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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Biography, literature and literary studies'
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Bullock, Edward L. "Considering the Human and Nonhuman in Literary Studies: Notes for a Biographic Network Approach for the Study of Literary Objects." UKnowledge, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/8.
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In recent years critical projects spanning philosophy, the social sciences, science studies, and nearly everywhere that has employed the term ecology have engaged in thinking humans and non-humans together as collectively producing outcomes, where objects do work beyond how humans perceive or make use of them. Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as its focus, this thesis explores how this reorientation might contribute to literary studies and to literary criticism more specifically. The thesis considers a notion that novels constitute objects with biographies running “against” the biographic material of their authors, mobilizes actor network theory as a manner of mapping that biographic assemblage, and tentatively develops a biographic network approach as one alternative to traditional literary interpretative practices. Attending to the novel as an actor shifts critical focus away from its interior – the “text” or content – and expands traditional literary criticism’s default practice – interpretation – and logic – mimetic representation – in hopes of facilitating a discussion of Zelda’s novel in a manner which destabilizes the overdetermined themes that continue to scaffold her imaginary. Ultimately, this work argues that a biographic network approach can prove instructive as a “method” for dealing with other texts which remain relatively obscured at the margins of literary consciousness.
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Khaldi, Boutheina. "Arab women going public Mayy Ziyadah and her literary salon in a comparative context /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3332477.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages, 2008.<br>Title from home page (viewed on May 14, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-09, Section: A, page: 3537. Adviser: Suzanne P. Stetkevych.
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McVeigh, Jane. "Literary biography and its critics." Thesis, University of Roehampton, 2013. https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/studentthesis/literary-biography-and-its-critics(a8f5e71a-c008-4fe2-b56b-2f3ab633e6d7).html.
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This thesis analyses Anglo-American criticism of biography, during the late twentieth century from within and outside the academy. It moves on to discuss the work of three contemporary British biographers, Claire Tomalin, Richard Holmes and Hermione Lee, in the context of recent debate about the genre. Claire Tomalin, is an independent freelance biographer; Hermione Lee, is a lifelong academic who writes biography for the general and academic reader; and Richard Holmes has had a foot in both camps in his experience both as an independent biographer and an academic. The aim is to make the case that contemporary British biography since 1970, literary biography in particular, has not only responded to objections from some academics critics but, at least in the biographies by Tomalin, Holmes and Lee, embraces aspects of recent academic literary theory, New Historicism and Feminism in particular. It is not within the remit of my thesis to provide an overview of literary theory or weigh up its arguments. It is rather the intention to argue that objections to the genre have been influenced by aspects of recent theory, and that critics have not acknowledged the extent to which biographers have also been aware of, and have responded to comparable influences. I will also consider the extent to which objections to the genre are reflected in reviews of biographies by Tomalin, Holmes and Lee, as well as recent developments in the academic study of the genre. The first chapter will identify major objections to biography influenced by academic theory, drawing on both British and American sources. The next chapter will discuss how biographers, within and outside the academy, have responded to these objections. A study of Claire Tomalin’s biographies in Chapter Three will explore the extent to which she considers ‘truth’ as mediated and provisional; how she approaches autobiographical evidence; her use of anecdotes and chronology; and the use she makes of speculation. Richard Holmes, the subject of Chapter Four, is often associated with debates about identification in biography and the chapter devoted to him will explore the extent to which his approach can be seen as ‘Romantic’ in its treatment of the subject as an isolated individual, a great i man or autonomous genius; the extent to which he places his biographical subjects within their social, political and cultural contexts; and his approach to historiography, influenced by the ontological and fictional focus important to Ira Nadel. Hermione Lee, the subject of Chapter Five, is a distinguished academic whose biographical writing negotiates the balance between fact and fiction and ontological and historical knowledge differently from that of Holmes, in ways more congruent with academic practice. Chapter Six will consider the critical reception of biographies by Hermione Lee, Claire Tomalin, and Richard Holmes in academic journals and the reviews of academics in the quality press. Chapter Seven will discusses the extent to which biography as a written narrative has been subsumed within the academy into the wider field of life-writing, and how this subsuming has affected its status and character as a literary genre.
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Atlee, Carl W. "Poetry and politics: A literary biography of GomezManrique (c.1415-1490)." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280139.
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Relatively little is known of Gomez Manrique (c. 1415-1490), warrior, statesman and author of a significant corpus of cancionero poetry. His poetic and dramatic works were first published by Antonio Paz y Melia, Cancionero de Gomez Manrique (1885-6) in an edition that is at variance with current established norms and includes only a brief, thirty-two-page biography. In the 116 years since Paz y Melia's study, a significant amount of new historical material has been published on fifteenth-century Spain, much of which bears directly on the life and times of Gomez Manrique. Despite Manfque's close alliance with Isabel I and Fernando V and his extensive involvement in the political events of the day, we do not find him mentioned as frequently as we might expect. This dissertation analyzes the historical evidence that exists in order to construct Gomez Manrique's biography and incorporates Manrique's poetry as testimony to the influence that he had on many of the eminent poets and politicians of his day. Manrique's verse dedicated to many of the statesmen and troubadours of the fifteenth century links him to the historical context in which he functioned as author, statesman and soldier. Part One details the formative years of Manrique. The many events and issues that occurred during this turbulent period of Castilian history are presented to show how they affected Manrique's development as a poet and knight. Part Two portrays Gomez Manrique's adulthood and development from an obscure soldier to a chief defender of the Catholic Monarchs. His poetry and his actions as documented in the chronicles reveal his important contributions to Isabel's and Fernando's successful accession to the throne of Castile. Part Three offers a profile of the knights, prelates, family members and royalty to whom Manrique dedicated poetry, many of whom are significant historical figures despite their relative obscurity. Finally, the Appendix offers an annotated selection of Gomez Manrique's poetry, newly transcribed to conform to current norms.
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MacGregor, Catherine. "Writing lives of addiction: A context for literary biography and criticism." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9180.
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This thesis presents a series of case studies demonstrating that literary biography and literary criticism concerning writers who abused alcohol or who lived in relationships with those who abused alcohol can be enriched by an interdisciplinary appreciation of contemporary addiction theory. It begins with an overview of the various constructions of addiction to alcohol and to other substances and activities, ways of thinking about harmful dependencies which have dominated Western attitudes since the eighteenth century. It then identifies the directions current addiction research and therapy have taken and focuses particularly on the paradigm in most frequent clinical use today; that is, the understanding of alcohol addiction as a disorder not merely of the individual subject but of a constellation of codependent relationships. Literary biography has all too often either trivialized or sensationalized the addictions of writers and their families, and in doing so, has made it difficult for critics to address textual questions which could be resolved more appropriately with a sensitivity to addiction theory in general and to the circumstances of the writer's life in particular. To demonstrate that current thinking about alcoholism and codependency provides a valid way to read works by writers who were either alcoholic themselves or who lived in domestic relationships with alcoholics, it presents "case studies" from eras prior to our own and argues that authorial anxiety about alcohol abuse and addiction was not only a significant factor in the production of the texts but in the preoccupations within the works themselves in ways which repay close reading. It provides readings of well-known nineteenth and twentieth-century novels: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, and Evelyn Waugh's The Sword of Honour trilogy. In doing so, it seeks to demonstrate that anxiety about alcohol abuse in the context of marriage and parent-child relationships is a recurring and meaningful element, attention to which deepens a reader's appreciation of the writers' theme and technique and, moreover, challenges-or complements, in unexpected ways-insights from more conventional criticism.
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Westover, Daniel. "R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2011. http://a.co/0Kggfyi.
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Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.<br>https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1100/thumbnail.jpg
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Sprenger-Holtkamp, Brigitte Roxanne. "Miss Epictus, or, the learned Eliza : a literary biography of Elizabeth Carter." Thesis, University of London, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.338509.
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Black, Devin Charles. "An economic model of literary studies /." View online, 2010. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211131524871.pdf.
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Clarke, Patricia, and n/a. "Life Lines to Life Stories: Some Publications About Women in Nineteenth-Century Australia." Griffith University. School of Arts, Media and Culture, 2004. http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/public/adt-QGU20040719.150756.
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This thesis consists of an introduction and six of my books, published between 1985 and 1999, on aspects of the history of women in nineteenth-century Australia. The books are The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882 (1985); A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857 (1986); Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (1988); Pioneer Writer: The Life of Louisa Atkinson, Novelist, Journalist, Naturalist (1990); Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur (1994); and Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (1999). At the time they were published each of these books either dealt with a new subject or presented a new approach to a subject. Collectively they represent a body of work that has expanded knowledge of women's lives and writing in nineteenth-century Australia. Although not consciously planned as a sequence at the outset, these books developed as a result of the influence on my thinking of the themes that emerged in Australian social and cultural historical writing during this period. The books also represent a development in my own work from the earlier more documentary-based books on letters and diaries to the interpretive challenge of biographical writing and the weaving of private lives with public achievements. These books make up a cohesive, cumulative body of work. Individually and as a whole, they make an original contribution to knowledge of the lives and achievements of women in nineteenth-century Australia. They received critical praise at the time of publication and have led to renewed interest and further research on the subjects they cover. My own knowledge and expertise has developed as a result of researching and writing them. The Governesses was not only the first full-length study of a particular group of letters but it also documented aspects of the lives of governesses in Australia, a little researched subject to that time. A Colonial Woman, based on a previously unpublished and virtually unknown diary, pointed to the importance of 'ordinary' lives in presenting an enriched view of the past. Pen Portraits documented the early history of women journalists in Australia, a previously neglected subject. Three of the women I included in Pen Portraits, Louisa Atkinson, Tasma and Rosa Praed, the first two of whom were pioneer women journalists as well as novelists, became the subjects of my full-length biographies. In my biographies of women writers, Pioneer Writer, Tasma, and Rosa! Rosa!, I recorded and interpreted the lives of these important writers placing them in the context of Australian cultural history as women who negotiated gender barriers and recorded this world in their fiction. My books on Louisa Atkinson and Tasma were the first full-length biographies of these significant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century women writers, while my biography of Rosa Praed was the first for more than fifty years. Each introduced original research that changed perceptions of the women's lives and consequently of attitudes to their creative work. Each provided information essential for further research on their historical significance and literary achievements. Each involved extensive research that led to informed interpretation allowing insightful surmises essential to quality biography.
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Field, Roger Michael. "Alex la Guma: a literary and political biography of the South African years." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2001. http://etd.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=etd&.
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The South African years (1925-1966) of Alex la Guma is examined in this thesis. While La Guma's father was an important role model, most critics have overlooked his mother's contribution to his literary and political development. Throughout the thesis the same point is made about Blanche, La Guma's wife, who supported him in many ways. The researcher describes La Guma's infancy, childhood and adolescence, his father's political profile, how notions of race and writing, coloured identity and family and political experiences created the conditions that enabled him to become a story teller and political activist ...
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Smart, Kirsten. "National consciousness in Postcolonial Nigerian children's literature." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22880.
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This project highlights the role of locally produced children's written literature for ages six to fourteen in postcolonial Nigeria as a catalyst for national transformation in the wake of colonial rule. My objective is to reveal the perceived possibilities and pitfalls contained in Nigerian children's literature (specifically books published between 1960 and 1990), for the promotion of a new national consciousness through the reintegration of traditional values into a contemporary context. To do this, I draw together children's literature written by Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and Mabel Segun in order to illustrate the emphasis Nigerian children's book authors writing within the postcolonial moment placed on the concepts of nation and national identity in the aim to 'refashion' the nation. Following from this, I examine the role of the child reader in relation to the adult authors' intentions and pose the question of what the role of the female is in the authors' imagining of a 'new nation'. The study concludes by reflecting on the persistent under-scrutiny of children's literature in Africa by academics and critics, a preconception that still exists today. I move to suggest further research on the genre not only to stimulate an increased production of children's literature more conscious in content and aware of the needs of its young, (male and female) African readership, but also to incite a change in attitude toward the genre as one that is as deserving of interest as its adult counterpart.
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Chaghafi, Elisabeth Leila. "Early modern literary afterlives." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c46edf04-50ed-4fc0-8d4f-74dfdfdb470e.
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My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.
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Pressman, Hannah Simone. "Confessional Texts and Contexts| Studies in Israeli Literary Autobiography." Thesis, New York University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3557024.
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<p> In Jewish Studies in general and Jewish literary studies in particular, the autobiography has taken on renewed significance in the twenty-first century. A recent wave of Hebrew autobiographical writing has reinvigorated long-standing debates about the connections between family drama and national history in the modern state of Israel. This dissertation examines the discourse of selfhood generated by a select group of authors from the 1950s-1990s, the decades immediately preceding the genre's current boom. The "confessional mode of Israeli literary autobiography," as I designate this discourse, exposes the religious underside of early Israeli life writing. </p><p> The proposed genealogy uncovers a heretofore unacknowledged stream of autobiographical writing positioned at the nexus of public and private expression. Starting with Pinhas Sadeh's <i>Hah&barbelow;ayim kemashal</i> (1958), I deconstruct the author's sacred-profane terminology and his embrace of sacrificial tropes. I then explore David Shahar's <i>Kayitz bederekh hanevi'im</i> (1969) and <i>Hamasa le'ur kasdim</i> (1971), two works engaging with the Lurianic kabbalistic mythology of fracture and restoration (<i> tikkun</i>). The next turn in my discussion, Hanokh Bartov's <i> Shel mi atah yeled</i> (1970), focuses on the development of individual memory and artistic identity. Haim Be'er's confessional oeuvre anchors the final two chapters, which reveal the therapeutic and theological motivations behind <i>Notsot</i> (1979) and <i>H&barbelow;avalim</i> (1998). </p><p> My interdisciplinary engagement offers fresh readings of these autobiographical performances. The narratives by Sadeh, Shahar, Bartov, and Be'er deploy memories as a conscious, aesthetic act of self-construction. Riffing on the portrait of the artist as a young man, each author reveals the intimate connections among memory, trauma, and artistic creation. Concurrently, they mediate their religious identities in the new Jewish state, Oedipally rejecting the father's faith. The combination of literary self-reflexivity with spiritual self-accounting (<i>h&barbelow;eshbon nefesh</i>) links these Israeli writers with the classic confessional "double address," which engages both God and the human reader. My analysis thus contributes a new consideration of the relationship between author and audience in modern Hebrew culture. </p>
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Austen, Benjamin. "Raceball : African Americans and myths of America in baseball literature." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18419.
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This paper will examine moments in literature where the narratives of baseball as American myth and those involving African Americans converge, moments where authors confront (either consciously or not) the implications of both narratives within the same shared space. It is at these moments of convergence that the mythic language surrounding the game and its interaction with African Americans are thrown into dramatic relief. A myth, says Roland Barthes in his Mythologies, is a kind of "metalanguage," a narrative which refers to and talks about another narrative; it is at least twice removed from any referent which exists in reality. "What is invested in the concept," writes Barthes, "is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality." Examining this space will reveal how myths operate and continue to affect an understanding of personal and national identities, especially since this space involves the intersection of the emblematic discourse of baseball with a black presence that appears to question the very tenets of established national memory.
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文英玲 and Ying-ling Man. "A study of Tao Hongjing (456-536) and his Taoist literary works." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1996. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31214423.
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Lidström, Brock Malin. "Telling feminist lives : a study of biography as ideological background." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669944.
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Kendall, George Henry. "The healing power : mythology as medicine in contemporary American Indian literature." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20184.
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Bibliography: pages 124-132.<br>This study explores the symptoms of alienation witnessed in Indian characters and the healing they achieve through myth in three contemporary American Indian novels. In James Welch's historical novel, Fools Crow, I explore the methods through which Welch tells the story of Fools Crow. I draw comparisons between oppositions such as oral and written language, oral and written history, and history and narrative. I examine the ideas of many theorists, including Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy and Hayden White's inquiry into historiography in Tropics of DiscouT'Se. My conclusions suggest that myth is the foundation of history and that Welch effectively uses myth to rehabilitate Fools Crow. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony presents its main character, Tayo, as alienated. He operates in a confusing world of dualities whereby the hegemonic culture brutalizes a feminine universe, and the counter-culture embraces a feminine universe. This study of Ceremony necessitates exploring the differences between Indian and Euro-American perceptions of landscape. Greta Gaard's studies on ecofeminism and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality help to focus the theories v presented in this chapter. In addition, I consider the opposition between European patriarchal and American Indian matriarchal cultures, a difference that may affect the way the two cultures perceive the landscape. Finally I look at the Laguna captivity narrative that heals Tayo and compare the Laguna captivity genre to Euro-American captivity tales. The juxtaposition of cultural captivity narrative types reveals further differences in Laguna and Euro-American perceptions of the land. Annette Kolodny's theories on landscape and feminism prove useful in focusing my conclusions. N. Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child explores the parameters of representation and struggles with the question of how an Indian author can effectively describe the condition of an alienated American Indian to an audience who is, for the most part, Euro-American. This novel ties together many of the themes explored in Fools Crow and Ceremony. Momaday shows myth as originating in oral language and oral language as invented by vision: The story's main character, Set, has to overcome his alienation by understanding the origin of a myth which exists in his 'racial memory.' As an Indian, Set must discover the importance of non-textual spatiality and not the spaces contained within and influenced by written texts such as the very one Momaday creates to depict this character. The term non-textual spatiality refers to the imaginative space created by oral language and myth and the notion of non-textual spatiality opens a path for Set's healing. W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory and Nelson Goodman's Languages of A rt are the main critical studies I use to amplify theories that grow out of The Ancient Child.
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Naim, Ibrahim Ali 1962. "Imam Musa al-Sadr: An analysis of his life, accomplishments and literary output." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282708.
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Imam Musa al-Sadr (1347 AH, 1928 CE), is an Iranian Shi'i Imam with Lebanese ancestry. He became the leader of the Shi'i community in Lebanon in 1959 after the death of the local leader. He lived in Lebanon for about nineteen years before his sudden disappearance during an official visit to Libya in 1978. His stay in Lebanon marked a major transformation in the political, social, religious, and economic life of the Shi'i community. It also marked a major change in the history of Lebanon and the Lebanese as a whole. His work and accomplishments touched all the Lebanese no matter what religion, region, or political affiliation they belonged to. This dissertation will discuss and analyze the life of Imam Musa, as he was known by his followers; his numerous writings, speeches, and manifestos; the contributions he made to the advancement of the Shi'i community in Lebanon. It will also analyze his appeal for Muslim unity around the world and religious tolerance between the various religious communities in Lebanon. Finally this dissertation will look at the legacy he left and the future of the Shi'ah in Lebanon. This study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is about the Shi'i community in Lebanon, its history, numbers and political and socio-economic status at the time of Imam Musa's arrival to Lebanon. The second chapter looks at the life of Imam Musa al-Sadr, his accomplishments, the changes he was able to affect for and within the Shi'i community, and his untimely disappearance in 1978. Chapter two also discusses the Imam by looking at him from three different points of view: the man, his political thought and his role as a religious reformer. "Imam Musa: The man" is a personal look at the Imam and views of people who lived and dealt with him throughout the nineteen years he spent in Lebanon. "Imam Musa: His Political Thought" discusses his dealings with the Lebanese government, the Christian parties, the Leftist Muslim parties and the Palestinians. "Imam Musa: Religious Reformer" analyzes his views on religion and relations between religions. As a reformer Imam Musa advocated unity between Muslims around the world, a more active role for women in Islamic society, and tolerance for other religions. The third chapter analyzes Imam Musa's literary output (books, speeches, and manifestos) during his tenure in Lebanon. These will be analyzed in their relation to Imam Musa's life and accomplishments in Lebanon. The fourth chapter looks at the legacy of the Imam, the fate of the Shi'i community since his disappearance, and the future of the community in Lebanon.
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Wilson, Sandip LeeAnne. "Coherence and Historical understanding in children's Biography and Historical Nonfiction Literature: A Content Analysis of Selected Orbis Pictus Books." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2001. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/WilsonSLA2001.pdf.
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Sutassi, Smuthkochorn Renner Stanley W. "Postmodernism and comparative mythology toward postimperialist English literary studies in the Thailand /." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 1996. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p9721398.
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Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1996.<br>Title from title page screen, viewed May 26, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Stanley W. Renner (chair), Ronald Strickland, William W. Morgan, Jr. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-146) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Gress, Priti Chitnis. "Tar Baby and the Black Feminist Literary Tradition." W&M ScholarWorks, 1997. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626111.
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Griffin, Julia. "Studies in the literary life of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1993. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d29ff5bd-8c7b-404e-91de-237954b1c55d.
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The thesis considers his work in roughly chronological order, combining a biographical outline with detailed discussion of his major works, their origins and their influence. The first, on the poetry, takes as a starting-point his relationship with Donne, their exchange of ideas, and Herbert's commemoration of his friend in an unpublished, probably autograph volume of verse. The second takes his major philosophical work, De Veritate. and explores its development from the first manuscript (1619) to the last edition (1645), its divergences from the scholastic teaching he received at Oxford, and the response to the work among some of the leading European thinkers of the day. The third is concerned with Herbert's two works on historical subjects, one near-contemporary, the other on the previous century - the century of the English Reformation: his distinctive views on religion emerge - and hints of a cautious attempt to alert the King to the dangers of his unpopularity. The fourth and fifth chapters consider Herbert's two theological treatises. As with the historical works, one of these is addressed directly to a contemporary readership which is supposed to follow his precepts; the other is rooted in the past, less direct in its polemic, revealing a more profound and complex attitude to the problems he saw in organized religion. The last chapter is more textual than literary: it examines a much-disputed work, the Dialogue, with its manuscripts, with the aim of preparing the ground for a better edition than has yet been produced. The conclusion attempts to sum up Herbert's place in the life of the time, and his legacy to his intellectual "nepotes".
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Cheng, Maorong. "Literary modernity : Studies in Lu Xun and Shen Congwen." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0018/NQ46330.pdf.
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Greene, Justin R. "I Am an Author: Performing Authorship in Literary Culture." VCU Scholars Compass, 2018. https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/5346.
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Authorship is not merely an act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard; it is a social identity performance that includes the use of multiple media. Authors must be hyper- visible to cut through the dearth of information, entertainment options, and personae vying for attention in our supersaturated media environment. As they enter the literary world, writers consciously create characters and narratives around themselves, and through the consistent and believable enactment of these features, authors are born. In this dissertation, I analyze the performance of authorship in U.S. literary culture through an interdisciplinary framework. My work pulls from authorship studies, performance studies, celebrity/persona studies, and sociological studies of art to uncover how writers create and disseminate their authorial identities. The writers used in this project embody four types of authorial identity: Jonathan Franzen as the professional artist, David Foster Wallace as the Romantic genius, Tao Lin as the digital eccentric, and Roxane Gay as the Intersectional Feminist. These writers flirt with popular recognition, but they remain tied firmly to the serious, or in a Bourdieuvian sense, restricted area of cultural production. As my case studies progress, I highlight how print, audio/visual, and digital media are used or not used by these writers as sites for their performances. I claim that as writers develop their characters on such digital platforms as Twitter and Tumblr that they are more accepting of the validity of digital authorship. However, this acceptance is diminished by the dominant role print media have in the conceptions of authorship. The varying ways literary tradition, media, and celebrity intersect are brought to the forefront in these examples, shedding light on the need for larger conceptions of authorship in the literary world. My interpretation of authorship as social identity performance broadens a relatively restrictive and, in many ways, stagnant area, adding nuance to how literary culture actively works to maintain and dilute the value of one of its most prominent features.
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Austen, Gillian. "The literary career of George Gascoigne : studies in self-presentation." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5b53ad11-58c3-4ce9-a3eb-e46e35b237e4.
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My thesis seeks to offer a reinterpretation of George Gascoigne's literary career by interrogating the means by which he manipulated his self-presentation in print. The Introduction defines the context for this study by outlining the received version of his career, that of the prodigal who underwent a moral reformation in 1575 and wrote only moralistic works thereafter. I question Gascoigne's inclusion with the Drab poets by suggesting that his more courtly personae co-existed with his predominant selfpresentation as repentant prodigal. The subsequent discussion falls into a broadly chronological structure. Chapter I surveys the range of self-presentations and authorial voices in the early works and concludes with a discussion of Gascoigne's first publication, the anonymous A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), in which they were presented as the work of several authors. Chapter II examines Gascoigne's publications in 1575, conventionally considered the turning point in his career, with the Posies and the Glasse of Government, his Prodigal Son play. These are set against his anonymous publication of the Noble Arte in June and his performances before the Queen at Kenilworth in July. Gascoigne gave his presentation manuscript ofHemetes to Elizabeth as a New Year gift in 1576. Chapter III examines all of Gascoigne's literary activity in that year, as he continued to develop a portfolio of moralistic titles but also published his account of the Princely Pleasures, continuing the series of anonymous courtly publications. Late in the year, Gascoigne travelled to Paris and then Antwerp, and on his return published an anonymous account of the sacking of that city, the Spoyle of Antwerpe. Chapter IV discusses Gascoigne's New Year gifts in 1577, the year of his death. These are a second presentation manuscript for Elizabeth, the Grief of Joye, and a presentation letter to Sir Nicholas Bacon.
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Ganz, Shoshannah. "Canadian literary pilgrimage: From colony to post-nation." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/29292.
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This thesis establishes the presence of pilgrimage in Canadian literature as reflective of Canadian cultural and global changes. It shows the enduring archetypal characteristics of pilgrimage from the earliest pre-Confederation travel writing to contemporary and postmodern novels. The topic of Canadian literary pilgrimage allows for an eclectic and necessarily multi-disciplinary approach and also for the study of the earliest Canadian letters and contemporary novelists, as well as for a breadth of forms, including journals, letters, archival sermons, dramatic works, poetry, and contemporary Canadian novels.
Chapter one begins with the cultural figure of Brebeuf as pilgrim first in The Jesuit Relations (1632-1673), proceeds to E. J. Pratt's long-poem Brebeuf and his Brethren (1940), on-site research at the memorial to Brebeuf in Midland, Ontario, and concludes with the post-colonial revisiting of this figure in James W. Nichol's dramatic work, Saint-Marie Among the Hurons (1980), and in Brian Moore's Black Robe (1985). Chapter two turns to Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village and explores Protestant pilgrimage, marking the material and spiritual progress of that pilgrimage. The thesis then looks at Goldsmith's work in conjunction with the influential sermons and journals of Bishop John Inglis of Nova Scotia. Chapter three follows pilgrimage into more contemporary works in Robertson Davies' Fifth Business and Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers, incorporating post-structuralist discussions of the nomad as pilgrim or anti-pilgrim figure and the implications of homelessness to the pilgrimage paradigm. Chapters four and five analyze Richard B. Wright's The Age of Longing and Clara Callan, and Timothy Findley's The Butterfly Plague and Headhunter, which are explored in light of some of Jacques Derrida's writing and the critical utopian studies of Ernst Bloch.
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Clay, Jason. "Seneca's Agamemnon: A Literary Translation with Annotations." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1491308000521512.
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Fee, Margery. "Canadian Literature and English Studies in the Canadian University." Essays on Canadian Writing, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11661.
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English Studies began in Canada in 1884 at Dalhousie University; Canadian literature was first taught at the post-secondary level in 1907 at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. Arnoldian humanism dominated the outlook of early professors of English in Canada. Their feeling that Canadian literature was not among "the best" explains why so few courses appeared in Canadian universities, despite nationalist pressure from students. About 5-10% of courses then were devoted to Canadian literature in the English curriculum and this (except in Quebec) remains the case today.
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Clarke, Sally. "In the space behind his eyes : Donald R. Stuart : a biography." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2004. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/857.
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The major part of this thesis, In the Space Behind His Eyes, is a biography of Western Australian author, Donald Robert Stuart (1913-1983), a colourful life story woven around accepted and persistent myths found in the Australian psyche. In his childhood, Donald Stuart listened to stories about his Scottish immigrant grandfather finding gold on the Victorian fields and his father's part in the 1891 Queensland Shearers strike. His poverty-stricken, but peaceful, upbringing in suburban Perth, Western Australia, was overtaken by the 1930s Depression and, as a rebellious fourteen-year old, he left home and took to the road. In the next decade or so, as he adopted the north-west outback life, he was exposed further to Australia's traditional yarns and philosophies. He emerged from this period as the outrageous ‘Scorp’ Stuart, who drank too much and took advantage of the freedoms on offer. At the start of World War II, Scorp volunteered for the 2nd AlF. He served in the Middle East and somehow survived three-and-a-half years as a Prisoner of the Japanese, including a time on the infamous Burma-Thailand railway. On his return to Australia, he began to tread the writer's path, supplementing his memories with renewed visits to the outback of his youth and working on yet another railway. Encouraged by his sister and her friends, supported by two of his wives and recognised by the Western Australian writh1g community, Donald R. Stuart played the role of noted author, a construct only possible because of Scorp Stuart's adventures. Calling on these experiences, in eleven novels and many short stories, he set down his record of a particular Australian life. The varying facets of his complex character come together in his writing, notably through his deep love of the land and in his sympathetic examination of the north-west Aborigines' position since white settlement. This biography of a writer sets out to trace the life of Donald Stuart, examine the disparity between Stuart the bushman and Stuart the noted author, and to shed light on the man behind the writing. In the essay following In the Space Behind His Eyes, I explore the biographical form, consider directions the genre has taken in recent years, discuss aspects of biography generally and support choices made in the writing of this biography.
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Mashigoane, Mncedisi Siseko. "Art as craft and politics : the literature of Mongane Wally Serote." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7875.
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Grigoriadis, Iordanis. "Linguistic and literary studies in the 'Epitome Historion' of John Zonaras." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15491.
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John Zonaras, a high-ranking judge, subsequently a monk in the twelfth-century Byzantine Empire, is well known as author of a universal history that stretches from the Creation to his own time and a collection of canon law. His history is regularly used as a historical source, not only for recent and contemporary events but also as the medium through which information from lost early historians (in particular Cassius Dio) is preserved, while his work on canon law shows an uncommon knowledge of the practices of the Byzantine Church. The language of these works, however, has not yet received detailed study. It is the intention of this thesis to remedy this deficiency, thereby attempting to identify and highlight the most important literary features of Zonaras' writings. The Introduction covers a survey of the intellectual currents in the twelfth century, to be followed by a biography of Zonaras and the description of the island of St. Glyceria, the place of his retirement, as it appeared during our visit in summer 1993. Part one studies the prooimion of Zonaras in relation to the prooimia of other eleventh and twelfth-century Byzantine historians. Part two entails a comparative study of Zonaras' history with the work of contemporary historians and non-historians and discusses the subject of the homogeneity of his language. Part three deals with specific linguistic features of Zonaras' style such as wordplay, humour and irony, the use of proverbs, linguistic borrowings from contemporaries, etc. The discussion ends with a Conclusion and an Appendix on the so-called Lexicon Tittmarmianum, a major work of lexicography of disputed authenticity which we argue is probably a genuine work of Zonaras. From the studies in this thesis, it emerges that Zonaras' language reveals the talent of an author who has been unjustly neglected and certainly deserves further attention and exploitation for the benefit of both historians and linguists.
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Harding, Warren. "Dubbin' the Literary Canon: Writin' and Soundin' A Transnational Caribbean Experience." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1370484912.
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Peleg, Kristine. "Rachel Calof's text(s): Family, collaboration, translation, 'Americanization'." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280320.
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Rachel Calof's Story. Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Ed. J. Sanford Rikoon, Indiana University Press, 1995) is a first-person memoir of homesteading in North Dakota from 1894-1917, based on Rachel Calof's Yiddish manuscript. I traced this text from inception to publication, especially the translation and editing process, comparing a new translation of the Yiddish manuscript with the English publication. Since the differences proved significant, my research investigated issues of oral history transmission and collaboration. In light of new scholarship in autobiography theory, particularly Paul Eakin's "proximate collaborative autobiography," I consider Rachel Calof's Story a hybrid text, integrating both oral histories and written texts to portray a more complete picture of homestead life. Rachel's son, Jacob, compiled the English version for publication, bringing a comprehensive knowledge of her life, and yet complicating objectivity because he was, indeed, her son. Recent scholarship in women's and western studies focuses on situational context; investigation of diversity supplements an increasingly multi-faceted picture. Contemporary scholarship in immigrant literature emphasizes ambivalence rather than assimilation and changed how I considered the Calof story. I apply the Personal Narratives Group's conceptualization of context, narrator-interpreter relations and multiple connotations of "truths." The oral nature of the Yiddish language is also considered as influencing the translation. I analyze specific themes at length: Rachel Calof's physical environment of home, prairie and transitional spaces; the rhetoric of frontier settlement; home in physical and religious terms; and finally, Americanization as an editorial emphasis which reduced ethnic and religious distinctions. Other multi-authored works, including those of Anne Frank, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Black Elk, reveal parallel collaborative tensions. Neither generational nor gender differences entirely explain alterations families and ethnographers make in editing transmitted works. Barbara Myerhoff's concept of the "third voice" particularly influenced my understanding the dialogic nature of manuscripts and oral histories. Finally, I question whether publishers and audiences are complicit in the demand for success stories even at the expense of stifling an author's voice. The English publication of Rachel Calof's Story was polished and unaccented; the original Yiddish manuscript was a stream of consciousness that might not have been published.
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Pioter, Jill. "(False) portrait of the artist as a woman: Editorial strategy in the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278790.
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This thesis contends that, in the process of publication of the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, their husbands, Leonard Woolf and Ted Hughes, employed editorial strategies that created false portraits of the authors. Each of these men tantalized readers with the possibility of reading the 'truth' of these women's lives, but they edited their texts in ways that would minimize readers' understanding of Plath and Woolf while maximizing the benefits they would collect as heirs of the authors' literary estates. These examples are typical of a larger pattern in which women's private writings are edited by family and/or friends of the author in an effort to gain control of the author's public personae.
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Dinnerstein, Noe. "Ladakhi traditional songs| A cultural, musical, and literary study." Thesis, City University of New York, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3601923.
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<p>This dissertation examines the place of traditional songs in the Tibetan Buddhist culture of the former Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh. I look at how Buddhism and pre-Buddhist religion informed the texts and performance contexts of traditional songs, and how Ladakhi songs represent cultural self-images through associated musical, textual, and visual tropes. Many songs of the past, both from the old royal house and the rural Buddhist populations, reflect the socio-political structure of Ladakhi society. Some songs reflect a pan-Tibetan identity, connecting the former Namgyal dynasty to both the legendary King Gesar and Nyatri Tsangpo, the historical founder of the Tibetan Yarlung dynasty. Nevertheless, a distinct Ladakhi identity is consistently asserted. A number of songs contain texts that evoke a mandala or symbolic representation of the world according to Vajrayana Buddhist iconography, ritual and meditative visualization practices. These mandala descriptions depict the social order of the kingdom, descending from the heavens, to the Buddhist clergy, to the king and nobles, to the common folk. </p><p> As the region has become more integrated into modern India, Ladakhi music has moved into modern media space, being variously portrayed through scholarly works, concerts, mass media, and the internet. An examination of contemporary representations of “tradition” and ethnic identity in traditional music shows how Ladakhis from various walks of life view the music and song texts, both as producers and consumers. </p><p> Situated as it was on the caravan routes between India, Tibet, China, and Central Asia, Ladakhi culture developed distinctive hybrid characteristics, including in its musical styles. Analysis of the performance practices, musical structures, form, and textual content of songs clearly indicates a fusion of characteristics of Middle Eastern, Balti, Central Asian, and Tibetan origin. Looking at songs associated with the Namgyal dynasty court, I have found them to be part of a continuum of Tibetan high literary culture, combined with complex instrumental music practices. As such, I make the argument that these genres should be considered to be art music. </p>
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Bradford, Robert Dale. "When Southern Labor Stirred: The Literary Reaction to Gastonia." W&M ScholarWorks, 1986. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625333.
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Van, Bolderen Patricia. "Literary Self-Translation and Self-Translators in Canada (1971-2016): A Large-Scale Study." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42749.
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This thesis constitutes a first large-scale study of literary self-translators and self-translations in Canada, with self-translation understood as interlinguistic and intertextual transfer where the same legal person is responsible for writing the antecedent and subsequent texts. Three main questions guide this investigation: To what extent is Canada fertile ground for self-translation? What does it mean to self-translate in Canada? Why does self-translation in Canada matter? After situating Canada-based research within broader self-translation scholarship, I engage in a critical analysis of the definition and implications of self-translation and contextualize the theoretical, sociopolitical and methodological rationale for studying Canada and adopting a macroscopic approach to examining self-translations and their writers in this country. The thesis predominantly revolves around self-translation artefacts produced by three groups of writers who self-translated in Canada at least once between 1971 and 2016: 1) those self-translating exclusively between English and French; and those self-translating into and/or out of 2) Spanish; or 3) standard Italian. Exploring the theme of collaboration, I propose a new typology of collaborative self-translation, attempting to account for both process- and product-related considerations. In examining the theme of frequency, I identify self-translators and discuss their relative distribution vis-à-vis language, generation, country of birth and location within Canada; I also map out a conceptual framework for defining and counting self-translation products, proposing new ways of understanding and classifying writers in light of their self-translational productivity. In considering the theme of language, I analyze how writers and their self-translations can be characterized in relation to language variety, language combinations and language directionality. In this thesis, I argue that Canada is a significant hub of heterogeneous self-translational activity, and that large-scale, quantitative and product-oriented study constitutes a useful research approach that can generate rich findings and complement other forms of investigation. The thesis also contains an extensive appendix in which I identify Canadian self-translators and their self-translations.
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Prown, Katherine Hemple. "Revisions and evasions: Flannery O'Connor, Southern literary culture, and the problem of female authorship." W&M ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623836.
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A look at the early manuscripts of Flannery O'Connor's two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, reveals that she worked hard to remove any traces of feminine sensibility or perspective from her work, hoping to distinguish it as superior to the efforts of other southern "penwomen." Both novels underwent a long and difficult transformation from stories centered upon the exploits of a diverse group of characters to novels whose sole focus was on a few male protagonists. Eager to develop her art within a framework acceptable to southern New Critical authorities like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren and the male-dominated literary establishment they represented, O'Connor attempted to cultivate a distinctly "unladylike" writing style. In the process, she radically altered the scope of her fictional landscape, banishing female characters, silencing female voices, and redirecting her satirical gaze from the masculine to the feminine. This dissertation considers O'Connor's unpublished fiction as evidence of her ambivalent relationship to a literary culture founded upon the racial and gender-based hierarchies that had traditionally characterized southern society. at the same time, this dissertation takes a revisionist look at southern literary history, focusing in particular on the role Ransom, Tate, Lytle, and Warren played in defining the "Southern Tradition" so as to exclude women, blacks, and the uneducated masses. Finally, this study reconsiders O'Connor's published novels in light of the manuscripts and explores the ways in which she veiled her female identity through the use of male characters and masculinist narrative conventions.
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Yudkoff, Sunny. "Let It Be Consumption!: Modern Jewish Writing and the Literary Capital of Tuberculosis." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467299.
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Let it Be Consumption!: Modern Jewish Writing and the Literary Capital of Tuberculosis investigates the relationship between literary production and the cultural experience of illness. Focusing attention on the history of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, this study examines how a diagnosis of tuberculosis mobilized literary and financial support on behalf of the ailing writer. At the same time, the disease itself became a subject of concern in the writer’s creative oeuvre and literary self-fashioning. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, I argue that the role played by disease in these traditions is best understood through the paradox of tubercular capital. The debilitating and incurable illness proved a generative context for these writers to develop their literary identities, augment their reputations and join together in a variety of overlapping and intersecting genealogies of tubercular writing.
I map this transnational network of disease, opportunity and creativity over the course of four chapters. Chapter One turns to the life and legacy of the Yiddish humorist Sholem Aleichem, who grew his reputation and defined his literary persona while taking “the cure” in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. Moving from Central Europe to British Mandate Palestine, Chapter Two investigates the tubercular space of the sickroom as both setting and subject for the Hebrew poet Raḥel Bluvshtein, who generated a poetic legacy and literary support network from her garret apartment. Chapter Three directs attention back across the ocean to a cohort of Yiddish writers affiliated with the Denver Sanatorium. These writers, such as Yehoash, H. Leivick and Lune Mattes, would find that a tubercular diagnosis created new possibilities for them to see their work read, cited, translated and performed across the United States. Returning to Europe, Chapter Four examines the life and writing of the tubercular modernist David Vogel. The Hebrew writer drew on his own sanatorium experience in Merano, Italy (formerly: Meran, Austria) to enter into an intertextual conversation with German writers, such as Arthur Schnitzler and Thomas Mann, if only to challenge precisely the possibility of that Hebrew-German exchange.<br>Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
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anderson, Crystal Suzette. "Far from "everybody's everything": Literary tricksters in African American and Chinese American fiction." W&M ScholarWorks, 2000. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623988.
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This dissertation examines trickster sensibilities and behavior as models for racial strategies in contemporary novels by African American and Chinese American authors. While many trickster studies focus on myth, I assert that realist fiction provides a unique historical and cultural space that shapes trickster behavior. John Edgar Wideman, Gloria Naylor, Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston use the trickster in their novels to articulate diverse racial strategies for people of color who must negotiate among a variety of cultural influences. My critical trickster paradigm investigates the motives and behavior of tricksters. It utilizes close literary readings that are strengthened by my comprehensive knowledge of the history of African Americans and Chinese Americans. Throughout time, images that define individuals in both groups develop in the popular imagination. The authors use the trickster to critique and revise those representations. African American authors also influence the racial discourse of Chinese American writers. I concluded that the literary trickster's behavior and sensibilities vary from character to character. I found that African American and Chinese American authors share some racial strategies. They also utilize different racial strategies as a result of the different historical and cultural experiences of African Americans and Chinese Americans. Moreover, male and female African American authors differ in the kinds of racial strategies they advocate, just as male and female Chinese American authors. Such research is significant because of its interdisciplinary exploration of racial strategies of African Americans and Chinese Americans. It provides an alternative approach to the study of the trickster. My work also goes beyond the black/white racial paradigm to explore the cultural dialogue between African American and Chinese American writers.
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Marubbio, M. Elise 1963. "The edge of the abyss: Metamorphosis as reality in contemporary Native American literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291692.
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The edge of the abyss: Metamorphosis as reality in contemporary Native American literature, approaches the concept of metamorphosis from a metaphysical and philosophical perspective as a culturally defined reality. It focuses on the works of contemporary Native American writers: Leslie Silko, Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, who address the metamorphic properties of Time and the metamorphic abilities of Man as a continuing link to the supernatural and natural worlds through stories which descend from a history of oral traditions. The Edge of the Abyss explores the use of language and stories as a cultural survival technique for the retention of tribal ideology and world view. It addresses the fine line which exists between Western and Native American concepts of reality in order to re-define metamorphosis within a cultural context. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach utilizing anthropological, sociological, shamanistic, literary, and cultural materials in a comparative analysis.
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Rowe, Martha L. 1953. "A poet revealed: Elizabeth Barrett Browning as portrayed in Libby Larsen's "Sonnets from the Portuguese" and Dominick Argento's "Casa Guidi"." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/290604.
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Composers Libby Larsen and Dominick Argento have each written song cycles based on the texts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Larsen's Sonnets from the Portuguese, for soprano and chamber orchestra, is a setting of six of the forty-four poems from Browning's amatory sequence of the same name. Argento's Casa Guidi, for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, is a setting of excerpts from letters written by Browning, primarily to her sister Henrietta, during her years in Florence. This study examines the two composers' images of Browning, and how those images are portrayed through choice of text and musical setting. The image of Browning depicted in Larsen's cycle is that of a woman who moves from a fear of love to an acceptance and embracing of it. The love that she comes to know is a love that recognizes the necessity of moving on in spite of unresolved issues. This image was gleaned from Browning's sonnets by Larsen and soprano Arleen Auger, who worked closely together to create a cycle that would speak of mature love, in contrast to the youthful love in Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben. Three of the six sonnets in the cycle are analyzed for Larsen's use of compositional devices that reinforce the themes of the recognition and acceptance of love and of trust in non-resolution. The texts chosen by Argento were based on his desire to depict the feminine and vulnerable aspects of Browning during her years in Florence. Although the letter excerpts are not arranged in chronological order, they accurately reveal a woman who delighted in her home and family. The last three of the five songs are examined to show how Argento's careful text setting and use of orchestral color and motives enhance Browning's words and the overall mood of the letters.
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Meek, Sabrina Lynn. "Literary shadow in Poe's selected works| Literature as conduit to psyche integration." Thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3730815.
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<p> The epitome of psychoanalysis is the process of psyche integration—making the unconscious conscious. As such, the unconscious material holds that which is feared most, the unknown. Buried within the unconscious, the shadow is born; an eerie abyss of repressed emotions, unwanted memories, and forgotten fantasies. Accessing this material can be wearisome, even distressing, without skillful clinical support. This dissertation postulates using literature as conduit in a therapeutic setting to facilitate psyche integration and healthy psychological development. The foundation of depth psychology lends a perfect lens through which to view a literary work because of the emphasis for considering the presence of the unconscious. A hermeneutic research methodology and imaginal approach are used to discuss unconscious material derived from the textual themes and characters in selected works of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s works provide an appropriate framework to hold shadow material as he utilized and personified psychological affects directly correlated to the shadow, and they still possess the ability to connect to their reader a century and a half after conception. The selected works for this dissertation analysis include: “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and “William Wilson” (1840). </p><p> <i>Keywords:</i> Edgar Allan Poe, shadow, literature, textual hermeneutic wheel, imaginal, depth psychology.</p>
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Alcorn, Haili A. "Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida." Scholar Commons, 2018. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7462.
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Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment to the land in stories written by Florida authors. Scholarly attention has noted the important relationships formed by humans and animals in literature about Florida, but no extensive study incorporating place theory, ecocriticism, and close reading has been done on the literary representation of Florida animals or their contribution to the state’s diverse reputations.
This dissertation brings together theories about place attachment, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies (CAS) to illustrate the roles of fictional and nonfictional animals in works by six Florida authors: William Bartram, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Elizabeth Bishop, Rachel Carson, and John Henry Fleming. These works contain prominent animal characters that illuminate four ways of seeing Florida: idyllic Florida, wild Florida, opportunistic Florida, and mysterious Florida. These identities build off historical views about Florida as place: explorers, tourists, and developers projected their hopes for advancement onto the state based on its reputation as an exotic paradise, wild hinterland, or untouched beacon for industry and agriculture. Literature helped to produce these ideas about Florida through travel writing, but Florida stories also critique opportunistic ideologies responsible for harming animals and the environment. Literature can also preserve Florida’s mysteries and myths, offering narratives about nature and animals that challenge notions of human superiority. Thus, literature enacts a dynamic engagement with the four faces of Florida I discuss.
Florida animals are vital to the construction of these four identities. For example, Henry Bunk, the protagonist of Douglas’s Alligator Crossings, sees the Everglades as an idyllic alternative to the city for its many birds and fish. Rawlings depicts Cross Creek as a wild host to deadly snakes, predatory big cats, and ubiquitous insects. Bishop captures through poetry the ordinary activity of Florida fishing in such a way that invites us to question the harm inflicted on animals for the opportunity of recreation. Fleming’s stories suggest that exploration, industry, and science have mostly erased the mysteries of Florida’s natural world, but his enigmatic and monstrous animals, along with their ties to the land, offer hope for reviving a meaningful attachment to the land.
This dissertation connects literary representations of animals to real forms of violence occurring in Florida today, including fishing, caged hunting, and animal captivity. The works examined herein can prompt readers to rethink their own relationships to place and to nonhuman nature. As a cultural force, literature holds the potential for effecting change in our world. Beginning with the local is one way of witnessing this potential for the dynamic interplay between literature and place.
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Soden, John. "Extending Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Legacy to the Literary and Moral Imagination." Thesis, Union Institute and University, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10592621.
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<p> This dissertation explores Martin Luther King, Jr.'s (1929-1968) ideas and philosophy in the context of dialogue with the moral and literary imagination. King was a leading thinker and voice for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States.</p><p> Two fundamental philosophical ideas for King were love and empathy. This dissertation explores these ideas through discussion and dialogue. Notably, King's philosophy and claims are contrasted with the writings of John Dewey and Martha Nussbaum. The dialogue between the three scholars should afford readers the opportunity for different and perhaps meaningful questions related to the teachings and philosophy of King.</p>
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Goodman, Brian Kruzick. "Cold War Bohemia: Literary Exchange between the United States and Czechoslovakia, 1947-1989." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493571.
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After the onset of the Cold War, literature and culture continued to circulate across the so-called Iron Curtain between the United States and the countries of the Eastern bloc, often with surprising consequences. This dissertation presents a narrative history of literary exchange between the US and Czechoslovakia between 1947 and 1989. I provide an account of the material circulation of texts and discourses that is grounded in the biographical experiences of specific writers and intellectuals who served as key intermediaries between Cold War blocs. Individual chapters focus on F. O. Matthiessen, Josef Škvorecký, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Roth, and I discuss the transmission of literary works by writers like Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Ludvík Vaculík, and Milan Kundera. I also discuss a range of institutions—from literary magazines and book series to universities and government censors—that mediated the circulation of literature between the US and Czechoslovakia. To reconstruct this history, I draw on a multilingual archive of sources that includes transnational correspondence, secret police files, travelogues, and samizdat texts.
A central argument of “Cold War Bohemia” is that the transnational circulation of literature produced new lines of countercultural influence across the Iron Curtain. By the 1970s and 1980s, literary exchange also helped constitute a network of writers and intellectuals who promoted new discourses about the relationship between literature, dissent, and human rights. The literary counterculture that emerged between the US and Czechoslovakia took on many local and contingent forms, but in each case, the circulation of literature allowed a new transnational public to imagine an alternative world beyond Cold War boundaries.<br>American Studies
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Wei, Xin. "The literary Chinese cosmopolis." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b4bba502-e364-4b1b-a22d-8ffb6cc61890.
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The thesis is set against the backdrop of literary Chinese as the cosmopolitan written language across East Asia and examines two contemporary literary Chinese writers in the ninth century: Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn from Silla Korea and Sugawara no Michizane from Heian Japan. Though composition in Chinese characters on the peninsula and the archipelago was ancient, a high-water mark within this community appeared in the ninth century. At that time, literary Chinese was embraced by mainstream literati as the medium for poetry and prose, and competent composition in this international written language came to have political as well as cultural significance. The importance of Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn and Sugawara no Michizane as the great masters of Chinese letters in Korea and Japan derives in part from their talents and in part from the social and political acceptance of Chinese. This comparative research primarily draws inspiration from Sheldon Pollock's comparison of the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the Latin cosmopolis. Pollock describes the Latin cosmopolis as coercive and the Sanskrit cosmopolis as voluntaristic. I argue that the history of literary Chinese in East Asia provides a third cosmo-political model for the history of interactions among language, literature, and cultural and military power. The literary Chinese cosmopolis can be characterized not as coercive or voluntaristic but as hegemonic. I compare Ch'oe Ch'iwǒn and Sugawara no Michizane for their cosmopolitan identities, transnational experiences, and diglossic worlds. Though there is debate over the appropriateness of the terms "diglossia," "Chinese cosmopolis," and "Sinographic cosmopolis" to describe the world in which Ch'oe and Michizane lived, I argue in favor of "literary Chinese cosmopolis," because I pay attention to the common grammar, syntax, and other linguistic features one must bear in mind when composing in literary Chinese (as opposed to reading). Localism produced vernaculars, but the unity of the community was based on composition in a cosmopolitan language. That cosmopolitan language was literary Chinese, a hyperglossic language, a language that allowed universal communication in East Asia. Intersecting with various disciplines and bringing several critical fields into conversation, this work contests and refreshes a series of key issues at the heart of discussions on globalization, namely the intrinsic relationship between language and power. How does cultural power emerge from language? How does writing in a "foreign" script articulate ethnic, local identities? As a meditation on language politics, ethics, and the historical situation of an earlier cosmopolitan ecumene (ninth century CE), this work will, I hope, offer insights into the specificities and mechanisms of a past cosmopolitan era in East Asia, even as it establishes a broader historical and ethical context for contemporary debates on globalization.
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Clyburn, Tiffani A. "African American Literary Counter-narratives in the Post-Civil Rights Era." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1313514090.
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Tucker, J. E. "Plomer's portrayal of the family in relation to a hegemonic ideology." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/17686.
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Bibliography: pages 67-68.<br>This dissertation examines how ideology is constituted in texts, and how colonial texts generally support the hegemonic ideology, that is, they offer a point of view which is racialistic and a picture of blacks which is patronizing and denigratory. With regard to the colonial white population, colonial texts generally portray a strongly patriarchal, often authoritarian societal structure. William Plomer writes within the liberal tradition and therefore seeks to undermine the dominant ideology. He shows how contradictory the colonial attitude to the natives is and how the 'civilising' mission often runs counter to the colonial desire for the ease and luxury which require a subject and 'uncivilised' population. The dissertation looks particularly at the portrayal of family life in Plomer's South African short stories and in Turbott Wolfe. It sees that society limits the range of what the author can invent, that the author in many cases 'encounters the solution' (Macherey), and Plomer seems unable to present a work in which a couple of mixed race is able to find a role in society. In the short stories, Plomer portrays families as weak entities, with married people often yearning for partners of a different racial group. Marriage is shown to be undermined by the racialistic and authoritarian strictures placed upon it. In Turbott Wolfe, Plomer portrays several bigoted and vicious white families with the men having secret liaisons with black women and seldom acknowledging their progeny. The only couple of mixed race, seems to operate in a social vacuum and has symbolic value only. Plomer thus presents a society and a familial structure undermined by the very restrictions which are designed to safeguard them.
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Barsby, Tina. "Olive Schreiner : women, nature, culture." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20138.
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Bibliography: pages 102-112.<br>This dissertation locates Olive Schreiner as a nineteenth-century colonial woman writer who challenges the traditional association of men with culture, and women with nature. In Schreiner's writing the oppression of women is situated within an understanding of the social construction of "woman" as closer to nature than man. Through the lives of her central female characters, Schreiner shows how this definition of "woman" works to position women as "other" to culture, both preventing their access to public power and marginalising their fully social activities within culture. Schreiner attempts to displace definitions of culture constituted through a system of binary oppositions which inevitably privilege masculinity as opposed to femininity by redefining culture in three distinct ways. The patriarchal conception culture as the sole preserve of men is rejected in Schreiner's demands for women's educational and legal equality, and for their right to economic independence. Conventional notions of culture are equally refused in Schreiner's stress on women's traditional domestic labour as essential to the very emergence and continuation of culture. Finally, the deconstruction of sexual difference as a fixed immutable category within Schreiner's writing exposes the definition of "woman" as socially constructed and legitimated. The contradictions and tensions within and between these demands illustrate the limits of Schreiner's feminist and socialist politics, and point to how her writing both challenges and articulates aspects of dominant nineteenth-century ideology. At the same time, such contradictions were vitally important in motivating Schreiner's on-going attempt to change radically the position of women within culture. Moreover, the co-existence of apparently conflicting demands within Schreiner's redefinition of culture suggests the terms of a resolution of the perennial problem within feminist discourse around competing claims for women's equality or for a recognition of their difference.