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Jung, Sandro. "The poetic fragment in the long eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683194.
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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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Moore, Lindsay Emory. "The Laureates’ Lens: Exposing the Development of Literary History and Literary Criticism From Beneath the Dunce Cap." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc822784/.
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In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.
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Blumenthal, Hugo. "Deconstructing appearances in the eighteenth-century English novel." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2015. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/58484/.
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Appearances are one of the main concerns in eighteenth-century novels, but most studies relegate them to a subordinate role, in relation to other issues. Following Slavoj Žižek's understanding of ideology, Alain Badiou's concept of logics of appearances and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, this thesis offers a sustained analysis of a series of issues of appearances in the eighteenth-century novel, through an exploration of sixteen defining traits, based on Samuel Johnson's definitions of ‘appearance', ‘appear' and ‘apparition'. The concept of appearances allows for an interrogation of ideas, beliefs and positions about most things, including appearances themselves, as they remain open, in their structure and logic, destabilising and deconstructing the ways of thinking that try to contain them. This thesis argues that eighteenth-century novels reproduce, resist and deconstruct the eighteenth-century ideology based on a desire to neutralise the effects of appearances. Through a wide range of eighteenth-century novels, from Robinson Crusoe to Evelina, it argues that novels destabilise the relationship between appearance and being, proposing the multiple appearances of beings and becomings. William Godwin's Caleb Williams is taken as a paradigm, shown to contain most of the issues of appearances in the eighteenth-century novel, revealing that whatever there is, it must be supplemented by appearances in order to appear as reality. This thesis argues that novels came to grasp such a truth of appearances from the beginning of eighteenth-century, by locating appearances subjectively, making more evident the multiplicity and extent of fictions, allowing readers an increased degree of awareness of the fictionality of reality. Thus, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the study of issues of appearance and ideology within literature studies by establishing the genre of the novel as the event of appearances in the eighteenth century.
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Grummitt, Elaine Jennifer. "Heraldic imagery in seventeenth-century English poetry." Thesis, Durham University, 2000. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4333/.
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The significance of heraldic references in literature has been the subject of both antiquarian interest and recent scholarship. In the field of seventeenth-century poetry, there exists a small body of published work concerned with the use of heraldry by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Jolin Cleveland. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the existence and significance of heraldic references in a wider range of seventeenth-century verse and poetry. It eschews assumptions regarding the use of heraldry by, or with reference to, a narrow social elite, and examines heraldic references published in broadsheets and used in songs, as well as in the privately- circulated manuscripts of the nobility. Chapter One offers a critical examination of a range of current scholarship concerned with heraldic readings of literature. Chapter Two demonstrates that formal heraldic references, affirming or celebrating their subject’s identity, were used in diverse genres, including dedicatory verses, encomia, epitaphs, elegies, epithalamia and anagrams. Chapter Three determines the social implications of the use of heraldry, with particular reference to epic and satirical verse, arguing that heraldic references in this period develop beyond their traditional, chivalric associations. Chapter Four discusses those works that include heraldic references as expressions of authority or political power, and considers their use in different contexts to affirm or undermine the position of individuals and groups within society. Chapter Five establishes the use of heraldry within religious or spiritual poetry and addresses whether its vocabulary was regarded as an expression of particular Christian values. Chapter Six explores the engagement of women writers with heraldry and considers how far their use of the language offered a challenge to the prevailing patriarchal culture. The Conclusion draws attention to the significance of the evolution of heraldry from the seventeenth century to the present day.
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Taher-Kermani, Reza. "The Persian 'presence' in nineteenth-century English poetry." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.658568.
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This thesis examines the 'presence' of Persia' in nineteenth-century English poetry. The focus is not on translations of Persian poetry as such, but on the ways in which knowledge of Persia, derived from a variety of sources including classical and biblical texts, history, and travel-writing, entered into English poetry in the period. Such knowledge may shape the structure of a poem, or Its verbal texture, and may do so at different levels of intensity and significance. This complex phenomenon cannot fully be covered by the term 'influence'; the term 'presence' encompasses a variety of . literary engagements including translation, imitation, interpretation, representation, conscious allusion, and indirect borrowing. The methodology of the thesis is neither that of conventional literary history, in which questions of influence and intertextuality are of primary concern, nor of cultural history, in which literature is seen as part of a broader analysis of the history of ideas. While recognising the importance of recent cross-cultural theories, notably Edward Said's Orientalism, it does not follow ,any theoretical model in its analysis of the poetic adaptation and appropriation of Persian stories, themes, and tropes. The poems themselves, whether considered in categories or as individual works, are the object of attention; particular emphasis is laid on elements that might be less 'visible' to English readers who lack knowledge of Persian literature in its original forms. The aim is to define the nature, and degree, of 'Persian-ness' in nineteenth-century English poetry. The term itself has multiple and shifting associations, but one strong connecting thread may be discerned in the poems discussed: the persistence, through a period in which British encounters with 'modem' Persia were increasing in the areas of diplomacy and trade, and in which knowledge of the country's history, language, and culture was becoming more exact and more detailed, of a fantasised 'Persia', or Persian 'imaginary', compounded of ancient and in some cases mythic elements. Structurally the thesis moves from context to text, and from general to specific: it begins with the provision of necessary contextual information about Anglo-Persian contacts before the nineteenth century, moves on to survey and classify the 'Persian tendency' in poetry of the period, and then offers case-studies of three central works: Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (1853), Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat ofOmar Khayyam (1859), and Robert Browning's Ferishtah's Fancies (1884).
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Gordon, Susan Elizabeth. "The iconography and mythology of the 18th-century English landscape garden." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.675857.
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Egan, Grace. "Corresponding forms : aspects of the eighteenth-century letter." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1b22283d-1b7b-46bc-8bbe-fdda16b20323.
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My thesis investigates the dialogic aspects and literary qualities ascribed to letters during the long eighteenth century. In part this involves documenting the correspondence between letters and other genres, such as the novel. Being in correspondence encouraged writers such as Burney and Johnson to express the relationship between sender and recipient in interesting ways. I posit that the letter offered a sophisticated means for writers, including those in Richardson's circle, to represent speech and thought, and mimic (with varying degrees of indirection), that of others. I consider the editorial habits and typographical conventions that governed letter-writing during the period, honing in on Richardson's contributions. I link his claim that letters were written 'to the Moment' with broader tropes of 'occasional' style, and show how this manifests in letters' intricate modulations of tense and person. Chapter 1 details the conventions that prevailed in letters of the period, and their interactions with irony and innovation. I compare convention in the epistolary novels of Smollett and Richardson, and look at closure in the Johnson-Thrale correspondence. Chapter 2 demonstrates that various methods of combining one's voice with others were utilized in letters (such as those of the Burney family), including some that took advantage of the epistolary form and its reputation as 'talking on paper'. Chapter 3 shows the role of mimesis in maintaining the dialogic structure of letters, and links it to contemporary theories of sympathy and sentiment. Chapters 4 and 5 apply the findings about epistolary tradition, polyphony and sentimentalism to the letters of Sterne and Burns. In them, there is a mixture of sentiment and irony, and of individual and 'correspondent' styles. The conclusion discusses the editing of letters, both in situ and in preparation for publication. The twin ideals of spontaneity and sincerity, I conclude, have influenced the way we choose to edit letters in scholarly publications.
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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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Williamson, Paul. "The metaphysical basis of mid eighteenth-century English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314489.
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Howard, William Scott. "Fantastic surmise : seventeenth-century English elegies, elegiac modes, and the historical imagination from Donne to Philips /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9527.
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Goodridge, John Anthony. "Rural life in English poetry of the mid-eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1052.
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This thesis examines several mid-eighteenth century poems, assessing their portrayal of rural life, its literary and historical significance, and the aesthetic and ideological issues it presents. An introductory essay on developments in rural poetry sets'the scene for two extended essays. The first essay is a comparative reading of the subject of rural labour in three poems: James Thomson's The Seasons %724-40, Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour (1730,1736) and Mary Collier's The Woman's Labour The viewpoints of a professional poet (Thomson), a farm labourer (Duck), and a working woman (Collier) are compared in relation to kinds of work all three address as well as to individual labouring subjects. The responses of the three poets to such related issues as folk traditions, forms of charity and other 'compensations', are also compared. Some surprising similarities as well as instructive differences are located; and an interesting picture of idealistic and realistic, male-oriented and female-oriented attitudes to labour and labour-related themes emerges. The second essay analyses the subject of agricultural prescription in John Dyer's The Fleece (1757). Drawing on interdisciplinary information, the essay makes a sequential reading of the first book of the poem, whose subject is 'the care of sheep'. It traces the historical and poetic significance of Dyer's advice on land use and environment, breeding and types of sheep, husbandry and veterinary practice. The poet's theoretical models, his use of topography and of epic and pastoral, didactic and popular styles is examined. Dyer is found to make a substantial engagement with contemporary agricultural developments, but also to draw on idealising models of agricultural history and economic development, uniting the contrasting imperatives of the 'practical' and the 'poetical'. Dyer's belief that shepherding provided an important model for society; and his intense engagement with agriculture, inform a complex pattern of mixed motivations.
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Bouagada, Habib. "Orientalism in translation: The one thousand and one nights in 18th century France and 19th century England." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26857.
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The objective of this study is to show how translation contributes to the "Orientalist" project and to the past and present knowledge of the Orient as it has been shaped by different disciplines such as anthropology, history and literature. In order to demonstrate this, I have decided to compare the Arabic text Alf Leyla wa Leyla (The One Thousand and One Nights) with the French translation by Antoine Galland (1704-1706) and the English translation by Sir Richard Burton (1885).
According to Edward Said, the Orientalist project or Orientalism is mainly a French and British cultural enterprise that has produced a wide-ranging wealth of knowledge about an Orient that has been represented as an undifferenciated entity with despotism, splendour, cruelty, or even sensuality being its main attributes.
I have chosen these translations because they come from places with a long Orientalist tradition. In 18th century France, the age of the Belles infideles, Galland is a man of the Enlightenment who appears to be a precursor of Orientalism as embodied in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Votaire's zadig. A century later, Burton's The Arabian Nights, backed by a deep knowledge of Islam, is published. Burton is an official in the service of the British Empire---an empire that takes pride in having the highest number of Muslim subjects.
The evolution of Alf Leyla wa Leyla and its translations is followed by an analysis of the shifts applied to the representations of Oriental elements found in it (social and religious practices). These shifts as well as the annotations that refer to Arabo-Islamic culture are related to Galland and Burton's intellectual development and to the socio-historical context of their respective translations.
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Lowe, Jeremy. "Desiring truth : the process of judgment in fourteenth-century art and literature /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9463.
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McRae, A. "The useful journey : Travellers through life in eighteenth-century French and English fiction." Thesis, University of Reading, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.373763.
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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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Bridges, James Richard. "Georgianism then and now : a recuperative study." Thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2001. http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/3033/.
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The thesis attempts to revise our view of Georgian poetry, and thus to rescue it from the critical disregard and disdain it has suffered since the 1930s. Georgian poetry will be redefined as a strong traditional poetry contemporaneous with, and yet different from, literary Modernism. An historical overview of the critical literature from the 1920s onwards will reveal the original co-existence of those now known as 'Georgians' and 'Modernists', stress their mutual break with Edwardian conventions, and will sketch the process by which Georgianism and Modernism became oppositional. Georgianism will be re-evaluated as a brave and creditable attempt to continue the Romantic and humanistic impulse in poetry at a time when younger and ostensibly more radical writers were forsaking it for the values of Modernism. The thesis will further suggest that the Georgian poets had a rather more socially aware and progressive agenda than many of the fledgling Modernists. Georgian poetry is reread, therefore, in order to bring out, as major themes, its concern with the poor and with work, with the changing environment of the nation, with the position of women in Georgian society, and with its response to the First World War. This reappraisal will lead to the contention that Georgianism should not be viewed as a low point in British poetry, but instead as supplying the formal foundations and political sensibility which mark the achievement of Great War poetry. While the thesis is careful not to overbid its claims for reviewing the Georgians' own achievement (especially in respect of their relative lack of formal experimentation compared to the Modernists), it hopes nevertheless to persuade its readers that the poets of 'Liberal England' had a more humane and realistic vision of their world than they have hitherto been credited with.
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Toscano, Angela Rose. "Resemblances: on the re-use of romance in three 18th-century novels." Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6512.
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This study examines three 18th-century novels and their connection to the romances of the 17th century, the middle ages, as well as the Greek romances that flourished during the Roman Empire. I argue that the novel and the romance differ, not because the novel possesses some intrinsic formal, structural, or thematic essence wholly and disjunctively different from the romance, but rather because the two forms have been arbitrarily differentiated over a long contentious history for ideological and not categorical reasons. Thus, I define the novel not as a form or a genre, but as a mode and medium—a way and means of expressing story rather than as a structural, shaping category of story. Romance, on the other hand, is a type of story particularly interested in how to deal with difference. It asks: How do I deal with difference without annihilating or exiling it or myself in the process? When the romance gets subsumed into the novel as the dominant mode of prose fiction, it re-inscribes this ethical aspect of the romance’s structure through the use of resembling conventions and tropes.
In analyzing how resemblances are treated in three 18th-century novels—Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Sophia Lee’s The Recess, and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess—my dissertation focuses on the novel’s re-use of the romance to explore anxieties about difference and sameness, about moral issues related to personhood, and about the tension between the individual and the collective. These texts ask: How do we cope with and incorporate the difference of the other when privilege in rank and perception is assumed by the subjective self? This question informs familiar and social relations of all kinds. It illuminates the 18th century’s scientific assumption that reality can be dissected via objective observation. It influences views of aesthetics, of gender and sexual politics, of creativity and the conflation of originality with novelty and of repetition with derivativeness.
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Williams, Laura. "Rus in urbe : greening the English town, 1660-1760." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683367.
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Guthrie, Neil. "A thousand wrecks! : rakes' progresses in some eighteenth century English novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b08473d6-9cae-4a14-b7a7-3e40cf7bb283.
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This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).
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Daniels, Rosemary. "Women's place in men's poetry: The creation of a beata femina in women's poetry of the eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/29093.
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This dissertation examines a group of female writers in the eighteenth century, the Countess of Winchilsea, Sarah Fyge, Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Anna Barbauld, who reconfigured elements of an authoritative generic mode, the georgic. In undertaking this reconfiguration these women developed their own distinctive tradition of verse which I describe as a portrayal of a beata femina . The poetry of the beata femina acknowledges the separate sphere to which eighteenth-century mores restricted women and privileges the life of that sphere. Thus the narrative of the beatus vir is not figured as an appeal to rural retirement so much as a gendered escape from a male dominated world into a female life of the mind. The traditional affirmation of the georgic labour of the estate is transformed into a testimony of domestic labour. The country-house poem is rewritten to celebrate the women who give it life, while the topographical survey is reordered as a means for women to survey their own narratives.
However, the most significant way in which these women establish a sense of a beata femina within georgically inflected verse is through their employment of time. Women's poetry in this mode self-consciously rejects both the seasonal cycles and sense of historic progression associated with the georgic. Instead, women describe short periods of time within their quotidian lives in which they experience pleasure, connect to nature or other women, and, often, achieve transcendent experiences which seem to stand outside time.
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Mazoff, C. D. (Chaim David) 1949. "Allegiance anxiety identity : the rhetoric of legitimation in the early Canadian long poem, from Carey to Crawford." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=28840.
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The early Canadian long poem has often been faulted for its lack of aesthetic integrity, being seen in many cases as little more than poorly "versified rhetoric," but it has never been submitted to a thorough rhetorical analysis. An investigation of the rhetorical devices at work in the early Canadian long poem, however, reveals them to be highly strategic operations of both the imperial-colonial project in British North America and the emerging national consciousness of the new nation of Canada. These operations may be understood more clearly through the close examination of periodic "ruptures" in the texts--inconsistencies, contradictions, anomalies, and deflections--which underscore the frequently conflictual nature of the "unsaid" (the real historical, economic and social conditions) and the surface level of the narrative (the aesthetic and generic constraints). Such an analysis reveals the extent to which the problems of allegiance, anxiety and identity were inextricably involved in the colonial and national projects, an involvement which the poetry, despite its intentions, could neither mask nor resolve.
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Lindesay, Tamar. "The sound of the city collapsing : the changing perception and thematic role of the ruin in twentieth-century British and American poetry." Thesis, University of South Wales, 2003. https://pure.southwales.ac.uk/en/studentthesis/the-sound-of-the-city-collapsing(a371d1ec-c3ea-407a-a1f3-227d87559b3f).html.
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Matthews, Samantha. "Representations of the grave in nineteenth century English poetry : a selected commentary." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.300631.
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Mills, Rebecca May. "'Thanks for that elegant defense' : polemical prose and poetry by women in the early eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d98a502d-97b4-4dd2-b5e6-1f8c432b5cb7.
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The end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth saw many women writers from numerous social ranks, political affiliations and religious denominations reading, writing, circulating and publishing polemical prose and poetry in defence of their sex. During this surge of protofeminist activity, many of these women decried 'Customs Tyranny' by advocating a more egalitarian status for themselves, especially in regard to marriage, education and religion. This thesis, then, is a socio-historic study of the lives and writings of several polemical women writers, namely, Mary Astell (1666-1731), Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) and Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731). It also considers how and why protofeminism evolved in the late seventeenth century and reached a climax between 1694, when Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and 1710, when Chudleigh published Essays upon Several Subjects. Until now, scholars of early women writers have labelled Astell the foremost English feminist of her day. Consequently, many of her contemporary protofeminist writers have been neglected. By contextualizing their lives and texts within the political and literary activity at the turn of the eighteenth century, this thesis ultimately argues that women polemicists, such as Chudleigh and Thomas, who followed Astell into print, were not merely echoes and disciples. Rather, they furthered the evolution and secularization of a genre that anticipates feminism proper, which began to develop in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to uncover and rediscover the personal and professional details of these women's lives their class, education, friendships and patronage relationships this thesis relied heavily upon material evidence such as letters, parish records, legal records, prison records and wills. As a result, it combines feminist, materialist inclinations with traditional methodology, such as historical and archival research.
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Scott, Linda Kane. "The Inheritance Novel: The Power of Strict Settlement Language in Clarissa, Evelina and Pride and Prejudice." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/ScottLK.pdf.
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Bertram, Aldous Colin Ricardo. "Chinese influence on English garden design and architecture between 1700 and 1860." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610795.
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Pascolini-Campbell, Claire. "François Villon in English : translation and cross-cultural poetic influence." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11827.
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This thesis argues that François Villon becomes a significant, but overlooked, influence in the tradition of English poetry, and that this influence reveals itself in translations, adaptations, and responses to his work. By focusing on the way in which numerous high profile poets in the United Kingdom and the United States have reacted to Villon, this study will posit that the reasons behind the appeal of his oeuvre as a source text lie both in the protean nature of his narrative voice and in the myth of his life. The inter-lingual intertextual relationships established through translation and the residue of Villon in English poetic tradition will be presented by means of five case studies, all taking the work of a specific poet as their theme: Algernon Charles Swinburne; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Ezra Pound; Basil Bunting; and Robert Lowell. These five poets are presented as being exemplary of a greater tradition of translating Villon into English, and will take the reader from the first verse translations of his work in the nineteenth century, to postmodern adaptations and parodies of Villon in the twentieth. They will illustrate the specified intertextual relationships that exist both between source text and target text, and the work of one translator and another, thereby demonstrating the accumulation of influences at play in any one translation of this medieval French poet. In so doing, this thesis will also explore translation and adaptation as dialogical and transformative spaces, distinct from other genres in their ability to establish cross-cultural and interlingual intertexts. Translation and adaptation as spaces of cultural and linguistic hybridity will be demonstrated by observing some of the ways in which Villon has left his mark on English verse, and some of the Villons that anglophone poets have created in their turn.
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Berman, Richard Andrew. "The architects of eighteenth century English freemasonry, 1720-1740." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/2999.
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Following the appointment of its first aristocratic Grand Masters in the 1720s and in the wake of its connections to the scientific Enlightenment, ‘Free and Accepted’ Masonry rapidly became part of Britain’s national profile and the largest and arguably the most influential of Britain’s extensive clubs and societies. The new organisation did not evolve naturally from the mediaeval guilds and religious orders that pre-dated it, but was reconfigured radically by a largely self-appointed inner core. Freemasonry became a vehicle for the expression and transmission of the political and religious views of those at its centre, and for the scientific Enlightenment concepts that they championed. The ‘Craft’ also offered a channel through which many sought to realise personal aspirations: social, intellectual and financial. Through an examination of relevant primary and secondary documentary evidence, this thesis seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of contemporary English political and social culture, and to explore the manner in which Freemasonry became a mechanism that promoted the interests of the Hanoverian establishment and connected and bound a number of élite metropolitan and provincial figures. A range of networks centred on the aristocracy, parliament, the magistracy and the learned and professional societies are studied, and key individuals instrumental in spreading and consolidating the Masonic message identified. The thesis also explores the role of Freemasonry in the development of the scientific Enlightenment. The evidence suggests that Freemasonry should be recognised not only as the most prominent of the many eighteenth century fraternal organisations, but also as a significant cultural vector and a compelling component of the social, economic, scientific and political transformation then in progress.
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Swank, Andrea H. "Virtually corporal : the polite articulation of the female body in the 18th century novel /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1997. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9841339.
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Johnson, Nancy E. (Nancy Edna) 1956. "The "equivocal spirit" of law : property, agency and the contract in the English Jacobin novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=29054.
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In the 1790s, the English Jacobin novelists became vital participants in the fiery debates over natural and civil rights. Energized by the success of the American Revolution and inspired by the calls for l'egalite, la liberte, la surete, and la propriete in France, the Jacobin authors contributed their narratives to the British campaigns for reform of parliament and extension of the franchise. In this dissertation, I argue that the Jacobin novel furnishes crucial insights into the development of a theory of juridical rights in the late eighteenth century. Working in the early modern traditions of contract theory, writers such as Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin embraced the concept of inalienable natural rights. In their novels, they identified the critical role property played in determining the individual's relationship to the law, and they celebrated the emergence of a new kind of citizen distinguished by economic independence, inalienable rights and political agency. But they also offered an important critique of contractarian thought. The Jacobins' narratives revealed the exclusion of certain segments of the population from participation in government formed by contract. Their analyses of the origins of political authority and the constitution of the legal subject render the Jacobin novel a critical component of the history of juridical rights.
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Traina, Denice N. "Politics and Poetry: Not so Separate Spheres (Voice of the Minority Muse)." Scholar Commons, 2010. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1793.
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This thesis contributes to continuing assessments of women writers and their political activities during the long eighteenth century. Analyzing works by Aphra Behn, Hannah More, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, I assert that these writers projected their voices into public affairs, and I explore their treatment of poetic forms. Through writing, they claimed equality with fellow authors and participated as equals beside the period's political leaders, debating about and commenting upon a wide array of concerns like the Glorious Revolution, the abolition of the slave trade, British military expansion, and religious and political liberties. This thesis argues that Behn, More, and Barbauld spoke as muses for the minority causes of their historical moment; their political-poetic participation further blurs the distinction between once held perceptions of the Habermasian public sphere.
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Martin, Julia School of English UNSW. "Self and subject in eighteenth century diaries." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English, 2002. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/18787.
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This thesis investigates new ways of reading eighteenth century British diaries and argues that these narratives do not necessarily rely upon the idea of the self as a single, unitary source of meaning. This contradicts what has traditionally been viewed as the very essence of autobiography (Gusdorf, 1954; Olney, 1980, 1988). Close readings of the diaries of John Wesley, Mrs Housman, James Boswell and Hannah Ball (all written between 1720 and 1795) show that they construct 'generalised', rather than 'unique' subjects of narrative. The self is seen to be an amalgam of common characteristic more than being a core of psychological impulses. In order to understand the 'generalised' rather than 'unique' subject found in these diaries, this thesis surveys and uses reading strategies informed by theories that can accommodate fragmented narrative forms like diaries. It also investigates the religious and philosophical underpinnings of eighteenth century autobiographical narratives to determine how the self, and consciousness, were popularly perceived in the period known as the Enlightenment (c. 1690-1810). As they are often marked by missing pages, deletions and heavy editing, careful strategies are required in order to 'read with' eighteenth century diary narratives (Sandoval, 1981; Huff, 2000; Raoul, 2001). This practice invites an engagement with philosophical debates about 'self'-the living human being who writes the diary, and the 'subject'-the 'I' produced by narrative. The thesis argues that more than any other type of written narrative, diaries demand an acknowledgement that the subject of narrative does refer to a self that lives in day-to-day relations. Not to acknowledge this is to 'write off experience altogether' (Probyn,1991:111) and exclude the political dimensions of autobiography from the analysis. The thesis concludes that by seeking to answer the questions of 'What am I?' and 'What are we?' rather than the Romantic or psychological question of 'Who am I?', eighteenth century diary narratives create complex relationships between time, subjective and narrative that transcend most theorisations of autobiography to date. This presents an exciting direction forward for a field of scholarship that has been overly concerned with defining its limitations.
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Ross, Trevor Thornton. "The making of the English literary canon : from the Middle Ages to the late 18th century /." Montréal (Ont.) ; Kingston (Ont.) ; London [etc.] : McGill-Queen's university press, 1998. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb375439576.
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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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Corens, Liesbeth. "Confessional mobility, English Catholics, and the southern Netherlands, c.1660-1720." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709379.
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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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Moore, Paul Henry. "Death in the eighteenth-century novel, 1740-1800." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5def918a-a899-4650-8850-efcacf3f4bf1.
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This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.
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Willey, Stephen. "Bob Cobbing 1950-1978 : performance, poetry and the institution." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2012. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8307.
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Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a poet known for his performances and as an organiser of poetry events, as a participant in the British Poetry Revival, as a late-modernist and as a sound and concrete poet. This thesis seeks to reconfigure our view of Cobbing as a performer by considering his performances across a range of institutions to argue that this institutionalised nature was their defining aspect. It maps the transition from Cobbing’s defence of amateurism and localism in the 1950s to his self-definition as a professional poet in the mid 1960s and his attempt to professionalise poetry in the 1970s. This process was not uncontested: at each stage the idea of the poet and the reality of what it meant to live as a poet were at stake The first chapter considers Cobbing’s poems and visual artworks of the 1950s in the context of Hendon Arts Together, the suburban amateur arts organisation he ran for ten years, and it situates both in Britain’s postwar social and cultural welfare system. Chapter two analyses Cobbing’s transition from Finchley’s local art circles to his creative and organisational participation in London’s international counterculture, specifically the Destruction in Art Symposium (9-11 September 1966). Chapter three considers ABC in Sound in the context of the International Poetry Incarnation (11 June 1965) and analyses Cobbing’s emergence as a professional poet. Chapter four examines Cobbing’s tape-based poems of 1965-1970 and their associated visual scores in the context of audio technology, and the role they played in Cobbing’s professionalisation. The final chapter examines Cobbing’s performances at the Poetry Society (1968- 1978) in order to investigate the effects of subsidy and friendship on poetic performance.
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Landon, Sydney Ann. ""Sundry pithie and learned inventions" : the Paradise of Dainty Devices and sixteenth century poetic traditions /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/15485.
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Batchelor, Paul. "'I am pearl' : guise and excess in the poetry of Barry MacSweeney." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/901.
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Barry MacSweeney was a prolific poet who embraced many poetic styles and forms. The defining characteristics of his work are its excess (for example, its depiction of extreme emotional states, its use of challenging forms, and the flagrancy with which it appropriates other writers and poems) and its quality of swerving (for example, the way it frustrates the reader's expectations, and its oppositional identification with literary antecedents and schools). I argue that MacSweeney's poetic development constitutes a series of reactions to a moment of trauma that occurred in 1968, when a crisis in his personal life coincided with a disastrous publicity stunt for his first book. I chart MacSweeney's progress from 1968 to 1997 in terms of five stages of trauma adjustment, which account for the stylistic changes his poetry underwent. In Chapter One I consider the ways in which the traumatic episode in 1968 led to MacSweeney embracing the underground poetry scene. In Chapter Two I examine the ways in which his 1970s poetry exhibits denial. In Chapter Three I look at Jury Vet and the other angry, alienated poetry he wrote in the early 1980s. In Chapter Four I look at 1984s Ranter, an example of poetic bargaining in which MacSweeney alludes to mainstream poetry in return for what he hopes will be a wider readership. In Chapter Five I consider Hellhound Memos, the collection that resulted from a period of depression MacSweeney suffered 1985- 1993. In Chapter Six I look at his most successful work, Pearl and The Book of Demons, in which he confronts and accepts the roots of his trauma. Using a combination of close reading, literary theory and biographical research, I explicate and evaluate MacSweeney's development in terms of his literary and cultural contexts. While accounting for the various styles and approaches MacSweeney undertook, this study shows his oeuvre to be remarkably consistent in its structure, imagery and poetic techniques.
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Milne, Anne. "'Lactilla tends her fav'rite cow' : domesticated animals and women in eighteenth-century British labouring-class women's poetry /." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0029/NQ66225.pdf.
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Calhoun, Randall L. "William Shenstone's aesthetic theory and poetry." Virtual Press, 1985. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/442604.
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William Shenstone's reputation has been dependent upon parts. He has been seen as a tasteful gardener who wrote verse, or as a poet who was also a landscape gardener. Until now, no one has studied his gardening, his daily activities, and his poetry as equal. expressions of one basic aesthetic view--the purpose of the present study.The Leasowes, Shenstone’s parental estate, became a popular tourist attraction during the early part of the century. There, tourists were able to leave their coaches and walk upon gravelled paths through "improved" nature. The paths followed the contours of his land, and Shenstone added small adornments like seats, urns, and statues. However, the Leasowes was a marked contrast to formal gardens of his time: Shenstone allowed no conspicuous display of his art.As a man retired from ambition but not from usefulness, Shenstone became an exemplar of "taste," a quality inherent in a select few, but with an ethical proviso. The tasteful man was able not only to live a genteel life, but was also obligated to act benevolently. These beliefs upon which Shenstone acted were derived from neo-Platonic philosophy, most notably that of the Earl of Shafteshury. The tasteful ran of the time was able to express his talents in various social and artistic ways. Shenstone, not surprisingly, became instrumental in editing Robert Podsley's final three volumes of his Miscellany, and he would probably have been named co-editor with Thomas Percy in the Reliques had death not prevented him.Shenstone cannot be considered a major poet not only because his other activities kept him from writing any massive number of works, but also because the good poetry he did produce was quite limited. He seemed, once past his apprentice state, never to be able to develop a unique voice combined with consistent artistic excellence. In short, his reputation as a poet must depend upon a relatively small canon and upon an even smaller number of verses that can he called poetry.Throughout his life, William Shenstone was concerned with art. It is not too much to say that he so merged art and life that, for him, the two could not he separated: his daily activities became minor productions and he strove for simplicity in art. Shenstone's aesthetic view was not original, but it was eclectic. He was fully aware of classical traditions, but he also knew the major aestheticians of his age--Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, Purke, anca Gerard. Shenstone's basic aesthetic--that the best art is that which conceals itself--was applied consistently to everything that he produced.
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Sawas, Waha. "The posthuman condition and the problem of youth in twenty-first century fiction and poetry (2000-2010)." Thesis, University of Hull, 2016. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:16522.
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[From the introduction]: In the twenty-first century, poetry, speculative fiction, science fiction, and young-adult fiction introduce new representations of youth in relation to contemporary social changes that arise from the application of technology to everyday life. The figure of youth in twenty-first-century dystopian, postapocalyptic, and science-fictional settings is used to emphasise the future challenges facing the younger generation. This thesis breaks new ground in examining contemporary literature that engages with youth and the repercussions of certain scientific developments while addressing the interstitial value of young-adult fiction, science fiction, and poetry. The originality of my argument lies mainly in the comparative analysis of poetry and fiction in the twenty-first century focusing on youth and the impact of scientific development on contemporary society and culture. This thesis also demonstrates how the boundaries between the different genres are gradually diminishing when engaging with the topics of technology and youth which is becoming more important to authors and readers than the literary categorisation of texts. This thesis explores the contemporary literary representations of modified bodies in twenty-first-century fiction and poetry. These representations include organically modified bodies (Chapter One) as well as artificially devised ones (Chapter Two). Another primary objective is to investigate the literary representations of social attitudes towards the generation of youth through adult characters such as parents and guardians (Chapter Three). The following three chapters aim to identify the literary standpoints regarding the cultural dominance of new technologies in contemporary societies, especially since advanced technology made its way into people's lives through social media and the internet. I will examine poetry and narrative poetry as well as postapocalyptic and dystopian fiction and young-adult fiction in the twenty-first century representing the role of advanced technology in creating the posthuman.
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Messem, Catherine. "'Angers, fantasies and ghostly fears' : nineteenth century women from Wales and English-language poetry." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364769.
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Tracy, Jordan Elizabeth. "Framing the Sacred in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Ekphrasis." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/556022.
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Framing the Sacred revisits the significance of ekphrasis, the verbal rendering of a visual representation, in modern and contemporary American poetics. Although a seemingly marginal strain of lyric poetry, ekphrasis is a literary crucible in which the problems of representation converge, catalyzing a unique process of enchantment and disenchantment. Through an examination of a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, I argue that this enchantment has bearing on how we envision the import of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America and its literature. On account of its liminal status--a text that is "betwixt and between" the verbal and visual--ekphrasis does not need to meditate explicitly on spiritual, sacred, or religious objects to undermine and destabilize our definitions of such terms. Each chapter in Framing the Sacred examines the manifestation of a single trope of containment--the figure of the frame, the genre of still life, the genre of the self-portrait, and the acts of collection and curation--and discovers the various ways the ekphrastic work of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Wright, A.E. Stallings, and Jorie Graham constructs and deconstructs such tropes. The pattern that emerges from a number of dramatically different ekphrases reveals the generative value of loosening the frames through which we consider the sacred in the study of literature and the visual arts.
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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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Blackmore, Sabine. "In soft Complaints no longer ease I find." Doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Philosophische Fakultät II, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/17176.
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Diese Dissertation untersucht die verschiedenen Konstruktionen poetischer Selbstrepräsentationen durch Melancholie in Gedichten englischer Autorinnen des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (ca. 1680-1750). Die vielfältigen Gedichte stammen von repräsentativen lyrischer Autorinnen dieser Epoche, z.B. Anne Wharton, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Henrietta Knight, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Mary Chudleigh, Mehetabel Wright und Elizabeth Boyd. Vor einem ausführlichen medizinhistorischen Hintergrund, der die Ablösung der Humoralpathologie durch die Nerven und die daraus resultierende Neupositionierung von Frauen als Melancholikerinnen untersucht, rekurriert die Arbeit auf die Zusammenhänge von Medizin und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Für die Gedichtanalysen werden gezielt Analysekategorien und zwei Typen poetisch-melancholischer Selbstrepräsentationen entwickelt und dann für die Close Readings der Texte eingesetzt. Die Auswahl der Gedicht umfasst sowohl Texte, die auf generisch standardisierte Marker der Melancholie verweisen, als auch Texte, die eine hauptsächlich die melancholische Erfahrung inszenieren, ohne dabei zwangsläufig explizit auf die genretypischen Marker zurück zu greifen. Die detaillierten Close Readings der Gedichte zeigen die oftmals ambivalenten Strategien der poetisch-melancholischen Selbstkonstruktionen der Sprecherinnen in den Gedichttexten und demonstrieren deutlich, dass – entgegen der vorherrschenden kritischen Meinung – auch Autorinnen dieser Epoche zum literarischen Melancholiediskurs beigetragen haben. Die Arbeit legt ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die sog. weibliche Elegie und ihrem Verhältnis zur Melancholie. Dabei wird deutlich, dass gerade Trauer, die oftmals als weiblich konnotierte Gegendiskurs zur männlich konnotierten genialischen Melancholie wahrgenommen wird, und die daraus folgende Elegie von Frauen als wichtiger literarischer Raum für melancholische Dichtung genutzt wurde und somit als Teil des literarischen Melancholiediskurses dient.This thesis analyses different constructions of poetic self-representations through melancholy in poems written by early eighteenth-century women writers (ca. 1680-1750). The selection of poems includes texts written by representative poets such as Anne Wharton, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Henrietta Knight, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Mary Chudleigh, Mehetabel Wright und Elizabeth Boyd. Against the background of a detailed analysis of the medical-historical paradigmatic change from humoral pathology to the nerves and the subsequent re-positioning of women as melancholics, the thesis refers to the close relationship of medicine and literature during the eighteenth century. Specifical categories of analysis and two different types of melancholic-poetic self-representations are developed, in order to support the close readings of the literary texts. These poems comprise both texts, which explicitly refer to generically standardized melancholy markers, as well as texts, which negotiate and aestheticize the melancholic experience without necessarily mentioning melancholy. The detailed close readings of the poems discuss the often ambivalent strategies of the poetic speakers to construct and represent their melancholic selves and clearly demonstrate that women writers of that time did – despite the common critical opinion – contribute to the literary discourse of melancholy. The thesis pays special attention to the so-called female elegy and its relationship to melancholy. It becomes clear that mourning and grief, which have often been considered a feminine counter-discourse to the discourse of melancholy as sign of the male intellectual and/or artistic genius, and the resulting female elegy offer an important literary space for women writers and their melancholy poetry, which should thus be recognized as a distinctive part of the literary discourse of melancholy.
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Williams, Thomas Richard. "Plural perspectives in the social observation of John Clare." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2014. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/9076.
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My thesis examines social observation in the poetry of John Clare, focusing on his work in the years before he was committed to an asylum in 1837. The project illuminates a plurality of perspectives in his poetry that has not been fully recognized in previous critical studies. It resituates the conventional scholarly approach to Clare, which has been preoccupied by an overly oppositional conception of the ‘two cultures’ that he inhabited: the oral and the literary. My thesis positions him as an intellectually curious seeker whose poetry is invigorated by his experience of different value systems in both the country and the city. Each chapter considers how Clare develops different strategies of social observation in the context of different discourses, and how he unsettles the validity of various attitudes to human behaviour. Chapter One, ‘Naturalizing Perspectives’, offers a new approach to Clare’s interest in natural history, by examining its influence on his portrayal of human behaviour, when he adopts the detailed observational habits of the naturalist. Chapter Two, ‘Refined Perspectives’, shows how he negotiates the influences of poets who represented the social structure of rural life, and poets who were interested in rural subjectivity, in order to identify the distinctiveness of his presentation of customary culture in ‘The Village Minstrel’. Chapter Three, ‘Female Perspectives’, considers his interest in his female readership, and examines how his courtship tales – which have generally been neglected by critics – engage with the concerns about conduct and social elevation that occupied the literature aimed for this audience. Chapter Four, ‘National Perspectives’, examines how he responds to the ferment of political ideas in his time through his representations of the nation – another area that has been little served in critical studies. My Conclusion considers Clare’s later poetry in the asylum and his developing self-consciousness as a social observer.
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Ahern, Stephen. "Between duty and desire : sentimental agency in British prose fiction of the later eighteenth century." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0027/NQ50101.pdf.
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