Дисертації з теми "Christian literature, english (old) – history and criticism"
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1
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.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
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.
2
Brooks, Britton. "The restoration of Creation in the early Anglo-Saxon vitae of Cuthbert and Guthlac." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:17b5d20e-446e-4891-90a6-f02a196a7409.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This thesis explores the relationship between Creation and the saints Cuthbert and Guthlac in their Anglo-Latin and Old English vitae. It argues that this relationship is best understood through received theological exegesis concerning Creation's present state in the postlapsarian world. The exegesis has its foundation in Augustine's interpretations of the Genesis narrative, though it enters the textual tradition of the vitae via an adapted portion of De Genesi contra Manichaeos in Bede's metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCM). Both Augustine and Bede argue, with slight differences, that fallen Creation can be restored into prelapsarian harmony with humanity by way of sanctity. Each individual vita engages with this understanding of the Fall in distinct, though ultimately interrelated, ways, and the chapters of this thesis will therefore explore each text individually. Chapter 1 argues that the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCA) unites Cuthbert's ability to restore Creation with the theme of monastic obedience, linking the ordering of a monastery to the restoration of prelapsarian harmony. The VCA also seeks to create sites for potential lay pilgrimage in the landscapes of Farne and Lindisfarne by highlighting the present efficacy of Cuthbert's miracles. Chapter 2 argues that Bede's VCM not only reveals his early attempt to fashion Cuthbert into the primary saint for Britain, via a focus on Cuthbert's obedience to the Divine Office, but also that the restoration of Creation functions as a ruminative tool. Chapter 3 argues that Bede transforms the nature of Cuthbert's sanctity in his prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCP) from static to developmental, influenced by the Evagrian Vita Antonii, and that Creation is adapted to function as the impetus for, and evidence of, Cuthbert's progression. Chapter 4 argues that Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci (VSG) unites the development of Guthlac with a physically delineated Creation, and that the restoration of Creation is elevated to an even greater degree here than in Bede's hagiography. Chapter 5 argues that the author of the Old English Prose Guthlac (OEPG) grounds his vita by utilizing a landscape lexis shared with contemporary boundary clauses, so that here the relationship between the saint and Creation has greater force; it further argues that Guthlac A uniquely connects Guthlac with the doctrine of replacement, consolidating links between his arrival to the eremitic space and the restoration of prelapsarian Eden.
3
Knight, Alison Elaine. "Pen of iron : scriptural text and the Book of Job in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610695.
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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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Neidorf, Leonard. "The Origins of Beowulf: Studies in Textual Criticism and Literary History." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11366.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
Beowulf is preserved in a single manuscript written out around the year 1000, but there are many reasons to believe that the poem was composed several centuries before this particular act of manual reproduction. Most significantly, the meter of Beowulf reveals that the poet regularly observed distinctions of etymological length that became phonologically indistinct before 725 in Mercia. This dissertation gauges the explanatory power of the hypothesis that Beowulf was composed about three centuries before the production of the extant manuscript. The following studies test the hypothesis of archaic composition by determining whether it is able to accommodate independent forms of evidence drawn from the fields of linguistics, textual criticism, and literary history.
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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.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
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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Boettcher, Anna Margarete. "Through Women's Eyes: Contemporary Women's Fiction about the Old West." PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4966.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.
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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.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
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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Durkin, Philip. "A study of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 86, with editions of selected texts, and with special reference to late Middle English prose forms of confession." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f63833b4-b75f-48bb-b1db-892929806abc.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
The thesis consists of a detailed examination of the contents of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 86, (Trinity), with particular attention being given to several lengthy English confessional items which it contains. This is complemented by a more general consideration of late Middle English prose forms of confession and the manuscripts in which they occur. Part One consists of a survey of all surviving independent prose forms of confession preserved in late Middle English manuscripts. I divide the texts into groups according to their probable audience and readership, assessed from both internal and external evidence. This is preceded by a brief introductory section on the background to late Middle English guides to preparation for confession. In three appendices, I provide: a full description of London, British Library, MS Sloane 1584, with transcriptions of three confessional texts; a transcription of a form of confession from London, British Library, MS Harley 2383, with variants from all known manuscripts; a transcription of a form of confession from Yale, University Library, MS Beinecke 317. Part Two consists of a close study of Trinity: a full description of the manuscript, supplementing existing catalogues; editions of four confessional texts from the manuscript, accompanied by detailed discussions of their form and probable function; an analysis of a series of short devotional texts which, taken together, constitute an elementary manual of religious instruction. I include full critical editions, with variants from all known manuscripts, of two of these texts, The Sixteen Conditions of Charity and The Eight Blessings of God, both of which originate in passages extracted from the Wycliffite Bible, and which survive, in varying versions, in thirty-four and nine manuscripts respectively. The thesis concludes with a summary of the probable origin and function of this manuscript collection.
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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.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
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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Flight, Tim. "Apophasis, contemplation, and the kenotic moment in Anglo-Saxon literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:16f34b87-8c3a-4fe1-9dbb-d8c6e3545bd8.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This thesis reveals the considerable influence of contemplation (sometimes referred to as mysticism) on Anglo-Saxon literature, manifested through the arrangement of narratives according to the theological concepts of apophasis and kenosis. This is demonstrated through a lengthy contextual discussion of the place of contemplation in Anglo-Saxon spirituality, and close analysis of four poems and a prose text. Although English mysticism is commonly thought to start in the High Middle Ages, this thesis will suggest that this terminus post quem should instead be resituated to the Anglo-Saxon period. The first chapter seeks to reveal the centrality of contemplation to Anglo-Saxon spirituality through analysing a range of diverse material, to evidence the monastic reader borne from this culture capable of reading and composing the texts that make up the rest of the thesis in the manner suggested. The thesis places chronologically diverse Anglo-Saxon texts in a contemplative context, with close reference to theology, phenomenology, and narrative structure, to suggest that our interpretation of them should be revised to apprehend the contemplative scheme that they advocate: to cleanse the reader of sin through inspiring penitence and kenosis (humility and emptying of one's will) and direct the mind intellectually beyond the words, images and knowledge of the terrestrial sphere (apophasis), so as to prepare them for the potential coming of God's grace in the form of a vision. This reading is supported by the close taxonomical resemblance of each text's narrative structure. The thesis thus suggests that contemplation was central to Anglo-Saxon spirituality, producing an elite contemplative audience for whom certain texts were designed as preparative apparatus.
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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/.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
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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Avis, Robert John Roy. "The social mythology of medieval Icelandic literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2837907c-57c8-4438-8380-d5c8ba574efd.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This thesis argues that the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature which pertains to Iceland contains an intertextual narrative of the formation of Icelandic identity. An analysis of this narrative provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between literature and identity, as well as the potency of the artistic use of the idea of the past. The thesis identifies three salient narratives of communal action which inform the development of a discrete Icelandic identity, and which are examined in turn in the first three chapters of the thesis. The first is the landnám, the process of settlement itself; the second, the origin and evolution of the law; and the third, the assimilation and adaptation of Christianity. Although the roots of these narratives are doubtless historical, the thesis argues that their primary roles in the literature are as social myths, narratives whose literal truth- value is immaterial, but whose cultural symbolism is of overriding importance. The fourth chapter examines the depiction of the Icelander abroad, and uses the idiom of the relationship between þáttr (‘tale’) and surrounding text in the compilation of sagas of Norwegian kings Morkinskinna to consider the wider implications of the relationship between Icelandic and Norwegian identities. Finally, the thesis concludes with an analysis of the role of Sturlunga saga within this intertextual narrative, and its function as a set of narratives mediating between an identity grounded in social autonomy and one grounded in literature. The Íslendingasögur or ‘family sagas’ constitute the core of the thesis’s primary sources, for their subject-matter is focussed on the literary depiction of the Icelandic society under scrutiny. In order to demonstrate a continuity of engagement with ideas of identity across genres, a sample of other Icelandic texts are examined which depict Iceland or Icelanders, especially when in interaction with non-Icelandic characters or polities.
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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.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
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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Culver, Jennifer. "Bridging the Gap: Finding a Valkyrie in a Riddle." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2007. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3684/.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
While many riddles exist in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book containing female characters, both as actual human females and personified objects and aspects of nature, few scholars have discussed how the anthropomorphized “females” of the riddles challenge and broaden more conventional portrayals of what it meant to be “female” in Anglo-Saxon literature. True understanding of these riddles, however, comes only with this broader view of female, a view including a mixture of ferocity and nobility of purpose and character very reminiscent of the valkyrie (OE wælcyrige), a figure mentioned only slightly in Anglo-Saxon literature, but one who deserves more prominence, particularly when evaluating the riddles of the Exeter Book and two poems textually close to the riddles, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, the only two poems with a female voice in the entire Old English corpus. Riddles represent culture from a unique angle. Because of their heavy dependence upon metaphor as a vehicle or disguise for the true subject of the riddle, the poet must employ a metaphor with similar characteristics to the true riddle subject, or the tenor of the riddle. As the riddle progresses, similarities between the vehicle and the tenor are listed for the reader. Within these similarities lie the common ground between the two objects, but the riddle changes course at some point and presents a characteristic the vehicle and tenor do not have in common, which creates a gap. This gap of similarities must be wide enough for the true solution to appear, but not so wide so that the reader cannot hope to solve the mental puzzle. Because many of the riddles of the Exeter Book involve women and portrayal of objects as “female,” it is important to analyze the use of “female” as a vehicle to see what similarities arise.
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Lee, Adam S. "The Platonism of Walter Pater." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5a0d6f60-85cf-4835-8212-0e7ad1561dcc.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
After graduating from the Literae Humaniores course, which after the mid-nineteenth century came to revolve around Plato’s Republic, Walter Pater’s (1839-1894) professional duties spanning thirty years at Oxford were those of a philosophy teacher and lecturer of Plato. This thesis examines Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism in his work, from his earliest known piece, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Plato is an ideal philosopher, critic, and artist to Pater, exemplifying a literary craftsman who blends genres with the highest authority. Platonism is a point of contact with several of Pater’s contemporaries, such as Arnold and Wilde, from which we can take new measure of their critical relationships regarding aestheticism and Decadence. Pater’s idea of aesthetic education takes Platonism for its model, which heightens one’s awareness of reality in the recognition of form and matter. Platonism also provides a framework for critical encounters with figures across history, such as Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism, evident even in his fiction, seeks the mind of the author, so that his writing enacts Platonic love. Through close reading, we highlight his many references to Plato, identify Platonic subjects and themes, and explore etymological nuances in the very selection of his words, which often reveals a Platonic tendency of refinement towards immateriality, from seen to unseen beauty. As a teacher and an author Pater helped shape Oxonian Platonism, and through his writing we examine how Platonism informs his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style.
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Soud, William David. "Toward a divinised poetics : God, self, and poeisis in W.B. Yeats, David Jones, and T.S. Eliot." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:331a692d-a40c-4d30-a05b-f0d224eb0055.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.
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Barush, Kathryn R. ""Every age is a Canterbury pilgrimage" : art and the sacred journey in Britain, c. 1790-1850." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:63e1545c-1362-4bc3-bbc3-b950eecf7c70.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This thesis examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination in Britain from the years 1790 to 1850. Historically, distinctions between understandings of pilgrimage as motif, metaphor, artistic process, and actual journey have been blurred to varying degrees, resulting in the creation of images that were at once narratives, memorials, and stimuli for contemplative journeys from pictorial space to imagination. In the first half of the nineteenth century, religious architecture, sacred landscapes, and the emblematic figure of the pilgrim with coat, hat, and scrip functioned as temporal reminders of a promised land to come, as mediated through artistic practice. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated visual sources, I contend that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. This study draws out the various levels at which pilgrimage engaged the visual imagination. In doing so it offers a detailed perspective on the conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process for artists and theorists, as notions of the transfer of ‘spirit’ from sacred space to represented space re-emerged as a key aspect of the theological and artistic discourse of the period. Chapter 1 outlines the antiquarian dissemination of medieval pilgrimage texts and images. I suggest that an awareness of pilgrimage as embodying the real and imagined emerged with the recovery of allegorical texts, histories of actual pilgrimages, and an interest in pilgrimage souvenirs. The discussion moves on to intersections between pilgrimage and religious art in Chapters 2 - 4, including the idea of painting as pilgrimage, as demonstrated through specific case studies, and the refashioning of relics and religious ruins as contemporary sites of pilgrimage (Chapter 5).
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Workman, Jameson Samuel. "Chaucerian metapoetics and the philosophy of poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8cf424fd-124c-4cb0-9143-e436c5e3c2da.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.
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Owen, Ceri. "Vaughan Williams, song, and the idea of 'Englishness'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:117f2c64-3b63-43aa-9dd3-15a7ce2f9339.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
It is now broadly accepted that Vaughan Williams's music betrays a more complex relation to national influences than has traditionally been assumed. It is argued in this thesis that despite the trends towards revisionism that have characterized recent work, Vaughan Williams's interest in and engagement with English folk materials and cultures remains only partially understood. Offering contextual interpretation of materials newly available in the field, my work takes as its point of departure the critical neglect surrounding Vaughan Williams's contradictory compositional debut, in which he denounced the value of folk song in English art music in an article published alongside his song 'Linden Lea', subtitled 'A Dorset Folk Song'. Reconstructing the under-documented years of the composer's early career, it is demonstrated that Vaughan Williams's subsequent 'conversion' and lifelong attachment to folk song emerged as part of a broader concern with the intelligible and participatory quality of song and its performance by the human voice. As such, it is argued that the ways in which this composer theorized an idea of 'song' illuminate a powerful perspective from which to re-consider the propositions of his project for a national music. Locating Vaughan Williams's writings within contemporaneous cultural ideas and practices surrounding 'song', 'voice', and 'Englishness', this work brings such contexts into dialogue with readings of various of the composer's works, composed both before and after the First World War. It is demonstrated in this way that the rehabilitation of Vaughan Williams's music and reputation profitably proceeds by reconstructing a complex dialogue between his writings; between various cultural ideas and practices of English music; between the reception of his works by contemporaneous critics; and crucially, by considering the propositions of his music as explored through analysis. Ultimately, this thesis contends that Vaughan Williams's music often betrays a complex and self-conscious performance of cultural ideas of national identity, negotiating an optimistic or otherwise ambivalent relationship to an English musical tradition that is constructed and referenced through a particular idea of song.
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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.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
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.
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Langdell, Sebastian James. "Religious reform, transnational poetics, and literary tradition in the work of Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2e8eb46-5d08-405d-baa9-24e0400a47d8.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.
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Davis, Glenn Michael. "Perception and anxiety in Old English poetry." 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3077521.
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Bishop, Christopher Damien Clifford. "Literature and society in tenth-Century Wessex." Phd thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/150472.
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Wigley, Richard D. "Matthew Arnold's religious reconstruction : seeing "the object as in itself it really is"?" Master's thesis, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/139495.
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Van, de Ruit John. "On the inside writing out : the dramatic represention of the private boys' boarding school on the South African stage." Thesis, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/9050.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
This dissertation sets out to analyze the manner in which the writers of dramatic fiction
deconstruct the mythology and ideology of the private boys' boarding school in their
work. It also seeks to interrogate the sociological and philosophical notions that underpin
this fictional work. The central thrust of this dissertation is to explore the representation
of the private boys' boarding school experience on the South African stage, with
particular reference to writers whose work reflects their personal experiences within such
institutions.
Private boys' boarding schools promote the ideology that they provide a superior
education based on liberal and democratic principles. These institutions supposedly
oversee the development of the individual's mental, physical, spiritual, cultural and social
education. The projected ideology of the private boys' boarding schools has become
entrenched and has manifested itself as a pervasive mythology, which glorifies and
glamourises the social reality of such institutions.
This mythology is challenged and refuted by the appropriation of various sociological,
and philosophical theorists, including: traditional Marxist critiques such as the theories of
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976); structuralist theories such as those proposed
by Louis Althusser (1971) and Antonio Gramsci (1971), whose notions of hegemony
carry much relevance when considering private boys' boarding schools; and finally,
Michel Foucault's (1977) theories of power and power hierarchies (Lotringer, 1989;
Smart, 1985).
Since South Africa's democratization in 1994, a number of fictional works have emerged
that have engaged with the social reality of private boys' boarding schools. Most
notably, two plays, Anthony Akerman's Old Boys (2000) and John van de Ruit's War
Cry (1999), have highlighted issues surrounding private boys' boarding schools in South
Africa. Together with a variety of texts written for different media these works have
formed a critical base that, to some degree, has undermined the supremely positive
resonance of the entrenched private school mythology, and in so doing, challenge the
projected ideology. This dissertation's prime focus is on South African private boys'
boarding schools; however, it also includes texts that articulate the social reality of
private education in England and America. These texts are relevant firstly because the
South African private schools are modeled very closely on the English public school
system and secondly, because their inclusion adds weight and variety to the discussion.
Important areas of study within this dissertation will be the interpretation of the various
thematic concerns raised, and character constructions created by the various writers. This
will be underpinned by the theoretical framework, which analyzes systems of power and
power hierarchies, and the notion of hegemonic masculinity. Finally, the private boys'
boarding school will be examined as a site for hegemonic struggle where power and
privilege are continually contested in a relationship characterized by coercion and
consent. The critical discourse of the fictional texts and its theoretical underpinning will
be placed in opposition to the elitist mythology of the private boys' boarding school and
the ideology that these institutions espouse.Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2001.
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Slabbert, Mathilda. "Inventions and transformations : an exploration of mythification and remythification in four contemporary novels." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/2267.
Повний текст джерелаАнотація:
The reading of four contemporary novels, namely: Credo by Melvyn Bragg, The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett, Everything You Need by A.L. Kennedy and American Gods by Neil Gaiman explores the prominent position of mythification and remythification in contemporary literature. The discussion of Bragg's novel examines the significance of Celtic mythology and folklore and to what extent it influenced Christian mythology on the British Isles and vice versa. The presentation of the transition from a cyclical, pagan to a linear, Christian belief system is analysed. My analysis of Bennett's novel supports the observation that political myth as myth transformed contains elements and qualities embodied by sacred myths and investigates the relevance of Johan Degenaar's observation that "[p]ostmodernism emphasises the fact that myth is an ambiguous phenomenon" and practices an attitude of "eternal vigilance" (1995: 47), as is evident in the main protagonist's dispassionate stance. My reading of Kennedy's novel explores the bond that myth creates between the artist and the audience and argues that the writer as myth creator fulfils a restorative function through the mythical and symbolic qualities embedded in literature. Gaiman's novel American Gods focuses on the function of meta/multi-mythology in contemporary literature (especially the fantasy genre) and on what these qualities reveal about a society and its concerns and values. The thesis contemplates how in each case the original myths were substituted, modulated or transfigured to be presented as metamyth or myth transformed.
The analysis shows that myth can be used in various ways in literature: as the data or information that is recreated and transformed in the creative process to establish a common matrix of stories, symbols, images and motifs which represents a bond between the author and the reader in terms of the meaning-making process; to facilitate a spiritual enrichment in a demythologized world and for its restorative abilities. The study is confirmed by detailed mythical reference.English Studies
(D. Litt. et Phil. (English))