Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Andrew Marvell'

My thesis seeks to offer a literary comparison of Andrew Marvell’s poems A Dialogue, between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure, A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body, and On a Drop of Dew and the works of the seventeenth century English theologians the Cambridge Platonists– namely Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683), Peter Sterry (1621-1678), Henry More (1614-1687), and John Sherman (?-1671). The question at its heart is not simply to assess the extent of their congeniality, but to determine how effectively the work of the Cambridge Platonists functions as a framework for the interpretation of Marvell’s poems. The thesis, therefore, hopes to validate two claims. The first, made by Pierre Legouis in 1928 but never fully substantiated, is that Marvell’s Platonist tendencies stem from his seven years at Cambridge, which are ascribed to the preaching of Whichcote and Sherman. The second, is Harold E. Toliver’s suggestion in 1965 that Marvell, like the Cambridge group, rejects lower links in the great chain for the autonomy of the soul. As proving that the Cambridge Platonists influenced Marvell is very difficult, this central contention is tested using both an ‘analogical’ and ‘genealogical’ method. Part I explores aspects of Marvell’s life where he may have been exposed to both Neoplatonist and Christian Neoplatonists writers, as well as direct interactions he shared with members of the Cambridge Platonists. Part I will predominantly focus on three aspects of Marvell’s life. First, the influence Marvell’s father, Reverend Marvell had on his son. Second, Marvell’s education at Hull Grammar. Third, Marvell’s sociable interactions at Cambridge and as Latin Secretary to Oliver Cromwell. Part I will use Foucault’s work What is an Author? and The Archaeology of Knowledge as a literary framework to ‘suspend typical’ questions, which are largely ignored in Marvell scholarship. Part II presents a sustained interpretation of two key theological themes in Marvell’s poetry– the function of the soul, and the structure of nature and the corporeal world– using Peter Sterry’s Sermons and Henry More’s Philosophical Poems. I will suggest that a close comparative reading of Marvell and these two members of the Cambridge Platonists reveals three similarities. First, Marvell like More, rejects nominalism, and instead seeks a doctrine of moral realism. Second, similarly to Sterry, Marvell represents the soul as functioning as a conduit of divine knowledge, which must distance itself from materiality. Third, much like Sherman, More, and Sterry, Marvell describes the soul as having to awaken from its bodily unconsciousness of the corporeal world via knowledge and reason to achieve its cycle back to God.

This thesis examines the treatment of the theme of justice in the works, both poetry and prose, of Andrew Marvell and, in a final chapter, the justice of certain aspects of his behaviour. In order to do this, it seeks to locate particular works in the context of contemporary debates or discussions as to ancient rights, the ancient constitution (and competing theories as to the king's power) and the disagreement between Hugo Grotius and John Selden on the subject of the legal status of the sea and, more generally, the laws of nature and nations. !e discussion of the justice of his behaviour offers a reinterpretation of the Chancery pleadings and other records in a cluster of cases arising after Marvell's death out of the collapse of a bank in which his friend, Edward Nelthorpe, was a partner. It is argued that these records have, up to now, been misunderstood. The thesis concludes that Marvell's work evinces an ambiguity about justice, with the poetry tending to give voice to his scepticism, while the sense that justice might be at least partly achievable is more likely to appear in the prose works. The conclusion as to his actions is also a matter of some ambivalence: while the evidence does not show that he colluded in a fraud on the bank's creditors, the suspicion that he behaved badly towards his wife is complicated by a lingering uncertainty that he had, in fact, married.

Andrew Marvell (1621-78), though best known today as a lyric poet, was also the author of a handful of aggressive pamphlets on religious toleration and proto-Whig political values. In comparison to earlier polemic produced by divines such as John Owen, Richard Baxter, or Samuel Parker, Marvell's books appear as a radical aesthetic departure into a witty style of dramatic pamphlet. This thesis argues that Marvell's aesthetic innovation owes to his infusion of theatre and theatricality into ecclesiastical controversy. The hybrid polemic caused a point of contact between smaller separate publics foreshadows the opening of the wider Public Sphere that Jurgen Habermas situates in the wake of the 16889 Glorious Revolution. As a new style of public writing, Marvell's hybrid polemic initiated a crossover between the ecclesiastical and theatrical publics that expanded debate to a new idiom and a wider audience.

Cette etude tend a retracer l'incidence de la pensee religieuse sur la vision esthetique d'andrew marvell, de mettre en place un point d'articulation entre la sensibilite baroque et le protestantisme en explorant la dynamique a trois poles, grace, art, et nature, qui sous-entend la poesie lyrique. Les poemes religieux de marvell s'inscrivent dans une poetique de la grace, emaillee d'images de cristallisation. Les divers arts, musique, peinture, sculpture, formulent une esthetique de l'humilite : est beau ce qui est utile, modeste, modere. A l'image du pic-vert d'appleton house ou de l'adroit jardinier du jardin, l'artiste doit creer un art moral et, pour ce faire, il doit posseder un coeur pur. Ainsi, le jardin enclos du jardinier pecheur est le fruit d'un art vicie, alors que la nature sauvage est l'habitat de dieu. Le plaisir a-t-il une place dans cette esthetique protestante? la poesie lyrique exalte l'erotisation de la nature regeneree mais est traversee par une tension autour de l'acte sexuel. Collections d'images d'enfants chastes, de prudes maitresses et de demons d'apocalypse, les poemes pastoraux et ou amoureux mettent en scene la solitude du seducteur, annoncent la mort du pecheur. En revanche, la creation de la poesie pastorale chretienne, dont l'exemple le plus accompli est "clorinda and damon," est mise en doute dans "the coronet". Dans un mouvement chiasmatique, ce poeme dramatise la conversion du poete et met en abyme l'acte poetique lui-meme. La poesie de marvell resonne d'innombrables echos aux psaumes, au cantique des cantiques, et aux evangiles. Prenant l'ecriture comme modele, l'art poetique reve par marvell est un ideal de concentration et de simplicite. Finalement, etudier les rapports de contrainte entre l'esthetique et l'ethique equivaut a redefinir le concept de metaphysique et a replacer marvell a l'interieur d'un courant d'esthetique protestante, nationaliste, realiste a la fois revolutionnaire par ses liens au puritanisme et classique par son desir de sobriete
The aim of this study is to define andrew marvell's religious aesthetics, to articulate the possibility of a junction between a baroque sensibility and a protestant worldview by exploring the interaction between grace, art and nature in the poet's lyric work. Marvell's religious poetry can be defined as a poetry of grace run through by images of crystallization. A close examination of the musical, the painterly, the statuesque, and the tectonic in the lyric poems leads to the formulation of an aesthetics of humility: is beautiful what is useful, modest, moderate. Emblematized as the judicious woodpecker of appleton house, the artist must, in the wake of the "skilful gardner", undergo a conversion to create an art worthy of god, a moral art. Thus, the enclosed garden designed by "luxurious man" must be rejected as the product of sinful pride while wild regenerate nature is the dwelling of the gods. Is pleasure absent from this religious aesthetics? a playful eroticism amidst bountiful nature is conterbalanced by a recurring tension around carnal pleasure. A gallery of pre-pubescent girls, coy mistresses, and apocalyptic monsters, the profane love pastoral stages the self-reflexive solitude of the seducer, foregrounds the death of the sinner. Questioning the possibility of the religious pastoral, exemplified in marvell's canon by "clorinda and damon," "the coronet" dramatizes in its chiastic structure the conversion of the poet and is a framing of the poetic act itself. Marvell's song echoes with references to the psalms, the song of songs, and the gospels. With the scripture as a model the poet's art poetica stresses an ideal of concentration and simplicity. Ultimately, analyzing the interdependence of ethics and aesthetics means redefining the concept of metaphysical. Marvell's poetry must beread within the context of a protestant aesthetics, nationalistic, realistic, both revolutionnary in its links with puritanism and classical in its desire for sobriety

The phrase "the just Figure" - a quotation from Upon Appleton House - is the central theme of this thesis as it aptly describes Marvell's repeated use of shape, harmony and proportion to suggest morality and virtue. The poet's concern with geometrical imagery is conveyed by the word "figure", which also is another term for a metaphor or conceit. The word "just" suggests not only moral appropriateness, but also mathematical exactness or fit. The thesis consists of five chapters, each dealing with an aspect of the imagery of shape and form which pervades so many of Marvell's lyrics. The first chapter, "Moral Geometry", deals with the way in which Marvell uses the imagery of lines, angles and curves. In some poems the lines are curved, as in Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borrow, where the graceful downward curved line of the hill conveys Fairfacian humility. Symmetry and circularity are discussed in the second chapter. The poet uses the perfect shape of the circle to depict objects which convey a moral significance. Similarly, several of the lyrics are themselves quasi-circular with their closing lines echoing their openings. Chapter Three deals with liquid spheres. Marvell explores the nature, shape and texture of tears in poems such as Eyes and Tears and Mourning; and in On a Drop of Dew uses the shape of the dew drop to suggest the perfection of the heavenly realm from which it has been parted. In several of the lyrics, Marvell places a frame around his poems to create an enclosed world in which his poetic creations exist. These enclosed, or framed, worlds are discussed in Chapter Four. The final chapter, "Beyond The Frame", describes how some of the lyrics suggest a move from the world within to the world beyond the frame of the poem.This can either be a movement from confinement to release, or from the seen world to worlds unseen. Shape, harmony and proportion are the qualities which Marvell uses to convey morality and humility and a vision of the world based on what is, in the various senses of the word, "just".

Cette étude se propose de recenser et d'étudier les éléments qui semblent être au coeur de l'imaginaire poétique d'Andrew Marvell ( le jardin, l'espace et le temps, la divinité, la femme, la chute, la sexualité, le travail, la mort, le conflit de l'âme et du corps, le problème de la pureté et de l'innocence, la relation de la pensée à l'objet pensé, etc. ). Cet examen nous permet de mettre à jour une structure fondamentale de l'imaginaire marvellien qui préside à la selection, la valorisation et l'organisation des images. Cette structure repose sur une hésitation permanente entre la nostalgie régressive et le volontarisme historique, la fuite devant l'histoire et l'engagement dans celle-ci. La dialectique narcissique est paradigmatique de ce double mouvement. Le second grand volet de l'étude vise à mettre en évidence les implications idéologiques de cette structure imaginaire. Idéologie et imaginaire sont présentés comme étroitement liés ; l'idéologie correspondant à l'actualisation historique des représentations imaginaires : l'imaginaire historique. Aussi, la double orientation de l'imaginaire marvellien détermine-t-elle un double discours idéologique : la monarchie est associée à un Age d'Or à la fois merveilleux et coupable, alors que l'activisme puritain, en particulier à travers l'image de Cromwell, s'incarne dans les images de la modernité capitaliste et de l'enthousiasme millénariste, suivant un parcours douloureux mais nécessaire. L'écriture poétique devient ainsi pour Marvell l'étape nécessaire d'une maturation idéologique qui ne saurait aboutir que par la résolution d'un profond conflit imaginaire, conflit qui constitue le ressort secret de la création poétique.

Thesis (MA (English Literature))--University of Stellenbosch, 2007.
Seventeenth-century England witnessed a time of radical sociopolitical conflict and transition. This thesis aims to examine how two writers closely associated with this period and its controversies, John Milton and Andrew Marvell, represent events as they unfold. This thesis focuses specifically on Milton’s Paradise Lost and Marvell’s Cromwellian poems in order to show how these poets reinterpret established literary conventions and invoke traditional Puritan practices in order to explain and legitimise the precarious new dispensation of post-Civil War England. At the same time, their work produces ambiguities and tensions that threaten to undermine the very discourse that they attempt to endorse. Both poets’ work indicates an active involvement in the political embroilments of their time while retaining its aesthetic value. Therefore, these texts do not only function on an aesthetic level but also within the historical framework of political ideologies. The focus of this thesis is a discussion of the relationship between politics and poetry, with the emphasis on poetry of conflict and transition in civil society. In other words, it is not only considered how different poetic genres reflect social and political change in different ways but also how these genres in turn contribute to political rhetoric. During the English Revolution Milton and Marvell try to provide solutions for the political disturbance, even while remaining aware of the new conflicts produced in the attempt.

The Restoration Era, 1660-1688, has long borne a reputation as an exceptionally debauched period of English history. That reputation is however a caricature, amplified from a handful of recognizable features. That rhetoric of debauchery originates in the Restoration’s own discourse, constructed as a language for opposing the rising French-style absolutism of the late Stuart kings, Charles II and James II. When Charles II was restored in 1660, enthusiastic panegyrists returned to the official aesthetics of his father Charles I, who had formulated power as abundance through pastoral, mythological, and utopian art. Oppositional satirists in the Restoration subverted that language of cornucopian abundance to represent Charles II and his court as instead excessive, diseased, and predatory. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, Williamite satirists and secret historians continued to wield these themes against the exiled Jacobites. Gradually, the political facets of Stuart excess dulled, but the caricature of the debauched Restoration survived in eighteenth-century state poem collections and historiography. The authors most emphasized in this study are John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Andrew Marvell. Works by John Milton, John Dryden, Edmund Waller, King Charles I, and Gilbert Burnet also receive sustained attention.

Although Andrew Marvell wrote and published relatively little, his poetry collects from the full range of “schools” and idiosyncratic styles present in the seventeenth century: echoes of Herbert, Donne, Milton, Traherne, Herrick, Lovelace, and Jonson, among others, permeate throughout his work. Although much of his imagery seems novel, if not strange, it is clear that Marvell has a deep engagement with several important long-running traditions. His work is conversation with Ovid, Horace, and Theocritus as much as it responds directly to the poets whose lives overlapped with his own. In his engagement with such varied sources, Marvell demonstrates an astounding degree of poetic flexibility. He is a master of imitating voice and style.

This dissertation argues that early modern writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell played a critical role in the transition from the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics. I demonstrate how the Protestant Reformation, with its special emphasis on the depravity of human nature, prompted writers to critique models of aesthetic judgment and experience that depended on high faith in human goodness and rationality. These writers in turn used their literary works to popularize skepticism about the human mind's ability to perceive and appreciate beauty accurately. In doing so, early modern writers helped create an intellectual culture in which aesthetics would emerge as a distinct branch of philosophy.

This thesis interprets John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667) and Andrew Marvell’s The Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) in light of recent scholarship drawing on English and Dutch visual culture traditions. These poems were written in close temporal proximity, and both provide a highly politicised account of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664-7). Marvell’s poem is traditionally read as a satiric response to Edmund Waller’s panegyric on the war in Instructions to a Painter (1665), thus providing the final word in the series of satiric Advice-to-a-Painter poems that Waller spawned. Dryden’s, Marvell’s and Waller’s poems explicitly draw upon visual cultural traditions, and it is the purpose of this thesis to explore the political implications of those choices. In this thesis I am not making a claim for the indiscriminate, general reference to visual cultural or scientific material in Dryden’s and Marvell’s poem; I am arguing that the choices they make quite explicitly include certain things and exclude others, which suggests a knowing attitude. Marvell employs Waller’s motif of giving instructions to a portrait painter; his poem conforms to principles of decorum long associated with “good” painting, but satirically subverts them to create a series of grotesque images of courtiers and parliamentarians in keeping with his corrupt subject matter. Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis also draws upon visual cultural material to give a more favorable account of the war, but the poem is to one side of the “painter poem” tradition. Dryden’s political argument is aligned with Waller’s, but he works to praise the English without direct reference to the Waller panegyric. Waller and Dryden both allude to perspective techniques used in Renaissance court portraiture and painting in order to celebrate Charles II and his generals and to portray a sense of national unity. Marvell alludes to English Mannerist and Dutch art traditions to create a poetic State Portrait designed to challenge Waller’s and Dryden’s Royalist interpretations of events. Marvell uses Mannerist stylisation to critique the decadence of Charles II and his court, while referring to Dutch painting techniques, characterised by a high attention to detail, to draw attention to unflattering features traditionally “painted” out. In Annus Mirabilis order is achieved by combining classical imagery with principles of Baconian science that sought to taxonomise nature, and to “reform” language, strengthening the relationship between signifier and signified, and imposing a sense of order and unity on the world. In Last Instructions the metaphor of the microscope functions as a framing device for reading Marvell’s poem. This enables Marvell to distort his subject matter in the name of “scientific” truth, with the deliberate failure to provide a unified image leaving the reader to piece together the various episodes. As a result, Marvell demonstrates that any attempt to represent the war is going to be partial and subjective. By studying the aesthetic and scientific techniques together, I argue that Dryden creates a poem in which the spatial design supports his praise for Charles II and the hierarchy in the state he wants to invoke. Conversely, Marvell creates a poetic State Portrait that alludes to Dutch painting techniques and the microscope to distort and fragment his subject matter, thereby challenging both Waller’s and Dryden’s imposition of order and unity on a war characterised by political corruption and strategic failure. Considering the aesthetic and scientific references concurrently draws attention to the use of perspectival cues that shape the political arguments of each poem. This method is important for drawing attention to Dryden’s and Marvell’s different approaches to engaging with key events of the Second Anglo Dutch war and the multi-disciplinary nature of these representations; an aspect that has, until now, been under examined in the critical tradition. Chapter one, “Panegyric and Satire in Waller’s, Dryden’s and Marvell’s poems on the Second Anglo-Dutch War” sets the context for my analysis by focusing on Marvell’s satiric Advice-to-a-Painter poems to which Last Instructions provides the final word. I ask whether there is evidence of Marvell’s knowledge of Dutch and English Mannerist painting traditions, and conclude that Marvell alludes to these traditions explicitly and systematically. In chapter two, “The Ekphrastic portraits in Waller’s, Dryden, and Marvell’s Anglo-Dutch War poems” I focus on the portraits that appear throughout Dryden’s and Marvell’s poems, and examine these in light of English, Mannerist and Dutch portraiture traditions. Chapter three, “Poetry as History Painting: Renaissance and Mannerist perspectives in Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter,” builds upon my analysis of Dryden’s and Marvell’s portraiture to consider the genre of the istoria or history painting for which Marvell’s poem purports to represent the “third sitting.” I argue that the composition of Annus Mirabilis adheres to principles of linear perspective, while Marvell’s Last Instructions is more usefully considered in terms of Mannerist and Dutch compositional techniques. Chapter four “Natural philosophy, optics and theatricality in Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis” focuses on Dryden’s metaphoric staging of the action in terms of a Renaissance stage set. I use Dryden’s allusions to the physical space of the theatre, where audiences were seated in relation to the King at the centre, as a governing metaphor for the civil hierarchy and perspective established in the poem. In chapter five, “Marvell’s Metaphor of the Microscope and the Partial Perspective of Dutch Visual Culture,” I focus on Marvell’s reference to the microscope in Last Instructions as a metaphor for reading the poem. In contrast to the aesthetically and politically unified structure of Dryden’s poem, the pluralism of the microscopic perspective and the overlaps with Dutch aesthetic techniques implies that any account of events will always be partial and subjective.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2016.

碩士
國立政治大學
英國語文學研究所
99
The garden, as a distinctive type of architectural art based upon nature, recurs in Andrew Marvell’s poetry and Marvell’s attitude toward the influence of art on nature in the garden has been considered quite ambivalent. To clarify how Marvell decides whether the gardener is impairing or repairing nature, this thesis proposes to study the influences of gardening on nature in “The Garden,” “The Mower Against Gardens,” and “Upon Appleton House” by examining how the gardener’s tasks in the poems are interpreted in the seventeenth-century treatises on horticulture. This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One reviews critical opinions and introduces the seventeenth-century treatises on horticulture that we will consult. Chapter Two concentrates on the Mower’s criticism of gardening in “The Mower Against Gardens.” In this chapter, we will examine the gardener’s tasks and explore whether artists should change nature and imitate God in the Mower’s view. Chapter Three concentrates on Marvell’s admiration for gardening in “The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House.” In this chapter, we will examine the gardener’s tasks and explore whether artists should organize nature and recreate paradise in Marvell’s view. Finally, the last chapter will conclude by showing how the Mower’s opinions and Marvell’s opinions about gardening complement each other, and commenting on Marvell’s attitude toward the influence of art on nature in general. It is hoped that an exploration of the influences of gardening on nature in “The Garden,” “The Mower Against Gardens,” and “Upon Appleton House” will clarify Marvell’s attitude toward gardening as well as his attitude toward art and nature and show that Marvell’s attitude is not as ambivalent as it appears.