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Knight, Alison Elaine. "Pen of iron : scriptural text and the Book of Job in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610695.
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Ludlow, Elizabeth. "'We can but spell a surface history' : the biblical typology of Christina Rossetti." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1993/.
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My research examines Christina Rossetti’s use of biblical typology in her articulation of individual and communal identity. The central concern of my thesis is with tracing the ways in which she bridges the gap between the two biblical covenants and her contemporary situation by a ceaseless interpretative movement between the discourses of the Old and New Testaments. After examining the basis for her typological modes of reading, I demonstrate the various ways in which they underpin her interpretations of Tractarian, Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite writings as well as providing her with a framework with which to structure her own poetic sequences. In my examination of the ways in which Rossetti engages with patristic and medieval theology and articulates identity through the cyclical dynamics of typology, I consider her writings alongside those of Isaac Williams, John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey and highlight the key part they play in reinforcing the Oxford Movement’s liturgical momentum. Focusing specifically on her poetic utilization of the ancient practice of chanting psalms and antiphons, her engagement with the musicality of the church service, and her depiction of the visual aspects of ritualism, I read her poetry in terms of the mystical journey towards God upon which, she suggests, each Christian embarks. Applying to Rossetti’s poetry the method of typological analysis that she herself uses, I consider how the poems in her 1893 volume, Verses, can be understood to comment upon her earlier works and how her earlier poetry can be seen as an antecedent to her later works. Through this, I trace the development of her theology as it engages more directly with the hermeneutical principles encouraged by the Tractarians and offers a basis upon which the patristic concept of trinitarian personhood can be understood.
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Brooks, Britton. "The restoration of Creation in the early Anglo-Saxon vitae of Cuthbert and Guthlac." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:17b5d20e-446e-4891-90a6-f02a196a7409.
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This thesis explores the relationship between Creation and the saints Cuthbert and Guthlac in their Anglo-Latin and Old English vitae. It argues that this relationship is best understood through received theological exegesis concerning Creation's present state in the postlapsarian world. The exegesis has its foundation in Augustine's interpretations of the Genesis narrative, though it enters the textual tradition of the vitae via an adapted portion of De Genesi contra Manichaeos in Bede's metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCM). Both Augustine and Bede argue, with slight differences, that fallen Creation can be restored into prelapsarian harmony with humanity by way of sanctity. Each individual vita engages with this understanding of the Fall in distinct, though ultimately interrelated, ways, and the chapters of this thesis will therefore explore each text individually. Chapter 1 argues that the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCA) unites Cuthbert's ability to restore Creation with the theme of monastic obedience, linking the ordering of a monastery to the restoration of prelapsarian harmony. The VCA also seeks to create sites for potential lay pilgrimage in the landscapes of Farne and Lindisfarne by highlighting the present efficacy of Cuthbert's miracles. Chapter 2 argues that Bede's VCM not only reveals his early attempt to fashion Cuthbert into the primary saint for Britain, via a focus on Cuthbert's obedience to the Divine Office, but also that the restoration of Creation functions as a ruminative tool. Chapter 3 argues that Bede transforms the nature of Cuthbert's sanctity in his prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCP) from static to developmental, influenced by the Evagrian Vita Antonii, and that Creation is adapted to function as the impetus for, and evidence of, Cuthbert's progression. Chapter 4 argues that Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci (VSG) unites the development of Guthlac with a physically delineated Creation, and that the restoration of Creation is elevated to an even greater degree here than in Bede's hagiography. Chapter 5 argues that the author of the Old English Prose Guthlac (OEPG) grounds his vita by utilizing a landscape lexis shared with contemporary boundary clauses, so that here the relationship between the saint and Creation has greater force; it further argues that Guthlac A uniquely connects Guthlac with the doctrine of replacement, consolidating links between his arrival to the eremitic space and the restoration of prelapsarian Eden.
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Woeber, Catherine. "A study of Christ and his saints as representatives of the values of Christian heroism in Old English poetry." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21143.
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Bibliography: pages 71-72.This dissertation investigates the concept of Christian heroism as it appears in a number of Old English poems, through a study of the figure of the miles Christi. These poems present a specific Christian heroism which, though couched in terms culled from Germanic heroism, nevertheless exists in its own right and is quite different from it. Christ and his saints are seen as heroes in themselves (Christian servants obedient to the will of God) rather than as heroic warriors as they are usually regarded (Germanic heroes fighting for a Christian cause). They are leaders and heroes in the sense of servants, and not only like kings and warriors of the Germanic code. A study of some poems from the Cynewulf canon shows that the poets understood Christian heroism to mean more than brave battling for the cause of good; in essence, it is complete submission to the will of God.
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Durkin, Philip. "A study of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 86, with editions of selected texts, and with special reference to late Middle English prose forms of confession." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f63833b4-b75f-48bb-b1db-892929806abc.
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The thesis consists of a detailed examination of the contents of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 86, (Trinity), with particular attention being given to several lengthy English confessional items which it contains. This is complemented by a more general consideration of late Middle English prose forms of confession and the manuscripts in which they occur. Part One consists of a survey of all surviving independent prose forms of confession preserved in late Middle English manuscripts. I divide the texts into groups according to their probable audience and readership, assessed from both internal and external evidence. This is preceded by a brief introductory section on the background to late Middle English guides to preparation for confession. In three appendices, I provide: a full description of London, British Library, MS Sloane 1584, with transcriptions of three confessional texts; a transcription of a form of confession from London, British Library, MS Harley 2383, with variants from all known manuscripts; a transcription of a form of confession from Yale, University Library, MS Beinecke 317. Part Two consists of a close study of Trinity: a full description of the manuscript, supplementing existing catalogues; editions of four confessional texts from the manuscript, accompanied by detailed discussions of their form and probable function; an analysis of a series of short devotional texts which, taken together, constitute an elementary manual of religious instruction. I include full critical editions, with variants from all known manuscripts, of two of these texts, The Sixteen Conditions of Charity and The Eight Blessings of God, both of which originate in passages extracted from the Wycliffite Bible, and which survive, in varying versions, in thirty-four and nine manuscripts respectively. The thesis concludes with a summary of the probable origin and function of this manuscript collection.
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Reeve-Tucker, Alice Glen. "Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Catholicism : 1928-1939." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3469/.
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This thesis considers the development of Evelyn Waugh's and Graham Greene’s Catholicism between 1928 and 1939. Focusing predominantly on Waugh’s and Greene’s novels, it investigates how their writings express Catholic ideas, as well how their faith informs their views of human nature, their political sympathies, and their criticisms of modern secular civilization. While it recognizes the important differences between Waugh’s and Greene’s thinking in this period (such as their diverging political sympathies and their uses of different forms and genres of writing), it also establishes some significant affiliations between their Catholic points of view. Both authors associate the increasingly secular condition of English society with themes of decay and disintegration, acknowledge the reality of Original Sin, and believe in a supernatural reality distinct from its earthly counterpart. The Introduction provides an overview of Greene and Waugh scholarship, noting that there is currently no critical study devoted to the topic of early affiliations between these authors’ Catholic principles. The first two chapters propose that the beginnings of Waugh’s and Greene’s Catholic perspectives can be detected in their early fiction. Chapter Three examines in relation to each other Waugh’s and Greene’s novels between 1930 and 1935. Chapter Four charts the development of their respective vantage-points in the period 1936-1938. The final chapter looks at the year 1939 and assesses the nature of these authors' Catholic views prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.
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Abunasser, Rima Jamil. "Corporate Christians and Terrible Turks: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Representation of Empire in the Early British Travel Narrative, 1630 - 1780." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4444/.
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This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in the work of scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan and Edward Said. This critical gap has left early travel narratives by Sir Francis Moore, Jonathan Harris, Penelope Aubin, and others largely neglected. These early writers, I argue, adapted the conventions of the travel narrative while relying on the authority of contemporary commercial practices. The early English travelers modified contemporary conventions of aesthetic representation by formulating their descriptions of non-European cultures in terms of the economic and political conventions and rivalries of the early eighteenth century. Early English travel literature, I demonstrate, functioned as a politically motivated medium that served both as a marker of authenticity, justifying the colonial and imperial ventures that would flourish in the nineteenth century, and as a forum for experimentation with English notions of gender and narrative authority.
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Rogozhina, Anna. "'And from his side came blood and milk' : the martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch in Coptic Egypt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:35b8fd5c-5c85-4b5f-81c8-77e0b66a165d.
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My thesis examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt. For this purpose I focus primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically - the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. This thesis examines the literary and historical background of the Martyrdom of Philotheus and similar hagiographical texts. It also explores the goals and concerns of the authors and editors of Coptic martyr passions and their intended audience. I am arguing that these texts were produced in order to perform multiple functions: to justify and promote the cult of a particular saint, as an educational tool, and as an important structural element of liturgical celebrations in honour of the saint. Another aim of this work is to stress the entertainment value of such texts. I explore the sources used by Coptic hagiographers for creating such entertaining stories, as well as the methods they used to re-work certain theological concepts and make them more accessible to the audience. The thesis begins with description of the manuscript tradition of Philotheus and a brief outline and comparison of its main versions. The second chapter discusses the place of the Martyrdom of Philotheus in Coptic hagiography and its connection to the so-called cycles. The next two chapters explore the motifs and topoi characteristic of Coptic martyr passions, especially the legend of Diocletian the Persecutor and the image of Antioch as the Holy City in Coptic hagiography, as these two motifs appear in one way or another in the majority of the martyr passions. Chapter 5 is dedicated to one of the focal points in the Martyrdom - the miracle of resurrection and the tour of hell – and its literary and theological background. Chapter 6 discusses representations of magic and paganism in Coptic hagiography and some of the concerns of Coptic hagiographers. In the last chapter I explore the geography of the cult, its iconographic and hymnographic dimensions and the transformation of the perception of the saint; the second part of this chapter discusses the questions of performance, authorship and audience.
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Lee, Adam S. "The Platonism of Walter Pater." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5a0d6f60-85cf-4835-8212-0e7ad1561dcc.
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After graduating from the Literae Humaniores course, which after the mid-nineteenth century came to revolve around Plato’s Republic, Walter Pater’s (1839-1894) professional duties spanning thirty years at Oxford were those of a philosophy teacher and lecturer of Plato. This thesis examines Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism in his work, from his earliest known piece, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Plato is an ideal philosopher, critic, and artist to Pater, exemplifying a literary craftsman who blends genres with the highest authority. Platonism is a point of contact with several of Pater’s contemporaries, such as Arnold and Wilde, from which we can take new measure of their critical relationships regarding aestheticism and Decadence. Pater’s idea of aesthetic education takes Platonism for its model, which heightens one’s awareness of reality in the recognition of form and matter. Platonism also provides a framework for critical encounters with figures across history, such as Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism, evident even in his fiction, seeks the mind of the author, so that his writing enacts Platonic love. Through close reading, we highlight his many references to Plato, identify Platonic subjects and themes, and explore etymological nuances in the very selection of his words, which often reveals a Platonic tendency of refinement towards immateriality, from seen to unseen beauty. As a teacher and an author Pater helped shape Oxonian Platonism, and through his writing we examine how Platonism informs his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style.
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Connolly, Margaret. "An edition of 'Contemplations of the dread and love of God'." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2786.
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This thesis presents an edition of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, a late Middle English devotional prose text for which no critical edition is currently available. I have transcribed and collated the text from all sixteen extant manuscripts and the 1506 printed edition. An investigation of the errors and variants according to the classical method of textual criticism has yielded little in the way of conclusive results, and it has therefore not proved possible to construct a stemma of manuscripts from the corpus of evidence as it now exists. My edition therefore uses one manuscript (Maidstone MS Museum 6) as a base; I emend the text of Maidstone where necessary, and cite variants from all the other witnesses to show all differences of substance. A full critical apparatus is provided, comprising: the text with variants, textual notes and glossary. The introduction includes a full description of all the manuscripts and the two early printed editions, an outline of the methods of textual criticism applied and their results, and an explanation of the choice of base manuscript; information about the language of the Maidstone manuscript and the date of the text are also provided, as is an outline of my editorial principles. The thesis also contains two appendices. The first of these deals briefly with the twenty-two instances where individual chapters of Contemplations appear in other manuscript compilations; the second discusses the English and Latin prayers which follow the full text in some manuscripts.
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Lingscheid, Claudia. "Das 'Buch von den Neun Felsen' : Textgeschichte und Überlieferung mit einer kritischen Edition." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7194d405-a68a-47c1-89f6-145f826921ad.
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Subject to this study is the Neunfelsenbuch ('Book of the Nine Cliffs'), an account of a vision, which is assumed to have originated in Strasbourg after 1352. Initially written in the German vernacular, it was widely circulated in various German dialects and in Dutch and Latin translation. The text exists in two versions: a long version, which is thought to be the work of Rulman Merswin (1382), a citizen of Strasbourg and founder of the convent at the 'Gruner Worth' (1367); and a short version of unknown authorship. Previous scholars have considered the long version to be Merswin's reformulation of the shorter text, which was presumed - though not proven - to have been the original. By investigating the transmission and the textual history, this study aims to solve the questions of authorship and original form. It provides an overview of the entire transmission of both versions in prints and manuscripts, particularly focusing on the southern German short version. For the first time the short version is made available in a critical edition, as a basis for a systematic comparison with the long version. The comparison reveals that, in fact, the long version is the original and thus confirms Rulman Merswin as the true author. Written in 1352, the text not only belongs to the oldest works of the Tauler reception, but also stands at the beginning of the literary production at the 'Gruner Worth'. As a result, this text provides new insights into the spiritual development and the literary heritage of one of the most important centres of spiritual literature in the German vernacular of its time.
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Pink, Stephen Arthur. "Holy scripture and the meanings of the Eucharist in late medieval England, C. 1370-1430." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:60a9655b-779b-4853-9102-7a9b058f0d5e.
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This thesis examines how, in late-medieval England, uses of Scripture and associated written discourses expanded to encompass the sacramental functions hitherto privileged to the bread and wine of the Mass. This process, reflecting the longstanding if implicit importance of scriptural symbolism to the medieval Eucharist, also bears witness to a major cultural shift in this period: the assignment to words of the same powers that had underpinned the function of visual, non-verbal symbols in medieval religion and society. As Chapter Two demonstrates, this process was starkly exposed in John Wyclif’s vision of an English religion centred upon the sacrament of the preached word of Scripture, rather than on the Mass. As Chapter Three shows, this was the vision that Wyclif’s followers sought to realize, even if they may have achieved their aims only within a limited band of followers. However, Wyclif’s vision was powerful precisely because its relevance was not confined to Wycliffites. Chapter Four charts how the same substitution was taking place through the dissemination in English of ‘Scripture’, which, in its broadest sense, encompassed meditations upon depictions of Christ crucified as well as preaching. The greatest danger of Wycliffite thought to the late-medieval Church rested in its potential to increase lay awareness of this process. This threat was reflected in the restrictions placed by the English Church upon lay use of religious writings in the early fifteenth century. Nonetheless, as Chapter Five shows through a reading of one of Wyclif’s sternest critics, Thomas Netter, the eucharistic function of ‘Scripture’ had not disappeared but had to be occluded. This occlusion represents the most significant shift in the eucharistic function of ‘Scripture’ in the fifteenth century, allowing its use to develop further without threatening the Mass. This thesis concludes that the unacknowledged yet increasingly central role of ‘Scripture’ helps to explain why, at the Reformation, a scripturally-based religion seemed so quickly to supplant one to which images had been fundamental.
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Mejias, Sarah J. "Sense and Sensibility: A Sermon on Living the Examined Life." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2017. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2387.
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Jane Austen’s novels remain an essential component of the literary canon, but her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, is frequently neglected. However, in Sense and Sensibility is the genesis of Austen’s technique through which her major characters cultivate and reveal a strong inner life, demonstrated through the character of Elinor Dashwood. This technique is a characteristic she incorporates in each of her succeeding novels. Her approach to literature centers on the interiority of her characters and their ability to change, but it her first novel Austen takes a unique approach. Following the structure of an eighteenth-century sermon, Austen creates a sermon for lay people that centers on the cultivation of a strong interior life.
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Curtis, Florence Sally Haines. "The intellectual scope of the 'mester de clerecía'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ac9a4eb0-567f-4668-983e-897dce15bfff.
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This thesis investigates the first poetry written in Castilian by intellectuals, the 'mester de clerecía', ‘craft of clerics’. Exploring the unique circumstances of Iberia in the Middle Ages as a hub for the intellectual vanguard and a holy territory for encounters with saints, pilgrimage and Reconquest, I examine the canonical texts of an alleged thirteenth-century poetic school as the Castilian bedrock of a wider Iberian and European literary movement. Notably including analysis of the fourteenth-century "Libro de buen amor", a canonical work in its own right thought to parody the earlier poems, I also reassess the significance of the verse form 'cuaderna vía' for the 'mester de clerecía', in which the thirteenth-century poems are exclusively written. Over an introduction and four chapters, I combine close reading of the "Libro de Alexandre" (Chapter 1), Berceo’s Vidas of Millán, Domingo and Oria (Chapter 2), the "Libro de Apolonio" and "Poema de Fernán González" (Chapter 3), and the "Libro de buen amor" (Chapter 4), with research into intellectual, pedagogical, and religious contexts. Notably, I have found the poems analyzed to be especially concerned with the landscape of the reading mind. The result is an expanded view of the 'mester de clerecía' as theological and philosophical poems that offer ways of understanding and approaching the life of the mind as well as that of the body that are thought-provoking and informative to this day. Concluding that the thirteenth-century, canonical poems are the witnesses of a 'textual community' of authors rather than a poetic school, I advocate an inclusive definition of the 'mester de clerecía'. The 'mester de clerecía' are of extremely rich intellectual scope and are of potential interest to scholars of all European literatures, and literary, intellectual, and social history, as well as theology and philosophy.
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Workman, Jameson Samuel. "Chaucerian metapoetics and the philosophy of poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8cf424fd-124c-4cb0-9143-e436c5e3c2da.
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This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.
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Soud, William David. "Toward a divinised poetics : God, self, and poeisis in W.B. Yeats, David Jones, and T.S. Eliot." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:331a692d-a40c-4d30-a05b-f0d224eb0055.
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This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.
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Barush, Kathryn R. ""Every age is a Canterbury pilgrimage" : art and the sacred journey in Britain, c. 1790-1850." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:63e1545c-1362-4bc3-bbc3-b950eecf7c70.
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This thesis examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination in Britain from the years 1790 to 1850. Historically, distinctions between understandings of pilgrimage as motif, metaphor, artistic process, and actual journey have been blurred to varying degrees, resulting in the creation of images that were at once narratives, memorials, and stimuli for contemplative journeys from pictorial space to imagination. In the first half of the nineteenth century, religious architecture, sacred landscapes, and the emblematic figure of the pilgrim with coat, hat, and scrip functioned as temporal reminders of a promised land to come, as mediated through artistic practice. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated visual sources, I contend that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. This study draws out the various levels at which pilgrimage engaged the visual imagination. In doing so it offers a detailed perspective on the conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process for artists and theorists, as notions of the transfer of ‘spirit’ from sacred space to represented space re-emerged as a key aspect of the theological and artistic discourse of the period. Chapter 1 outlines the antiquarian dissemination of medieval pilgrimage texts and images. I suggest that an awareness of pilgrimage as embodying the real and imagined emerged with the recovery of allegorical texts, histories of actual pilgrimages, and an interest in pilgrimage souvenirs. The discussion moves on to intersections between pilgrimage and religious art in Chapters 2 - 4, including the idea of painting as pilgrimage, as demonstrated through specific case studies, and the refashioning of relics and religious ruins as contemporary sites of pilgrimage (Chapter 5).
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Raloff, Carl-Christian [Verfasser], Jürgen [Akademischer Betreuer] Klein, Jürgen [Gutachter] Klein, and Michael [Gutachter] Szczekalla. "History's Leftovers. Irish History and the Question of Identity in Sebastian Barry's Revisionist Writings / Carl-Christian Raloff ; Gutachter: Jürgen Klein, Michael Szczekalla ; Betreuer: Jürgen Klein." Greifswald : Universität Greifswald, 2020. http://d-nb.info/121172526X/34.
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Khalidi, Anbara Mariam. ""It was the worst of times; it was the worst of times" : popular prophecy, Rapture fiction, and the imminent apocalypse in contemporary American Evangelism." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e2e7da46-9462-448c-88ae-8a98a9482b8d.
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This thesis explores how the Rapture fiction and popular prophecy of modern American premillennial dispensationalism shapes the eschatological beliefs of its readership. This will be accomplished through a text-based critical analysis of the anxiety narratives of the Bible study and exegetical guides of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and its counterpart, the Left Behind fiction series. This thesis represents the first scholarly analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and the first situation of Left Behind fiction within its theological context. It will be proposed that these two sets of texts shape the eschatological beliefs of their readers through a discursive ‘streamlining’ that is performed in several ways. Firstly, the historical development of the movement will be examined, exploring the evolution of a specific premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic and its ‘channelling’ through particular cultural institutions. Secondly, an analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library and Left Behind fiction will demonstrate that this premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic is almost exclusively communicated through anxiety narratives which focus on expressions of horror, isolation, powerlessness and paranoia. It will be argued that these narratives serve to explore ‘abjective’ elements of premillennial dispensationalist belief, re-integrating them into the fabric of the faith. Particular attention will be paid to these abjective elements, which include the role of the eschatological body, the nature of individual salvation, and the perpetual deferment of the Rapture. As such, the popular media of premillennial dispensationalism serves as a further channel for the discursive streamlining of the movement’s prophetic scheme. Finally, this thesis proposes that the ‘deprivation’ theory of millennial appeal does not adequately explain the appeal and success of premillennial dispensationalism. As such, the following analysis will suggest that an alternate critical analysis of the movement, concentrating on its tropes of anxiety, serves to better explain the continued appeal of this ideology.
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Hall, Simon W. "The history of Orkney literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2365/.
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The history of Orkney literature is the first full survey of the literature of the Orkney Islands. It examines fiction, non-fiction and poetry that is uncomplicatedly Orcadian, as well as that which has been written about Orkney by authors from outside the islands. Necessarily, the work begins with the great Icelandic chronicle Orkneyinga Saga. Literary aspects of the saga are examined, as well as its place within the wider sphere of saga writing. Most significantly, this study examines how the saga imposes itself on the work of subsequent writers. The book goes on to focua on the significance of Orkney and Orkney history in the work of a number of key nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures, including Sir Walter Scott, Edwin Muir, Eric Linklater, Robert Rendall and George Mackay Brown. The Victorian folklorist and short story writer Walter Traill Dennison is re-evaluated: The History of Orkney Literature demonstrates his central significance to the Orcadian tradition and argues for the relevance of his work to the wider Scottish canon. A fixation with Orkney history is common to all the writers considered herein. This preoccupation necessitates a detailed consideration of the core historiography of J. Storer Clouston. Other non-fiction works which are significant in the creation of this distinctly Orcadian literary identity include Samuel Laing's translation of Heimskringla; the polemical writings of David Balfour; and the historical and folklore studies of Ernest Walker Marwick. The study welcomes many writers into the fold, seeking to map and define a distinctly Orcadian tradition. This tradition can be considered a cousin of Scottish Literature. Although the writing of Orkney is a significant component of Scottish Literature at various historical stages, it nevertheless follows a divergent course. Both the eighteenth century Vernacular Revival and the twentieth century Literary Renaissance facilitate literary work in the islands which nevertheless remains distinctly independent in character. Indigenous Orcadian writers consider themselves to be Orcadians first and Scots or Britons second. Regardless of what they view as their national or political identity, their sense of insular cultural belonging is uniformly and pervasively Orcadian. What emerges is a robust, distinctive and very tight-knit minor literature.
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Safran, Morri. ""Unsex'd" texts : history, hypertext and romantic women writers /." Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3026209.
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Rooney, Lee. "Prophecy in Shakespeare's English history cycles." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2014. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/2003748/.
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Prophecy — that is, the action of foretelling or predicting the future, particularly a future thought to represent the will of God — is an ever-present aspect of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a reading of the dramas of Shakespeare’s English history cycles — from 1 Henry VI to Henry V — that focuses exclusively upon the role played by prophecy in representing and reconstructing the past. It seeks to show how, through close attention to the moments when prophecy emerges in these historical dramas, we might arrive at a different understanding of them, both as dramatic narratives and as meditations on the nature of history itself. As this thesis seeks to demonstrate, moreover, Shakespeare’s treatment of prophecy in any one play can be viewed, in effect, as a key that can take us to the heart of that drama’s wider concerns. The comparatively recent conception of a body of historical plays that are individually distinct and no longer chained to the Tillyardian notion of a ‘Tudor myth’ (or any other ‘grand narrative’) has freed prophecy from effectively fulfilling the rather one-dimensional role of chorus. However, it has also raised as-yet-unanswered questions about the function of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English history cycles, which this thesis aims to consider. One of the key arguments presented here is that Shakespeare utilises prophecy not to emphasise the pervasiveness of divine truth and providential design, but to express the political, narratorial, and interpretative disorder of history itself. It is also argued that any conception of the English history plays that rejects homogeneity and even consistency must also acknowledge that prophecy, as a form of historical narrative in essence, cannot be expected to manifest itself in the same ways in each drama throughout Shakespeare’s career. In this sense, the purpose of this thesis is to show that Shakespeare not only uses ‘prophecy’ to construct ‘history’: as a dramatist, he also thinks through ‘prophecy’, in various ways and from multiple perspectives, in order to intensify and complicate our sense of the complexity and drama of history itself. This thesis treats the English chronicle plays in order of composition and performance. While the Introduction contextualizes concepts of prophecy in the early modern period, and its relationship to history in particular, chapters 1–3 address the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with chapters 4 and 5 examining Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV. Henry V is addressed in the Conclusion. The inclusion of the second cycle of histories, rarely interrogated by critics in relation to prophecy, is crucial to the approach taken by this thesis. Unlike previous studies, this thesis privileges prophecy in both the earlier and the later histories, not least because its perceived absence from the plays of the second cycle is capable of informing our understanding of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy more generally. What is at stake in this reading of prophecy in Shakespeare’s English histories, both locally in the plays themselves and more generally across the cycles, are questions of causality, identity (both personal and national), monarchy, and the art of theatre itself.
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Thomas, Alun Deian. "The making and remaking of history in Shakespeare's History Plays." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2012. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/42105/.
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History is a problem for the history plays. The weight of ‘true’ history, of fact, puts pressure on the dramatic presentation of history. Not fiction and not fact, the plays occupy the interstitial space between these opposites, the space of drama. Their position between the binary opposites of fact and fiction allows the history plays to play with history. They view history as a problem to be solved, and the different ways in which each play approaches the problem of history gives us a glimpse of how they attempt to engage and deal with the problem of creating dramatic history. Each history play rewrites the plays that preceded it; the plays present ‘history’ as fluid and shifting as competing narratives and interpretations of the past come into conflict with each other, requiring the audience to act as historians in order to construct their own narrative of events. In this way the plays dramatise the process of remaking history. This can be seen in the relationship between the two parts of Henry IV, which restage the same narrative in a different emotional key, and the way that Henry IV’s retelling of the events of Richard II from his own perspective at the conclusion of 1 Henry IV forces the audience to re-evaluate the events of the earlier play, reinterpreting the dramatic past and imaginatively rewriting the play in light of the new perspective gained on events. The history plays thus create a new, dramatic history, a history without need for historical precedent. The plays deliberately signal their departure from ‘fact’ through anachronism, deviation from chronicle history and wholesale dramatic invention. In this sense the plays deliberately frustrate audience expectations; knowledge of chronicle history does not provide foreknowledge of what will happen onstage. History in the theatre is new and unpredictable, perhaps closer in spirit to the uncertainty of the historical moment rather than the reassuring textual narrative of the chronicles.
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Williams, Lydia. "Good Christian." restricted, 2008. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11172008-162748/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008.Title from file title page. Josh Russell, committee chair; John Holman, Sheri Joseph, committee members. Description based on contents viewed June 8, 2009.
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Monteverde, Margaret Pyne. "The patterning of history in Old English literature." The Ohio State University, 1988. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1241188005.
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Owen, Ceri. "Vaughan Williams, song, and the idea of 'Englishness'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:117f2c64-3b63-43aa-9dd3-15a7ce2f9339.
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It is now broadly accepted that Vaughan Williams's music betrays a more complex relation to national influences than has traditionally been assumed. It is argued in this thesis that despite the trends towards revisionism that have characterized recent work, Vaughan Williams's interest in and engagement with English folk materials and cultures remains only partially understood. Offering contextual interpretation of materials newly available in the field, my work takes as its point of departure the critical neglect surrounding Vaughan Williams's contradictory compositional debut, in which he denounced the value of folk song in English art music in an article published alongside his song 'Linden Lea', subtitled 'A Dorset Folk Song'. Reconstructing the under-documented years of the composer's early career, it is demonstrated that Vaughan Williams's subsequent 'conversion' and lifelong attachment to folk song emerged as part of a broader concern with the intelligible and participatory quality of song and its performance by the human voice. As such, it is argued that the ways in which this composer theorized an idea of 'song' illuminate a powerful perspective from which to re-consider the propositions of his project for a national music. Locating Vaughan Williams's writings within contemporaneous cultural ideas and practices surrounding 'song', 'voice', and 'Englishness', this work brings such contexts into dialogue with readings of various of the composer's works, composed both before and after the First World War. It is demonstrated in this way that the rehabilitation of Vaughan Williams's music and reputation profitably proceeds by reconstructing a complex dialogue between his writings; between various cultural ideas and practices of English music; between the reception of his works by contemporaneous critics; and crucially, by considering the propositions of his music as explored through analysis. Ultimately, this thesis contends that Vaughan Williams's music often betrays a complex and self-conscious performance of cultural ideas of national identity, negotiating an optimistic or otherwise ambivalent relationship to an English musical tradition that is constructed and referenced through a particular idea of song.
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Crone-Romanovski, Mary Jo. "A Spatial History of English Novels 1680-1770." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1274451914.
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Hopkins, Julie Marina. "The understanding of history in English-speaking western Christian-feminist theology." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.280049.
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Stamper, Amber M. "Witnessing the Web: The Rhetoric of American E-Vangelism and Persuasion Online." UKnowledge, 2013. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/3.
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From the distribution of religious tracts at Ellis Island and Billy Sunday’s radio messages to televised recordings of the Billy Graham Crusade and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, American evangelicals have long made a practice of utilizing mass media to spread the Gospel. Most recently, these Christian evangelists have gone online. As a contribution to scholarship in religious rhetoric and media studies, this dissertation offers evangelistic websites as a case study into the ways persuasion is carried out on the Internet. Through an analysis of digital texts—including several evangelical home pages, a chat room, discussion forums, and a virtual church—I investigate how conversion is encouraged via web design and virtual community as well as how the Internet medium impacts the theology and rhetorical strategies of web evangelists. I argue for “persuasive architecture” and “persuasive communities”—web design on the fundamental level of interface layout and tightly-controlled restrictions on discourse and community membership—as key components of this strategy. In addition, I argue that evangelical ideology has been influenced by the web medium and that a “digital reformation” is taking place in the church, one centered on a move away from the Prosperity Gospel of televangelism to a Gospel focused on God as divine problem-solver and salvation as an uncomplicated, individualized, and instantaneously-rewarding experience, mimicking Web 2.0 users’ desire for quick, timely, and effective answers to all queries. This study simultaneously illuminates the structural and fundamental levels of design through which the web persuades as well as how—as rhetoricians from Plato’s King Thamus to Marshall McLuhan have recognized—media inevitably shapes the message and culture of its users.
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Longstaffe, Stephen. "The politics of the English history play 1589 - 1605." Thesis, University of York, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.333556.
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Fenwick, Andrew. "Girdles of iron, breast-plates of silk: Homeric women and Christian pity in Tolkien's Middle-Earth." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6804.
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Davall, Nicole Elizabeth. "Shakespeare and concepts of history : the English history play and Shakespeare's first tetralogy." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2014. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/65797/.
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Divided into three large chapters, this thesis explores sixteenth-century concepts of history, considers how those concepts appear in Elizabethan history plays on English history, and finally looks at Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays. The aim of the thesis is to consider in some detail the wider context of historical and dramatic traditions in Tudor England to gain a better appreciation of how they influenced possible readings of Shakespeare’s early history plays. Chapter One looks at how medieval approaches were modified in the fifteenth century. St. Augustine’s allegorical method of biblical exegesis made it possible to interpret history from inside the historical moment by allowing historically specific incidents to stand for trans-historical truths. However, the sixteenth-century chronicle tradition shows an increasing awareness of the difficulties of interpreting history. Chapter Two looks at early English history plays outside of the Shakespearean canon. History plays borrowed the conventions of comedy, tragedy and the morality play to provide frameworks for interpretation. Nevertheless, early histories such as Kynge Johan, Edmund Ironside, Famous Victories, Edward III, The True Tragedy, and The Troublesome Reign did not fit comfortably within established dramatic modes, leading to history’s gradual recognition as a separate genre. Chapter Three looks at the contribution Shakespeare’s plays made to the developing genre. The un-unified dramatic structure of the Henry VI plays denies the audience a stable framework within which to interpret events. In Richard III, a clear tragic framework appears, but is undermined by a strong thread of irony that runs through the play. History appears in the tetralogy as a repetitive cycle of violence perpetuated by characters’ attempts to memorialise the past while failing to learn from it. The crisis presented by history is the necessity of acting on partial information, while the promise of fuller understanding is projected into an unknowable future.
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Church, Alan P. "Scribal rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9320.
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Forsberg, Laura. "The Miniature and Victorian Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845467.
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The Victorian period is famously characterized by its massiveness, with the vast extent of the British Empire, the enormous size of the nineteenth-century city and the massive scale of the three-volume novel. Yet the Victorians were fascinated with miniature objects, which seemed in their small scale to belong to another world. Each miniature object prompted a unique imaginative fantasy of intimacy (the miniature painting), control (the toy), wonder (the microscope and the fairy) or knowledge (the miniature book). In each case, the miniature posited the possibility of reality with a difference, posing the implicit question: What if? This dissertation traces the miniature across a range of disciplines, from aesthetics and art history to science and technology, and from children’s culture to book history. In so doing, it shows how the miniature points beyond the limits of scientific knowledge and technical capabilities to the outer limits of the visual and speculative imagination. In novels, the miniature introduces elements of fantasy into the framework of realism, puncturing the fabric of the narrative with the internal reveries and longings of often-silent women and children. Miniature objects thus function less as realist details than as challenges to realism. In charting the effect of the miniature, both as a portal into the Victorian imagination and as a challenge to narrative realism, this dissertation puts the techniques of material history to new use. It aims not to describe the world of the Victorians but to show how the Victorians imagined other worlds.English
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Musty, Emma. "A short history of lines." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2160/c4aa2292-b43a-4d1f-bb59-b3cea766cb02.
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Zollinger, Cynthia Wittman. "Sanctifying history : Hagiography and the construction of an Anglo-Saxon Christian Past /." The Ohio State University, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1486462702467936.
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Miller, Nancy Weitz. "Rape and The Rhetoric of Female Chastity in English Renaissance Literature /." The Ohio State University, 1996. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487934589975906.
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Johnson, Michael C. "Character Development in a Distance Education Literature Course: Perspectives on Independent Study English 395R-Christian Fantasy Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2009. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3157.pdf.
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Oberer, Karen. "The arc of character: medieval stock types in Shakespeare's English history plays." Thesis, McGill University, 2012. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=106396.
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This dissertation focuses on practices of stock characterisation as they are represented in literature and drama of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in England, with particular emphasis on the transformations of social types from medieval literature to early modern drama, specifically Shakespeare's English history plays. Its wider focus is on the social context in which medieval authors created their characters, and on the conventional construction of medieval characters from what Elizabeth Fowler defines as "social persons." I argue that stock characters allow for permeability between past history and present performance. Attendant on their deployment in literature and drama is their recollection of past literary and cultural traditions. This is why Shakespeare employs them to such great effect in his English history plays: stock characters have an overt purchase on the past that makes history more socially immediate to early modern audiences. Shakespeare's stock characters recall medieval privileging of family and community, and thus are particularly suitable to the English histories' narratives of a country subsumed by family tragedy. The dissertation focuses on four social persons which Shakespeare uses to construct stock characters: the Garcio, the Alewife, the Corrupt Clergyman and the Romance Heroine. He employs these social persons in four characters: the Bastard Faulconbridge in King John, Mistress Quickly in the second "tetralogy," Cardinal Beaufort in the first "tetralogy" and Queen Isabel in Richard II. This dissertation is intended to provoke reconsideration of the stock characters as "flat" stereotypes, and to elaborate upon their complex roles in literary and dramatic history.Cette thèse examine la représentation des personnages types dans la littérature et le drame en Angleterre du quatorzième au seizième siècle en mettant particulièrement l'accent sur les transformations des types sociaux entre la littérature médiévale et le drame de la Renaissance, surtout dans les pièces historiques britanniques de Shakespeare. Au plus large, la thèse porte sur le contexte social dans lequel les auteurs médiévaux ont façonné leurs personnages et sur la fabrication conventionnelle des personnages médiévaux à partir des « personnes sociales » telles que définies par Elizabeth Fowler. Les personnages types, je soutiens, créent un espace de perméabilité entre l'histoire du passé et la performance au moment présent. L'emploi de ces personnages dans la littérature et dans le drame est associé à leurs souvenirs des traditions littéraires et culturelles du passé. C'est pourquoi Shakespeare s'en sert si bien dans ses pièces historiques : les personnages types ont une prise sur le passé qui rend l'histoire plus immédiate sur le plan social pour les spectateurs de la Renaissance. Les personnages types de Shakespeare rapellent l'emphase sur la famille et la communauté pendant l'époque médiévale, ce qui les rend particulièrement appropriés aux récits des pièces historiques d'un pays subsumé par la tragédie familiale.Cette thèse porte sur quatre personnes sociales à partir desquelles Shakespeare fabrique des personnages types, soit le « garcio », la femme du tavernier, le curé corrompu, et l'héroïne des histoires romanesques. Il a recours à ces personnes sociales dans quatre personnages, soit le bâtard Faulconbridge dans La vie et la mort du roi Jean, Madame Quickly dans la deuxième tétralogie, Cardinal Beaufort dans la première tétralogie, et la Reine Isabel dans Richard II. Le but de cette thèse est de provoquer une reconsidération des personnages types comme des stéréotypes « plats » et d'élaborer sur leurs rôles complexes dans l'histoire littéraire et dramatique.
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Battles, Kelly Eileen. "The antiquarian impulse history, affect, and material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature /." Diss., Connect to online resource - MSU authorized users, 2008.
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Broggi, Alicia. "J.M. Coetzee and the Christian tradition : navigating religious legacies in the novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f53e2155-c9e7-4aad-aed8-d8087f92c5f4.
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This thesis examines how J.M. Coetzee's engagement with Christian thinkers and concepts has shaped his fiction. Through a series of close readings, I show how Coetzee, who does not identify as a Christian, reworks and reimagines concepts from key Christian interlocutors across his writings. Each close reading is informed by a consideration of what Coetzee had himself been reading during the writing process, based on evidence in interviews, essays, monographs, and archival materials. Attending to Coetzee's reading and writing, together, illuminates the distinctively self-conscious nature of his engagement with Christianity. Whereas current Coetzee criticism has given attention to specific Christian themes and lexical choices in his fiction, this thesis demonstrates that Coetzee's engagement with Christianity is more profound and pervasive than has been credited hitherto. In addition to the vast body of allusion to Scripture in his writings, Christian thinkers have in fact played a major role in his innovative approach to the novel, a genre predominantly forged in Christian contexts, and in his handling of narrative more generally. Through its explication of Coetzee's extensive dialogue with Christian thinking, and with the Bible, across the full span of his career, this thesis seeks to describe the nuanced and diverse ways in which Coetzee's writings have revised and reimagined this vast and complex religious legacy.
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Mullally, Erin Eileen. "Giving gifts : women and exchange in Old English literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3061960.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-271). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Ferretter, Luke. "Towards a Christian literary theory." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15232.
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Most contemporary literary theories are either explicitly or implicitly atheistic. This thesis describes a literary theory whose principles are derived from or consistent with Christian theology. It argues against modern objections to such a theory that this is a rationally and ethically legitimate mode of contemporary literary theory. The first half of the thesis constitutes an analysis of deconstruction, of Marxism and of psychoanalysis. These are three of the most influential discourses in modern literary theory, each of which constitutes a significant argument against the existence of God, as this has traditionally been understood in Christian theology. In a chapter devoted to each theory, I examine its relation to Christian theology, and argue that it does not constitute a conclusive argument against the truth-content of such theology. I go on to assess which of its principles can be used in modem Christian literary theory, and which cannot. The second half of the thesis constitutes an analysis of a Christian tradition of thought that pertains to literary theory. In the fourth chapter, I examine the concepts of language and of art expressed or implied in the Bible, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and assess which of these concepts could be used in Christian literary theory today. In the fifth chapter, I examine certain twentieth-century Christian philosophers and literary critics, and assess how their thought could be used in contemporary Christian literary theory. In the final chapter, I synthesize the conclusions to these arguments into the outline of a literary theory that both derives from Christian theology and takes account of the objections to such theology posed by contemporary literary theory.
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Potter, John. "Vocal authority : style and hegemony in the history of English singing." Thesis, Open University, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.386266.
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DiCuirci, Lindsay Erin Marks. "History's Imprint: The Colonial Book and the Writing of American History, 1790-1855." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1280362004.
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Sherlow, Lois Juanita. "Towards interculturalism: A critical history of contemporary drama in Canada." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/10363.
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In the late sixties in Canada, the emerging alternative theatre adapted dramaturgical models, many of them from the international countercultural movement of the period, which served as means of challenging the primacy of the playwright and of creating a new decentralized iconography of the Canadian people. In the process of doing so, however, this theatre left many colonialist practices unexamined, and effectively succeeded in disseminating nationalist or centralizing mythologies of utopian populism. Thus, the suppressive effects of colonialism were ironically prolonged as the new nationalist theatre continued to produce marginalizing effects. This study reframes critical perspectives on contemporary theatrical values and practices in Canada by revisiting the ways in which colonialist representation inscribed subordination and marginality in the first place. Since 1980, there has been a significant subversion and effacement of nationalist ideology by the very groups which had been suppressed by the universalizations of populism. In addition, the adoption by many practitioners of decentred, postmodern textuality combined with experimentation in interdisciplinary techniques has created performance modes more adaptable to cultural reality. In Canadian theatre of the nineties, it has become common practice to historicize unitary narratives of culture and self-identity and to construct, instead, intercultural texts which acknowledge the co-presence of universality and difference, and which assist in drawing spectators with diverse cultural expectations into communal experience.
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Hoffman, Nicholas D. "The Art of Information Management| English Literature, 1580-1605." Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10013556.
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“The Art of Information Management” explores the ways that information technologies influence thought and take shape in imaginative works of literature at the turn of the seventeenth century in early modern England, from 1580 to 1605. Imaginative literature becomes a space for articulating the challenges presented by discourses perceived to have been unalterably expanded and amplified through technology, as well for experimenting with strategies to respond to those challenges.
Drawing on studies of early modern Materialism, New Historicism, Literary History, Digital Humanities, and Media Archeology, this project seeks to move the understanding of the role information technologies as agents of change forward by relocating debates concerning technology to the spaces imagined in early modern English literature of the fantastic: Thomas Nashe’s multi-modal London and ocean-sanctuary Yarmouth, Edmund Spenser’s Faery Land, William Shakespeare and Robert Armin’s holiday Kingdom of Illyria, and Samuel Daniel’s pastoral Arcadia. In each imagined space, this project looks at the printing press and beyond to attendant technologies in order to develop a better understand of the period’s relationship to our own.
The works considered here expose a moment of feverish innovation with regard to the rhetorical construction of authenticity, political expression, and right behavior. The first two chapters argue that the writings of Thomas Nashe and Edmund Spenser reflect a heightened sensitivity to the speed and timings associated with technologically-mediated discourse. The final two chapters examine the efforts of William Shakespeare, Robert Armin, and Samuel Daniel, as they sort through the solidifying perception of discourse structures outpacing traditional modes of thought and learning.
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Prager, Valerie. "Comparative analysis of the Christian theme in Soviet literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1993. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=67518.
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During the 70 years of the Soviet regime the officially approved Soviet literature consistently reflected an exclusively materialistic world view. As a result, there were very few critical works, published in the West, dealing with the Christian theme in Russian literature of the Soviet period.Surprisingly, literature with the Christian theme did exist in the years of militant state atheism. Such literary works raised questions about the purpose of life, about truth, moral courage and the person of Christ. These books were published during the 60-s, the time of the "thaw", and became a focal point of public discussions. Two of them--Bulgakov's "Master i Margarita" and Pasternak's "Doktor Zhivago" were internationally acknowledged as major literary works.
This study will examine in detail and compare five literary works with christian content, published in the Soviet years of Russia. Two of them were mentioned above. The other three are "Plakha" by Aytmatov, "Dzhvari" by Alfeeva and "Fakul'tet nenizhnikh veshchei" by Dombrovsky.
The existence of such literature proves that all the efforts to suppress the human spirit and its longing for the Absolute have failed.
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Bisdorff, Claire Janine. "Essayer des mots : translating French and English Caribbean literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609255.
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Pruitt, John. "British drama museums : history, heritage, and nation in collections of dramatic literature, 1647-1814 /." View abstract, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3203336.
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