Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'War poetry, English – History and criticism'
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McArthur, Kathleen Maureen. "The heroic spirit in the literature of the Great War." Thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/23680.
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Richards, Alan. "Not the way you thought it was, a paradoxical modernist aesthetic in Canadian poetry." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ60338.pdf.
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Goodland, Giles. "Modernist poetry and film of the Home Front, 1939-45." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cbc4f071-0e64-4a07-866d-ba83359262cb.
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This thesis is an exploration of the links between modernist literature and film and society at a period of historical crisis, in Gramscian terms a moment of national 'popular will'. In general, these works are informed by a greater organicity of form, replacing the previous avant-garde model of a serial or mechanical structure. This organicity, however, maintains an element of disjunction, in which, as with filmic montage, the organicity is constituted on the level of the work seen as a totality. Herbert Read's aesthetics are shown to develop with these changes in the Thirties and the war years. The work of H.D. and T.S. Eliot is explored in the light of these new structural elements, and the formal questioning of the subject through the interplay of 'we' and montages of location and address in the poems. The pre-war years are portrayed in these works as a time of shame, and the war as a possible means of redemption, perhaps through suffering, or through the new subjectivity of the wartime community. The documentary movement provides an opportunity to trace these formal changes in a historical and institutional context, and with the work of Dylan Thomas, the relations between mass and high culture, film and poetry, are investigated, as well as the representation of the Blitz, in which guilt is sublimated into celebratory transcendence. These aspects, and the adaptation of a European avant-garde to meet British cultural needs, are examined in the work of the Apocalyptic movement. The last structure of feeling is reconstruction, which is related to Herbert Read's thought, but shown to inform all these other works and to be a linking-point between ideology and the structure of the text, formed as an organic unity that promises a reconstructed post-war society.
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Lynch, Éadaoín. "'This may be my war after all' : the non-combatant poetry of W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and Stevie Smith." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16566.
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This research aims to illuminate how and why war challenges the limits of poetic representation, through an analysis of non-combatant poetry of the Second World War. It is motivated by the question: how can one portray, represent, or talk about war? Literature on war poetry tends to concentrate on the combatant poets of the First World War, or their influence, while literature on the Second World War tends to focus on prose as the only expression of literary war experience. With a historicist approach, this thesis advances our understanding of both the Second World War, and our inherited notions of 'war poetry,' by parsing its historiography, and investigating the role critical appraisals have played in marginalising this area of poetic response. This thesis examines four poets as case studies in this field of research-W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and Stevie Smith-and evaluates them on both their individual explorations of poetic tone, faith systems, linguistic innovations, subversive performativity, and their collective trajectory towards a commitment to represent the war in their poetry. The findings from this research illustrate how too many critical appraisals have minimised or misrepresented Second World War poetry, and how the poets responded with a self-reflexivity that bespoke a deeper concern with how war is remembered and represented. The significance of these findings is breaking down the notion of objective fact in poetic representations of war, which are ineluctably subjective texts. These findings also offer insight into the 'failure' of poetry to represent war as a necessary part of war representation and prompt a rethinking of who has the 'right' experience-or simply the right-to talk about war.
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Boykin, Dennis Joseph. "Wartime text and context Cyril Connolly's Horizon /." University of Sydney, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1959.
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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)This thesis examines the literary journal Horizon, its editor Cyril Connolly, and a selection of its editorial articles, poems, short stories and essays in the context of the Second World War, from 1939-45. Analyses of these works, their representation of wartime experience, and their artistic merit, serve as evidence of a shared and sustained literary engagement with the war. Collectively, they demonstrate Horizon’s role as one of the primary outlets for British literature and cultural discourse during the conflict. Previous assessments of the magazine as an apolitical organ with purely aesthetic concerns have led to enduring critical neglect and misappraisal. This thesis shows that, contrary to the commonly held view, Horizon consistently offered space for political debate, innovative criticism, and war-relevant content. It argues that Horizon’s wartime writing is indicative of the many varied types of literary response to a war that was all but incomprehensible for those who experienced it. These poems, stories and essays offer a distinctive and illuminating insight into the war and are proof that a viable literary culture thrived during the war years. This thesis also argues that Horizon, as a periodical, should be considered as a creative entity in and of itself, and is worthy of being studied in this light. The magazine’s constituent parts, interesting enough when considered separately, are shaped, informed, and granted new shades of meaning by their position alongside other works in Horizon. Chapters in the thesis cover editorials and editing, poetry, short stories, political essays, and critical essays respectively. Analyses of individual works are situated in the context of larger concerns in order to demonstrate the coherence of debate and discourse that characterised Horizon’s wartime run. In arguing that Horizon is a singular creative entity worthy of consideration in its own right, this thesis locates itself within the emerging field of periodical studies. Further, by arguing that the magazine demonstrates the value of Second World War literature, it articulates with other recent attempts to reassess the scope and quality of that literature. More specifically, this thesis offers the first focused and in-depth analysis of Horizon’s formative years.
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Travis, Isabelle. "The poetry of pain : trauma, madness and suffering in post-World War II American poetry." Thesis, University of Reading, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.553108.
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Kokotailo, Philip 1955. "Appreciating the present : Smith, Sutherland, Frye, and Pacey as historians of English-Canadian poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39772.
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This thesis argues that as historians of English-Canadian poetry, A. J. M. Smith, John Sutherland, Northrop Frye, and Desmond Pacey explicitly promote the value of past conflict reconciled into present harmony. They do so by claiming that such reconciliation marks the maturity of English-Canadian culture. This thesis also argues, however, that the interactive progression of their histories implicitly undermines this value. It does so because each critic appreciates a different group of poets for realizing their shared cultural ideal, thereby establishing contradictory representations of what they all claim to be the culmination of English-Canadian literary history. The thesis concludes that while their lingering sense of present cultural maturity should now be fully renounced, the value these critics place on reconciliation is well worth preserving and transforming.
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貝雪菁 and Suet-ching Whitty Bui. "A study of Du Fu's (712-770) war poems." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2009. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B43208757.
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McWha, Matthew. "Voices of Vietnam : a monumental poetry of trauma." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=20448.
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The poetry written by combat veterans and other witnesses to the Vietnam War is a testament to what they saw and felt in Southeast Asia. Through their poetry they build 'monuments' to their traumatic experience, piecing together memories in order to heal themselves and teach future generations about the horrors of Vietnam. These poems function in much the same way as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., both poem and Memorial requiring the effort of the 'reader' in order to propagate the legacy of the Vietnam War. By bearing witness to the Vietnam experience, the poem and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial facilitate questions; questions through which the reader and the visitor are able to construct their own imaginary monuments to the Vietnam War.
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Emig, Rainer. "The end of modernism in English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c02149d4-6f3b-4368-b20e-d8e669514ccf.
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'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.
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Al, Shammari Adhraa. "'History engraved on his shoulder' : a comparative study of the influence of British First World War poetry on post-1980 Iraqi war poetry." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/5475.
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This study aims to compare British war poetry of the First World War with Iraqi poetry from the mid-20th century with special reference to Iraqi war poetry of the 1980’s Iraq-Iran War and the period that followed it. It will also investigate the influence of the designated British war poetry on the chosen body of Iraqi poetry. Through the comparison of sample poems the study presents, firstly, the direct influence of the British poetry of the Great War and its translation which formed the seeds of a more radical movement in Iraqi poetry during the 1980’s Iran/Iraq War and the period that followed it. The study also presents a comparison of the works of British and Iraqi civilian poets during and after the war time and their contribution in setting the ground for the younger generation to create more subversive poetic forms with special reference to women as influential characters and inspirations in their works. The moment of the 1980’s war marks the break with the clear direct influence of British war poetry and starts another phase of the comparison of a universal bond of similar reactions, conscious and unconscious expression reflecting the lives of the combatant group of men first and then of poets sharing a devastating war reality. The study reveals a remarkable, more radical change of poetic forms in Iraqi poetry between the time of the first seeds planted by the influence of translations from European poetry until the time of the Iran/Iraq war and the Gulf War in 1991 and the rise of the new nihilistic generation of the 1990s subverting war, politics and cultural life through their innovation in prose poem writing and its significance as an alternative space for their political and social subversion.
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Watson, Stephen. ""Bitten-off things protruding" : the limitations of South African English poetry post-1948." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22545.
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Bibliography: p. 362-393.In this thesis, the discussion of South African English poetry is undertaken in terms of critical questions to which the body of work, to date, has not been subjected. In the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, several anthologies of South African English poetry were published which, despite their differing foci, attested to the strength, innovation, and international stature of the work. Their editors made claims which emphasised both the importance of Sowetan poetry and the emancipation of white poetry, particularly in the last three decades, from the legacy of a stultifying colonial past. This thesis sets out to examine the validity of these critical evaluations. The impetus for such an examination is threefold. Firstly, in comparison with a world literature, South African English poetry has had little impact on the kinds of aesthetic questions which have led to the radical work of international figures like Milosz, Walcott, Neruda. Secondly, South African English poetry tends to be bifurcated by critical analysis, both locally and internationally, into the work of black poets and the work of white poets. Despite the realities of social history which have indeed dichotomised the human experience of South Africa in racial terms, this dichotomy does not seem the most fertile assumption from which to approach the achievement of a nation's poetry. Thirdly, as a poet himself, the writer of this thesis embarked upon the scholarly analysis of a poetic ancestry to which his own work looked ,in vain for location. The re-examination of the roots and value of South African English poetry begins in the thesis with the dilemmas posed by a legacy of romanticism in its displaced relation to a British colony. From this point the discussion argues that this legacy is visible in the unsatisfactory work of liberal poets in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, and argues that such choices cannot be nourishing to a South African cultural originality. Turning to the work most forcefully emphasised as culturally original - i.e. the work of the Soweto poets in the nineteen-seventies and after - the thesis explores this poetry's claims to stylistic and conceptual innovation. The poetry of the late eighties is then examined in relation to its desire to support, and even to drive, anti-apartheid philosophy and practice. The conclusions of the final chapter, presaged throughout the entire argument, suggest that earlier critical estimations of South African English poetry ignore crucial aspects of what has usually been meant by a fully achieved poetic tradition and that such neglect amounts to the betrayal of the very meaning of the term "poem".
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Leadingham, Norma Compton. "Propaganda and Poetry during the Great War." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2008. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1966.
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During the Great War, poetry played a more significant role in the war effort than articles and pamphlets. A campaign of extraordinary language filled with abstract and spiritualized words and phrases concealed the realities of the War. Archaic language and lofty phrases hid the horrible truth of modern mechanical warfare. The majority and most recognized and admired poets, including those who served on the front and knew firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, not only supported the war effort, but also encouraged its continuation. For the majority of the poets, the rejection of the war was a postwar phenomenon. From the trenches, leading Great War poets; Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Sitwell, and others, learned that the War was neither Agincourt, nor the playing fields of ancient public schools, nor the supreme test of valor but, instead, the modern industrial world in miniature, surely, the modern world at its most horrifying.
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Ni, Xia Jia. "From imagism to informationism :a study of 20th century experimental poetry in English." Thesis, University of Macau, 2018. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b3953521.
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Cavell, Megan Colleen. "Representations of weaving and binding in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610453.
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Young, Sharon. "The country house in English women's poetry 1650-1750 : genre, power and identity." Thesis, University of Worcester, 2015. http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/6439/.
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This thesis examines the depiction of the country estate in English women’s poetry, 1650-1750. The poems discussed belong to the country house genre, work with or adapt its conventions and tropes, or belong to what may be categorised as sub-genres of the country house poem. The country house estate was the power base of the early modern world, authorizing social status, validating political power and providing an economic dominance for the ruling elite. This thesis argues that the depiction of the country estate was especially pertinent for a range of female poets. Despite the suggestive scholarship on landscape and place and the emerging field of early modern women’s literary studies and an extensive body of critical work on the country house poem, there have been to date no substantial accounts of the role of the country estate in women’s verse of this period. In response, this thesis has three main aims. Firstly, to map out the contours of women’s country house poetry – taking full account of the chronological scope, thematic and formal diversity of the texts, and the social and geographic range of the poets using the genre. Secondly, to interrogate the formal and thematic characteristics of women’s country house poetry, looking at the appropriation and adaptation of the genre. Thirdly, to situate the selected poetry both within and against the extensive and formally published male-authored canon and the more general literary and historical contexts of the early modern period. Across these related strands of discussion, the study has two important implications for our understanding of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poetry: it adds to our knowledge of women’s poetic practices of the period and extends and complicates our understanding of the country house genre. Each chapter highlights a particular engagement with the genre responding to a complex of historical contexts, literary trends and personal circumstance. Chapter one will explore the contexts which prompt the emergence of the country house poem and the shape and detail of the genre, 1600–1650. It also examines where the specific gendered contexts of women’s writing practices are relevant to the selection of texts. Chapter two focuses on the thematic and formal interplay in Katherine Austen’s manuscript miscellany ‘Book M’ and role the country house genre plays in exploring and negotiating women’s relationship to property. Chapter three shares many of the same historical and literary contexts but from a different religio-political standpoint and focuses on Lucy Hutchinson’s manuscript collection ‘Elegies’. Chapter four examines the appropriation and re-positioning of the country house genre in the poetry of Anne Finch and Jane Barker, arguing that as the post- Restoration period began, the motivation to explore the country house as a symbol of legitimate political power, a location and symbol of retirement and retreat and the site of financial and cultural investment did not wane, but was reworked by Finch and Barker to explore their political sympathies for the Stuart monarchy. Chapter five explores the use of the country house genre by poets associated with Whig political sympathies: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anne Ingram. Largely unaffected by socio-economic or political marginalisation, both Montagu and Ingram enter into a public, and politically inflected, debate on the importance of taste. Chapter six explores two writers, Mary Leapor and Mary Chandler, who belong to an emerging body of writers of mercantile or labouring class. The discussion will focus on Leapor’s ‘Crumble-Hall’ and Chandler’s A Description of Bath and the contexts of consumerism and tourism to which both poems respond.
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Hacksley, Reginald Gregory. "The poetry of N.H. Brettell : a critical edition." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008072.
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This thesis presents for the first time a critical reading edition of all known poems by N. H. Brettell. It makes no claim to being definitive, nor does it attempt to establish a final text. It represents merely the best thinking of the editor. Brettell printed and circulated his poetry primarily in hand-made illustrated volumes in a process reminiscent of the scribal publication of the seventeenth century. Only 137 of his 206 extant poems were commercially published during his lifetime. In this study all known printed versions of Brettell's poetry whether in privately printed or commercially published form were examined. All variant readings were recorded and are shown. Wherever possible the relationships between texts are also noted. The poems in this edition are ordered in each case according to the version in the latest datable privately produced collection. The commentary and critical introduction were compiled with the general reader in mind. No previous familiarity with southern African fauna and flora is assumed: animals, birds and insects are described and their scientific names supplied. Expressions current in ordinary British or South African English and present in non-specialist dictionaries are not glossed, but archaic and dialectal forms felt to require explication are briefly explained. So too are less familiar South African dialectal expressions which have been assimilated into the South African English lexicon. Intertextual, Christian and mythological references, both African and Western, are annotated in an attempt to make such references accessible to readers who may not share Brettell's cultural background. The intention is to close the changing distance between the text and the audience. An essay discussing the merits, potential and limitations of electronic scholarly editing is included as part of the textual introduction. A CD-Rom containing Brettell's watercolour illustrations in his privately produced collections and audio-clips of him reading his poetry accompanies this thesis.
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Kaze, Douglas Eric. "The environmental imagination in Arthur Nortje’s poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/58024.
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This thesis seeks to contribute to the conversations in the humanities about the treatment of the physical environment in the context of a global ecological fragility and increased scholarly interest in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, a South African poet who wrote in the 1960s. While previous studies on Nortje concentrate on the political, psychic and technical aspects of his poetry, this study particularly explores the representations of the environment in Nortj e’s poetic imagination. Writing in the dark period of apartheid in South Africa’s history, Nortje’s poetry articulates a strong interest in the physical environment against the backdrop of official racialization of space and his personal nomadic life and exile. The poetry abounds with constant intersections of nature and culture (industrialism, urbanity and the quotidian), a sense of place and a deep sense of dislocation. The poems, therefore, present a platform from which to reevaluate conventional ecocritical ideas about nature, place-attachment and environmental consciousness. Drawing mainly on Felix Guattari’s ideas of three ecologies and transversality along with other theories, I conduct the study through what I call a transversal postcolonial environmental criticism, which considers the ecological value of the kind of assemblages that Nortje’s works represent. The first chapter focuses on conceptualizing a postcolonial approach to the environment based on Guattari’s concept of transversality to lay the theoretical foundation for the whole work. The second chapter analyses Nortje’s poetic imagination of place and displacement through his treatment of the private-public tension and the motif of exile. While the third chapter examines Nortje’s depiction of nature as both an everyday and urban phenomenon, the fourth chapter turns to his direct treatment of environmental crises handled through his imagination of the Canadian urban spaces, exile memory of apartheid geography, war and ecocide and the human body as a subject of environmental degradation. The fifth chapter, which is the conclusion, takes a brief look at the implication of Nortje’s complex treatment of the environment on postcolonial environmentalism.
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Robinson, Brendon Kimbale. "No other world: the poetry of Don Maclennan." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002264.
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This is a study of the poetry of Don Maclennan in four chapters. Chapter One explores the poetry's deep involvement with the immediate world, and with the being that encounters it. Chapter Two examines the corpus's mistrust of abstract thought, and its suggestions for alternative ways of intepreting (or at least approaching an interpretation of) our existential situation. Chapter Three deals with Maclennan's writing on the subject of death, while the final chapter looks at the response of the poetry to the fact of death: put simply, this is to learn to love the situation we are in, and to record our thoughts for future generations, thus reaching beyond death to share with others the necessarily unique experience of our one and only life.
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Moore, Natasha Lee. "The unpoetical age : modern life and the mid-Victorian long poem." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610158.
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Goddard, Kevin Graham. "Defined by wine : a study of sacramentalism in George Herbertʾs poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001828.
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This dissertation proposes that George Herbertʾs poetry may profitably be understood as a sacramental means by which the divine is made present in temporal existence. In order to support this claim, the relation between sacramental symbolism and literary symbolism, particularly Herbertʾs, is examined from a number of perspectives. The symbolic meanings suggested by Herbertʾs title (The Temple), and their relation to sacramentalism are considered in the opening chapter. This includes a consideration of some of the background to the analogical thinking prevalent in both the seventeenth-century and Herbert. It is followed in the second chapter by an examination of some of the modern theories about how literary symbolism may relate to sacramental symbolism, a discussion which is followed by a consideration of this dissertation's argument in relation to modern scholarship. The chapter ends with a reading of ʺThe Flowerʺ. The third chapter discusses the poet's attempt to imitate the divine by ʺcopyingʺ both Scripture and Nature, and this includes a consideration of the allegorical and hieroglyphic modes of thought prevalent in the poems. The concern with imitation encourages an examination of the poet's frequent invitation for God actually to assume the poet's role, and this is the subject of the fourth chapter. The argument suggests that the poet's attempt to ʺsacrificeʺ his own writing may be seen in his concern with corporate imagery and corporate (impersonal) structures. The five ʺAfflictionʺ poems are examined as examples of the first, while structures such as synecdoche and metonymy are examined as examples of the second. The final chapter considers aspects of narrative time in the poems, particularly the sense often evoked of the eternal being imminent in the present. This involves a consideration of both liturgical imagery, and what may be called liturgical structures as they can be seen to operate in the poems. Particular examples of the latter are the relation between the liturgical anamnesis and the poems, as well as certain narrative structures that may be called ʺachronisticʺ.
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Letcher, Valerie Helen. "A view of Herrick's poetic world and its values: with some reference to his fairy poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004773.
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From the preface: Herrick was a prolific poet, and a remarkably consistent one. Hesperides encompasses a lifelong collection of poems on themes as diverse as serious reflections on life's brevity and the playful examination of the minutely imagined world of the fairies, yet his vision of life remains coherent. My purpose in this study is to try to see ·Herrick's secular work in its unity and as a whole, without claiming to consider every aspect of his secular poetry. (I have not attempted, for example, to consider his classical sources.) As my interest lies mainly in his values and vision, my emphasis is on theme and tone, and the way they indicate his conception of life. For this reason, I only occasionally consider Herrick's poetic techniques, such as his versification and language, and there are no detailed analyses of individual poems which examine them from every angle. In addition, I am almost entirely concerned here with Hesperides , the secular poetry, and not with Herrick's religious verse, which is collected under the title of His Noble Numbers. (Although Herrick calls his book Hesperides: or The Works both Humane and Divine, the arrangement within is clearly a division into Hesperides, the secular poetry, and His Noble Numbers, the religious verse.)
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Fan, Xing. "A crossing of waters : a dialogical study of contemporary indigenous women's poetry : portfolio consisting of creative work and dissertation." Thesis, University of Macau, 2011. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2456341.
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Bellis, Joanna Ruth. "Language, literature, and the Hundred Years War, 1337-1600." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609852.
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Maxwell, Catherine. "Looking and perception in nineteenth century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8f4ff9be-6c07-4060-b777-6a7402d024c7.
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The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.
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Hazzard, Oli. "Trying to have it both ways : John Ashbery and Anglo-American exchange." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:87f922c5-79dc-4fd5-85dd-50c4a7661015.
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This dissertation explores John Ashbery's interactions with several generations of English poets, during a period which ranges from the late 1940s to the present day. It seeks to support two principle propositions: that Ashbery's engagements with contemporaneous English poets had a decisive influence on his poetic development; and that Ashbery's own poetic and critical work can be employed to revise our understanding of mid-to-late 20th century English poetry. The dissertation demonstrates that Ashbery's relationships with four English poets - W.H. Auden, F.T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford - occurred at significant junctures in, and altered the course of, his poetic development. Ashbery's critical and poetic engagements with these poets, when read together, are shown to constitute an idiosyncratic but coherent re-reading of the English poetry of the past and present. The dissertation addresses the ways in which each poet theorises the difficulties posed, and opportunities afforded, by perceived changes in Anglo-American poetic relations at different points during the 20th century. Chapter one re-evaluates Ashbery's relationship with Auden. It traces the legacy of Auden's coterie poetics in The Orators for Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, offers a revisionary reading of The Vermont Notebook as a strident response to Auden's late-career conservativism, and reads in depth Ashbery's unpublished, highly ambivalent elegy for him, "If I had My Way, Dear". Chapter Two attends to the extensive correspondence between Ashbery and Prince, argues that Prince's work provided a model for Ashbery's "encrypted" early lyrics addressing his homosexuality, and reads "Clepsydra" as an early elaboration of Ashbery's conception of a reciprocal influential model. Chapter Three examines Lee Harwood's "imitations" of Ashbery, and considers the latter's first critical formation of an English "other tradition" through his association of Harwood with the work of John Clare. Chapter Four portrays Ashbery's relationship with Mark Ford as a successful enactment of reciprocal influence, a form of engagement which allows Ashbery a means to "shake off his own influence" and to retain his status as a "major minor writer".
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Bailey, Hannah McKendrick. "Misinterpretation and the meaning of signs in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:880a2482-9573-4142-be27-ec8c87cfa3fb.
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This thesis investigates how Old English poets understood the processes of signification and interpretation through analysis of depictions of poor interpreters and the use of 'sign terms' such as tacen and beacen in the longer Old English poems. The first chapter deals with the Beowulf Manuscript, the second and third chapters consider Elene and Andreas within the network of related poems found in the Vercelli Book and the begin- ning of the Exeter Book, the fourth chapter is on the Junius Manuscript, and the conclusion looks at the use of the 'bright sign' motif across all four major poetic codices. I suggest that there is a 'heroic sign-bearing interpreter' character-type which several of the poems utilize or ironically invert, and that poor interpretation is nearly always asso- ciated with hesitation, which often resembles acedia. I also argue that there is greater nuance in the poems' depictions of modes of understanding than has previously been acknowledged: Eve in Genesis B does not stand for the senses which subvert the mind, but rather models the limits of rational thought as a means of understanding God, and Elene does not depict a simple opposition of letter and spirit, but a threefold mental pro- cess of learning about the Cross with analogues in exegesis and Augustine's Trinity of the Soul. Finally, I argue that there is a 'bright sign' motif which functions within a brightness-sign-covenant concept cluster, whose evocation as a traditional poetic unit is not identical to the denotation and connotation of its constituent parts. These strands of inquiry taken together demonstrate how Old English poems invest signs with significance by tapping into a specifically poetic network of allusion.
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Bennett, Matthew. "The Roadmap: exploring T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with World War One literature." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2020. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/545.
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Through careful analysis paired with poetry, war memoirs, and novels from the same period, one can break down T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to recognize the impact of The Great War on the world's modern memory while pondering the possibility of memory as a tool to overcome trauma.
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Abdalla, Laila. "The dialectical adversary : the satanic character and imagery in Anglo-Saxon poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=59563.
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This thesis examines the positive role of evil in select Old English Poetry, namely The Junius Book, "Guthlac", "Vainglory", "The Whale", "Juliana", "Judith" and "Beowulf". Using a background of Augustan and Boethian thought, each adversarial character is discussed with regard to role and imagery, but specifically in relationship to the protagonist. Evil plays a surprisingly positive role when it offers the protagonist the opportunity to defeat it. The protagonists' honour at the poem's conclusion is necessarily defined by the extent of resisting the antagonists. The hero must fight evil on two levels: the temporal in humans and the metaphysical in Satan. The thesis examines the various levels of victory and indeed failure they achieve, and concludes that of all the heroes only Juliana is completely successful. Although evil itself cannot be defined as "good", this thesis discovers that in its relationship with the human hero, it can indeed give rise to goodness.
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Schubert, Layla A. Olin 1975. "Material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10909.
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x, 208 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.The scattered instances depicting material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry should be regarded as a group. This phenomenon occurs in Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Husband's Message. Comparative examples of material literature can be found on the Ruthwell Cross and the Franks Casket. This study examines material literature in these three poems, comparing their depictions of material literature to actual examples. Poems depicting material literature bring the relationship between man and object into dramatic play, using the object's point of view to bear witness to the truth of distant or intensely personal events. Material literature is depicted in a love poem, The Husband's Message, when a prosopopoeic runestick vouches for the sincerity of its master, in the heroic epic Beowulf when an ancient, inscribed sword is the impetus to give an account of the biblical flood, and is also implied in the devotional poem The Dream of the Rood, as two crosses both pre-and-post dating the poem bear texts similar to portions of the poem. The study concludes by examining the relationship between material anxiety and the character of Weland in Beowulf, Deor, Alfred's Consolation of Philosophy, and Waldere A & B. Concern with materiality in Anglo-Saxon poetry manifests in myriad ways: prosopopoeic riddles, both heroic and devotional passages directly assailing the value of the material, personification of objects, and in depictions of material literature. This concern manifests as a material anxiety. Weland tames the material and twists and shapes it, re-affirming the supremacy of mankind in a material world.
Committee in charge: Martha Bayless, Chairperson, English; James Earl, Member, English; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology
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Carrière, Marie J. "Poetics of the other, five feminist writers from English Canada and Quebec." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0015/NQ45662.pdf.
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Louw, Denise Elizabeth Laurence. "A study of the numinous presence in Tennyson's poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1005891.
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From Preface: A reader looking to this study for a charting of the diverse religious views held by Tennyson at different periods in his life may be disappointed. My primary concern has been not with religious forms, but with the numinous impulse. However, though I approached the topic with a completely open mind, I find my own Christian convictions have been strengthened through the study of Tennyson's poetry. As the title indicates, I have not attempted to deal with the plays. To explore both the poetry and the plays in a study of this length would have been impossible. I have perhaps been somewhat unorthodox in attempting to combine several disciplines, especially since I cannot claim to be a specialist in the areas concerned. However, I felt it necessary to approach the subject from a number of points of view, and to see to what extent the results could be said to converge on some sort of central "truth". When I have despaired of being able to do justice to a particular aspect within the imposed limits, I have sometimes found comfort in the words of Alan Sinfield (The Language of Tennyson's "In Memoriam", p.211): "We can only endeavour continually to approach a little closer to the central mystery; the ma j or advances will be infrequent, but most attempts should furnish one or two hints which others will develop. "
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Wong, Alexander Tsiong. "Aspects of the kiss-poem 1450-1700 : the neo-Latin basium genre and its influence on early modern British verse." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708782.
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Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.
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Eckstein, Simon J. "The shadow of the past : fantasy, modernism, and the aftermath of a world at war." Thesis, Swansea University, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678625.
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This study constitutes a single strand of a wider argument for a thorough-going reassessment of the place of fantasy literature within the canon. In particular, it aims to redress a marked lack of critical attention paid to the distinct movement towards fantastic modes of representation in the mid-twentieth century.
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Cox, Octavia. "Pope's poetic legacy, 1744-1830." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:236ec8eb-4d21-43c6-b4eb-8c7b349447ef.
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Jerome McGann observes that 'Deceptive apparitions haunt romantic writing'. This thesis investigates one such haunting apparition; it analyses the ways in which selected eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets engage with the poetry of Alexander Pope. The received view of "Romantic" anti-Popeanism is expressed in comments such as that of William Hazlitt's 'I do not think there is any point of sympathy between Pope and the Lake School: on the contrary, I know there is an antipathy between them'. There is plenty of evidence to suggest some Romantic writers had an aversion to the previous literary age. In a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in March 1819, for example, Keats reviews a play by mocking that it 'was bad even in comparison with ... the Augustan age'. Pope had been the pre-eminent figure of Augustan poetry. Hence, the argument runs, Pope was rejected wholesale by Romantic poets. Such an understanding of literary history is, however, too dogmatic. Rather than accepting the view that the progression from Pope's era to the Romantic period involved a sudden pivot in taste, I explore how Popean poetic principles filtered into the development of his successors' literary aesthetics and ideas about poetry. The central questions I ask are how, and in what ways, Pope's successors used Pope's poetry to formulate their own poetic visions. I address these questions in four main chapters. In the first, I analyse Joseph Warton's An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. I show that Warton's Essay on Pope should not be taken as a denigration of Pope's poetic achievement, and suggest ways in which Pope's work permeates his, and his brother Thomas', poetry. In the second, I examine the response to Pope's Iliad, a text which prompted conflicting reactions among his successors. In particular, I appraise William Cowper's response to Pope's translation, not only as contained in his prose discussion of it, but also as revealed by his own translation. My third chapter considers ways in which Wordsworth plays with Pope's poetic legacy, and acknowledges Pope's contribution to the formulation of his own ideas of what constitutes good poetry. In the final chapter, I illustrate that even in the poetry of Keats - who, at times, vociferously rejects Pope as a mere handicraftsman - there is a sympathy in song between brother-poets. Literary criticism has often stressed the prominence of authors such as Lord Byron, Erasmus Darwin and George Crabbe in Pope's poetic reception and legacy. Yet Pope haunts other writers in subtler, but no less compelling, ways. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge observes, in Biographia Literaria, 'many ... formed ... their notions of poetry, from the writings of Mr. Pope'. What I try to give colour to here are some of the ways in which subsequent 'notions of poetry' were 'formed' from 'the writings of Mr. Pope'.
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Greentree, Rosemary. "An annotated bibliography of the Middle English lyric /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1999. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phg815.pdf.
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Woeber, Catherine. "A study of Christ and his saints as representatives of the values of Christian heroism in Old English poetry." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21143.
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Bibliography: pages 71-72.This dissertation investigates the concept of Christian heroism as it appears in a number of Old English poems, through a study of the figure of the miles Christi. These poems present a specific Christian heroism which, though couched in terms culled from Germanic heroism, nevertheless exists in its own right and is quite different from it. Christ and his saints are seen as heroes in themselves (Christian servants obedient to the will of God) rather than as heroic warriors as they are usually regarded (Germanic heroes fighting for a Christian cause). They are leaders and heroes in the sense of servants, and not only like kings and warriors of the Germanic code. A study of some poems from the Cynewulf canon shows that the poets understood Christian heroism to mean more than brave battling for the cause of good; in essence, it is complete submission to the will of God.
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Cook, Méira. "Speaking in tongues, contemporary Canadian love poetry by women." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0025/NQ31971.pdf.
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Harris, Candice R. (Candice Rae). "The Decline of the Country-House Poem in England: A Study in the History of Ideas." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331572/.
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This study discusses the evolution of the English country-house poem from its inception by Ben Jonson in "To Penshurst" to the present. It shows that in addition to stylistic and thematic borrowings primarily from Horace and Martial, traditional English values associated with the great hall and comitatus ideal helped define features of the English country-house poem, to which Jonson added the metonymical use of architecture.
In the Jonsonian country-house poem, the country estate, exemplified by Penshurst, is a microcosm of the ideal English social organization characterized by interdependence, simplicity, service, hospitality, and balance between the active and contemplative life. Those poems which depart from the Jonsonian ideal are characterized by disequilibrium between the active and contemplative life, resulting in the predominance of artifice, subordination of nature, and isolation of art from the community, as exemplified by Thomas Carew's "To Saxham" and Richard Lovelace's "Amyntor's Grove."
Architectural features of the English country house are examined to explain the absence of the Jonsonian country-house poem in the eighteenth century. The building tradition praised by Jonson gradually gave way to aesthetic considerations fostered by the professional architect and Palladian architecture, architectural patronage by the middle class, and change in identity of the country house as center of an interdependent community.
The country-house poem was revived by W. B. Yeats in his poems in praise of Coole Park. In them Yeats reaffirms Jonsonian values. In contrast to the poems of Yeats, the country-house poems of Sacheverell Sitwell and John Hollander convey a sense of irretrievable loss of the Jonsonian ideal and isolation of the poet.
Changing social patterns, ethical values, and aesthetics threaten the survival of the country-house poem, although the ideal continues to reflect a basic longing of humanity for a pastoral retreat where life is simple and innocent.
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Nelson, Nancy Susan. "Heroism and Failure in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: the Ideal and the Real within the Comitatus." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1989. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc332044/.
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This dissertation discusses the complicated relationship (known as the comitatus) of kings and followers as presented in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. The anonymous poets of the age celebrated the ideals of their culture but consistently portrayed the real behavior of the characters within their works. Other studies have examined the ideals of the comitatus in general terms while referring to the poetry as a body of work, or they have discussed them in particular terms while referring to one or two poems in detail. This study is both broader and deeper in scope than are the earlier works. In a number of poems I have identified the heroic ideals and examined the poetic treatment of those ideals. In order to establish the necessary background, Chapter I reviews the historical sources, such as Tacitus, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the work of modern historians. Chapter II discusses such attributes of the king as wisdom, courage, and generosity. Chapter III examines the role of aristocratic women within the society. Chapter IV describes the proper behavior of followers, primarily their loyalty in return for treasures earlier bestowed. Chapter V discusses perversions and failures of the ideal. The dissertation concludes that, contrary to the view that Anglo-Saxon literature idealized the culture, the poets presented a reasonably realistic picture of their age. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry celebrates ideals of behavior which, even when they can be attained, are not successful in the real world of political life.
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McLauchlan, Laura Jane. "Transformation poetics, refiguring the female subject in the early poetry and life writing of Dorothy Livesay and Miriam Waddington." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq22896.pdf.
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Phillips, Malcolm. "Experiment and representation : the domestic surreal in contemporary British and American poetry." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14707.
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In order to counter what I regard as premature and reductive formulations of a 'native' British postmodernism, I identify a specific tendency in contemporary writing which I name the domestic surreal, and which I trace through the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Roy Fisher, Christopher Middleton, John Ash, Peter Didsbury and Ian McMillan. Through close reading and a comparative approach, I uncover key preoccupations with idiosyncratic perception, shared experience, urban space and poetic play. I also describe a network of allegiances and influence among these writers which reveals the domestic surreal to be one of the contemporary manifestations of an imaginative tradition which stretches back through the Surrealist and Cubist movements to Baudelaire and Rimbaud. For the poets of the domestic surreal, engagement with an aesthetic tradition is inextricably linked with their response to contemporary conditions. Drawing on dialectical and poststructuralist perspectives, I propose that the domestic surreal attempts to resist the constraints of social and aesthetic consensus in Britain and America in the period following the Second World War.
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Holmgren, Michele J. "Native muses and national poetry, nineteenth-century Irish-Canadian poets." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq28493.pdf.
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McDermott, Lydia Eva. "Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetic art as "current language heightened" : (with reference to selected sonnets and in the light of contemporary stylistic theory)." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002019.
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The aim of this thesis is twofold: To examine Hopkins's writings on poetics and to relate these to modern theories of poetic stylistics; and to show, through an examination of two sets of Hopkins sonnets, the ways in which Hopkins's writings on language and poetics are reflected in his verse (Introductory outline, p. 5)
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Becker, Charity Dawn. "Constructing the mother-tongue, language in the poetry of Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Nourbese Philip." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0016/MQ54604.pdf.
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Mackinnon, Jeremy E. "Speaking the unspeakable : war trauma in six contemporary novels." Title page, contents and abstract only, 2001. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phm15821.pdf.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258) Presents readings of six novels which depict something of the nature of war trauma. Collectively, the novels suggest that the attempt to narrativise war trauma is inherently problematic. Traces the disjunctions between narrative and war trauma which ensure that war trauma remains an elusive and private phenomonen; the gulf between private experience and public discourse haunts each of the novels.
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Gardner, Corinna. "The just figure shape, harmony and proportion in a selection of Andrew Marvell's lyrics." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002273.
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The phrase "the just Figure" - a quotation from Upon Appleton House - is the central theme of this thesis as it aptly describes Marvell's repeated use of shape, harmony and proportion to suggest morality and virtue. The poet's concern with geometrical imagery is conveyed by the word "figure", which also is another term for a metaphor or conceit. The word "just" suggests not only moral appropriateness, but also mathematical exactness or fit. The thesis consists of five chapters, each dealing with an aspect of the imagery of shape and form which pervades so many of Marvell's lyrics. The first chapter, "Moral Geometry", deals with the way in which Marvell uses the imagery of lines, angles and curves. In some poems the lines are curved, as in Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borrow, where the graceful downward curved line of the hill conveys Fairfacian humility. Symmetry and circularity are discussed in the second chapter. The poet uses the perfect shape of the circle to depict objects which convey a moral significance. Similarly, several of the lyrics are themselves quasi-circular with their closing lines echoing their openings. Chapter Three deals with liquid spheres. Marvell explores the nature, shape and texture of tears in poems such as Eyes and Tears and Mourning; and in On a Drop of Dew uses the shape of the dew drop to suggest the perfection of the heavenly realm from which it has been parted. In several of the lyrics, Marvell places a frame around his poems to create an enclosed world in which his poetic creations exist. These enclosed, or framed, worlds are discussed in Chapter Four. The final chapter, "Beyond The Frame", describes how some of the lyrics suggest a move from the world within to the world beyond the frame of the poem.This can either be a movement from confinement to release, or from the seen world to worlds unseen. Shape, harmony and proportion are the qualities which Marvell uses to convey morality and humility and a vision of the world based on what is, in the various senses of the word, "just".
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Kelly, Alice Rose. "'A change of heart' : representations of death and memorialisation in First World War writing by women, 1914-39." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708210.
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Lokash, Jennifer Faith. "In sickness and in health : romantic art therapy and the return to nature." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=82920.
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This thesis explores the network of relationships among health and healing, the natural environment, and poetry during the Romantic period in Britain, and thus offers a new perspective on the Romantic relation to Nature. The context for this study is both the long and varied history that links literature to ideas of health and disease, and the intersection of the late 18th- and early 19th-century discourses of holistic science and healing that emphasize the synergy between self and world and recognize that our living environments can be either hostile or congenial to body and spirit. For many Romantic poets, illness was a painful reality that became vital to their thoughts about poetry and creativity in general. Through Wordsworth's partnership with Coleridge, a vocabulary of health and disease emerges in relation to poetic production and reception that has influenced critics of the period. It constructs the "natural" as a source of health, and establishes Wordsworth and his poetic celebrations of the therapeutic potential of nature as the often problematic legacy both for Coleridge and for second generation poets like Byron and Shelley. While composing Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III, Byron tests Wordsworth's notion that immersion in the natural world can be spiritually therapeutic from the point of view of poetic production. The intensity of Byron's bodily existence, however, prevents him from fully experiencing the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Wordsworthian nature. As his attempts to disengage the spirit from the body by meditating on nature actually have the reverse effect of bringing him more in touch with his physical identity, he must reject Wordsworth's methodology as a possible vehicle for healing. In refiguring Wordsworth's ideas about "taste," Shelley conceives of his poetry as healthy food for thought. His frequently used metaphors of "literature as food" have their source in his attitudes towards intake first exp