative categories of postmodernism. The novel ultimately affirms the romantic recoding of history in its own closure, positing its endless narrative possibilities. In the final analysis, I situate the romance as offering manifold narrative possibilities to women in very different historical dispensations. Bibliography: pages 91-94.
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Neufeldt, Bradley. "Cultural confusions, oral/literary narrative negotiations in Tracks and Ravensong." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq22548.pdf.
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Radicchia, Gloria. "Southern Nigeria and the politics of memory: literary accounts on the Biafra war and the minorities’ struggle." Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Afrikanska studier, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-34493.
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The Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-70) was a critical event for the country and on an international level: furthermore, it forged forever the memory and narrative of Igbo people, authors, politicians and activists and minority groups. I chose this topic because I have always been interested in how political issues have been represented and argued in literature, how the authors and intellectuals have narrated the struggle and the fracture of such a complex nation as Nigeria and how much powerful collective memory can be for the personal and cultural story of a population. What can make the difference in remembering is even how a story and a particular memory is narrated through time. The aim of this thesis is therefore to explore the meaning of the political use of memory of the war through the testimonies of two contemporary fictional novels by Nigerian writers.
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Englard, Michael Anselm. "'Grounds for argument' : English literary travel 1911-1941." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610092.
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Magerski, Christine 1969. "The constitution of the literary field in Germany after 1871 : Berlin modernism, literary criticism and the beginnings of the sociology of literature." Monash University, German Studies, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8724.
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Attard, Karen Patricia, University of Western Sydney, of Arts Education and Social Sciences College, and School of Humanities. "Lost and found : a literary cultural history of the Blue Mountains." THESIS_CAESS_HUM_Attard_K.xml, 2003. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/568.
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This thesis is a cultural tour of the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia. It is concerned with the way in which Europeans employed stories to claim land and, conversely, their fears that the land would claim them.The stories considered are taken from literature and folk legend. The concept of liminality is important to the work because the mountains are a threshold, a demarcation between the city and the bush. Allied with the notion of liminality in the mountains is that of the uncanny (as defined by Freud). The work is divided into four sections. The first section, A POCKET GUIDE, introduces the terrain to be traversed. Section 2, FOUND, centres around the notion of foundation. Section 3, PASSAGE, links LOST and FOUND. LOST is the converse of FOUND. It explores our fears that the land will consume us.This fear is often expressed in the notion that the bush, beneath a surface beauty, has a dark and dangerous aspect and that it will swallow up the unwary. This idea is evident in the notion of possession - that a certain place can take hold of a person and induce a prescribed response from them - and of haunting, in which a spirit is tied to a specific location.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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Attard, Karen Patricia. "Lost and found : a literary cultural history of the Blue Mountains /." View thesis, 2003. http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20040420.110911/index.html.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2003.A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, School of Humanities, 2003. Includes bibliographical references.
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Duke, Siân. "Recreating history : literary depictions of Iceland's conversion to Christianity 100-1300." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.408108.
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Ribo, Ignasi. "The one-winged angel : history and memory in the literary discourse." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.487093.
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This study explores an ambiguity in W.G. Sebald's literary discourse. The author presents writing as a way to resist the fatality of the historical process and to overcome the limits of historical representation. His narratives are founded on the recognition that it is ethically necessary to speak in the name of the victims, but epistemologically impossible to do so. In order to overcome his scepticism, Sebald developed a discourse of memory largely inspired by Nabokov and Benjamin's ideas of aesthetic redemption. The reader should be transformed through a sort of epiphany, an aesthetic illumination that works in his imagination and engages him in a ritual of mourning. This discourse, however, hides a tendency to glorify the figure of the melancholy writer, portraying him as a cultural hero. The narrator of Sebald's fictions is not just a critical witness of the catastrophic course of the world, but an image of the poet who struggles heroically against fatality and is redeemed, not because he triumphs, but precisely because he fails. It is my contentiOIi that Sebald's concept of the writer as a sublime-tragic figure - what I call the one-winged angel - undermines the political, if not the ethical, significance of his artistic legacy. In this study, I try to make W.G. Sebald's literary discourse explicit. Analysing his published fictions and essays, I describe the implicit trail that extends from his interpretation of the meaning of histOly and the problems of its representation to the emergence of remembrance as a form of cultural heroism, which appears to ~e the keystone of Sebald's writing. In the first chapter, I explore Sebald's notion of a 'natural history of destruction,' in order to elucidate the idea of history that underlies his writings. In t~e second chapter, I consider how Sebald's particular blend of fact and fiction articulates and contends with the practices of historiography. The conclusions of these two chapters are developed in the third chapter, which analyses the central role of remembrance in Sebald's writings, both as a break in the mythifying tendency of the 'natural history of destruction' and as a form of breaching the limits of representation. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I consider the aesthetical implications of Sebald's discourse of remembrance. In particular, I confront his pretension that literature should engage the reader in a rite of mourning, as a way of maintaining hope in the midst of fatality, with the model of the tragic. By probing into the function and the limits of his melancholy narrative voice, I show that the essential concern of Sebald's essays and fictions is the hopeless struggle of the artist. As I argue in my conclusions, Sebald's literary discourse originates from a tragic conception of man and the world, but tends to subvert its premises by heroizing the figure of the melancholy writer. In this sense, it is possible to speak of Sebald's work as an attempt to avoid the fatality of history through a ·form of aesthetic transcendence, which stems from Romantic and Christian sources.
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Donofrio, Nicholas Easley. "The Vanishing Freelancer: A Literary History of the Postwar Culture Industries." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11532.
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Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, a wide range of U.S. fiction writers took jobs--sometimes briefly, but often for several years or more--in the film, broadcasting, publishing, and advertising industries. As a result of their experiences in these industries at a time when corporate employment was on the rise and freelance work was becoming less viable, writers like Raymond Chandler, Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, and Ishmael Reed crafted new narrative forms to examine the problems of bureaucratized creativity. While drawing on literary modernism's techniques and strategies, they traded its aesthetics of difficulty and self-sufficiency--its serene disdain for the uninitiated--for a more broadly communicative disposition.
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Neidorf, Leonard. "The Origins of Beowulf: Studies in Textual Criticism and Literary History." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11366.
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Beowulf is preserved in a single manuscript written out around the year 1000, but there are many reasons to believe that the poem was composed several centuries before this particular act of manual reproduction. Most significantly, the meter of Beowulf reveals that the poet regularly observed distinctions of etymological length that became phonologically indistinct before 725 in Mercia. This dissertation gauges the explanatory power of the hypothesis that Beowulf was composed about three centuries before the production of the extant manuscript. The following studies test the hypothesis of archaic composition by determining whether it is able to accommodate independent forms of evidence drawn from the fields of linguistics, textual criticism, and literary history.
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Fenner, Jane Louise. "'Remembering Daphne Rooke' : a literary history for the 'new' South Africa." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.323024.
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This thesis is concerned with recovering the literary history of Daphne Rooke, who experienced short-lived international fame as a South African novelist during the 1950s and 1960s. The value of this undertaking is predicated upon the fact that the author is currently enjoying something of a 'literary revival' within South Africa. with scholars persuasively arguing for Rooke's relevance within a post-apartheid literary culture. This obviously begs the question of why she was 'forgotten' in the first place; a question which is addressed within this, the first full-length literary history of the author. My thesis adopts an original methodological approach, as the lack of existing research into Rooke's original standing necessitates the use of analytical tools which open up alternative avenues of historical investigation. Accordingly, this thesis treats the cultural 'organs' attached to Rooke's novels in their capacity as published books - the imprints; dust-covers; sales figures; reviews; paperback reprints; ect. - as 'texts' which say something concrete about the contemporary value granted these works and their author. In the case of Rooke, a publishing-centred literary historiography is invaluable because it also exposes the degree to which the author's literary standing as a South African writer has been largely, and often negatively, influenced by forces emanating from the world of metropolitan and South African publishing. Furthermore, this thesis argues that a theoretical perspective which grants primacy to publishing practices is not only pertinent to a literary history of Rooke but to postapartheid literary studies in general. This is because the inherent weakness of South African publishing and, conversely, the strength of the metropolitan book industry, continues to determine what South Africans can make of their own literature.
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Seymour, G. S. "History and aesthetics and in the development of English literary criticism." Thesis, University of Essex, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.381257.
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Twidle, Hedley Lewis. "Prison and garden : Cape Town, natural history and the literary imagination." Thesis, University of York, 2010. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1057/.
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This work considers literary treatments of the colonial encounter at the Cape of Good Hope, adopting a local focus on the Peninsula itself to explore the relationship between specific archives – the records of the Dutch East India Company, travel and natural history writing, the Bleek and Lloyd Collection – and the contemporary fictions and poetries of writers like André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, Jeremy Cronin, Antjie Krog, Dan Sleigh, Stephen Watson, Zoë Wicomb and, in particular, J. M. Coetzee. Although it would hardly claim to be a literary history of Cape Town, it begins by asking what it might mean to read a history of the city through its literature. Yet moving beyond an initial enquiry into how (and at what cost) imaginative literature brings historical records into the public domain, it is ever more concerned with the writing in and of a specific topography: with the dynamics of rendering in words a landscape celebrated for its beauty and biodiversity, and with the wider social dimensions implied (or obscured) by the phrase ‘natural history’. It intends to question the received wisdom that attention to the landscape, flora and fauna of the subcontinent conceals an unwillingness to deal with social and political realities, probing the limits of this now well-trodden critical model to explore the limits of what Coetzee called ‘dream topographies’: ways of imagining contested ground that have shaped writing here, and the forms in which these persist today. Throughout I hope to suggest productive rather than antagonistic relations between what might broadly be termed ‘postcolonial’ and ‘ecocritical’ ways of reading, and to ask what, if anything, a ‘sense of place’ could mean in a spatially distorted, linguistically divided city of the global South.
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Melodia, Festa Beatrice <1990>. "Walking the Walk: How Literary Walkers sketched New York City History." Master's Degree Thesis, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10579/7182.
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Questa tesi ha lo scopo di analizzare la figura del flaneur Americano e la sua evoluzione nella città di New York. Inizieremo concentrandoci sul concetto di camminare urbano. Procederemo analizzando poi l'origine del flaneur letterario attraverso il paragone dei principali fondatori del termine: Baudelaire e Benjamin. Una volta chiarito il contesto e le origini del concetto di camminare urbano, porteremo alla luce le caratteristiche dell'atto di camminare a New York ripercorrendo così i passaggi che hanno portato il flaneur Americano sino ai nostri giorni. Considereremo brevemente esempi letterari di camminatori nella città di New York, analizzando l'evoluzione del camminare urbano ed i suoi cambiamenti. Arriveremo così all'obiettivo principale di questa tesi, paragonando ed analizzando quattro romanzi ambientati nella città di New York che rappresentano la figura del flaneur, passando dalla sua origine letteraria, il 1800, al periodo contemporaneo, a seguito dell'11 Settembre.La contrapposizione di diversi periodi storici ci permetterà di tracciare i cambiamenti del flaneur Americano dimostrando quindi che questa figura letteraria varia a seconda del tempo, degli eventi e del paesaggio. Concluderemo dimostrando che il flaneur Americano cambia attraverso il tempo e che la sua evoluzione è profondamente influenzata dalle conseguenze sociali in cui viene a formarsi. Così facendo, la figura del camminatore urbano è in grado di influenzare e ricostruire la storia della città di New York.
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Karloff, Boris. "The eighteenth century origins of modern literary Yiddish." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670327.
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Ferretter, Luke. "Towards a Christian literary theory." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15232.
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Most contemporary literary theories are either explicitly or implicitly atheistic. This thesis describes a literary theory whose principles are derived from or consistent with Christian theology. It argues against modern objections to such a theory that this is a rationally and ethically legitimate mode of contemporary literary theory. The first half of the thesis constitutes an analysis of deconstruction, of Marxism and of psychoanalysis. These are three of the most influential discourses in modern literary theory, each of which constitutes a significant argument against the existence of God, as this has traditionally been understood in Christian theology. In a chapter devoted to each theory, I examine its relation to Christian theology, and argue that it does not constitute a conclusive argument against the truth-content of such theology. I go on to assess which of its principles can be used in modem Christian literary theory, and which cannot. The second half of the thesis constitutes an analysis of a Christian tradition of thought that pertains to literary theory. In the fourth chapter, I examine the concepts of language and of art expressed or implied in the Bible, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and assess which of these concepts could be used in Christian literary theory today. In the fifth chapter, I examine certain twentieth-century Christian philosophers and literary critics, and assess how their thought could be used in contemporary Christian literary theory. In the final chapter, I synthesize the conclusions to these arguments into the outline of a literary theory that both derives from Christian theology and takes account of the objections to such theology posed by contemporary literary theory.
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Chapin, Charles Nicholas. "The turn to reading in twentieth-century literary criticism." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609859.
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Owen, Deborah Lynn. "Mann Thinking Across Antebellum Culture---Mann Satterwhite Valentine's Literary Aspirations." W&M ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625791.
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Mosley, Marcus. "Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe : the pre-history of a literary genre." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.306789.
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Delchamps, Vivian. "“Of the Woman First of All”: Walt Whitman and Women's Literary History." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/420.
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This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.
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RIBEIRO, FLAVIO DA SILVA. "HUME AND HISTORY: AN ANALYSIS ON THE ESSAYS MORAL, POLITICAL AND LITERARY." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2006. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=9538@1.
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CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOA presente dissertação procura compreender algumas reflexões sobre a história contidas nos Ensaios Morais, Políticos e Literários do filósofo escocês David Hume (1711-1776). Neste trabalho (1758), cuja característica dominante é a heterogeneidade dos temas abordados, o autor busca o conhecimento dos assuntos humanos sob uma perspectiva secularizada, mostrando que entre uma idealização da sociedade (e de uma conduta moral dos homens que nela vivem) e sua realidade concreta a escolha para o verdadeiro esclarecimento deve recair sobre esta última, desmistificando quaisquer hipóteses metafísicas e religiosas como guias ao saber. Tomando a Inglaterra como exemplo preferencial não apenas dos avanços conquistados pelo mundo moderno europeu, mas também dos principais problemas deste, Hume estabelece algumas reflexões - tal como a moderação nas disputas políticas e a interdependência econômica entre os países - que têm por objetivo a fundamentação de uma ciência política. Para esta concorre também uma crítica empírica, que levará o escocês a priorizar os aspectos gerais das sociedades (como a economia, as instituições, os avanços técnicos) como modo de explicação da dinâmica histórica, que, segundo sua percepção, opera por transformações lentas e graduais, de forma seqüenciada, nunca ou raramente de maneira abrupta e imediata. Procuramos, além disso, analisar a importância metodológica de sua regra geral para a reflexão histórica, pois, por meio desta regra, Hume faz tanto considerações acerca do passado como propõe observações gerais para sua época e para o futuro, assinalando, desta forma, a maneira como as sociedades se desenvolveram e como elas, provavelmente, se desenvolveriam doravante, almejando o primeiro passo em direção a um conhecimento científico do funcionamento do conjunto social, capaz de permanecer ante as próprias mudanças circunstanciais pelas quais as sociedades naturalmente passam.
The present research aims to comprehend some thoughts on history within the Essays Moral, Political and Literary, by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). In this particular work (1758), whose dominating characteristic is the heterogeneity of the proposed themes, the author is looking for the knowledge of human affairs under a secular perspective, exposing that between an idealization of society (including the moral conduct of men who live under her) and its concrete reality, the choice towards the very true knowledge must stand with the last, demystifying any metaphysical and religious hypothesis as guides to the capacity of learning. Taking England as a preferential example of the advances and problems of modern Europe, Hume sets some reflections - just as moderation in politics affairs and the economic interdependence among States - which observe the goal of founding a science of politics. In its basis remains an empirical criticism, which leads the Scot to conceive a priority to the general aspects of societies (as economy, institutions, technical advances) as a model of explanation on the historical dynamics, which, according to his conception, is transformed slowly and gradually, in a sequential way, never or rarely trough fast and immediate changes. One looked for, besides these aspects, to analyze the methodological importance of the author´s general rule to the historical concern, for, by using her, Hume wonders about the past and either proposes general directions for his time and future, marking, this way, how societies historically must have developed and how they, probably, would develop themselves from now on, aiming the first step to a scientific knowledge of society as a whole, that would be able to remain even through the circumstantial changes that naturally take place in societies.
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Walsh, Bridget. "Dark desires : a literary and cultural history of domestic murder, 1828-1891." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.539789.
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Nineteenth-century newspapers were awash with accounts of sexualized domestic murders which gripped the Victorian cultural imagination. This thesis examines the mediation of these crimes through a range of genres, arguing that the portrayal of domestic murder reflected significant discontent with the codes of behaviour imposed upon sections of society, particularly around the issues of gender and class. The thesis first examines the coverage of domestic murder trials in street literature and newspapers, before moving on to examine how the theatre was enlisted in the depiction of an idealized domestic sphere. The chapter then examines the public disarray at the 1828 trial of William Corder, which reflected a discontent with the constraints imposed within the theatre, and by the ideology of the domestic sphere. Chapter three engages with the debate surrounding the Newgate Novel, examining Sikes in Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) and the eponymous 'heroine' of Thackeray's Catherine (1840). The ambivalent presentation of both murderers reveals an incongruity between public opinion, fictional representation, and press coverage. Chapter four assesses how debates on models of male behaviour were played out in five novels featuring sexually-motivated acts of violence: Wilkie Collins's Basil (1852), Hardy's Desperate Remedies (1871) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The relationship between desirable male behaviour and the domestic sphere in these novels is shown to be a contested one. Chapter five argues that the ambivalent portrayal of the female domestic murderer at the fin de siecle reflected developments in psychology and the changing relationship between women and the domestic space. The chapter focuses on the trials of Florence Maybrick (1889) and Eleanor Pearcey (1890), and the female domestic murderers in Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael (1889), Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1890).
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Cataldi, Claudio. "A literary history of the 'Soul and Body' theme in medieval England." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1983/3e96475b-107e-416c-a574-846f0b99d879.
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This dissertation seeks to reconstruct the development of the literary ‘Soul and Body’ theme over time. This theme is preserved and developed in several medieval English texts, both in prose and verse, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century. Central to this theme is an opposition between the eternal soul and the decaying body; this opposition was eleborated both in the form of a monologue in which the soul accuses a silent body and in the form of a debate in which the two sides dispute over the responsibility for sin and eternal damnation. The first part of the Introduction offers a brief overview of the previous scholarship, highlighting the need for a more comprehensive treatment of the theme. The Introduction also outlines its origins, which have been traced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars to the earliest century of the Christian era in the Mediterranean area. My methodological model for the study of how traditional material was reworked is Ernst Robert Curtius, and his concept of the topos. To analyse in detail how the Soul and Body topos changed over time, I break the topos down into smaller motifs, which constitute its ‘building blocks’. Using this methodological approach, the first chapter proposes a classification of the various ‘Soul and Body’ texts of the Old English period into three groups, which are characterized by the occurrence of several shared motifs. The crystallization of these motifs into a structured and recognized sub-genre in the early Middle English phase is the focus of Chapter 2. The third chapter discusses how this sub-genre became part of the wider genre of medieval debate poetry between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Finally, the results of the investigation carried out in the present dissertation are summarized in a general conclusion.