Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Scottish literature 18th century History and criticism'
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Lindfield-Ott, Kristin. ""See SCOT and SAXON coalesc'd in one" : James Macpherson's 'The Highlander' in its intellectual and cultural contexts, with an annotated text of the poem." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2096.
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This thesis explores James Macpherson’s The Highlander (1758) in relation to originality, Scottish identity and historiography. It also situates the Ossianic Collections in the context of Macpherson’s earlier poetical and later historical works. There are three parts to it: a biographical sketch of Macpherson’s early life, the annotated edition of The Highlander, and discursive commentary chapters. By examining The Highlander in detail this thesis questions the emphasis of other Macpherson criticism on the Ossianic Collections, and allows us to see him as a writer who is historically minded, very aware of sources, well versed in established forms of poetry and thoroughly, and positively, British. The Highlander stands out among the corpus of his works not because it can give us insights into the Ossianic Collections, which is its usual function in Macpherson criticism, but because it can help us understand what it is that connects Macpherson’s earlier and later works with the Ossianic Collections: history, Britishness, tradition. Macpherson’s poetical works are united by a desire to translate Scotland’s factual past into sentimental British poetry. In the Ossianic Collections he does so without particular faithfulness to his sources, but in The Highlander he converts historical sources directly into neo-classic verse. This is where Macpherson’s originality lies: his ability to adapt history. In different styles and genres, and based on different sources, Macpherson’s works are early examples of Scotland’s great literary achievement: historical fiction. Instead of accusing him of forgery or trying to trace his knowledge of Gaelic ballads, this thesis presents Macpherson as a genuine historian who happened to write in a variety of genres.
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Gairn, Louisa. "Aspects of modern Scottish literature and ecological thought." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14839.
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'Aspects of Modern Scottish Literature and Ecological Thought' argues that the science and philosophy of 'ecology' has had a profound impact on Scottish literature since the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and relates the work of successive generations of Scottish writers to concurrent developments in ecological thought and the environmental sciences. Chapter One suggests that, while Romantic ways of thinking about the natural world remained influential in nineteenth-century culture, new environmental theories provided fresh ways of perceiving the world, evident from the writings of Scottish mountaineers. Chapter Two explores the confrontation of modernity and wilderness in the fiction and travel writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and some contemporaries such as John Muir. Chapter Three suggests that ecologically-sensitive local and global concerns, rather than 'national' ones per se, are central to the work of Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and others, while Chapter Four demonstrates that post-war 'rural' writers including Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown, often viewed as peripheral, are actually central and of international relevance, and challenges the assumption that there is a fundamental divide between Scottish rural and urban writing. Finally, Chapter Five argues that contemporary writers John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Alan Warner are not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role writing has to play in exploring and strengthening that relationship, helping to determine the ecological 'value' of poetry and fiction. By looking at Scottish literature through the lens of ecological thought, and engaging with international discourses of 'Ecocriticism', this thesis provides a fresh perspective in contrast to the dominant critical views of modern Scottish literature, and demonstrates that Scottish writing constitutes a heritage of ecological thought which, in this age of environmental awareness, should be recognised as not only relevant, but vital.
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Martin, Julia School of English UNSW. "Self and subject in eighteenth century diaries." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English, 2002. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/18787.
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This thesis investigates new ways of reading eighteenth century British diaries and argues that these narratives do not necessarily rely upon the idea of the self as a single, unitary source of meaning. This contradicts what has traditionally been viewed as the very essence of autobiography (Gusdorf, 1954; Olney, 1980, 1988). Close readings of the diaries of John Wesley, Mrs Housman, James Boswell and Hannah Ball (all written between 1720 and 1795) show that they construct 'generalised', rather than 'unique' subjects of narrative. The self is seen to be an amalgam of common characteristic more than being a core of psychological impulses. In order to understand the 'generalised' rather than 'unique' subject found in these diaries, this thesis surveys and uses reading strategies informed by theories that can accommodate fragmented narrative forms like diaries. It also investigates the religious and philosophical underpinnings of eighteenth century autobiographical narratives to determine how the self, and consciousness, were popularly perceived in the period known as the Enlightenment (c. 1690-1810). As they are often marked by missing pages, deletions and heavy editing, careful strategies are required in order to 'read with' eighteenth century diary narratives (Sandoval, 1981; Huff, 2000; Raoul, 2001). This practice invites an engagement with philosophical debates about 'self'-the living human being who writes the diary, and the 'subject'-the 'I' produced by narrative. The thesis argues that more than any other type of written narrative, diaries demand an acknowledgement that the subject of narrative does refer to a self that lives in day-to-day relations. Not to acknowledge this is to 'write off experience altogether' (Probyn,1991:111) and exclude the political dimensions of autobiography from the analysis. The thesis concludes that by seeking to answer the questions of 'What am I?' and 'What are we?' rather than the Romantic or psychological question of 'Who am I?', eighteenth century diary narratives create complex relationships between time, subjective and narrative that transcend most theorisations of autobiography to date. This presents an exciting direction forward for a field of scholarship that has been overly concerned with defining its limitations.
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Mapstone, Sally. "The advice to princes tradition in Scottish literature, 1450-1500." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a93e3e2d-89ce-4d4a-bcbf-47aa24f93e5c.
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The regions of James II, III, and IV in the second half of the fifteenth century in Scotland saw a distinctive flowering of advice to princes literature. This is the first account of its kind to examine in detail the sources, arguments, and extent of political comment of each individual work. In particular it employs both literary and historical sources to reveal the largely unrecognized impact of continental, especially French, political thought, on a number of writers. The study opens with a consideration of the poem De Regimine Principum, a politically very forthright advice work, influential for a century or so after its composition. Chapter 2 deals with the writings of Sir Gilbert Hay, whose work shows clear influences from the continent, particularly in the Buik of King Alexander, which is also seen to have interesting links with De Regimine Principum. Chapter 3 discusses the romance Lancelot of the Laik, a poem less precise in its allusions, but clearly indicative of a number of recurrent preoccupations in Scottish advisory literature in the areas of justice and kingly minorities. The two following chapters examine The Talis of the Fyve Bestes, which gives a markedly nationalistic evocation of good kingship, and The Buke of the Chess, where Scottish advice to princes is seen at its least politically aware. In Chapter 6 advice appears in yet another genre, the devotional poem The Contemplacioun of Synnaris, where the wider associations of `kingship' with the nosce te ipsum tradition are apparent. Chapters 7 and 8 concern The Thre Prestis of Peblis and John Ireland's Meroure of Wyssdome, possibly produced around the same time, but presenting their advice in very different manners: the Thre Prestis adroitly worked and entertaining, the Meroure, highly theological and drawing strongly on continental writers, notably the sermons of Jean Gerson. In conclusion it is shown that through this context we can best appreciate the purpose and formidable execution of Robert Henryson's advice to princes fable lq The Lion and the Mouse.
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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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Shannon, Josephine E. "From discourse to the couch : the obscured self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary narrative." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34533.
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Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression.I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.
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Dufresne, Virginie. "De Versailles à Clarens : nature et politique dans les jardins littéraires de l'âge classique." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99589.
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During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French garden history witnesses the triumph and then the decline of the French formal garden, to which succeeds the fashion of landscape gardening of foreign inspiration. Integrating and nourishing this debate, the literary texts of that period enable to grasp the stakes that it brings up. The garden notably lends itself to the expression of an emerging sentiment of nature, as well it also serves that of a political thought enlightened by new ideas. Effectively, the treatment that these texts give to the garden is a witness to the revival that installs itself in the way of conceiving nature, and the relation that nature holds with man and the art of the gardens. The garden's topic and scenography are a testimony of changes that in turn affect its imaginary and that of the walk. Finally, the critical discourse exploits the analogy that establishes itself between the art of the gardens and the exercise of power, polarizing the debate around the political metaphor.
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Geissler, Christopher Michael. "'Die schwarze Ware' : transatlantic slavery and abolitionism in German writing, 1789-1871." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610465.
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Monette, Isabelle. "Récritures de récits criminels en France sous l'Ancien Régime." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79966.
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Three original stories are the basis for our study of rewriting during the French Ancien Regime: the story of Thibaud de la Jacquiere, that of the "sorcier Gaufridy" and that of the Marquise de Ganges, which Sade will rewrite as a novel. Having all originated from a "canard", they appear in the 1679 edition of the Histoires tragiques of Francois de Rosset, and two of them can also be found in Francois Gayot de Pitaval's Causes celebres. Each of these stories was rewritten by different authors at least three times. Using Gerard Genette's theory of the narrative, we will analyse the processes of transformation that the rewriting operates in the text, as well as the changes it imposes to its original meaning. The number of rewritings of each text---up to five for the Marquise de Gange---is a testament to the importance of textual reappropriation as much as it shows the relevance of a study which brings to light the role of rewriting in the survival of these stories.
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Moore, Paul Henry. "Death in the eighteenth-century novel, 1740-1800." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5def918a-a899-4650-8850-efcacf3f4bf1.
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This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.
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Ganofsky, Marine. "Night in eighteenth-century French libertine fiction (1730-1789)." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610662.
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Casey, Shawn Thomas. "Literacy and the Social Worlds of Writing in the Scottish Atlantic: 1750-1800." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1354125418.
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Polak, Victoria. "Religious and moral concepts in the eighteenth-century German novel of sensibility : from Christian Fürchtegott Gellert's 'Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G+' to the end of the 1770s." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/13391.
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In my introduction I analyse the state of research in my subject. No detailed study of the subject has been conducted in recent years, hence there exists no work which takes account of recent conclusions in the examination of Sensibility in its entirety. I, therefore, consider it important to trace the origins of a movement in European culture. I draw attention to possible influences from philosophy and psychology which have tended to be neglected in favour of too exclusive emphasis on Empfindsamkeit as secularised Pietism. The main part of my thesis is devoted to detailed interpretation of five novels covering a period 1747 to 1776. This study yields various conclusions. In the novel as a genre, as in theoretical works on Empfindsamkeit, there is no polarity between the Enlightenment and Sensibility. Each of the novelists analysed is concerned to proclaim the necessity of achieving a balance between reason and emotion. In the novels of Gellert and La Roche this is explicitly stated in the form of moral instruction to the reader, while the fate of the heroes of Goethe and Miller perhaps suggests indirectly that such an equilibrium might be desirable. In particular the earlier authors I study equate moderation in feeling with virtue. Here these novelists advocate only feeling in the cause of virtue, while at the same time arguing that those who are capable of "true feeling" are by definition virtuous. In the sphere of religion, all novelists show a tendency to regard Christianity as a matter of emotion on the one hand and of practical ethics on the other. While there was a shift in emphasis from Tugendempfindsamkeit to the cultivation of feeling for its own sake, perceptions of the nature of religions and virtue remained constant.
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Guthrie, Neil. "A thousand wrecks! : rakes' progresses in some eighteenth century English novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b08473d6-9cae-4a14-b7a7-3e40cf7bb283.
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This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).
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Ahern, Stephen. "Between duty and desire : sentimental agency in British prose fiction of the later eighteenth century." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0027/NQ50101.pdf.
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Mills, Rebecca May. "'Thanks for that elegant defense' : polemical prose and poetry by women in the early eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d98a502d-97b4-4dd2-b5e6-1f8c432b5cb7.
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The end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth saw many women writers from numerous social ranks, political affiliations and religious denominations reading, writing, circulating and publishing polemical prose and poetry in defence of their sex. During this surge of protofeminist activity, many of these women decried 'Customs Tyranny' by advocating a more egalitarian status for themselves, especially in regard to marriage, education and religion. This thesis, then, is a socio-historic study of the lives and writings of several polemical women writers, namely, Mary Astell (1666-1731), Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) and Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731). It also considers how and why protofeminism evolved in the late seventeenth century and reached a climax between 1694, when Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and 1710, when Chudleigh published Essays upon Several Subjects. Until now, scholars of early women writers have labelled Astell the foremost English feminist of her day. Consequently, many of her contemporary protofeminist writers have been neglected. By contextualizing their lives and texts within the political and literary activity at the turn of the eighteenth century, this thesis ultimately argues that women polemicists, such as Chudleigh and Thomas, who followed Astell into print, were not merely echoes and disciples. Rather, they furthered the evolution and secularization of a genre that anticipates feminism proper, which began to develop in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to uncover and rediscover the personal and professional details of these women's lives their class, education, friendships and patronage relationships this thesis relied heavily upon material evidence such as letters, parish records, legal records, prison records and wills. As a result, it combines feminist, materialist inclinations with traditional methodology, such as historical and archival research.
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Pazdziora, John Patrick. "George MacDonald's fairy tales in the Scottish Romantic tradition." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4460.
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George MacDonald (1824-1905) is one of the most complex and significant Scottish writers of the nineteenth century, especially as a writer of children's fiction and literary fairy tales. His works, however, have seldom been studied as Scottish literature. This dissertation is the first full-length analysis of his writings for children in their Scottish context, focusing particularly on his use of Scottish folklore in his literary fairy tales. MacDonald wrote in the Scottish Romantic tradition of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and James Hogg; by close reading his works alongside similar texts by his compatriots, such as Andrew Lang, MacDonald's own idiosyncratic contribution to that tradition becomes more apparent. His profound knowledge of and appreciation for Christian mysticism is in evidence throughout his work; his use of folklore was directly informed by his exploration of mystical ideas. Hogg is recast as a second Dante, and ‘bogey tales' become catalysts for spiritual awakening. MacDonald's fairy tales deal sensitively and profoundly with the theme of child death, a tragedy that held personal significance for him, and can thus be read as his attempt to come to terms with the reality of bereavement by using Scottish folklore to explain it in mystical terms. Traditional figures such as Thomas Rhymer, visionary poets, and doubles appear in his fairy tales as guides and pilgrims out of the material world toward mystical union with the Divine.
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Nash, Andrew. "Kailyard, Scottish literary criticism, and the fiction of J.M. Barrie." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15199.
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This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.
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Staton, Maria S. "Christianity in American Indian plays, 1760s-1850s." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1364944.
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The main purpose of this study is to prove that the view on the American Indians, as it is presented in the plays, is determined by two dissimilar sets of values: those related to Christianity and those associated with democracy. The Christian ideals of mercy and benevolence are counterbalanced by the democratic values of freedom and patriotism in such a way that secular ideals in many cases supersede the religious ones. To achieve the purpose of the dissertation, I sifted the plays for a list of notions related to Christianity and, using textual evidence, demonstrated that these notions were not confined to particular pieces but systematically appeared in a significant number of plays. This method allowed me to make a claim that the motif of Christianity was one of the leading ones, yet it was systematically set against another major recurrent subject—the values of democracy. I also established the types of clerical characters in the plays and discovered their common characteristic—the ultimate bankruptcy of their ideals. This finding supported the main conclusion of this study: in the plays under discussion, Christianity was presented as no longer the only valid system of beliefs and was strongly contested by the outlook of democracy.I discovered that the motif of Christianity in the American Indian plays reveals itself in three ways: in the superiority of Christian civilization over Indian lifestyle, in the characterization of Indians within the framework of Christian morality, and in the importance of Christian clergy in the plays. None of these three topics, however, gets an unequivocal interpretation. First, the notion of Christian corruption is distinctly manifest. Second, the Indian heroes and heroines demonstrate important civic virtues: desire for freedom and willingness to sacrifice themselves for their land. Third, since the representation of the clerics varies from saintliness to villainy, the only thing they have in common is the impracticability and incredulity of the ideas they preach. More fundamental truths, it is suggested, should be sought outside of Christianity, and the newly found values should be not so much of a "Christian" as of "democratic" quality.Department of English
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Hone, Joseph. "The end of the line : literature and party politics at the accession of Queen Anne." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d847a561-130a-42f0-b78f-2463e9e65535.
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This thesis provides the first full-length account of the political and cultural significance of the accession of Queen Anne. It offers a critical reassessment of the politics of the royal image across a spectrum of texts, events, and artefacts - from panegyrics, newspapers, sermons, royal progresses, and processions to medals, coins, and playing cards. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of party politics to the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century. This thesis nuances that assumption by arguing: (1) that the principal focus of partisan texts was competing representations of monarchy; and (2) that the explosion of partisanship at the start of the eighteenth century was triggered by unrest about the royal succession. Anne was the last protestant Stuart. She had no surviving children. This thesis explores how authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and a great many lesser known and anonymous writers and propagandists conceptualized the end of the Stuart dynasty. Anne's accession forced writers to conjecture on the future succession. There were two rival claimants to the throne after Anne's death: the protestant Electress Sophia of Hanover and Anne's Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward. Sophia's claim was statutory, James's hereditary. Factions emerged in support of both claimants. Almost all topical writing took a stance on the issue. Many sided with the government, supporting Hanover. Yet some writers favoured the illegal but hereditary claim of James Francis Edward; they had to express support in covert ways. This succession crisis triggered not only printed polemic, but also swathes of clandestine manuscript literature circulating in the Jacobite underground. The government took a hard line on Jacobite writers and printers; this thesis documents both their persecution and the techniques they used to evade the law. The thesis concludes by suggesting that this oppositional literary culture only disintegrated after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, and the consequent settlement of the Hanoverian succession, in late 1716. After this point, royal succession ceased to be a major source of political discontent.
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Collins, Margo. "Wayward Women, Virtuous Violence: Feminine Violence in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2474/.
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This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in order to maintain social boundaries, particularly sexual and economic ones, and that writers of the period drew upon this tradition of acceptable feminine violence in order to create the figure of the violent woman as a necessary agent of social control. One such figure is Violenta, the heroine of Delarivier Manley's novella The Wife's Resentment (1720), who murders and dismembers her bigamous husband. At her trial, Violenta is condemned to death "notwithstanding the Pity of the People" and "the Intercession of the Ladies," who believe that although the "unexampled Cruelty [Violenta] committed afterwards on the dead Body" was excessive, the murder itself is not inexcusable given her husband's bigamy. My research draws upon diverse archival materials, such as conduct manuals, criminal biographies, and legal records, in order to provide a contextual grounding for the interpretation of literary works by women. Moving between contemporary accounts of feminine violence and discussions of pertinent literary works by Eliza Haywood, Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Jane Wiseman, the dissertation examines issues of interpersonal violence and communal violence committed by women.
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Mcavoy, Meghan. "Critical nationalism : Scottish literary culture since 1989." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/23242.
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This thesis is a critical study of Scottish literary culture since 1989. It examines and interrogates critical work in Scottish literary studies through a ‘critical nationalist’ approach. This approach aims to provide a refinement of cultural nationalist literary criticism by prioritising the oppositional politics of recent Scottish writing, its criticism of institutional and state processes, and its refusal to exempt Scotland from this critique. In the introduction I identify two fundamental tropes in recent Scottish literary criticism: opposition to a cultural nationalist critical narrative which is overly concerned with ‘Scottishness’ and critical centralising of marginalised identity in the establishment of a national canon. Chapter one interrogates a tendency in Scottish literary studies which reads Scottish literature in terms of parliamentary devolution, and demonstrates how a critical nationalist approach avoids the pitfalls of this reading. Chapter two is a study of two novels by the critically neglected and politically Unionist author Andrew O’Hagan, arguing that these novels criticise an insular and regressive Scotland in order to reveal an ambivalent, ‘Janus-faced’ nationalism. Chapter three examines representations of Scottish traditional and folk music in texts by A. L. Kennedy and Alan Bissett, engaging with the Scottish folk tradition since the 1950s revival in order to demonstrate literature and music’s ambivalent responses to aspects of literary and cultural nationalism. Chapter four examines texts by Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, analysing the relationships they construct between gender, nation and class. Chapter five examines three contemporary Scottish texts and elucidates an ethical turn in Scottish literary studies, which reads contemporary writing in terms of appropriation and exploitation.
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Nicholls, Angus 1972. "The mantic art : an examination of the notion of the daemonic in the writings of Plato, Goethe and Goethe's contemporaries." Monash University, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/9148.
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CONNERY, BRIAN ARTHUR. "AN AMBITION TO BE HEARD IN A CROWD: MAD HEROES AND THE SATIRIST IN THE WORKS OF JONATHAN SWIFT (ALIENATION, DOUBLE-BIND)." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/183857.
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In Swift's works, both heroes and madmen are characterized by supra-normal aspiration, imagination, individuality, and pride, and the mad hero becomes an effective emblem for the chaos arising when individual vision challenges traditional authority in religion, politics, and literature. Swift's view of madness as the willful perversion of reason tends to be traditional, though his sense of its pervasiveness creates a subversive skepticism. Consistently throughout his works, Swift posits conscience as the only safeguard against the madness of pride. Swift views the traditional hero as subversive, typically portraying him as mad while presenting the sane man as unheroic. As the Tale-teller argues, the traditonal hero is a successful madman. Swift's later works demonstrate that madness and heroism often coincide because of the mutually reinforcing relationship between power and ego, and he asserts that the will to power, manifested in the heroic imposition of one's will upon others, is a form of madness. As an alternative to the asocial and amoral traditional hero, Swift promotes a moderate hero in the figures of the Church of England Man, the Examiner, and the Drapier: the one just man, motivated by Roman and Christian virtue, in a mad society. But even the vir bonus remains susceptible to challenges of authority, for in a mad and corrupt society his singular vision cannot appeal to common sense. Moreover, if he becomes powerful, he risks madness, and if he retreats from madness, he becomes impotent. As a consequence of this double bind, the satirist himself suffers a profound alienation. Swift recognizes that by engaging in the controversies of his age, he himself becomes liable to charges of the madness of pride. Even as he harangues the world, his recognition of the heroic conceit in establishing himself as satirist is evident in the self-satire of A Modest Proposal and the verses on his death. Similarly, the self-portraits in his poetry and Gulliver's Travels demonstrate his conscience at work as he satirizes his own indignation and reforming urges, striving thereby to maintain a modicum of humility and thus sanity, and, in laughing with the reader, striving to maintain common sense as well.
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Harikae, Ryoko. "John Bellenden's Chronicles of Scotland : translation and circulation." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d0ebf41c-8263-45e0-a6d5-5826bf8e0396.
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John Bellenden's Chronicles of Scotland (1531-r. 1537) is a humanist Scots translation of Hector Boece's Scotorum Historia (1527). As the first full-scale printed national history in the vernacular, the Chronicles assumed a pivotal role in sixteenth-century Scottish literary culture. Despite its contemporary importance,however, relatively little critical attention has been paid to Bellenden's work itself, primarily due to the misconception that it is a neutral translation of the Scotorum Historia. However, as Bellenden successively revised his text in several stages with stylistical, ideological and material alterations, the Chronicles needs to be evaluated as an individual literary work. The
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Wood, Laura Thomason. "Change of Condition: Women's Rhetorical Strategies on Marriage, 1710-1756." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2005. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4921/.
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This dissertation examines ways in which women constructed and criticized matrimony both before and after their own marriages. Social historians have argued for the rise of companionacy in the eighteenth century without paying attention to women's accounts of the fears and uncertainties surrounding the prospect of marriage. I argue that having more latitude to choose a husband did not diminish the enormous impact that the choice would have on the rest of a woman's life; if anything, choice might increase that impact. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Mulso Chapone, Mary Delany, and Eliza Haywood recorded their anxieties about and their criticisms of marriage in public and private writings from the early years of the century into the 1750s. They often elide their own complex backgrounds in favor of generalized policy statements on what constitutes a good marriage. These women promote an ideal of marriage based on respect and similarity of character, suggesting that friendship is more honest, and durable than romantic love. This definition of ideal marriage enables these women to argue for more egalitarian marital relationships without overtly calling for a change in the wife's traditional role. The advancement of this ideal of companionacy gave women a means of promoting gender equality in marriage at a time when they considered marriage risky but socially and economically necessary.
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Bender, Ashley Brookner. "Personal Properties: Stage Props and Self-Expression in British Drama, 1600-1707." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2009. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12081/.
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This dissertation examines the role of stage properties-props, slangily-in the construction and expression of characters' identities. Through readings of both canonical and non-canonical drama written between 1600 and 1707-for example, Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (1678), Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1677)-I demonstrate how props mediate relationships between people. The control of a character's props often accords a person control of the character to whom the props belong. Props consequently make visual the relationships of power and subjugation that exist among characters. The severed body parts, bodies, miniature portraits, and containers of these plays are the mechanisms by which characters attempt to differentiate themselves from others. The characters deploy objects as proof of their identities-for example, when the women in Behn's Rover circulate miniatures of themselves-yet other characters must also interpret these objects. The props, and therefore the characters' identities, are at all times vulnerable to misinterpretation. Much as the props' meanings are often disputed, so too are characters' private identities often at odds with their public personae. The boundaries of selfhood that the characters wish to protect are made vulnerable by the objects that they use to shore up those boundaries. When read in relation to the characters who move them, props reveal the negotiated process of individuation. In doing so, they emphasize the correlation between extrinsic and intrinsic worth. They are a measure of how well characters perform gender and class rolls, thereby demonstrating the importance of external signifiers in the legitimation of England's subjects, even as they expose "legitimacy" as a social construction.
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Margrave, Christie L. "Women and nature in the works of French female novelists, 1789-1815." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6391.
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On account of their supposed link to nature, women in post-revolutionary France were pigeonholed into a very restrictive sphere that centred around domesticity and submission to their male counterparts. Yet this thesis shows how a number of women writers – Cottin, Genlis, Krüdener, Souza and Staël – re-appropriate nature in order to reclaim the voice denied to them and to their sex by the society in which they lived. The five chapters of this thesis are structured to follow a number of critical junctures in the life of an adult woman: marriage, authorship, motherhood, madness and mortality. The opening sections to each chapter show why these areas of life generated particular problems for women at this time. Then, through in-depth analysis of primary texts, the chapters function in two ways. They examine how female novelists craft natural landscapes to expose and comment on the problems male-dominant society causes women to experience in France at this time. In addition, they show how female novelists employ descriptions of nature to highlight women's responses to the pain and frustration that social issues provoke for them. Scholars have thus far overlooked the natural settings within the works of female novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, a re-evaluation of these natural settings, as suggested by this thesis, brings a new dimension to our appreciation of the works of these women writers and of their position as critics of contemporary society. Ultimately, an escape into nature on the part of female protagonists in these novels becomes the means by which their creators confront the everyday reality faced by women in the turbulent socio-historical era which followed the Revolution.
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Pickard, Claire. "Literary Jacobitism : the writing of Jane Barker, Mary Caesar and Anne Finch." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:85514fc9-6f0c-4992-ae8c-2666dc1f7ede.
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This thesis argues that much of the gender based criticism that has led to the "rediscovery" of neglected early modern women writers has, paradoxically, also served to limit our understanding of such writers by distracting attention from other aspects of their writing, such as their political commitments. The three authors considered, Jane Barker (1652-1732), Mary Caesar (1677-1741) and Anne Finch (1661-1720), have been selected precisely because Jacobitism is central to their writing. However, it will be argued that a focus upon gender politics in the texts of these writers has led to a failure to comprehend the party political boldness of their work. The thesis examines the writing of each author in turn and explores the implications of Barker's, Caesar's and Finch's Jacobite allegiances for their respective views of human history as played out in political affairs. It also considers the ways in which each author attempts to reconcile a cause that is supposedly supported by God with apparent political failure. The quest of Barker, Caesar and Finch to investigate these issues and to comprehend how Jacobitism forms part of their own authorial identities is central to what is meant here by "literary Jacobitism" in relation to these writers. The thesis demonstrates that Jacobitism is enabling for each of these three women as it enhances their ability to conceive of themselves as authors by allowing their sense of political identity to overcome their scruples about their position as women who write. However, it also illustrates that Jacobitism functions differently in the writing of each of the selected authors. It thus argues that an undifferentiated labelling of the work of these three women as "Jacobite" is as restrictive as their previous categorisation as "women writers".
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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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Grovier, Kelly. "Walking Stewart & the making of Romantic imagination." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670203.
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MacKenzie, Garry Ross. "Landscapes in modern poetry : gardens, forests, rivers, islands." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5910.
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This thesis considers a selection of modern landscape poetry from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that this poetry demonstrates how the term landscape might be re-imagined in relation to contemporary environmental concerns. Each chapter discusses poetic responses to a different kind of landscape: gardens, forests, rivers and islands. Chapter One explores how, in the poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Douglas Dunn, Louise Glück and David Harsent, gardens are culturally constructed landscapes in which ideas of self, society and environment are contemplated; I ask whether gardening provides a positive example of how people might interact with the natural world. My second chapter demonstrates that for Sorley MacLean, W.S. Merwin, Susan Stewart and Kathleen Jamie, forests are sites of memory and sustainable ‘dwelling', but that deforestation threatens both the ecology and the culture of these landscapes. Chapter Three compares river poems by Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald, considering their differing approaches to river sources, mystical immersion in nature, water pollution and poetic experimentation; I discuss how in W.S. Graham's poetry the sea provides a complex image of the phenomenal world similar to Oswald's river. The final chapter examines the extent to which islands in poetry are pastoral landscapes and environmental utopias, looking in particular at poems by Dunn, Robin Robertson, Iain Crichton Smith and Jen Hadfield. I reflect upon the potential for island poetry to embrace narratives of globalisation as well as localism, and situate the work of George Mackay Brown and Robert Alan Jamieson within this context. I engage with a range of ecocritical positions in my readings of these poets and argue that the linguistic creativity, formal inventiveness and self-reflexivity of poetry constitute a distinctive contribution to contemporary understandings of landscape and the environment.
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Angel-Cann, Lauryn. "Stretched Out on Her Grave: Pathological Attitudes Toward Death in British Fiction 1788-1909." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4271/.
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Nineteenth-century British fiction is often dismissed as necrophillic or obsessed with death. While the label of necrophilia is an apt description of the fetishistic representations of dead women prevalent at the end of the century, it is too narrow to fit literature produced earlier in the century. This is not to say that abnormal attitudes toward death are only a feature of the late nineteenth century. In fact, pathological attitudes toward death abound in the literature, but the relationship between the deceased and the survivor is not always sexual in nature. Rather, there is a clear shift in attitudes, from the chaste death fantasy, or attraction to the idea of death, prevalent in Gothic works, to the destructive, stagnant mourning visible in mid-century texts, and culminating in the perverse sexualization of dead women at the turn of the century. This literary shift is most likely attributable to the concurrent changes in attitudes toward sex and death. As sex became more acceptable, more public, via the channels of scientific discourse, death became a less acceptable idea. This “denial of death” is a direct reaction to the religious uncertainties brought about by industrialization. As scientists and industrialists uncovered increasing evidence against a literal interpretation of the Bible, more people began to doubt the nature of God and the existence of an afterlife. If there was no God, then there was no heaven, which raised questions about what happened to the soul after death. With the certainty of an afterlife gone, death became mysterious, something to fear, and the passing of loved ones was doubly-mourned as their fate was now uncertain.
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Bryce, Sylvia. "Tracing the shadow of 'No Mean City' : aspects of class and gender in selected modern Scottish urban working-class fiction." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14803.
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This Ph.D. dissertation examines the influence of Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long's novel No Mean City (1935) on the representation of working-class subjectivity in modem Scottish urban fiction. The novel helped to focus literary attention on a predominantly male, working-class, urban and realistic vision of modern Scotland. McArthur and Long explore - in their representations of destructive slum-dwelling characters - the damaging effects of class and gender on working-class identity. The controversy surrounding the book has always been intense, and most critics either deplore or downplay the full significance of No Mean City's literary impact. My dissertation re-examines one of the most disliked and misrepresented working-class novels in modern Scottish literary history. McArthur and Long's literary legacy, notwithstanding its many detractors, has become something to write against. Through examination of works by James Barke, John McNeillie, Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, Bill McGhee, George Friel, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, Meg Henderson and A.L. Kennedy, the thesis outlines how the challenge represented by No Mean City has survived the decades following its publication. It argues that contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the novel's influence has been instrumental, not detrimental, to the evolution of modern Scottish literature. Ultimately I hope to pave the way toward a fuller, more nuanced understanding of No Mean City's remarkable impact, and to demonstrate how pervasive its legacy has been to Scottish writers from the 1930s to the 1990s.
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Pnevmonidou, Elena. ""Liebes-Töten" : zur Objektwerdung der Frau im Roman der Frühromantik : Novalisʹ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Friedrich HÜlderlins Hyperion, Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde." Thesis, McGill University, 2004. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=84537.
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The aim of this comparative study of Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen , Holderlin's Hyperion, and Schlegel's Lucinde is to develop a comprehensive overview of the role of woman in conceptions of male subjectivity in Early German Romanticism. The reading of the novels developed here examines the Early Romantic poetics with a specific view to the conceptualizations of woman contained therein. The Early Romantic 'Project' consists in the rewriting of the subject and the world in the medium of poetry. Tanscendental poetry, the fragment, allegory, and irony are intended to invoke the presence of an absence, that is the absolute. In the concrete praxis in the novels, these concepts of Early Romantic poetics imply conceptualizations of woman. They articulate a specific approach in the encounter of the male subject with the female object. At the center of Romantic poetics lies the encounter with woman. The unique situatedness of the romantic subject is, indeed, crystallized in this encounter.Early Romanticism is situated between Kant and Hegel. The post-Kantian subject experiences a crisis of legitimation. Lacking an unmediated access to the object, it is fragmented and threatened. Early Romanticism, however, also prefigures Hegel, inasmuch as the crisis does not consist in the loss of the object, but rather in the encounter of two subjects. The three novels are juxtaposed here because this position between the loss of the object and the crisis of the encounter with the other as subject leads to a paradoxical conceptualization of woman as an uncanny object of desire. In all three novels, the constitution of the male subject and the possibility of poetry depend on the encounter with woman. However, the possibility of woman emerging, indeed, as subject represents an extreme threat. As a consequence, the constitution of the male poetic subject requires the simultaneous assimilation of femininity and the shielding against woman. Hence, the three novels are love stories that narrate the death of woman. However, woman is fundamentally uncanny because even the presence of the dead woman represents a threat. The constitution of the male subject and novel unfolds, therefore, in three stages; the encounter with woman, the assimilation of femininity and death of woman, and the removal of any traces of that death.
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Hill, Lorna. "Bloody women : a critical-creative examination of how female protagonists have transformed contemporary Scottish and Nordic crime fiction." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/27352.
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This study will explore the role of female authors and their female protagonists in contemporary Scottish and Nordic crime fiction. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Lin Anderson and Liza Marklund are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender in the crime fiction genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society, they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, all journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series; Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series; Anna Smith’s books about Rosie Gilmour; and Liza Marklund’s books about Annika Bengzton, I explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives and also draw parallels between their societies. I document the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research, a novel, The Invisible Chains, set in post-Referendum Scotland. The thesis will examine and define the role of the female protagonist, offer a feminist reading of contemporary crime fiction, and investigate how the rise of human trafficking, the problem of domestic abuse in Scotland and society’s changing attitudes and values are reflected in contemporary crime novels, before discussing the narrative structures and techniques employed in the writing of The Invisible Chains. This novel allows us to consider the role of women in a contemporary and progressive society where women hold many senior positions in public life and examine whether they manage successfully to challenge traditional patriarchal hierarchies. The narrative is split between journalist Megan Ross, The Girl, a victim of human trafficking, and Trudy, who is being domestically abused, thus pulling together the themes of the critical genesis in the creative work. By focusing on the protagonist, the victims and raising awareness of human trafficking and domestic abuse, The Invisible Chains, an original creative work, reflects a contemporary society’s changing attitudes, problems and values.
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Abunasser, Rima Jamil. "Corporate Christians and Terrible Turks: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Representation of Empire in the Early British Travel Narrative, 1630 - 1780." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4444/.
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This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in the work of scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan and Edward Said. This critical gap has left early travel narratives by Sir Francis Moore, Jonathan Harris, Penelope Aubin, and others largely neglected. These early writers, I argue, adapted the conventions of the travel narrative while relying on the authority of contemporary commercial practices. The early English travelers modified contemporary conventions of aesthetic representation by formulating their descriptions of non-European cultures in terms of the economic and political conventions and rivalries of the early eighteenth century. Early English travel literature, I demonstrate, functioned as a politically motivated medium that served both as a marker of authenticity, justifying the colonial and imperial ventures that would flourish in the nineteenth century, and as a forum for experimentation with English notions of gender and narrative authority.
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Tankard, Paul 1956. "In full possession of the present moment : Samuel Johnson, reading and the everyday." Monash University, English Dept, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8952.
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Rumbold, Kate Louise. "All the men and women merely players : quoting Shakespeare in the mid-eighteenth-century novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670136.
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Woloshen, Richard Allen. "L’individu exceptionnel dans Les liaisons dangereuses." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25532.
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Nous espérons montrer dans cette thèse que le développement du type de l'individu exceptionnel dans les romans du dix-huitième siècle en France est le résultat des courants philoso-phiques et artistiques de la période. Les Liaisons dangereuses de Laclos reflète mieux que tout autre roman du siècle ces deux influences, mais elles se font aussi sentir dans Manon Lescaut de Prevost, La Vie de Marianne de Marivaux, et Jacques le fataliste de Diderot.
L'introduction démontre que les philosophes du siècle désiraient le bonheur personnel de l'individu, la tolérance et la raison au lieu de l'ascétisme, l'intolérance et la foi aveugle qui dominaient la pensée du dix-septième siècle. Les philosophes voyaient l'aristocratie comme un obstacle à la réalisation d'un meilleur monde car cette classe ne voulait pas un changement de l'ordre établi. Puisque la pensée d'une période influeence souvent l'art, le fait que les romanciers du dix-huitième siècle adoptaient le point de vue des philosophes en critiquant l'aristocratie n'est pas surprenant. L'individu exceptionnel devient par la suite un moyen idéal pour voiler de telles critiques aussi bien que pour satisfaire des instincts créateurs chez les romanciers.
Dans le premier chapitre nous indiquons que Prévost, Marivaux et Diderot critiquaient l'aristocratie à mesure qu'ils analysaient les raisons pour lesquelles les personnages princi-paux de leurs romans étaient exceptionnels. Des influences à l'extérieur du roman comme le conflit philosophique entre la raison et la sensibilité semblent définir à première vue la nature extraordinaire de Des Grieux, Marianne et Mme de la Pommeraye; ces individus veulent nous convaincre qu'ils sont spéciaux à cause de leur sensibilité ou de leur intelligence. Cependant des influences à l'intérieur du roman, comme la forme, nous donnent les vrais clefs du caractère unique de ces personnages. Les protagonistes racontent leur propre histoire au lecteur et leur talent de duper autrui afin de se montrer dans une image flatteuse est ce qui les distingue enfin des autres. Néanmoins, les protagonistes se sentent obligés de se faire valoir car la société leur est presque toujours hostile.
Le deuxième chapitre introduit les protagonistes des Liaisons dangereuses, le vicomte de Valmont et la marquise de Merteuil. Chacun d'eux se croit un libertin sans pareil et dans ce chapitre nous étudions comment ils exploitent leur sagacité pour prouver leur supériorité l'un à l'autre. Nous expliquons la tradition libertine qui est la base de la philosophic personnelle de Valmont et de Merteuil. Le roman est dans la forme épistolaire; les protagonistes échangent des lettres. La forme du roman, une influence à l'intérieur, révèle encore une fois que ce que Valmont et Merteuil croient les rendre exceptionnels est illusoire. C'est de nouveau leur capacité de tromper autrui et eux-mêmes dans leurs lettres sur leur qualité spéciale qui est vraiemnt leur qualité distinctive.
Les lettres soutiennent l'illusion de l'invincibilité de Valmont et Merteuil dans le deuxième chapitre, mais elles les détruisent dans le troisième chapitre en leur révélant toutes leurs faiblesses émotionnelles. La rivalité entre les libertins s'intensifie vers la fin du roman et l'influence de la raison sur leur conduite s'affaiblit. Nous voyons que la façade intellectuelle cède rapidement à la force des émotions violentes, longuement supprimées. La forme épistolaire du livre révèle done que cette oeuvre suit l'exemple des romans précédents du siècle. L'illusion du point de vue du protagoniste et la réalité du point de vue du lecteur existent en meme temps; cette juxtaposition indique une attitude des romanciers envers la société contemporaine.
Dans la conclusion nous montrons que cette attitude est une critique de l'aristocratie qui ne permet pas aux protagonistes
de se réaliser complètement car chaque protagoniste symbolise le bouleversement de l'ordre établi. Des Grieux, Marianne, Mme de la Pommeraye, et surtout Valmont et Merteuil outragent la société en brisant les règles de conduite qu'ils devraient suivre. Qu'ils n'atteignent pas le bonheur personnel malgré leurs efforts reflète le sentiment de frustration que les romanciers veulent partager avec le lecteur. Prévost, Marivaux, Diderot et Laclos créent des romans dans lesquels les influences de la philosophic et de l'art romanesque de l'époque aident ces auteurs à critiquer une société décadente et à créer un personnage unique. Les Liaisons dangereuses est l'exemple le plus brillant des possibilités inhérantes à cette combinaison d'influences.Arts, Faculty of
French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of
Graduate
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Poston, Craig A. (Craig Alan). "The Problematic British Romantic Hero(ine): the Giaour, Mathilda, and Evelina." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278684/.
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Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different and more sentimental hero. Byron seems to play off the reader's expectations of the "Byronic hero" with an ambiguous hero whose character reflects the Romantic aesthetic of indeterminacy. Through the accretive structure of The Giaour, Byron creates a hero of competing component characteristics, a focus he also gives to his heroines. Chapters 4 and 5 address works that are traditionally considered eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Mathilda and Evelina, both epistolary works, present their heroines as worldly innocents who are beset by aggressive males. Yet their subtext suggests that these girls aggressively maneuver the men in their lives. Mathilda and Evelina create a tension between the expected and the radical to energize the reader's imagination.
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Sutton, Peter David. "'The trade of application' : political and social appropriations of Ben Jonson, 1660-1776." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16547.
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This thesis is an analysis of the manner in which the persona and works of Ben Jonson were appropriated – between the Restoration, in 1660, and the retirement of David Garrick, in 1776 – to reflect the political and social concerns of the age. Unlike previous studies, rather than primarily focusing on the stage history of Jonson, I analyse a wide range of sources – produced both within and outwith the theatre – in order to explore, across a variety of media, a breadth of material which appropriates the playwright and his works. I shall consider in my first main chapter the appropriations of Jonson within the Restoration court, in particular noting the assimilation of the playwright's work to what might be styled a proto-Tory ideology, as well as the way in which his plays could mirror the destabilising effects of the king's romantic liaisons. In my second chapter, I explore the moral reformation at the turn of the eighteenth century, in which we can see appropriations of Jonson which cast his works as being primarily didactic. The third chapter moves the narrative of the thesis into the years of the premiership of Sir Robert Walpole. I shall consider the way in which the playwright's works – especially The Alchemist and Eastward Ho! – were seen as being especially relevant to an age of speculation and mercantile endeavour, as well as examining the manner in which the figures of Sejanus and Volpone were appropriated to mock the increasingly unpopular premier. In the final chapter, I shall offer an analysis of Garrick's seminal portrayal of Drugger in the contexts of the political philosophy of the mid-eighteenth century, considering the manner in which it was interpreted alongside the character's further appropriations by Francis Gentleman. The thesis concludes by exploring political appropriations of Jonson up to the present day.
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Gaubert, Benoit Céline. "Le goût d'écrire et de lire dans le conte de fées français des 17° et 18° siècles. Fantaisies de l'écriture, du livre, de la bibliothèque et de la lecture." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017USPCA086.
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L’étude du conte de fées de 1690 à 1789, période de la mode du genre en France, montre que la matière merveilleuse s’est constituée dès ses débuts avec des éléments de pratiques lettrées transposés du réel mais aussi et surtout transformés de manière fantaisiste. Les premiers conteurs (1690-1704) érigent en effet le genre selon une poétique complexe mariant l’oralité des temps naïfs et l’écrit, signe d’une pratique sociale et culturelle du conte. Les conteurs suivants en apportent des infléchissements plus parodiques, des imitations et des variations notamment orientalisantes. L’ensemble des auteurs est concerné mais à des degrés divers, Perrault, Choisy et Fénelon étant moins prolixes en la matière que Madame d’Aulnoy, Pétis de la Croix ou le chevalier de Mailly.Le pays merveilleux dévoile ses arcanes, son secret de fabrication métatextuelle à travers des scènes plus ou moins fugaces de lecture, d’écriture et d’évocations de bibliothèques féériquesThe study of the fairy tale over the years 1690-1789, when the genre was in fashion in France, shows that, from its inception, the subject matter grew up with elements of realistic literary practice which were largely reshaped by imagination. The first storytellers (1690-1704) set up the literary genre according to a complex poetics allying the orality of naive times with literacy, which is the mark of a social and cultural practice of the story. The contributions of the forthcoming storytellers are imitations, parodies or are tinged with Orientalism. All the writers are affected, but to varying degrees: Perrault, Choisy and Fénelon are less inventive in this respect than Madame d’Aulnoy, Pétis de la Croix or the Chevalier de Mailly. The wonderland reveals its mysteries and the secret of its metatextual layout through more or less fleeting scenes of book reading or writing conjuring up a magical library
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Frazier, Dustin M. "A Saxon state : Anglo-Saxonism and the English nation, 1703-1805." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4146.
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For the past century, medievalism studies generally and Anglo-Saxonism studies in particular have largely dismissed the eighteenth century as a dark period in English interest in the Anglo-Saxons. Recent scholarship has tended to elide Anglo-Saxon studies with Old English studies and consequently has overlooked contributions from fields such as archaeology, art history and political philosophy. This thesis provides the first re-examination of scholarly, antiquarian and popular Anglo-Saxonism in eighteenth-century England and argues that, far from disappearing, interest in Anglo-Saxon culture and history permeated British culture and made significant contributions to contemporary formulations and expressions of Englishness and English national, legal and cultural identities. Each chapter examines a different category of Anglo-Saxonist production or activity, as those categories would be distributed across current scholarship, in order to explore the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons were understood and deployed in the construction of contemporary cultural- historiographical narratives. The first three chapters contain, respectively, a review of the achievements of the ‘Oxford school' of Saxonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; antiquarian Anglo-Saxon studies by members of the Society of Antiquaries of London and their correspondents; and historiographical presentations of the Anglo-Saxons in local, county and national histories. Chapters four and five examine the appearance of the Anglo-Saxons in visual and dramatic art, and the role of Anglo-Saxonist legal and juridical language in eighteenth-century politics, with reference to discoveries resulting from the academic and antiquarian research outlined in chapters one to three. It is my contention that Anglo-Saxonism came to serve as a unifying ideology of origins for English citizens concerned with national history, and political and social institutions. As a popular as well as scholarly ideology, Anglo-Saxonism also came to define English national character and values, an English identity recognised and celebrated as such both at home and abroad.
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Fonsato, Vanna Marisa. "Giudizi letterari di Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi nel carteggio inedito della Raccolta Piancastelli." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61287.
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The present work examines the literary criticism expressed by Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi in several of her unpublished letters.The first part outlines the cultural and historical tradition of Venice during the Eighteenth Century. Particular attention is subsequently given to the intellectual role of women, their contribution to the literary salons of the time, and the neoclassical tradition. This first part is essential in that it supplies a valuable context to Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi's writings.
In the second part, I examine Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi's literary criticism of major European authors and works. Through these criticisms she exposes her misvision of the literary world to which she aspired, and reveals that although she was influenced by the subtle preromantic tendencies, she remained faithful to the neoclassical school.
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Volz, Jessica A. "Vision, fiction and depiction : the forms and functions of visuality in the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4438.
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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.
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André, Valérie. "Le roman de libertinage, 1782-1815: de l'exhumation à la réhabilitation?" Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/212334.
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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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Viegas, Shéllida Fernanda da Collina 1978. "A extraordinária e irresoluta história da trajetória de Roxana e Moll Flanders." [s.n.], 2011. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270173.
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Orientador: Suzi Frankl SperberTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T21:56:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Viegas_ShellidaFernandadaCollina_D.pdf: 120671766 bytes, checksum: 6769e677622ca23add669406b7687de0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011
Resumo: Como é possível o mesmo autor, na mesma época, escrever dois romances com a mesma temática e dar-lhes tratamento tão distinto? Essa é a pergunta que intriga os leitores de Defoe ao ler duas das suas principais obras literárias, Moll Flanders (1722) e Roxana (1724), e é também a pergunta que norteou esta pesquisa. Para responder a isso, estudamos a história da leitura, o surgimento e a popularização do romance, a história dos direitos autorais e a influência do público leitor na produção de romances. Isso porque ambas as obras de Defoe tiveram várias edições ao longo do séc. XVIII que se diferenciavam das primeiras tiragens. Visando estabelecer algumas hipóteses para explicar os motivos que levaram os editores a alterar os finais das obras, foram analisadas, nesses romances, as figuras da prostituta, amante, esposa e mãe e a condição da mulher na Inglaterra pré-Revolução Industrial, sem perder de vista a questão da edição e da recepção
Abstract: To what extent is it possible that an author over the same decade had written two novels about the same central theme, but from and with different perspectives? The readers of Daniel Defoe are right to raise this issue after reading Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). This research sets about answering such questions. To this end, I used Defoe's novels to take a close look at the history of reading, the creation and popularity of the novel, copyright implications and the influence of the reader in the production of novels. After all, both novels underwent a series of different editions throughout the eighteenth century. To formulate a working hypothesis to outline the reasons that allowed such changes in editions, I analyzed the figures of the prostitute, lover, wife and mother and the condition of women in pre-Industrial Revolution England in both novels
Doutorado
Literatura Geral e Comparada
Doutor em Teoria e História Literária
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Tapscott, Elizabeth L. "Propaganda and persuasion in the early Scottish Reformation, c.1527-1557." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4115.
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The decades before the Scottish Reformation Parliament of 1560 witnessed the unprecedented use of a range of different media to disseminate the Protestant message and to shape beliefs and attitudes. By placing these works within their historical context, this thesis explores the ways in which various media – academic discourse, courtly entertainments, printed poetry, public performances, preaching and pedagogical tools – were employed by evangelical and Protestant reformers to persuade and/or educate different audiences within sixteenth-century Scottish society. The thematic approach examines not only how the reformist message was packaged, but how the movement itself and its persuasive agenda developed, revealing the ways in which it appealed to ever broader circles of Scottish society. In their efforts to bring about religious change, the reformers capitalised on a number of traditional media, while using different media to address different audiences. Hoping to initiate reform from within Church institutions, the reformers first addressed their appeals to the kingdom's educated elite. When their attempts at reasoned academic discourse met with resistance, they turned their attention to the monarch, James V, and the royal court. Reformers within the court utilised courtly entertainments intended to amuse the royal circle and to influence the young king to oversee the reformation of religion within his realm. When, following James's untimely death in 1542, the throne passed to his infant daughter, the reformers took advantage of the period of uncertainty that accompanied the minority. Through the relatively new technology of print, David Lindsay's poetry and English propaganda presented the reformist message to audiences beyond the kingdom's elite. Lindsay and other reformers also exploited the oral media of religious theatre in public spaces, while preaching was one of the most theologically significant, though under-researched, means of disseminating the reformist message. In addition to works intended to convert, the reformers also recognised the need for literature to edify the already converted. To this end, they produced pedagogical tools for use in individual and group devotions. Through the examination of these various media of persuasion, this study contributes to our understanding of the means by which reformed ideas were disseminated in Scotland, as well as the development of the reformist movement before 1560.