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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Christian poetry, Nigerian (English)'
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Esser, Carolin Maud. "Naming the divine : designations for the Christian God in old English poetry." Thesis, University of York, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.434102.
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Herbison, David Ivan Currie. "The legacy of Christian epic : a study of Old English biblical and hagiographical poetry." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.394463.
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Turner, Kandy M. (Kandy Morrow). "A Study of "The Rhyming Poem": Text, Interpretation, and Christian Context." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1986. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331700/.
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The purpose of the research presented here is to discover the central concept of "The Rhyming Poem," an Old English Christian work known only from a 10th-century manuscript, and to establish the poem's natural place in the body of Old English poetry. Existing critical literature shows little agreement about the poem's origin, vocabulary, plot, or first-person narrator, and no single translation has satisfactorily captured a sense of the poem's unity or of the purposeful vision behind it.
The examination of text and context here shows that the Old English poet has created a unified vision in which religious teachings are artistically related through imagery and form. He worked in response to a particular set of conditions in early Church history, employing both pagan and Christian details to convey a message of the superiority of Christianity to idol-worship and, as well, of the validity of the Augustinian position on Original Sin over that of the heretical Pelagians.
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Leduc, Natalie. "Dissensus and Poetry: The Poet as Activist in Experimental English-Canadian Poetry." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/38773.
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Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.
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Richardson, Rebecca M. "A silent savior the inapproachability of Christ in the Dream of the rood /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/6679.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008.Title from Graduate School website. The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 22, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.
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Fletcher, Elizabeth Read David. ""Noble virtues" and "rich chaines" patronage in the poetry of Amilia Lanyer /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri--Columbia, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/6590.
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The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on November 13, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. David Read. Includes bibliographical references.
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McMullen, Mary Katherine. "Wrestling power George Herbert's struggle for spiritual union /." To access this resource online via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses @ UTEP, 2008. http://0-proquest.umi.com.lib.utep.edu/login?COPT=REJTPTU0YmImSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=2515.
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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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Chatfield, Thomas Edward Francis. "Beyond realism and postmordernism : towards a post-Christian morality in the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1db4198a-56e4-417d-b5e5-eb6586a6d7d6.
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This thesis evaluates and re-evaluates the relationship between the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis through a detailed examination of their published works, and attempts to locate this relationship in the context of the central moral uncertainties of post-1945 British fiction. Most previous critical studies of these authors have tended to discuss the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis in terms of an opposition between the father's realism and the son's postmodernism, and have debated Philip Larkin's influence upon Martin Amis only tangentially. Against this trend, this thesis argues that these three authors share a commitment to literature as a public, moral act, and, in particular, that their works share the intention of articulating a number of closely related secular 'human values' which map out a potential post-Christian morality in British society. The thesis also examines a common tension within their oeuvres inimical to such hopes - the fear that the possibilities of rational self-scrutiny and of becoming 'less deceived' have been discredited by the history of the twentieth century, and that this history instead evidences the dominance of irrational and self-destructive tendencies in the human. These fears, it is further claimed, are implicated in the works of all three authors in a tendency towards the construction of Edenic myths, deterministic simplifications, and despairing devaluations of the value of human life. Overall, this thesis makes the case for the significance of the common concerns of Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin's works in the context of contemporary literary studies: their efforts to create in art an unpretentiously 'public space' for the address of burning moral and existential issues, and their unresolved struggles with the question of what it might mean to live a good life in a society which no longer possesses religion as a common moral language.
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Wallace, Amy. "Waste Land or Promised Land: T.S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society." TopSCHOLAR®, 1987. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2945.
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In T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society, the poet questions the nature of our society's foundations; he believes that Western culture is moving dangerously closer to the liberal and secular and that this shift could be disastrous. Instead, Eliot suggests that we return to what is at the very roots of Western tradition: Christianity. To facilitate this change in direction, Eliot stresses the importance of an educational system which takes a Christian perspective. Also important in his thinking is a Community of Christians, who would act as leaders, and the Christian community (encompassing most of the population), which would restore unity to what has become a depersonalized existence. The philosophical validity of Christianity is integral to Eliot's scheme, and is explained well by author C. S. Lewis. Historian Christopher Dawson outlines the intertwining of religion and culture and the debt Western civilization owes the Christian faith. Eliot's poem The Waste Land is a picture of a society whose barrenness is ironic in light of the promise of life which surrounds it. Both the individuals and their society are blind to their own spiritual deaths. Also echoing Eliot's ideas concerning a Christian society, The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party are plays of rejuvenation, in which a sacrificial death--whether literal or figurative--brings new life, both to the individual characters and their broken relationships. As allegories of the family of man, Eliot uses the families in these plays to illustrate the change that could turn a waste land into a promised land.
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Gaw, Cynthia. "Freedom in George Herbert's 'The Temple'." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683068.
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Goddard, Kevin Graham. "Defined by wine : a study of sacramentalism in George Herbertʾs poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001828.
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This dissertation proposes that George Herbertʾs poetry may profitably be understood as a sacramental means by which the divine is made present in temporal existence. In order to support this claim, the relation between sacramental symbolism and literary symbolism, particularly Herbertʾs, is examined from a number of perspectives. The symbolic meanings suggested by Herbertʾs title (The Temple), and their relation to sacramentalism are considered in the opening chapter. This includes a consideration of some of the background to the analogical thinking prevalent in both the seventeenth-century and Herbert. It is followed in the second chapter by an examination of some of the modern theories about how literary symbolism may relate to sacramental symbolism, a discussion which is followed by a consideration of this dissertation's argument in relation to modern scholarship. The chapter ends with a reading of ʺThe Flowerʺ. The third chapter discusses the poet's attempt to imitate the divine by ʺcopyingʺ both Scripture and Nature, and this includes a consideration of the allegorical and hieroglyphic modes of thought prevalent in the poems. The concern with imitation encourages an examination of the poet's frequent invitation for God actually to assume the poet's role, and this is the subject of the fourth chapter. The argument suggests that the poet's attempt to ʺsacrificeʺ his own writing may be seen in his concern with corporate imagery and corporate (impersonal) structures. The five ʺAfflictionʺ poems are examined as examples of the first, while structures such as synecdoche and metonymy are examined as examples of the second. The final chapter considers aspects of narrative time in the poems, particularly the sense often evoked of the eternal being imminent in the present. This involves a consideration of both liturgical imagery, and what may be called liturgical structures as they can be seen to operate in the poems. Particular examples of the latter are the relation between the liturgical anamnesis and the poems, as well as certain narrative structures that may be called ʺachronisticʺ.
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Bray, Robyn. "'A scholar, a gentleman, and a Christian' : John Josias Conybeare (1779-1824) and his 'Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry' (1826)." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4709/.
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This thesis contextualises the life and work of John Josias Conybeare (1779-1824), one of the first to hold the Rawlinson chair of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, and considers his contribution to the development of Old English studies as a discipline. I argue that he has been unduly marginalised as a result of posthumous criticism that has failed to acknowledge the extent of his contribution to Old English scholarship. Part I of the thesis considers this issue from the perspective of John Josias himself, setting him in the context of the period in which he lived and the longer continuum of Old English studies as a whole. It also reconstructs what is known of his associates and friends, illustrating that he occupied a central position among the literati of his day alongside figures such as Thomas Gaisford (1779-1855), Joseph Hunter (1783-1861), Robert Southey (1774-1843), and Sharon Turner (1768-1847). Part II focuses on Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1826), the scholar’s most well-known and significant contribution to Old English studies, which was published posthumously by John Josias’ brother, William Daniel (1787-1857), and widow, Mary (1790-1848). This section traces the composition of the book from its first conception through to its final publication and critical reception, using previously unpublished correspondence to disambiguate the contribution of the author from that of his editors. This is followed by an examination of John Josias’ ability as an early editor of Old English, which critically evaluates some of his transcriptions, translations, and interpretations as they appeared in Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, with particular attention to his work on Widsith and the Exeter Book. Part III contains transcripts of unpublished correspondence and other documents that provide details about John Josias’ life and, in particular, about the preparation and posthumous publication of his Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. This thesis, which brings together genealogical, scholarly, and archival materials, constitutes the first comprehensive study of his life and work. My reassessment of his scholarship concludes that John Josias in fact made a substantial and influential contribution to the discipline, deserving of greater recognition today.
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Alger, Jean. "Aemilia Lanyer's threads in the tapestry of dialectical devotion /." Read thesis online, 2010. http://library.uco.edu/UCOthesis/AlgerJ2010.pdf.
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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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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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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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Langdell, Sebastian James. "Religious reform, transnational poetics, and literary tradition in the work of Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2e8eb46-5d08-405d-baa9-24e0400a47d8.
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This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.
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Teller, Joseph R. "Members of his body Christ's passion and community in early modern English poetry, 1595-1646 /." 2010. http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-07122010-114117/.
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Saretto, Gianmarco Ennio. "Consuming the Word: Figures of Vernacular Translation in Late Medieval Christian Poetry." Thesis, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-r5cp-wq08.
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More than any other period in the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages were informed by translation. Practices of translation pervaded and underlay every aspect of medieval culture and politics. Yet, our understanding of how medieval writers thought about translation remains profoundly lacking. Most contemporary histories of translation theory choose to neglect the Middle Ages entirely, or to turn them into a footnote to Jerome’s distinction between “sense-for-sense” and “word-for-word” translation. Consuming the Word offers a new approach to medieval translation theory by considering texts, genres, and forms that have been largely neglected by scholars. While most research in this field has concentrated on texts that are regarded as explicitly “theoretical,” such as prefaces, commentaries, and treatises, Consuming the Word extends this investigation to the figurative language of “literary” works: poetical texts written primarily for moral and intellectual edification, aesthetic pleasure, and entertainment. By analyzing an archive of four 14th-century devotional poems composed in Spanish, Italian, and Middle English, this dissertation demonstrates that the writers of the Middle Ages articulated arguments on language, interpretation, and translation whose complexity and originality greatly surpassed the arid and derivative thinking about translation that is generally attributed to this period.
Consuming the Word further demonstrates that, by the late 14th century, Christian devotional writers tended to deploy a particular figure to construct arguments on translation, interpretation, and vernacularity: the figure of gluttony. In the first chapter of this dissertation I examine the theories of language and translation conceived by Dante Alighieri in the first decades of the 14th century. I argue that the figures of consumption and gluttony that appear in the last section of Purgatorio are meant to convey a theoretical justification for his use of the vernacular, bringing to fruition several contradictory arguments that are only outlined in his two previous works on the subject: Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the second chapter I concentrate on Cleanness, an anonymous and generally overlooked Middle English poem in which the poet ostensibly eulogizes the virtue of purity. By examining its figurative depictions of cooking and feasting, I contend that, rather than as a casual assortment of disparate scriptural episodes, Cleanness should be interpreted as a coherent argument in favor of vernacular translation. On the contrary, in the third chapter I show how a contemporary Middle English poem, the more famous Piers Plowman, relies on the personification of gluttony to disclose an almost antithetical argument. In Piers Plowman, vernacular translation is described as a losing bargain, morally and intellectually detrimental. In my fourth and final chapter, I turn to the celebrated Libro de Buen Amor, to analyze how its figures of eating and overeating convey an argument on the endlessness of all interpretation and on the importance of choice in the act of translating.
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Meehan, Kathryn Stewart Walker Eric. ""When my pen begins to run" class, gender, and nation in the poetry of Christian Milne /." 2004. http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04122004-123047.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004.Advisor: Dr. Eric Walker, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 17, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.
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Myers, Benjamin. "The theology of freedom in Paradise Lost." 2004. http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/1157/1/01front.pdf.
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Milton scholarship remains divided between characterisations of Paradise Lost’s theology as either “orthodox” or “heretical.” In this study I situate Paradise Lost within its complex post-Reformation context, and I argue that its theology is more variegated and more elusive than either straightforwardly orthodox or straightforwardly heretical readings have tended to suggest. This study pursues the theological portrayal of freedom as it unfolds throughout Paradise Lost, and seeks to identify and explore the ways in which the poem’s theology is continuous and discontinuous with the major post-Reformation theological traditions. By teasing out the complexities of this theology and the distinctive manner in which it draws on diverse post-Reformation traditions, this study offers a nuanced reading of the poem which allows its theology to emerge clearly on its own terms. In particular, this reading of Paradise Lost highlights the poem’s profound commitment to both human and divine freedom. It is this commitment which underlies the poem’s appropriation and reformulation of a wide range of existing theological concepts in its unique and compelling account of the idea of freedom.
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Schoen, Jenna. "Romantic Theology: Contemplating Genre in Late Medieval England." Thesis, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-jc43-jk69.
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This dissertation explores the use of romance across religious poetry in late medieval England. Medieval devotional poems frequently borrow motifs and devices from romance; they might, for example, figure Jesus as a knight jousting with the devil or adopt the romance technique of interlace to narrate the Passion. Critics most frequently read these borrowings as a popularizing method, arguing that the poets of these religious texts turn to romance in order to appeal to their secular audience. I argue instead that late 14th century Middle English poets use romance to explore difficult theological paradoxes and Christian practices. In Pearl, the romance descriptio personae helps articulate the paradoxes of divine reward, at once hierarchical and egalitarian. In Piers Plowman, the romance incognito demonstrates the shifting and multivalent nature of the Trinity. In St. Erkenwald, the slow indulgence of romance wonder stands in contrast to God’s time, which is simultaneously immediate and drawn-out. In the Canterbury Tales, the romance parody of Thopas primes the reader for the prudential lessons of Melibee.
This dissertation adds to a growing body of scholarship that reads medieval romance, and in particular Middle English romance, as a genre that does not simply entertain audiences but also interrogates, challenges, or reiterates medieval values and ideas. However, this project adds to current scholarship by examining romance out of its native context and inside or beside religious genres instead. In the first three chapters, I argue that by triggering a romantic reading, the Middle English poems Pearl, Piers Plowman, and St. Erkenwald enact and demonstrate the conceptual difficulties of certain theological paradoxes. In these poems, romance serves as a contemplative tool by demonstrating the reader’s comprehensive limits in the face of the divine. My fourth chapter, which explores Chaucer’s romance parody Sir Thopas alongside his pedagogical treatise Melibee, instead considers the Christian virtue of prudence; here, the exaggerated romance tropes of Sir Thopas prepare the pilgrims to pay penance prudentially by feeling and contemplating time in daily Christian life. While romance does not articulate a paradox about God in Thopas-Melibee, it still prompts contemplation about a difficult Christian virtue, prudence. In all four chapters, I find that romance serves as a vehicle for spiritual contemplation because of its own modes of thinking, whether that be social, economic, or temporal. Whether romance is set within or beside devotional texts, the secular genre allows the reader to contemplate difficult Christian theology and practices and to experience them as difficult in contemplation. Romance, I argue, is a critical tool in the vernacular theologian’s toolkit.
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Levin, Yisrael. ""O sun that we see to be God": Swinburne's Apollonian Mythopoeia." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/1284.
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This dissertation examines the place of Hellenism in nineteenth-century literature as a background to my discussion of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetic treatment of Apollo, the Greek god of poetry and of the sun. My point of departure is the common view that sees the Victorians’ fascination with Hellenism as representing a collective sense of dissatisfaction with Christian culture, its politics, and morality. Raised High Anglican, Swinburne was an avid and devoted believer throughout his early life. However, a spiritual crisis which he experienced during his years in Oxford in the late 1850s caused him to grow extremely critical of Christianity and eventually forsake his faith by his mid-twenties. Yet Swinburne’s rejection of Christianity did not result in his rejection of spirituality. And indeed, throughout his poetic career, Swinburne searches for alternative deities that would replace the Christian God. One such deity is Apollo, who becomes a pivotal figure in Swinburne poetry starting with the 1878 publication of Poems and Ballads and in the collections that follow. Focusing on seven major poems written during a period of almost three decades, I show how Apollo serves as the main deity in an emerging Swinburnean mythology. Swinburne’s Apollonian myth, I show, consists of three stages: the invocation and conceptualization of Apollo as a new god by manipulating Biblical and Classical notions of divinity; the formation of a unique Apollonian theology; and the shift toward a nihilistic agnostic vision of spirituality. Each stage, I argue, presents the development of Swinburne’s thought, as well as his deep engagement with nineteenth-century debates about religion, mythography, and the reformative function of poetry. As such, my dissertation has two main purposes: first, expanding the scope of Swinburne scholarship by providing a new thematic context for his later poetry; and second, reclaiming Swinburne’s place in nineteenth-century intellectual history by showing his contribution and involvement in discussions about some of the period’s most central issues.