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Bingham, Sarah. "Colour in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2018. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.766284.
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In early modern England, colour was both a material and a textual preoccupation. However, the polychromatic palette that surrounded English men and women, and the particoloured palette of early modern writers, has thus far received little scholarly attention. This thesis rethinks the culture of colour in England between c. 1580 and c. 1660 to stimulate and enhance critical appreciation of colour in early modern literature. In contradistinction to the monochromatic trend of current cultural histories and early modern research, in this thesis I analyse all colours, situating these within their original socio-cultural contexts to substantiate the significance of colour in a literary text. My contextualised and polychromatic colour-concern offers an alternative method to traditional quantitative or symbolic approaches to colour in literature, as it takes into consideration how colour was experienced during an era that was attentive both to the material qualities and textual existence of colour. This thesis explores five "colourscapes," which include the workplace, household, Church, New World, and theatre, in order to finesse connections between colourful environs and attendant colour-configurations in early modern English literature. Attending to rhetorical instantiations of colour, and to the lived experience of colour as manifested in literature, this thesis offers an analytical lens through which early modern scholars, and literary scholars alike, can approach colour in literature.
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Frazer, P. "Deviant mobility in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.546343.
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De, Ornellas K. P. "Troping the horse in early modern English literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.273067.
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Giglio, Katheryn M. "Unlettered culture the idea of illiteracy in early modern writing /." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/login?COPT=REJTPTU0NWQmSU5UPTAmVkVSPTI=&clientId=3739.
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Hoffman, Tiffany. "Virtuous passions: Shakespeare and the culture of shyness in early modern England." Thesis, McGill University, 2014. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=122962.
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The dissertation develops an interdisciplinary account of the psychological and affective state of shyness, and examines representations of the emotion, along with its variant states shame, bashfulness, and modesty, in Shakespeare and in other early English literature. It brings together work from various fields: literature, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, religious studies, classics, and ancient philosophy. It is a literary study, but also considers medical, political, theological, and social tracts. The dissertation begins with an exploration of the classical emotion concept the fear of shame, and finds the roots of shyness in the virtue ethics tradition of Aristotle. It then moves on to examine the influence Aristotle's moral philosophy had on early modern conceptions of shyness, especially as a religious passion associated with conscience. In view of the way new modes of courtesy, social humility, and courtly interaction infiltrated the predominantly male world of civil conversation, the dissertation outlines how the cultural status of shyness shifted throughout the period. As I demonstrate, shyness underwent a radical secularization and went from being widely understood as a religious emotion to a pathological condition linked to melancholy.Chapter one investigates Shakespeare's interest in the gendering of shyness, and argues that the rising prevalence of bashfulness amongst male courtiers contributed to the medicalization of the emotion in the period. The chapter develops an account of Shakespeare's King Henry the Sixth: a figure whose characterization exemplifies the rapid transformation of shyness as it devolved from a virtuous moral and religious passion into one associated with notions of male disease and political immorality. The following chapters, however, reveal a shift in perspective. In Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare questions the early modern pathologization of bashfulness through his endorsement of an Aristotelian account of shyness as a social, ethical, and religious virtue. In these plays the experience of bashfulness operates as a governing emotional force over the advancement of sinful forms of pride and vengeance, and produces a spiritually reformative and transformative effect within the Christian subject. By calling attention to the moral and religious connotations associated with bashfulness throughout its history, the dissertation seeks to counter the medicalization and denigration of shyness currently taking place in the modern world.La présente thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre interdisciplinaire d'une étude psychologique et affective de la timidité. Aussi rend-elle compte, chez Shakespeare et autres premiers littérateurs anglais, des représentations de l'émotion dans ses états de honte, d'embarras et de modestie. Elle fait également appel à plusieurs disciplines: littérature (y compris celle des Anciens), psychologie, neuroscience, sociologie, études religieuses. Elle est assurément une étude littéraire, encore qu'elle s'appuie également sur les apports de la médecine, de la politique, de la théologie et de la sociologie. La thèse débute par une étude sur la crainte de la honte sous l'angle classique et dans la tradition de l'éthique aristotélicienne. Elle enchaîne sur l'influence exercée par la philosophie morale d'Aristote sur les premières conceptions modernes de la timidité, vue essentiellement comme passion religieuse en étroit lien avec la conscience. Par ailleurs, à mesure que s'établissait un nouveau code de bienséances (courtoisie, humilité, courtisanerie), le monde largement masculin et le comportement qui s'ensuivit en furent affectés. D'où un changement de l'état culturel de la timidité au cours de l'époque. C'est dire que la timidité se vit entièrement sécularisée et devint, d'émotion religieuse qu'elle avait été, une condition pathologique causée par une humeur mélancolique.Le premier chapitre a, pour objet, l'intérêt porté par Shakespeare pour la différentiation sexuelle de la timidité. Son constat: la prévalence grandissante de la timidité chez les courtisans mâles eut pour effet, à l'époque, la médicalisation de l'émotion. Le chapitre renvoie au roi Henri VI, personnage qui illustre la transformation religieuse et morale de la timidité en une maladie d'homme immoral et politique. Les chapitres suivants, toutefois, font montre d'une perspective nouvelle. Dans Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice et Measure for Measure, Shakespeare revient sur son idée initiale. Il met en doute la pathogenèse de la timidité pour reprendre le concept aristotélicien de vertu religieuse, éthique et sociale. Dans les pièces citées, un sentiment de timidité apparaît comme un état émotionnel en pleine force maîtresse plutôt que comme la manifestation d'un péché d'orgueil et de vengeance. Il appelle ainsi à une réformation du cœur et de la spiritualité dans une dogmatique chrétienne. Ainsi, par son retour historique aux diverses connotations morales et religieuses liées à l'embarras, la thèse s'emploie ici, dans un renversement du pour au contre, à démythifier l'actuelle et universelle conception de la timidité, tout ensemble gratuite et dénigrante, comme une source profane de stigmatisation médicale.
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Rosario, Deborah Hope. "Milton and material culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:45542c8d-0049-49cf-8d19-6d206195d9a7.
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In contradistinction to critical trends which have rendered Milton’s thought disembodied, this thesis studies how seventeenth-century material culture informed Milton’s poetry and prose at the epistemic level and by suggesting a palette of forms for literary play. The first chapter explores the early modern culture of fruit. At the epistemic level, practices of fruit cultivation and consumption inform Milton’s imagination and his vocabulary, thereby connecting their historic-material lives with their symbolic ones. Milton further turns commonplace gestures of fruit consumption into narrative devices that frame discussions of agency, aspiration, sinful and right practice. The second chapter examines two floral catalogues to discover how they find shape through the epistemologies of flowers, ceremony, and decorative arts. Here material culture shapes literary convention, as one catalogue is found to secret ceremonial consolation in its natural ingenuousness, while the other’s delight in human physicality upsets the distinctions between inner virtue and outer ornament, faith and rite. In the third chapter, urban epistemologies of light, darkness, movement, and space are examined through urban phenomena: skyline, suburbs, highways, theft, and waterways. By interpellating contemporary debates, these categories anatomise fallen character, intent, action, and their consequences. Milton’s instinctive distaste for urban nuisances is interesting in this Republican figure and is subversive of some ideologies of the text. Discursive and material aspects meet again in the fourth chapter in a discussion of his graphic presentations of geography on the page. Usually prone to analyses of textual knowledge, they are also informed by the embodiment of knowledge as material object. Milton’s search for a fitting cartographic aesthetic for the Biblical narrative and for the rhetoric of his characters leads him to an increasing consciousness of the ideologies energising these material forms. The fifth chapter explores Milton’s engagement with forms of armour and weapons. Military preferences for speed and mobility over armour help Milton explore the difference between unfallen and fallen being. Milton also uses his inescapably proleptic knowledge of arms and armour as a field of imaginative play for representations that are both anachronistic and typological. These lead to a discussion of imitation in the mythic imagination. In each of these studies, we witness Milton’s consciousness of his temporal and proleptic location, and his attempts to marry the temporal and the pan- or atemporal. In the conclusion I suggest that Milton’s simultaneous courting of the atemporal while he is drawn to or draws on temporal material culture imply an incarnational aesthetic.
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Routledge, Amy. "'Dress and undress thy soul' : nakedness and theology in early modern literature and culture." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2014. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/5536/.
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This thesis examines how concepts and images of nakedness are used to shape literary and theological meaning and experience within the literature and culture of early modern England. It considers how nakedness functions within a number of key literary and spiritual forms, including theological treatises, the spiritual allegory, religious lyrics, and drama. The first three chapters establish the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of nakedness, through an examination of the Bible, the works of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Anglican Church practice and debate, and anatomical texts and practices. The final three chapters offer a close analysis of the meaning and affect of nakedness within three distinct literary forms. This thesis contends that nakedness has a spiritual potency: a spiritual charge recognised and utilised by early modern theologians, preachers and writers, as they debated, defined and expressed their faith. It considers how far the meaning of nakedness is shaped by gender, and how early modern society negotiated the tensions between bodily sanctity and obscenity, naked praise and pornography. The thesis concludes by reflecting how far tropes and experiences of nakedness in our time remain obscurely charged, albeit in non-theological contexts, with something like theological meaning.
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Berger, Ronit. "Legalizing love : desire, divorce, and the law in early modern English literature and culture /." Saarbrücken : VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2007. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb411164623.
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Redmond, Michael John. "The Scence lyes in Italy : representations of Italian culture in early modern English drama." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.321486.
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Calbi, Maurizio. "Approximate bodies : aspects of the figuration of power, gender and eroticism in early modern culture." Thesis, University of Essex, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.242233.
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Kim, Bomin. "Recycling History| Early Modern Fasting and Cultural Materialist Awareness in Thomas Middleton." Thesis, New York University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3557008.
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This dissertation explores the possibility of an early modern cultural materialism in selected dramatic works of Thomas Middleton in which fasting plays a prominent thematic role. The once venerable Christian practice of fasting was compartmentalized into secular and religious components in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in England even as its overall practical contour was preserved largely intact. It was subjected to conflicting representations and programs for reform, and appropriated by differing political and ecclesiastical factions. The vicissitudes that beset fasting offered a fertile ground for cultivating an understanding about the nature of the material basis of cultural formations and the historical dynamic governing their fates. It is this indigenous cultural materialist understanding, I argue, that Middleton's treatment of fasting in his dramatic works exemplifies.
The first chapter offers a history of fasting from the early church to its secularization under Queen Elizabeth as Protestant status quo ante in reference to which later departures and appropriations took place. One such departure by King James is the subject of the next chapter on A Chaste Maid in Cheapside in which the king's attempt to re-sacralize fasting is subjected to a materialist satire and made into a springboard for imagining a utopia of a specifically materialist kind. The next chapter on The Puritan contextualizes the play in terms of the puritan attempts to incorporate fasting as part of the Protestant prayer regime in the place of cunning folk's witchcraft and Catholic ecclesiastical magic. Masque of Heroes and Christmas keeping at the Jacobean Inner Temple are the subjects of the last chapter. I discuss the prominence in the masque of the anthropomorphized Fasting Day in connection with inter-generational and inter-constituency struggle for the custodianship of the valued custom of Christmas keeping.
These studies represent a series of historicist contributions to Middleton scholarship on the individual works. More broadly, they constitute an attempt to exploit insights from cultural history and material culture studies to broaden the scope of the study of religion in early modern English drama.
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Hirsch, Brett Daniel. "Werewolves and women with whiskers : figures of estrangement in early modern English drama and culture." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0175.
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Each chapter of Werewolves and Women with Whiskers: Figures of Estrangement in Early Modern English Drama and Culture explores a particular figure of fascination and fear in the early modern English imagination: in one it is owls, in another bearded women, in a third werewolves, and in yet another Jews. Drawing on instances from drama and other cultural forms, this thesis seeks to examine each of these phenomena in terms of their estrangement. There is a symbolic appositeness in each of these figures, whether in estranged and estranging minority groups, such as Catholics, Jesuits, Jews, Puritans, Italians, the Irish, and the Scots; or in transgressive behaviours, such as cross-dressing and gender trouble, infidelity and apostasy, intemperate passion and unnatural desire. Essentially unfixed and unstable, these emblematic figures are indicative of cultural uncertainty and therefore are easily adapted to suit changing political, religious, and social climates. However, adaptability and fluidity come at a price, since figures of difference have an uncomfortable way of transforming themselves into figures of resemblance. Thus, this thesis argues, each of these figuresowls, bearded women, werewolves, Jewsoccupies an undefined and undefinable space on the precarious boundary between the usual and the unusual, between the strange and the strangely familiar, and, most strangely and paradoxically of all, between us and them.
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Miele, Benjamin Charles. ""God's spies": reading, revelation, and the poetics of surveillance in early modern England." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6212.
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"God's Spies": Reading, Revelation, and the Poetics of Surveillance in Early Modern England
The recent material turn in humanities scholarship has yielded fascinating and insightful research in roughly the past decade, especially in the fields of book history and the history of reading. Scholars of material culture have researched the concrete particulars of book production, the places books were sold, and the conditions in which they were read. This dissertation focuses on the clandestine aspects of early modern English material culture, with particular emphasis on the secret spaces in which reading occurred. Early modern English monarchs cultivated a culture of surveillance in an effort to eliminate illicit religious texts, which combined with changes to the conditions in which texts were read to encourage more private and secretive reading habits. Ultimately, technological, religious, and political change became epistemological as readers increasingly applied a hermeneutics of surveillance to the texts they approached, reading for hidden meaning and for total interpretive control of a text. Writers of imaginative fiction staged scenes of what I call textual surveillance in their works, transforming the hermeneutics of surveillance into a poetics of surveillance that scrutinized the validity of this interpretive strategy and explored how these material, religious, and political changes warped the way readers interpreted, thought, and perceived reality.
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Lublin, Robert I. "Costuming the Shakespearean stage visual codes of representation in early modern theatre and culture /." Connect to this title online, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1060614385.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.Document formatted into pages; contains x, 256 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2005 Aug. 11.
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Porterfield, Melissa Rynn. "Warning, Familiarity and Ridicule: Tracing the Theatrical Representation of the Witch in Early Modern England." Connect to this document online, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1114108678.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Theatre, 2005.Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], ii, 104 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-104).
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Hodder, Mike. "Petrarch in English : political, cultural and religious filters in the translation of the 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta' and 'Triumphi' from Geoffrey Chaucer to J.M. Synge." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:49cdf913-cd2a-48c6-bf1e-533052018285.
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This thesis is concerned with one key aspect of the reception of the vernacular poetry of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), namely translations and imitations of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf) and Triumphi in English. It aims to provide a more comprehensive survey of the vernacular Petrarch’s legacy to English literature than is currently available, with a particular focus on some hitherto critically neglected texts and authors. It also seeks to ascertain to what degree the socio-historical phenomena of religion, politics, and culture have influenced the translations and imitations in question. The approach has been both chronological and comparative. This strategy will demonstrate with greater clarity the monumental effect of the Elizabethan Reformation on the English reception of Petrarch. It proposes a solution to the problem of the long gap between Geoffrey Chaucer’s re-writing of Rvf 132 and the imitations of Wyatt and Surrey framed in the context of Chaucer’s sophisticated imitative strategy (Chapter I). A fresh reading of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is offered which highlights the author’s misgivings about the dangers of textual misinterpretation, a concern he shared with Petrarch (Chapter II). The analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion in the same chapter reveals a hitherto undetected Ovidian subtext to Petrarch’s Rvf 190. Chapter III deals with two English versions of the Triumphi: I propose a date for Lord Morley’s translation which suggests it may be the first post- Chaucerian English engagement with Petrarch; new evidence is brought to light which identifies the edition of Petrarch used by William Fowler as the source text for his Triumphs of Petrarcke. The fourth chapter constitutes the most extensive investigation to date of J. M. Synge’s engagement with the Rvf, and deals with the question of translation as subversion. On the theoretical front, it demonstrates how Synge’s use of “folk-speech” challenges Venuti’s binary foreignising/domesticating system of translation categorisation.
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Jones, Melissa J. "Early modern pornographies." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3278243.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3870. Adviser: Linda Charnes. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 8, 2008).
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Allen, Lea Knudsen. "Cosmopolite subjectivities and the Mediterranean in early modern England." View abstract/electronic edition; access limited to Brown University users, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3318286.
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Kelly, Denise. "Time in early modern English theatre and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.695382.
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This thesis explores the emergence of the theatre in England as significantly congruent with the horological evolutions of the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. It examines the cultural texture of England's shifting notion of time, and demonstrates that the theatre was not simply an event that occurred within time, but a powerful cultural institution that actively deployed it. Through an exploration of the works of playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, John Fletcher, Robert Green, Margaret Cavendish, and William Davenant, and an engagement with a range of theoretical paradigms, this thesis resituates early modern England and the theatre in the horological narrative and establishes the theatre as a significant time-keeping institution.
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Clark, Douglas Iain. "Theorising the will in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2015. http://digitool.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26032.
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This thesis examines how the faculty of the will was conceptualised in early modern English literature. The attempt to understand its function and purpose was a crucial concern for a vast range of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, largely because of the important role the notion of the will played in the development of classical philosophy and the reformation of Christian theology. Providing a coherent definition of the will, its powers and associated functions in the human subject did, nonetheless, pose a significant problem for many early modern writers. Although scholars have documented the impact that notions of will had in the theology of the period, an analysis of the way in which the will was represented in the drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean England is missing from current academic criticism. This thesis seeks to remedy this gap in scholarship by clarifying the conceptual difficulties involved in theorising the powers of the will in the philosophy of the age, and by demonstrating how these difficulties are represented and played with in the period's drama. This thesis contributes original knowledge to the field of early modern studies by illustrating: the role that notions of will take in shaping the didactic framework of the morality tradition in late sixteenth-century drama; how the will was used to establish and explore notions of malevolence and acts of moral transgression in early modern plays; the part theories of the will played in shaping how notions of death and human fate were signified in early modern texts. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the literary representation of the faculty of the will should be understood to be a vital and essential part of early modern intellectual culture.
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Collins, Nicholas J. "Forming the nation : early modern England and modern Ireland." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/77249/.
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Previous work links early modern England with modern Ireland solely through the figure of Shakespeare. This thesis broadens the connection to early modern literature more generally, and examines the deeper cultural tie between the two temporo-geographical spaces. In forming nations, writers in the two periods adopt the same strategies; England and Ireland as nation-states emerge into modernity in the same manner because they share a cradle of modernity, characterised by widespread cultural production. The respective polities of Elizabethan England and the Irish Republic are shaped by the same forces: modern Ireland is not merely postcolonial, but is post-early modern England. Without a positive engagement with early modern England, there is no modern Ireland. In five chapters I examine different formal arrangements that are rewritten through literary culture. The relationship between mothers and daughters in James Stephens and Eavan Boland is central to Irish modernity through the motif of maternity, as with Queen Elizabeth I. Fathers and sons in Pádraic Pearse, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and in John McGahern are reorganised into fraternal relationships at the foundation of Ireland’s modernity alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-5) and King Lear (1605-6; 1609). Ghosts are the ideal figure of the sovereign, descending from Hamlet into J. M. Synge, Joyce’s ‘Hades’ and John Banville. Additionally, bodies are the most alienating form, yet provide the surest path to personal sovereignty from Volpone (performed 1605-6; published 1607) to Troilus and Cressida (1602), through to Samuel Beckett and Edna O’Brien. Finally, a national poet emerges from the nationalised land in the dance of John Davies’ Orchestra (1596) and W. B. Yeats, as in the digging of Hamlet (1600-1) and Seamus Heaney. We have long known about early modern writers’ importance to the shape of the nation, and here those ideas are updated. They now show how modern Irish writers’ contribution to the Republic’s polity forms through their English forebears several centuries earlier; the literary form of the nations gives rise to authors’ sovereignty – authors who in English script the modern Irish nation. Note on the Text When citing William Shakespeare I use the latest Arden editions, but I do not footnote references; instead I cite in parentheses in the main text. Occasionally I have used a different Shakespearean text, which has been signalled in the notes. Standard systems of reference have been adopted for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Joyce’s Ulysses. I parenthetically cite line numbers for poems, rather than increase the number of notes. For prose and for drama, aside from Shakespeare, notes are used. Notes are reset for each chapter.
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Pappa, Joseph. "Carnal reading early modern language and bodies /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2008.
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Bowles, Amy. "Ralph Crane and early modern scribal culture." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/269693.
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This thesis investigates the twenty-six manuscripts which survive in the hand of the scribe Ralph Crane (1565?-1632?), and the manuscript culture in which he wrote and circulated these copies. It introduces six previously unknown Crane manuscripts, and fully evaluates Crane's scribal work as a whole for the first time. Chapter One considers the place of manuscript copies in early modern England. It introduces Crane as one of the figures responsible for the production of these copies, and details what is known of his life and career. Chapter Two situates Crane's work alongside that of other scribes, using the manuscript circulation of Sir Henry Mainwaring's early 1620s naval dictionary 'Parts and Things belonging to a Ship' as a case-study. Chapter Three looks at Crane's eight dramatic manuscripts, and argues that the presentational habits for which Crane is known were consciously adopted in order to turn dramatic texts into private, literary, presentation manuscripts. Chapter Four introduces two new Crane manuscripts, both of which contain early copies of Francis Bacon's correspondence. It considers how these Bacon manuscripts fit into the rest of Crane's scribal corpus, and how they capture an early moment in the construction of the statesman's literary legacy. Chapter Five examines Crane's manuscript poetry collections, and the other scribal circles in which these poems can be found. It finds that professional scribes, though operating separately, employed similar strategies. Finally, this thesis concludes by examining how all these copies can help to illuminate a recently discovered manuscript that otherwise gives little away. Crane's manuscripts show that he was an active textual agent: his activity arose from a responsive engagement with his texts, a consideration of their use, and a desire to produce professional and valuable volumes. His manuscripts are important witnesses to the role of the professional scribe and the manuscript circulation of literature in early modern England.
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Barrett, Christine. "Navigating Time: Cartographic Narratives in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10320.
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In the sixteenth century, the cartographic revolution was rapidly changing the experience of everyday life in England. Modes of thinking and inhabiting space (such as astronomy, trigonometry, surveying, and cartography) were advanced and refined, and in England, the map went from rarity to ubiquity in less than seventy years. Navigating Time explores how literary strategies changed in response to this rapid shift in the technology of spatial representation. I consider four epics, the epic being the early modern genre most overtly invested in matters of empire (and thus, in matters of space and history). Building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities, I argue that the epic offers a radical critique of the technological innovations of the cartographic revolution and the menace those innovations posed. Alongside this critique, the early modern epic outlined a new poetics centered on navigation. Epics by Holinshed, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton sought to encompass the representational possibilities of the map, but also to highlight and exceed the map's narrative insufficiency. Holinshed's Chronicles reforms the topography of the city, converting its streets and alleys into historical texts and presenting historiography and mapping as competing interpretive frameworks for urban space. The Faerie Queene redefines genre as the conduct of bodies in space, making it thus impossible to fix Faeryland as a mappable terrain, and asserting the continuous interpretation required by allegory against the compression imposed by the map. Drayton's Poly-Olbion seems at first to be a verbal map of Britain, but the poem quietly insists on the power of literature not to mimic but rather to supplant the world it describes, becoming the terrain a map can only represent. Finally, Milton's Paradise Lost creates a form of navigating without a destination, by transforming history into a geographic expanse that cannot be mapped, only wandered.
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Ashworth-King, Erin L. Barbour Reid. "The ethics of satire in early modern English literature." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,2593.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009.Title from electronic title page (viewed Oct. 5, 2009). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature." Discipline: English and Comparative Literature; Department/School: English and Comparative Literature.
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Hong, Sara. "Moving Imitation: Performing Piety in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, Boston College, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/644.
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Thesis advisor: Mary T. CraneUsing the rich concept of imitatio as an organizing theme, this study explores the tangibility of faith and a privileging of an affective, embodied religious subjectivity in post-Reformation England. Moving Imitation asserts that literary and devotional concepts of imitatio--as the Humanist activity of translation and as imitatio Christi--were intensely interested in semiotics. Indeed, if the Renaissance was a period in which literary imitatio flourished, advancements in translation theory were not unaccompanied by anxieties--in this case, anxieties about the stability of language itself. Likewise, as iconophilia turned into iconophobia, a similar anxiety about the reliability of signs also characterized the turmoil of the English Reformation. Moving Imitation examines the overlapping qualities of both types of imitatio in order to point out how an important devotional aesthetic in the period involves a type of embodied imitation. The human body's resonance with the humanity of Christ and the pre-Cartesian worldview that saw the human body as fully engaged with what we consider to be more cognitive functions contributed to a privileging of the body as an acceptable sign of true devotion. Beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt's paraphrase of the traditional penitential psalms, Moving Imitation explores the translation of penitence in Wyatt's work, and argues that a focus on David's outward gestures and body lends a firmness to a work that is otherwise anxious about the mutable nature of human words. Chapter two examines the suffering bodies in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments and their enactment of a visible imitatio Christi. Terms such as "members" function in its corporeal and communal senses in Acts and Monuments, for the marks of one's membership in the "true church" are born, literally, on one's members. Although much of Foxe's argumentation includes polemical disputes that seek to shut out a copia of meanings to the words, "This is my body," Foxe as an editor exploits the polysemous nature of the body in its corporeal and communal sensibilities. The performative aspects of martyrdom pave the way to a discussion of what I call transformative imitatio in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Winter's Tale. Although the theater's ability to "body forth" its fiction is a source of anxiety for antitheatricalists, proponents of the stage saw it as a way to defend the theater. Moving Imitation notes that the characterization of the stage's dangers--the ability to move people's affections--articulates an important Reformist desire: that the individual subject should not only be affected, but also be galvanized into devotional imitation. Such interest in action becomes important in Hamlet; if the central dilemma of the play (Hamlet's inability to take action) is considered against a common religious dilemma (how one stirs oneself towards genuine worship) the solutions as well as the problems overlap. Through the statue scene of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare defuses the danger attributed to the stage by animating a potentially idolatrous image with life; in ways that were only hinted at in Hamlet, The Winter's Tale makes use of the lively bodies onstage to suggest that the presumed connection between idolatry and the imitative stage is an unwarranted one, and "to see... life as lively mocked" can help to perform redemption
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
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Wright, Myra. "Whores and their metaphors in early modern English drama." Thesis, McGill University, 2010. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86819.
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Several clusters of metaphors were routinely used to represent the sex trade onstage in early modern England. Close philological study of these figures reveals that even the most conventional metaphors for whores and their work were capable of meaning many things at once, especially in the discursive context of the drama. This project follows a practice of reading that admits multiple significations for the words used by characters on the early modern stage. I argue that metaphors are social phenomena with consequences as varied and complex as the human interactions they're meant to describe. Each chapter treats a different set of images: commodities and commercial transactions, buildings and thoroughfares, food and drink, and rhetorical and theatrical ingenuity. Using methods based on the study of conceptual metaphor in the field of cognitive linguistics, I trace the deployment of conventional figures for prostitution in plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. I also introduce occurrences of these metaphors in other genres (news pamphlets, prose narratives, homilies, medical manuals, and so on) to show that they were part of pervasive cultural patterns. The readings below dwell on the figurative associations that were most available to early modern writers as they fashioned prostitute characters for the stage—metaphors commonly taken for granted as literal descriptions of sex work. An understanding of the social force of metaphor begins with the realization that words convey more than any writer, printer, or actor intends. The language of prostitution in the early modern theatre is therefore both common and complex, much like the characters it conjures.Pendant la Renaissance, divers grappes de métaphores étaient utilisées couramment dans les représentations théâtrale de la prostitution en Angleterre. Des études minutieuses philologiques des métaphores pour les putains et leur travail révéler que même les plus conventionnelles pouvaient signifier plusieurs choses à la fois, particulièrement dans le contexte discursif du théâtre. Le projet suit un procédé de lecture qui admet plusieurs significations pour les mots utilisés par des personnages de la Renaissance. Je soutiens que les métaphores sont des phénomènes sociaux qui ont des conséquences aussi variées et complexes que les interactions humaines qu'elles sont censées décrire. Chaque chapitre met en évidence une différente série d'images: les marchandises et transactions commerciales, les bâtiments et les voies urbaines, la nourriture et les boissons, l'ingénuité rhétorique et théâtrale. En utilisant des méthodes basées sur l'étude des métaphores conceptuelles dans le domaine de la linguistique cognitive, je retrace le cortège des figures conventionnelles de prostitution dans les pièces de théâtre de William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, et John Marston. Je signale aussi l'existence de ces métaphores dans d'autres genres littéraires (pamphlets de nouvelles, narratives en prose, homélies, manuels médicaux, etc.) pour démontrer qu'elles faisaient partie des tendances culturelles omniprésentes. Les explications ci-dessous s'entendent sur les associations figurées qui étaiaent les plus à la disposition des écrivains de la Renaissance en façonnant les personnages des prostituées—les métaphores qui étaient souvent considerées comme constituant les descriptions littérales du travail sexuel. Pour bien comprendre la force sociale de la métaphore, il faut realiser d'abord que les mots communiquent beaucoup plus qu'un écrivain, un imprimeur, ou un acteur les destine. La la
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Morris, Robert Blair. "Shakespearean secularizations: endangering beliefs on the early modern stage." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=117007.
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This dissertation sets out to offer a renewed perspective on the participation of Shakespeare's theatre in the secularization of early modern England. It engages with current theories of secularization, in which the pluralization of beliefs is recognized as fuelling secularizing processes, as opposed to longstanding subtraction theories of secularization, which have mistakenly charted a comprehensive decline of belief. While this study acknowledges the historical reality of Shakespeare's involvement in the secularization of the religious landscape of early modernity, it also resists the common reception of his plays as prescient anticipations of much later secularisms. I argue that these retroactive secularist interpretations of the plays have tended to elide the profoundly conflicted responses to secularization in Shakespeare's drama. This dissertation's historical investigation of tolerance, demonism, blasphemy, and love in the plays reveals that while Shakespeare's dramas do often convey an implicit recognition of the possible opportunities that secularization presented, they also represent it as a development that could render humans vulnerable to social and to supernatural harm. The introductory chapter provides an overview of current secularization theory, focusing particularly on Charles Taylor, the most influential proponent of recent developments in our understanding of secularizing processes. In cooperation with other theorists, Taylor has reanimated the idea of secularization by reconceiving of it as an unpredictable and dynamic process, largely driven by the pluralization of beliefs over time. I take up this hypothesis by demonstrating its potential for analyzing tolerance in several of Shakespeare's comedies, as well as more generally as a means of furthering critical debate on Shakespeare and religion. Chapter one is devoted to Shakespeare's theatricalization in Othello of the idea that the devil could make use of the discordant processes of the Reformation, as well as of the innovations of humanism, both pluralizing engines of secularization in the period, in order to infiltrate weakened spiritual communities. Chapter two investigates Shakespeare's response in Macbeth to legislation that prohibited blasphemous swearing in public entertainments. Shakespeare appears to have been inspired by the new bill to write Macbeth in a way that superficially complied with the law, but which nonetheless engaged profoundly with the dispersion of the post-Reformation idea of blasphemy into a secularizing plurality of beliefs, a fragmentation that is enacted in the play with an ambiguous mixture of approval and disapproval. In the final chapter, I consider how in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare recuperates the radicalism of the Franciscan Order's societal and poetic ideals of relational and spiritual love in ways that initially appear to support, but which then ultimately subvert, English Protestantism's tentative investment in matrimonial love as the principal means by which the fraying bonds of the religious and the secular dimensions of Reformed society might be restored. Instead of celebrating a unified representation of Catholic or of Protestant aspirations for marriage, the play concludes by evoking a secularizing plurality of options for belief in matrimony, an impetus which has contributed to the currently widespread, albeit variously experienced, belief in wedded love as the cornerstone of the modern social imaginary.Cette thèse propose une perspective renouvelée sur la participation du théâtre de Shakespeare dans la sécularisation de l'Angleterre pendant la Renaissance. Elle utilise les théories actuelles de la sécularisation, selon lesquelles la pluralisation des croyances est reconnue pour avoir alimenté les processus de sécularisation, contrairement aux théories dites « de soustraction » qui attribuent ceux-ci à une diminution globale de la croyance religieuse. Bien que cette étude reconnaisse la réalité historique de l'implication de Shakespeare dans la sécularisation du climat religieux de la Renaissance, elle résiste également à l'idée populaire que ses pièces anticipaient de façon presciente la laïcité moderne. Je soutiens que ces interprétations rétroactives des pièces de Shakespeare ont eu tendance à élider les réponses en conflit à la sécularisation contenu dans le drame de Shakespeare. Cette enquête historique de la tolérance, du démonisme, de blasphème, et d'amour dans les pièces de Shakespeare révèle que ses drames véhiculaient non seulement la reconnaissance implicite des opportunités que la sécularisation présentait, mais aussi d'un développement capable de rendre les humains plus vulnérables à l'endommagement social et surnaturel. Le chapitre d'introduction fournit une vue d'ensemble de la théorie de la sécularisation actuelle, en se concentrant particulièrement sur Charles Taylor, le partisan le plus influent des développements récents dans notre compréhension des processus de sécularisation. Avec d'autres théoriciens, Taylor a ravivé l'idée de sécularisation en la présentant comme un processus imprévisible et dynamique, conduit principalement par la pluralisation des croyances au fil du temps. J'applique cette hypothèse en démontrant son potentiel pour l'analyse de la tolérance dans plusieurs comédies de Shakespeare, ainsi que plus généralement comme un moyen de faire progresser le débat critique sur Shakespeare et la religion. Le premier chapitre est consacré à Othello où Shakespeare théâtralise l'idée que le diable peut faire usage des processus discordants de la réforme protestante, ainsi que des innovations de l'humanisme, deux instigateurs de la pluralisation séculaire durant cette période, afin d'infiltrer une communauté spirituelle affaiblie. Le deuxième chapitre étudie la réponse de Shakespeare dans Macbeth à la législation interdisant le langage blasphématoire dans les spectacles publics. Ici, Shakespeare décrie le nouveau projet de loi en écrivant d'une manière conforme seulement en apparence à la loi, mais qui en réalité promulgue une dispersion de l'idée post-réforme du blasphème en une pluralité séculaire de croyances, une fragmentation qui est jouée dans la pièce par le biais d'un mélange ambigu d'approbation et de désapprobation. Dans le dernier chapitre, je considère comment, dans Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare s'appuie sur le radicalisme des idéaux sociaux et poétiques de l'ordre Franciscain, particulièrement ceux concernant l'amour relationnel et spirituel, d'une manière qui apparait initialement à le soutenir, mais qui finalement s'insurge contre l'investissement du protestantisme anglais dans l'amour matrimonial comme principal moyen de restauration des dimensions religieuses et séculaires de la société réformée. Au lieu de célébrer une représentation unifiée des aspirations catholiques ou protestantes du mariage, la pièce se termine en évoquant une pluralité d'options pour séculariser la croyance dans le mariage, un élan qui a contribué à faire aujourd'hui de l'amour conjugal, sous toutes ses formes, une fondation de l'imaginaire social moderne.
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Bertram, Benjamin Glenn. "Skepticism and social struggle in early modern England /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1997. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9804020.
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Cairns, Daniel. "As it likes you early modern desire and vestigial impersonal constructions /." Waltham, Mass. : Brandeis University, 2009. http://dcoll.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23236.
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Tibbs, Simon John. "Lineages of Turkish power in early modern writing in English." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/571.
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The Ottoman Turks were of England's cultural others perhaps the most widely written about in the early modem period. The texts devoted to them cover a wide range of literary kinds, including history, drama, travel narrative, religious tract, newsbook, and ballad. This thesis concentrates pincipally on history writing and drama,a ddressing the image of the Turks as one of violent power, expressed in their immemorial hostility towards Christians, and in their internal dynastic relationships. The difference of the Turks is closely bound up in early modern writings with their descent, both in relation to distant forbears such as the Saracens and Scythians, and locally within the Ottoman dynasty. In approaching the early modern literature about the Turks as a series of interrelated lineages of power, my main aim has been to trace the relationship between the images of the ancient and modern Ottoman rulers. These two aspects of the early modern sense of the difference of the Turks are signalled by the division of the thesis into two parts, Part One, The Originall of the Turks, addressing ancient lineages, and Part Two The Image of the 0thoman Greatnesse, modern ones.
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Albano, Caterina. "Representations of food and starvation in early modern English drama." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314188.
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Johnson, Toria Anne. "'Piteous overthrows' : pity and identity in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4197.
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This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.
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Zlatkin, Rachel L. "Remembering Mothers: Representations of Maternity in Early Modern English Literature." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1368014379.
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Alfar, Cristina León. ""Evil" women : patrilineal fantasies in early modern tragedy /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9455.
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Wood, Jennifer Linhart. "Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Theater and Travel Writing." Thesis, The George Washington University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3587221.
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My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. "Sounding" implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. "Otherness" in this study refers to a foreign presence outside of the listening body, as well as to an otherness that is already inherent within. Sounding otherness enacts a bi-directional exchange between a culturally different other and an embodied self; this exchange generates what I term the sonic uncanny, whereby the otherness interior to the self vibrates with sounds of otherness exterior to the body. The sonic uncanny describes how sounds that are perceived as foreign become familiar through the vibratory touch of the soundwave that attunes a body to its sonic environment or soundscape. Sounds of foreign Eastern and New World Indian otherness become part of English and European travelers; at the same time, these travelers sound their own otherness in Indian spaces. Sounding otherness occurs in the travel narratives of Jean de Lèry, Thomas Dallam, Thomas Coryate, and John Smith. Cultural otherness is also sounded by the English through their theatrical representations of New World and Oriental otherness in masques including The Masque of Flowers, and plays like Robert Greene's Alphonsus, respectively; Shakespeare's The Tempest combines elements of East and West into a new sound—"something rich and strange." These dramatic entertainments suggest that the theater, as much as a foreign land, can function as a sonic contact zone.
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Criswell, Christopher C. "Networks of Social Debt in Early Modern Literature and Culture." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2014. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799514/.
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This thesis argues that social debt profoundly transformed the environment in which literature was produced and experienced in the early modern period. In each chapter, I examine the various ways in which social debt affected Renaissance writers and the literature they produced. While considering the cultural changes regarding patronage, love, friendship, and debt, I will analyze the poetry and drama of Ben Jonson, Lady Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Middleton. Each of these writers experiences social debt in a unique and revealing way. Ben Jonson's participation in networks of social debt via poetry allowed him to secure both a livelihood and a place in the Jacobean court through exchanges of poetry and patronage. The issue of social debt pervades both Wroth's life and her writing. Love and debt are intertwined in the actions of her father, the death of her husband, and the themes of her sonnets and pastoral tragicomedy. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), Antonio and Bassanio’s friendship is tested by a burdensome interpersonal debt, which can only be alleviated by an outsider. This indicated the transition from honor-based credit system to an impersonal system of commercial exchange. Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608) examines how those heavily in debt dealt with both the social and legal consequences of defaulting on loans.
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Hartmann, Anna-Maria Regina. "Reading the ancient fable : early modern English mythographers 1590-1650." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610786.
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Anderson, David. "Violence against the sacred: tragedy and religion in early modern England." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=32544.
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This dissertation argues that the tragedy of the English Renaissance reflects the religious culture of the era in its depiction of sacrificial violence. It contests New Historicist assumptions about both the relationship between religion and politics, and the relationship between religion and literature, by arguing that the tragedians were reflecting the Girardian sacrificial crisis that characterized martyr executions in the sixteenth century and which was fuelled by uncertainty within the church over the issue of violence. Chapter One develops the historical framework. It begins by surveying the history of Protestant and Catholic martyrdom in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It then traces the doctrine of the persecuted church—the recovered New Testament sense that the true church is necessarily a persecuted minority that suffers for Christ's sake—in various religious writers of the period. The most important of these writers is the martyrologist John Foxe, who fostered an anti-sacrificial strain of Christianity from within the national church. Finally, I discuss how this victim-centred theology disrupted consensus at religious executions, offering an emotional template that the tragedians exploited. Each of the three subsequent chapters is devoted to a different tragedian. Chapter Two discusses William Shakespeare's King Lear, a play which is radical in its sympathy for the sacrificial victim. King Lear shows no particular faith in Christian redemption, but in this very lack of transcendence it demystifies and condemns sacrificial violence. Chapter Three is devoted to John Webster's two tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Here, theNotre thèse soutient l'idée que la tragédie de la renaissance anglaise reflète la culture religieuse de l'époque dans son évocation de la violence sacrificielle. Elle conteste les présupposés du néo-historicisme à l'égard de la relation entre la religion et la politique et entre la religion et la littérature, en proposant que les dramaturges exprimaient à travers leurs tragédies une crise sacrificielle girardienne qui caractérisait les exécutions des martyres au seizième siècle et qui était alimentée par une crise de conscience par rapport à la violence qui s'exprimait au sein même de l'église. Le premier chapitre fait état du contexte historique. Nous nous intéressons d'abord à l'histoire des martyres protestants et catholiques au seizième et au début du dix-septième siècles. Nous détaillons ensuite la doctrine de l'église persécutée, c'est à dire la conviction issue du nouveau testament que la véritable église est nécessairement une minorité persécutée au nom du Christ, au travers des écrits de nombreux écrivains de l'époque. Figure illustre parmi ces écrivains, le martyrologue John Foxe cultivait une tendance anti-sacrificielle au sein de l'église nationale. Nous examinons enfin comment cette théologie centrée sur la victime bouleversa le consensus face aux exécutions religieuses, en présentant un champ émotionnel exploité par les dramaturges tragiques. Chacun des trois chapitres suivants se consacre à un différent dramaturge. Le deuxième chapitre aborde King Lear de Shakespeare qui se distingue précisément par la compassion qui y est manifestée pour la victime sacrificielle. King Lear ne fait preuve d'aucune
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Smith, Katherine Jo. "Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry in early modern England." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/95225/.
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This thesis explores the genre of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry and its tradition in early modern English literature. In looking at original poems, translations and receptions of Ovid’s Heroides, I argue that female as well as male writers throughout the early modern period engaged with the tradition of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry. By using case studies advancing chronologically throughout the period, I will also show how female-voiced complaint changes and develops in different historical and literary contexts. Nobody as yet has produced a study looking at a large sample of women writing female-voiced complaint. The criticism around complaint is diffuse, with only a small number of book-length studies which focus on complaint in general as a genre or discourse. There are many articles or chapters on individual complaint poems but not many which compare different female-voiced complaints of the same period, especially those written by women. When female poets write in the genre, the rhetorical trope of Ovidian female-voiced complaint (that the sex of the author is discontinuous with that of the speaker) must be renegotiated. This renegotiation by female poets is often the result of close and learned engagement with the traditions of complaint, both the classical precedents and the receptions and re-imaginations of the genre in early modern England. They are choosing a genre which has a productive potential in being female-voiced but which also has a tradition of male manipulation. However, rather than seeing women writers as existing separately from male writers, I argue that they work in parallel, drawing on the same Ovidian complaint traditions.
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Decamp, Eleanor Sian. "Performing barbers, surgeons and barber-surgeons in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:42cdcea1-56b8-4d3d-961f-d2a3e7fa0d13.
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This study addresses the problem critics have faced in identifying contemporary perceptions of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon in early modernity by examining the literature, predominantly the drama, from the period. The name ‘barber-surgeon’ is not given formally to any character in extant early modern plays; only within the dialogue or during stage business is a character labelled the barber-surgeon. Barbers and surgeons are simultaneously separate and doubled-up characters. The differences and cross-pollinations between their practices play out across the literature and tell us not just about their cultural, civic and occupational histories but also about how we interpret patterns in language, onomastics, dramaturgy, materiality, acoustics and semiology. Accordingly, the argument in this study is structured thematically and focuses on the elements of performance, moving from discussions of names to discussions of settings and props, disguises, stage directions and semiotics, and from sound effects and music, to voices and rhetorical turns. In doing so, it questions what it means in early modernity to have a developed literary identity, or be deprived of one. The barber-surgeon is a trope in early modern literature because he has a tangible social impact and an historical meaning derived from his barbery and surgery roots, and consequently a richly allusive idiom which exerted attraction for audiences. But the figure of the barber-surgeon can also be a trope in investigating how representation works. An aesthetic of doubleness, which this study finds to be diversely constructed, prevails in barbers’, surgeons’ and barber-surgeons’ literary conception, and the barber-surgeon in the popular imagination is created from opposing cultural stereotypes. The literature from the period demonstrates why a guild union of barbers and surgeons was never harmonious: they are opposing dramaturgical as well as medical figures. This study has a wide-ranging literary corpus, including early modern play texts, ballads, pamphlets, guild records, dictionaries, inventories, medical treatises and archaeological material, and contributes to the critical endeavours of the medical humanities, cultural materialists, theatre historians and linguists.
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Lavery, Hannah. "The development of the impotency poem into early modern English literature." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.489100.
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In this thesis I explore some of the key influences and lines of descent whereby we arrive at the Restoration 'imperfect enjoyment' poem. I demonstrate how the notion of 'influence' as a necessary part of the development of the impotency poem leads to satiric reinterpretation in reference to different cultural and historical contexts. This recognises the tradition's vitality and force, allowing the impotency poem to transgress cultural and linguistic boundaries with ease, and yet maintains a clear focus on the core elements of the original impotency poems.
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Stockton, William H. "Sex, sense, and nonsense the anal erotics of early modern comedy /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3274908.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2960. Adviser: Linda Charnes. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 10, 2008).
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Stafford, Brooke Alyson. "Outside England : mobility and early modern Englishness /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9326.
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Price, Victoria. "Discursive prostitution : (re)positioning women in early modern literature and culture." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.403208.
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Hill, Alexandra Nicole. ""Bloudy tygrisses" murderous women in early modern English drama and popular literature /." Orlando, Fla. : University of Central Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002727.
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Breuer, Heidi Jo. "Crafting the witch: Gendering magic in medieval and early modern England." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280400.
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This project documents and analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. The prophet becomes the wicked witch. This dissertation explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation. Chapter Two surveys representations of magic in the texts of four authors within the Arthurian canon: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Layamon. These writers gender magic similarly (representing prophecy and certain forms of transformative magic as masculine and healing as feminine) and use gendered figures to mitigate the threat of masculine power posed by the feudal patriarchy present in England and France in the twelfth century. Chapter Three explores representations of two magical characters who appear in a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romances associated with Gawain: the churlish knight and the loathly lady. The authors of these romances privilege gender conventions radically different from those in earlier models and conjure a figure neglected by the earlier writers, the wicked witch. In particular, representations of the witch as a wicked step-mother reflect the anxiety created by expanding space for women (especially mothers) in previously exclusively male arenas of English society. In Chapter Four, I follow the romance tradition into early modern England, studying the work of Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare. For these authors, the wicked witch (alternately represented as temptress or crone) is connected specifically to maternity; the severe anxiety about maternity in these texts is representative of widespread concern about mothers and motherhood in sixteenth-century England. Chapter Five traces the legislative policy governing prosecution of witches in England and offers suggestions about the relationship between legal climates and literary representations of magic. Though prosecution of witchcraft is now extremely rare in the U.S., filmmakers still rely on medieval and Renaissance models to inform their representations of witches. Once she arrived, the witch never left.
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Ettari, Gary. ""That within which passeth show" : the dialectics of early modern subjectivity /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9383.
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Chaghafi, Elisabeth Leila. "Early modern literary afterlives." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c46edf04-50ed-4fc0-8d4f-74dfdfdb470e.
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My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.
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Farabee, Darlene. "Print travels movement and metaphor in the early modern era /." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file, 296 p, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1456289051&sid=3&Fmt=2&clientId=8331&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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