To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: English English literature Religious literature.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English English literature Religious literature'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'English English literature Religious literature.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Keating, Lise Manda. "Religious propaganda in selected Anglo-Saxton literature." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/17868.
Full textAbstract:
Includes bibliographical references.This study of selected Old English texts, from the canons of Aelfric and Cynewulf, presents the argument that the primary purpose of the Saints' Lives in question is that of instruments of persuasion. After a description of the rites of Anglo-Saxon paganism, an attempt is made to outline the manner in which the Christian missionaries used certain aspects of pagan belief to promote Christianity. As such, these texts may therefore be viewed as religious propaganda in the Anglo- Saxon Church's attempt to win new converts to Christianity and to strengthen the faith of those already within its fold, firstly by promoting belief in the miraculous and secondly by investing Anglo-Saxon Christianity with the supernatural powers of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Pagan religions. Although the works of Cynewulf predate those of Aelfric, I have chosen to discuss the prose works of Aelfric first. However, I do not believe that reversing the historical order invalidates the argument.
2
Malo, Roberta. "Saints' relics in medieval English literature." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1186329116.
Full text
3
Welch, Mary T. "Early English religious literature : the development of the genres of poetry, narrative, and homily /." Read thesis online, 2009. http://library.uco.edu/UCOthesis/WelchMT2009.pdf.
Full text
4
Mann, Erin Irene. "Relative identities: father-daughter incest in Medieval English religious literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4873.
Full textAbstract:
Medieval tales of father-daughter incest depict more than offensively dominant fathers and voiceless, victimized young women: these stories often contain moments of surprising counternarrative. My analysis of incest narratives foregrounds striking instances of feminine resistance, where daughters act independently, speak unrestrainedly, adopt masculine behaviors, and invert masculine gazes. I argue that daughters of incestuous fathers participate in a complex back-and-forth of attraction and rejection that thrusts the fraught nature of the incest into sharp relief, revealing the ways in which medieval families--as well as the medieval church and state--constructed and deconstructed identities and sexualities. Extending Judith Butler's insights on how incest tales interrogate state and kinship networks, I show how the liminal position of daughters in the family destabilizes the sex/gender system as it functioned in both the family and the larger world, secular and sacred. My dissertation thus relocates daughters from the periphery to the center of the medieval family. Christian thematics likewise provide a key framework for both my argument and medieval audiences: biblical translations and retellings, saints' lives, and moral exempla offered familiar points of reference. By revealing how authors and artists employed well-known religious stories to impart political readings of sexuality and of the family, the four chapters of my dissertation assert daughters' key role in medieval Christian culture. I examine both Anglo-Saxon texts--the biblical epic Genesis A and the prose Life of Euphrosyne--as well as the late medieval poem Cursor mundi and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. My readings are enhanced by recourse to the medieval visual record offered by three manuscripts that illustrate the Lot story--British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv, the Old English Hexateuch, and Oxford Bodleian Library MSS Junius 11(the Genesis A manuscript) and Bodley 270b, a Biblé moralisée. Artistic renderings of father-daughter incest are no less unsettled than their literary counterparts, and demonstrate that the position of daughters was so fundamentally unstable that it often varied not only within an era, but also within a single manuscript. I argue that authors and artists radically reimagined the fundamental texts of the Middle Ages, including the Old Testament, to establish new narratives of sin and salvation, self and other, and power and submission.
5
Tann, Donovan Eugene. "Spaces of Religious Retreat in Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Culture." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2014. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/277961.
Full textAbstract:
EnglishPh.D.
Religious spaces are inextricably bound to the seventeenth century's most challenging theological and epistemological questions. In my dissertation, I argue that seventeenth-century writers represent specifically religious spaces as testing grounds for contemporary theological and philosophical debates about the material foundations of religious knowledge and the epistemological foundations of religious community. By examining how religious concerns shape the period's construction of literary spaces, I contend that religion's developing privacy reflects this previously unexamined conversation about religious knowledge and communal belief. My focus on the central theological and philosophical ideas that shape these literary texts demonstrates how this ongoing conversation about religious space contributes to the increasingly individuated character of religious knowledge at the beginning of the long eighteenth century and shapes the history of religion's social dimension. I explore this conversation in two distinct parts. I first examine those writers who contend with new sensory and experiential bases of religious belief as they represent dedicated religious spaces. After considering how Nicholas Ferrar's family pursues religious knowledge through dedicated religious spaces, I argue that John Milton's Paradise Regained evaluates competing bases of religious knowledge through an extended debate about religious space and knowledge. Finally, I contend that Margaret Cavendish transforms an imagined convent space into an argument that nature serves as the sole source of religious knowledge. In the second part, I examine writers who contend with the social consequences of individual accounts of religious knowledge. The sequel to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress articulates the writer's struggle to reconcile an individual epistemology with the concerns of the religious community. Like Bunyan, Mary Astell seeks to unify individual believers with her proposal for a rationally persuasive Cartesian religion. Finally, William Penn relies on the solitary space of the conscience in his advertisements for Pennsylvania. As these writers seek to reconcile the individual's role in the production of religious knowledge with religion's social manifestations, they associate religious belief and practice with increasingly private, bounded constructions of space. These complex articulations of religion's place in the world play a significant role in religion's developing spatial privacy by the end of the seventeenth century.
Temple University--Theses
6
MacDiarmid, Laurie J. 1964. "T. S. Eliot's civilized savage: Religious eroticism and poetics." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282374.
Full textAbstract:
Current studies of T. S. Eliot explore his social poetic, his religion, his sexuality, and his place in the history of modernism and contemporary poetics. "T. S. Eliot's Civilized Savage" links these interests, beginning with Eliot's controversial masculinity. Eliot constructs an impotent poet who engages in celibate heterosexual relationships; he uses comparative religious studies (such as Frazer's Golden Bough and Harrison's Themis) to transform these relationships into a social imperative. "The Death of Saint Narcissus," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Hysteria" compare Eliot's poet to Frazer's self-sacrificing god, pitting him against a voracious mother goddess who demands the poet's self-sacrifice. Eliot's lady poses as an alibi for his own hysteria and as a spiritual catalyst; the poet is reborn in the Father. By Ash Wednesday, Eliot rewrites heterosexuality using Christian iconography. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" exposes Eliot's ambivalent relationship to masculinity and maternity: though Eliot describes a purely scientific poetic reproduction, the essay bears traces of his maternal fascinations, though these images are sterilized by the rhetoric of Immaculate Conception. By 1927, Eliot converts to the Church of England, abandons Vivienne, rekindles a chaste romance with Emily Hale, develops his poetry of confession, and refashions the Lady. Now she acts as the perfect vessel for God's Word, and her "torn and most whole" body eliminates the threat of sexual intercourse. Subsumed in her, Eliot's poet becomes God's womb. Eliot's contemporary fall from grace seems to stem from repeated exposures of his erotic and religious masquerades. Christopher Ricks's publication of Eliot's notebooks foregrounds Eliot's racist, sexist and classicist ideology and Michael Hastings's Tom and Viv suggests that Eliot blamed his hysteria on Vivienne while profiting from the marriage. Eliot's mysticism appears to be an impotent attempt to escape domestic horrors, but a re-examination of this diagnosis may reveal our own construction of sexuality, poetics, politics and spirituality. As we recoil from Eliot's corrosive "conservatism" perhaps we safeguard our own.
7
Stachniewski, J. "The persecutory imagination : English puritanism and the literature of religious despair." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.376025.
Full text
8
Pepperney, Justin R. "Religious Toleration in English Literature from Thomas More to John Milton." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1245245934.
Full text
9
Reeve, Daniel James. "Romance and the literature of religious instruction, c.1170-c.1330." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:00ff0d43-6ace-49e2-a80f-cf5b6c9553fc.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis investigates the relations between romance and texts of religious instruction in England between c.1170–c.1330, taking as its principal textual corpus the exceptionally rich literary traditions of insular French romance and religious writing that subsist during this period. It argues that romance is a mode which engages closely with religious and ethical questions from a very early stage, and demonstrates the discourses of opposition in which both kinds of text participate throughout the period. The thesis offers substantial readings of a number of neglected insular French religious texts of the thirteenth century, including Robert Grosseteste's Chasteau d'Amour, John of Howden's Rossignos, and Robert of Gretham's Miroir, alongside new readings of romances such as Gui de Warewic and Ipomedon. This juxtaposition of romance narrative and religious instruction sheds new light onto both kinds of text: romance emerges as a mode with deep-rooted didactic qualities; insular French religious literature is shown to be intensely concerned with the need to compete with romance’s entertaining appeal in literary culture. This oppositional discourse profoundly affects the form of instructional writing and romance alike. The discussion of the interactions between insular French romance and instructional literature presented here also serves as a new pre-history of Middle English romance. The final chapter of the thesis offers several new readings of texts from the Auchinleck manuscript, including the canonical romance Sir Orfeo and the neglected, puzzling Speculum Gy de Warewyk. These readings demonstrate that fourteenthcentury romance intelligently adapts the material it inherits from Francophone literature to a new cultural situation. In these acts of reformation, Middle English romance reveals itself as a discursive space capable of accommodating a wide range of ethical and ideological affiliations; the complex negotiations between romance and instructional literature in the preceding centuries are an important cultural condition for this widening of possibilities.
10
Hill-Vásquez, Heather. "The possibilities of performance : mediatory styles in Middle English religious drama /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9355.
Full text
11
Heady, Emily Walker. "Conversion in crisis realism and religious experience in the Victorian novel /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3167276.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2005.Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 3, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 1007. Chairperson: Patrick Brantlinger.
12
Donnelly, Phillip Johnathan. "Interpretation and violence, reason, narrative, and religious toleration in the works of John Milton." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/NQ66145.pdf.
Full text
13
Knapper, Daniel. "The Tongue of Angels: Pauline Style and Renaissance English Literature." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1574171968581074.
Full text
14
Ewoldt, Amanda M. "Conversion and Crusade| The Image of the Saracen in Middle English Romance." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2019. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10813454.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract This dissertation is a project that examines the way Middle English romances explore and build a sense of national English/Christian identity, both in opposition to and in incorporation of the Saracen Other. The major primary texts used in this project are Richard Coer de Lion, Firumbras, Bevis of Hampton, The King of Tars, and Thomas Malory?s Morte Darthur. I examine the way crusade romances grapple with the threat of the Middle East and the contention over the Holy Land and treat these romances, in part, as medieval meditations on how the Holy Land (lost during a string of failed or stalemated Crusades) could be won permanently, through war, consumption, or conversion. The literary cannibalism of Saracens in Richard Coer de Lion, the singular or wholesale religious conversions facilitated by female characters, and the figure of Malory?s Palomides all shed light on the medieval English politics of identity: specifically, what it means to be a good Englishman, a good knight, and a good Christian. Drawing on the works of Homi Bhabha, Geraldine Heng, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and Siobhain Bly Calkin, this project fits into the overall conversation that contemplates medieval texts through the lens of postcolonial theory to locate early ideas of empire.
15
Etzkorn, Timothy M. "How freud explains the tudors psychological motivations and historical understanding of tudor England's religious schism /." [Denver, Colo.] : Regis University, 2009. http://165.236.235.140/lib/TEtzkorn2009.pdf.
Full text
16
Brandolino, Gina. "Voice lessons violence, voice, and interiority in Middle English religious narratives, 1300--1500 /." [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:3283967.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-10, Section: A, page: 4305. Adviser: Lawrence M. Clopper. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 20, 2008).
17
Sadedin, Ann. "The uncentred self : image and awareness in the Middle English religious lyrics /." Connect to thesis, 1995. http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00000220.
Full text
18
Wallbank, Adrian J. "Political, religious, and philosophical mentoring of the Romantic period : the dialogue genre." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1068/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the strategies, diversity and evolution of political, religious, and philosophical dialogues between the publication of Sir William Jones’s The Principles of Government (1782) and Robert Southey’s Colloquies on Society (1829). The dialogue genre during the Romantic period has received scant critical attention, and little is known about its evolution between the ‘death’ of the ‘Dialogues of the Dead’ style towards the end of the eighteenth-century and the satirical and literary innovations demonstrated in the dialogues of Peacock and Landor. This thesis elucidates the very significant changes that occurred in dialogue writing during this period in relation to wider contemporaneous issues concerning the Revolution Controversy, evangelical ‘enthusiasm’, reading audiences, the formation of class identities, the diffusion of knowledge, and the burgeoning of the novel to name but a few. Central to my argument is the notion that dialogue enacts a form of mentoring – a procedure that is intended to either directly or indirectly facilitate a ‘conversion’ within the reader, (and which ultimately becomes subverted only in satire). Such tactics go to the heart of debates concerning education, didacticism, and the reading process itself. Dialogue’s encapsulation of the primal constituent in communication - linguistic interchange - raises fundamental questions regarding the exchangeability of ideas, power relations and ideological manipulation, and as such, I look at how writers and propagandists used dialogue to bolster or critique various ideological standpoints, whilst constantly interrogating the many philosophical and textual problems that the genre poses. I argue that such questions, coupled with the increasing sophistication and interpretative capabilities of reading audiences, made the didacticism of the mentoring scenario untenable by the 1820s. However, I conclude that philosophical dialogue becomes an ‘impossible’ venture without some form of direction and coercion, and following this realization, the satirizing of philosophical debate and the process of dialogue itself became a more viable way of dialogue writing.
19
Fee, Christopher Richard. "Torture, text and the reformulation of spiritual identity in old English religious verse." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1997. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1214/.
Full textAbstract:
The Introduction to this thesis includes a brief discussion of various understandings of what torture is, and a statement of the definition of torture adopted for the purposes of this study. Torture, as it is examined in this study, is not so much an act of violence as it is a violent process; that is, torture is a means, not an end in itself, and torture always presupposes intent and causality. Chapter One provides the historical and legal contexts for later literary and theoretical discussions of torture. This chapter is divided into two parts, the first dealing with instances of torture which appear in Anglo-Saxon historical records, and the second dealing with legal codes which are concerned with torture. In the course of this chapter it becomes apparent that torture as a public act serves as a document of sorts, sometimes recording and sometimes interpreting political realities. Any study of torture must be grounded in an understanding of pain, and Chapter Two is concerned with the nature of pain, and with its relationship to torture. The paradox of pain is that it is universal and at the same time isolating and inexpressible. In Chapter Two, a close examination of the language and structure of The Dream of the Rood serves to illustrate that the Anglo-Saxons understood this paradox. The graphic and sometimes almost loving detail with which the poet describes the passion of Christ functions as a language "of weapons and wounds", and helps to convey, in some measure, the almost incommunicable nature of intense physical pain. Chapter Three explores the way in which torture acts may function as language acts, and the necessarily public nature of such performative language. This chapter begins with a discussion of linguistic theories concerning pragmatics and performative language acts. Then, drawing upon textual examples from such Old English sources as Elene, Juliana and Daniel, this chapter examines how torture may be construed as a form of language, and how the performative nature of an act of torture articulates that act's context of power and politics in the culture at large.
20
Varnam, Laura. "The howse of God on Erthe : constructions of sacred space in late Middle English religious literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670140.
Full text
21
Broggi, Alicia. "J.M. Coetzee and the Christian tradition : navigating religious legacies in the novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f53e2155-c9e7-4aad-aed8-d8087f92c5f4.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines how J.M. Coetzee's engagement with Christian thinkers and concepts has shaped his fiction. Through a series of close readings, I show how Coetzee, who does not identify as a Christian, reworks and reimagines concepts from key Christian interlocutors across his writings. Each close reading is informed by a consideration of what Coetzee had himself been reading during the writing process, based on evidence in interviews, essays, monographs, and archival materials. Attending to Coetzee's reading and writing, together, illuminates the distinctively self-conscious nature of his engagement with Christianity. Whereas current Coetzee criticism has given attention to specific Christian themes and lexical choices in his fiction, this thesis demonstrates that Coetzee's engagement with Christianity is more profound and pervasive than has been credited hitherto. In addition to the vast body of allusion to Scripture in his writings, Christian thinkers have in fact played a major role in his innovative approach to the novel, a genre predominantly forged in Christian contexts, and in his handling of narrative more generally. Through its explication of Coetzee's extensive dialogue with Christian thinking, and with the Bible, across the full span of his career, this thesis seeks to describe the nuanced and diverse ways in which Coetzee's writings have revised and reimagined this vast and complex religious legacy.
22
O'Donnell, Thomas Joseph. "Monastic literary culture and communities in England, 1066-1250." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1905660951&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
Full text
23
James, Nicola. "Jane Gardam : religious writer." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7628/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the work of the award-winning contemporary English short story and novel writer Jane Gardam. It proposes that much of her achievement and craft stems from her engagement with religion. It draws on Gardam’s published works from 1971 to 2014 including children’s books and adult novels. While Gardam has been reviewed widely, there is little serious critical appreciation of her fiction and there are misreadings of the influence of religion in her work. I therefore analyse the religious dimensions of her stories: the language, stylistics and hermeneutic of Gardam’s three religious influences, namely the Anglo-Catholic, Benedictine and Quaker movements and how she sites them within her work. The thesis proposes lectio divina, arguably an ancient form of contemporary reader-response criticism, as a framework to describe the Word’s religious agency when embedded or alluded to in fiction. It also considers and applies critical discussion on the medieval concept of the aevum, a literary religious space. Finally, I suggest that religious writing such as Gardam’s has a place in the as yet unexplored ‘poetic’ strand of Receptive Ecumenism, a new movement that seeks to address reception of the Word between members of different faith communities. Having examined many aspects of Gardam’s writing, its history and potential, I conclude that her achievement owes much to her engagement with particular and divergent forms of religious life and practice.
24
Seal, Jill. "Psalms, sonnets and spiritual songs : some traditions and innovations in English religious poetry, c. 1560-1611." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.363689.
Full text
25
Buckner, Elisabeth. "Superior Instants: Religious Concerns in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson." TopSCHOLAR®, 1985. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2195.
Full textAbstract:
When I decided to write a thesis on Emily Dickinson's poetry, my intention was to show that she did, indeed, implement a concrete philosophy into her poetry. However, after several months of research, I realized that this poet's philosophy was ongoing and sometimes inconsistent. Emily Dickinson never discovered the answers to all of her religious and spiritual questions although she devoted her entire life to that pursuit. What Dickinson did discover was that orthodox religion had no place in her heart or mind and she must make her own choices where God was concerned. Immortality was an intense fascination to Emily, and many of her poems are related to that subject. In fact, the majority of Dickinson's poems deal, in some way, with spirituality. Emily Dickinson is a poet who deserves to be studied on the basis of her philosophical pursuits as well as her style. Dickinson scholarship has improved in the past several decades; however, Emily Dickinson has yet to receive the attention she deserves as a philosopher and thinker.
26
Rayment, Andrew David. "The aesthetic and the ethical : the dialogue between religious belief and literary form in D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2006. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11187/.
Full textAbstract:
This is a cross-disciplinary investigation that seeks to read some of the representative works of Eliot and of Lawrence as viewed through the critical lens of Soren Kierkegaard's authorship, its strategies and preoccupations. The third arrival in the earlier development of my theoretical project of cross-reading, and not an ascertainably direct influence, Kierkegaard soon became the dominant maieutic presence in my thesis, a fact that is deliberately signalled by the explicit reference to his Life Stages that my title makes. Some of SK's major concerns were indeed shared, idiosyncratically, by the two later writers, each in his distinct biographical, cultural and historical context. There is little undisputed and ascertainable evidence for any conscious direct influence of Kierkegaard on Eliot and still less so of Kierkegaard on Lawrence, but there are thematic, literary and, I will argue, significant diagnostic points of contact and mutual illumination. As Michael Bell did with Lawrence and Heidegger, beginning with Cassirer (Bell 1991: 3-4,6-10), in the same manner I read Kierkegaard as an 'explicatory parallel' to Lawrence and Eliot, as an aid to clarify and to 'bring out the internal complexity and cogency of ... [each man's] ... conception.' I believe this to be an academically valid and illuminative approach to themes of continuing significance. Biographical research and speculation, which continues to be intense in the case of each of these publicly enigmatic men, is largely eschewed in this literary-critical dissertation except where pertinent. However the issue of 'existence-statement', under the mutually modifying criteria of aestheticism and apostolicity, is at one and the same time a decisive and an elusive concern and how it may be both is a peculiarly Kierkegaardian kind of 'truth'. 'Lives' may not therefore be totally excluded from the perimeters of my discussion but must be discerningly considered, where this is germane, and with no rush to judgement. In his remarkable but flawed major study of Kierkegaard (1993), the late Dr. Roger Poole addressed this issue, perhaps too boldly in the context of a purportedly aesthetic reading, but I follow him to the extent that I have included some of my own very different and tentative researches in these areas largely in the Appendices to my main arguments. I define the twinned issues of aestheticism and apostolicity here as, respectively, projected modes of artistic/imaginative pattern making, and the self-perceived status of one commissioned with a message to proclaim. Between these them comes a second-level Kierkegaardian Stage of awareness, the Ethical, that is transitional, explicitly purposeful but still fundamentally truncated and incomplete. These categories, themselves in constant transition, are central to my cross-comparison because in his distinctive way each writer occupied this thematically complex terrain or, put differently, his work can be profitably read through this theoretical 'grid'. Even a superficial consideration of pseudonymous Kierkegaard, 'doctrinal' Lawrence and 'invisible' Eliot indicates this. Similarly Kierkegaard's deliberate employment of the indirect as a mode of communication sheds real and variegated light on the related practices of the twentieth century authors. In Chapter One, Kierkegaardian diagnostic preoccupations and authorial strategies are presented and contextualised, with emphases on the 'Individual', the 'Stages' and Indirection of Discourse. In Chapter Two Lawrence and Eliot are introduced in their wider cultural setting and Chapters Three and Four develop a relevant Kierkegaardian methodology-in-practice for reading some of Eliot's poetry. Chapter Five scrutinises passages from Burnt Norton as a text of progression-through retrieval. Chapter Six addresses the task of refining a method to engage with Lawrence through a Kierkegaardian approach to a quite different generic type of writer. Chapter Seven exploits the Kierkegaardian concepts of Repetition and his three Stages to inform a reading of Lawrence's most original novel, Women in Love. Chapter Eight reads late Lawrence, sometimes against Eliot, with a view to establishing the nature of Lawrence's final attempts to forge a religious discourse, paying attention again to Kierkegaardian insights. I conclude that through ingenious and dynamic strategies, within formidable constraints and limitations Lawrence attains a fitfully remarkable and, at best, strikingly original achievement of modern religious discourse. In Chapter Nine I draw my generalised conclusions about the value of Lawrence's and Eliot's work in the wider area of religion, language and meaning.
27
Zimmerman, Elizabeth Farrell. "God’s Teachers: Women Writers, Didacticism, and Vernacular Religious Texts in the Later Middle Ages." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1244059446.
Full text
28
Parsons, Catherine Anne. "'Harlots and harlotry' : the eroticisation of religious and nationalistic rhetoric in early modern England." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2011. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6327/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores gendered embodiment in early-modern England as a 'semiotic field' onto which were transcribed anxieties about the contingent nature of individual and national 'masculine' identity in an era of social and religious change and flux. I examine how the construction of an emergent 'Englishness' is articulated through the employment of eroticised metaphors of religious and national opposition. Anxieties about the threat to English national stability are feminised in order to contain and distance them, where the trope of the 'worrying feminine', in the Biblical archetype of the ambitious and sexually promiscuous Whore of Babylon, becomes an 'over-coded' entity representing a spectrum of anxieties surrounding internal and external religious threats to the self-constituted identity of English Protestant masculinity. In contrast to this, chaste female virtue in the form of the Bride of Christ is used, frequently in conjunction with the trope of the 'motherland', to privilege the righteousness of the Protestant masculine agenda against a perceived lack of proper monarchical rule. Together with the insights of literary criticism and history, I draw on models from gender and identity theory and cultural theory of the body, to engage with a series of six 'moments' from 1530 to 1640. Plays by Bale, Sackville and Norton, Shakespeare, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, Davenport, Brome, Richards and Quarles are analysed in conjunction with Spenser's poetry and polemical works by Knox, Aylmer and Stubbes. I explore the ways in which the antithetical tropes are employed and how this reflects, interacts with and works against shifting social and cultural preoccupations. I conclude that the elaborate and over-insistent emphasis upon individual and national masculine supremacy is undermined by the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in its gendered construction. I argue that these disjunctures are nonetheless revealing, since the disentangling and examination of their complexities enables new and productive insights into the cultural climate of the period.
29
Mason, Emma Jane. "Religious intellectuals : the poetic gravity of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4370/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the writing of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti in terms of its expression of religious culture and belief. It is my argument that Brontë and Rossetti experienced religion as intellectuals, questioning and exploring doctrine and dogma neither as sentimental lady Christians nor dismissive, secular critics. I contend that by close reading their poetry, the genre both women privileged as most appropriate for the consideration of religious matters, the reader may trace the sermons and theological works they read. Moreover, their writing, I suggest, evinces their intellectual response to theological, ecclesiological and ecclesiastical developments that took place in the nineteenth century. I thus label Brontë and Rossetti 'religious intellectuals,' a phrase suggestive of their intense understanding of, rather than their mild acquaintance with, religious debate. Many women writing within the nineteenth century found that religion granted them a field within which to freely read and research, but were denied the professional title of 'theologian.' Brontë and Rossetti are thus examples of a wider phenomenon wherein women encountered religion like scholars, one disregarded by current criticism unable as it is to categorize a female activity simultaneously religious and intellectual. I use Brontë and Rossetti as examples of what I call the 'religious intellectual' because they represent different sides of this classification. Where Brontë struggled away from her Methodist background, serving as a cultural commentator on its enthusiastic belief-system, Rossetti forged a scholarly identity as a late member of the High Church Oxford Movement. Both poets, I contend, wrote about religion in order to signal their intellectual ability. I conclude that Brontë's interest in Methodism and Rossetti's fascination with Tractarianism reveals the poets to be both independent of family pressures and false consciousness, and fully engaged with a subject central to their age.
30
Curran, Timothy M. "The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature." Scholar Commons, 2018. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7491.
Full textAbstract:
The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature posits religious medievalism as one among many critical paradigms through which we might better understand literary efforts to bring notions of sanctity back into the modern world. As a cultural and artistic practice, medievalism processes the loss of medieval forms of understanding in the modern imagination and resuscitates these lost forms in new and imaginative ways to serve the purposes of the present. My dissertation proposes religious medievalism as a critical method that decodes modern texts’ lamentations over a perceived loss of the sacred. My project locates textual moments in select works of John Keats, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde that reveal concern over the consequences of modern dualism. It examines the ways in which these texts participate in a process of rejoining to enchant a rationalistic epistemology that stymies transcendental unity. I identify the body of Christ, the central organizing principle of medieval devotion, as the cynosure of nineteenth-century religious medievalism. This body offers a non-dualistic alternative that retroactively undermines and heals Cartesian divisions of mind and body and Kantian distinctions between noumenal and knowable realities. Inscribing the dynamic contours of the medieval religious body into a text’s linguistic structure, a method I call the “medievalizing process,” underscores the spiritual dimensions of its reform efforts and throws into relief a distinctly religious, collective agenda that undergirds many nineteenth-century texts.
31
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.
Full textAbstract:
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
32
Wolf, Johannes. "The art of arts : theorising pastoral power in the English Middle Ages." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/278517.
Full textAbstract:
Gregory the Great described the government of souls as ‘the art of arts,’ a sentiment that the Fourth Lateran Council would echo in 1215. This thesis takes as its fundamental proposition that this ‘art’ can be understood as a ‘craft’, one that is responsible for producing and maintaining a Christian subjectivity marked by introspection, inwardness, and a strong distrust of externalities. Using a theoretical framework influenced by Michel Foucault I suggest a tradition of administering and producing these subjects through ‘pastoral power.’ Charting the trajectory of these ideas from the ascetics of the early church through to fifteenth-century Middle English texts, I explore the dynamics produced by texts invested in producing this specific form of subjectivity as they expand their reach from a specialised audience of monks to an increasingly laicised vernacular sphere. This investigation is broken into two halves. The thesis begins with a re-reading of Michel Foucault’s theories of power and subjection. Here I suggest that there are important conceptual connections between Foucault’s concept of ‘discipline’ and medieval approaches to the care of the soul. The first half of the thesis stresses the longue durée development of pastoral power, focussing on two particular historical moments. The first of these chapters engages with the pastoral and monastic thinkers of the early church, who developed two overlapping regimes – that of body and spirit. The second turns to the Ancrene Wisse, arguing that the it responds to the developments of twelfth-century spirituality by suggesting a form of spiritual engagement that is increasingly imbricated in the mundane world. The second half of the thesis focuses on a number of texts produced in Middle English during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Two chapters focus on a collection of pastoral texts produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first focuses on the hermeneutic dynamics of these texts whilst second chapter assesses the use of documentary imagery and theories of legal accountability in the same texts. The final chapter suggests that certain proto-autobiographical texts, represented by the work of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are conditioned by the concerns and dynamics of pastoral power, which also affects the practices modern readers bring to bear on them.
33
Sahiner, Mustafa. "Reflections of contemporary socio-political and religious controversies in William Shakespeare's Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Henry V and Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3941/.
Full textAbstract:
While the general idea is to illustrate how William Shakespeare reflected the contemporary conflicts and problems of the Elizabethan society, the particular aim of the thesis is to offer a close critical analysis of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, Henry V and Henry VI Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 plays in an eclectic critical approach derived from the theoretical principles of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In order to provide a better understanding of the plays studied in the thesis, there is a presentation of the development of drama, both religious and secular, in the Reformation period. In addition to this, main features of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism are given. The English Reformation and its effects on drama have been given in the introductory chapter. In the first chapter, contemporary religious controversies as reflected in Shakespeare's 1 and 2 Henry VI plays are discussed. The second chapter deals with the reflections of contemporary social conflicts in especially the Jack Cade episode of Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI. In the third chapter, reflections of political conflicts in Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry V, and Henry VI plays are analysed in terms of the appropriation of commoners by the ruling class for the preservation of the dominant order. The thesis concludes that the plays are polyvalent in meaning and thus open to further academic discussions for the years to come.
34
Mai, Chih-Yuan. "Sacrificial form : the libretti in English 1940-2000." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/437/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis focuses on the genre of libretto, the sung words for music theatre. The “little book” which accompanies every operatic performance is not just an extended program note to the spectacle, but in fact a substantial literary form in its own right. However, despite the immense influence of Wagner, the output from librettists in an operatic collaboration, has been serious ignored; indeed in opera the aesthetic function of language is frequently diminished and foreshortened, because it is often re-directed by and within the music. The result is that librettists are often seen as offering words to be “decomposed” by composers in the process of operatic collaboration. Opera, in the English language, finally achieved its rightful status, alongside its European counterparts, during the second half of the twentieth century. The thesis is intended to encompass something of the vast diversity of this genre and discusses a number of individual works as constituting legitimate literary artefacts in their own right. There will be five chapters featured in the thesis and each chapter is devoting to a specific theme.
35
Patterson, Gina Rebekah Joan. "Doing Justice: Addressing the LGBTQ-Religious Junction in English Studies." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1374755476.
Full text
36
Weimer, David E. "Protestant Institutionalism: Religion, Literature, and Society After the State Church." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493395.
Full textAbstract:
Even as the Church of England lost ground to political dissent and New England gradually disestablished its state churches early in the nineteenth century, writers on both sides of the debates about church establishments maintained their belief in religion’s role as a moral guide for individuals and the state. “Protestant Institutionalism” argues that writers—from Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe to George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell—imagined through literature the institutions that would produce a religiously sound society as established churches began to lose their authority. Drawing on novels and poems as well as sermons and tracts about how religion might exist apart from the state, I argue that these authors both understood society in terms of institutions and also used their literature to imagine the institutions—such as family, denomination, and nation—that would provide society with a stable foundation. This institutional thinking about society escapes any literary history that accepts Protestant individualism as a given. In fact, although the US and England maintained different relationships between church and state, British authors often looked to US authors for help imagining the society that new forms of religion might produce precisely in terms of these institutions. In the context of disestablishment we can see how the literature of the nineteenth century—and nineteenth-century novels in particular—was about more than the fate of the individual in society. In fact, to different degrees for each author, individual development actually relies on the proper understanding of the individual’s relationship to institutions and the role those institutions play in supporting societyEnglish
37
Wright, Jarrell D. "Dancing before the Lord| Renaissance ludics and incarnational discourse." Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3725605.
Full textAbstract:
Play is a manifestation of overflowing excess. When applied to the study of discourse, this bounty can be understood in terms of figurativeness and depth. If “degree-zero” discourse is the almost entirely unfigured language of an instruction manual, then verse lies near the other extreme: highly figured and elaborate language open to rich interpretive possibilities. I posit a further pole yet on this continuum: the hyperabundant texts of the Renaissance, when ludics were at a height partially quashed by the Enlightenment preference for the plain style. These ludic texts are not merely decorative but rather reflect the incarnational impulse of Renaissance Christian thought; they attempt to praise and to imitate the power of Divine language, in which Word is made Flesh in the West’s master model of superabundance, grace through Christ’s Incarnation and Sacrifice.
This project conducts three case studies of playfully incarnational discourses during the Renaissance: in speech, in imagery, and in verse. First, it analyzes sermons by John Donne that reflect candidly on the power of Donne’s own ludic speech, concluding that his transgressive, gamelike rhetoric was oriented toward stimulating responsive action. Next, it examines period images through the lens of contemporary popular works that conceive of images as puzzles to be decoded, solved, and read, concluding that period anamorphoses and similar works were efforts to infuse images with lively presence in a way that helps to account for iconophobic and iconophilic strains in English Reformation thought. Finally, it reads George Herbert’s deceptively simple poem, “The Altar,” examining how the piece may be understood as an intervention into the shaped-verse tradition and how it reflects on period debates about Church fabric, concluding that the toylike or tricklike construction evokes the Eucharistic presence of the Divine in Herbert’s worshipful meditation.
At stake are a greater appreciation for Renaissance artistry, a fuller understanding of the complexityof the English Reformation, and a richer vocabularyfor play theorists working with ludic discourses. A conclusion considers these implications and explains whyRenaissance thinkers might have chosen a ludic mode of imitative worship—God’s grace and creation are themselves forms of play.
38
Ward, Lowery Nicholas J. L. "Patriarchal negotiations : women, writing and religion 1640-1660." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1994. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1682.
Full textAbstract:
Women were prominent in the Lollard movement in the fifteenth century, but it is only in the mid-seventeenth century that women begin to produce theological texts which contribute to the controversy over popular religious expression and women's part in religious culture. After 1640 women began to publish on a number of theological issues and in a wide range of genres: prose polemic, prophecy, autobiography and spiritual meditation. Subject to widespread criticism, they quickly had to fashion a rhetoric of justification with which to defend their intervention in print and pacify male critics. This thesis shows that they achieved this in two ways: by producing a literature which complied with the expectations of masculine theological culture and by manipulating these assumptions so as to create space for a female symbolic language of piety. They developed a literary self-consciousness which depends on the idea of subjectivity as a gendered experience and they often resisted their detractors by valorising denigrated forms of female subjectivity and pursuing theological conclusions irrespective of normative ideas of gender. Women did not engage in theological debate in isolation, however. They often intervened as committed members of religious sects and thus deserve to be read as representatives of corporate and communal theologies. In contrast to earlier studies which have sought to recover neglected women writers as early feminists, without reading their work historically, this thesis seeks to uncover the social and the theological rather than the authorial origin of much early modem women's writing and to measure its engagement with early modem debates on women and religious culture. It seeks to challenge the increasingly dominant view of early modem women writers which invests them with too modem an authorial presence, by reconstituting the seventeenth-century debates which gave rise to their work and by bringing modem French feminist perspectives to bear on a period largely untouched by theoretical approaches to literature. To this end it proceeds by way of several close readings of women who wrote as women and as Baptists, Independents, Levellers, Presbyterians and Quakers.
39
Matsuda, Takami. "Death and the afterlife in the Middle English religious lyric : a study in the reception and influence of the idea of purgatory." Thesis, University of York, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.241038.
Full text
40
Dollimore, Jonathan. "Radical tragedy : religion, ideology and power in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1985. http://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/53cbc055-2f12-417b-bf0b-22329cadfb23/1/.
Full textAbstract:
PART I: Literary criticism in the twentieth century has sometimes shown that Jacobean drama challenged religious orthodoxy. The aim of this thesis is to show that this challenge was bound up with other, equally subversive concerns: a critique of ideology and a struggle to demystify political and power relations. In the tragedy here described as radical, power is identified in its complex manifestations and relations, and in its equally complex ideological misrepresentations. This section concludes with a study of three plays which exemplify this radicalism: Marston's Antonio plays and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. PART II: The sceptical interrogation of providentialist belief finds expression in structuralist disjunction rather than teleological development, realist rather than idealist mimesis. These themes are explored in relation to twentieth century and then Renaissance literary theory, theological controversy in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, and then through analyses of Dr. Faustus, Mustapha, Sejanus and The Revenger's Tragedy. PART III. In undermining the purposive and teleologically integrated universe envisioned by providentialists, these playwrights necessarily subverted its corollary: the unitary human subject harmoniously positioned at the centre of the cosmic design. Hence the Jacobean anti-hero: malcontented, dispossessed, satirical and vengeful; at once the agent and victim of social corruption, condemning yet simultaneously contaminated by it; made up of inconsistencies and contradictions which, because they cannot be understood in terms of individuality alone, constantly pressure attention outwards to the conditions of the protagonist'ssocial existence. The Jacobean malcontent is a decentred subject, the bearer of a subjectivity which is not the antithesis of social process but its focus, in particular the focus of political, social and ideological contradictions. Plays analysed in this section are Bussy D'Ambois, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and The White Devil. PART IV. This section of the thesis makes explicit the materialist theory on which it draws---including that of Marx, Brecht, and Foucault---and seeks to contest the dominant tradition of idealism in literary erticism, especially its misrepresenation of subjectivity and social process in the early seventeenth century.
41
Thomson, Heather. ""I think it well to search for truth everywhere": Religious Identity and the Construction of the Self in L M Montgomery's "Selected Journals"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28692.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis considers the religious identity that Lucy Maud Montgomery constructed in The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. As an adequate theoretical model to study religion in modern autobiography is not available, this thesis approaches the Selected Journals with a "social construction" model (adapted from autobiography theory on gender) in a consideration of her religious identity. Montgomery's religious self-constructions---as unorthodox, Presbyterian, and a seeker of truth---are considered in successive chapters through close readings of passages from her journals. Though her separate self-constructions are apparently paradoxical, I argue that Montgomery's overall religious identity is nonetheless fairly consistent with her most crucial religious self-construction---that of being a seeker of truth---and that she ultimately presents herself in her journals as having faith centred on hope. In conclusion, I offer reflections on the need for the development of an autobiography theory in which religion is regarded as an important aspect of identity.
42
Adriaanse, Jaco Hennig. "Alternative afterlives : secular expeditions to the undiscovered country." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/20198.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis investigates texts which are argued to construct secular imaginings of the afterlife. As such my argument is built around the way in which these texts engage with death, while simultaneously engaging with the religious concepts which have come to give shape to the afterlife in an increasingly secular West. The texts included are: Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1907), Mark Twain’s unfinished reimagining of Christian salvation; Kneller’s Happy Campers (1998) by Etgar Keret, its filmic adaptation Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), as well as the Norwegian film A Bothersome Man (2006), which all strip the afterlife of its traditional furnishings; Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy (1995, 1997, 2000) in which he wages a fictional war with the foundations of Western religious tradition; and finally William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Feersum Endjinn (1994) by Iain M. Banks, two science fiction texts which speculate on the afterlife of the future. These texts are so chosen and arranged to create a logical progression of secular projects, each subsequent afterlife reflecting a more extensive and substantial distantiation from religious tradition. Twain’s text utilises a secularising satire of heaven, and draws attention to the irrational notions which pervade this concept. In the process, however, it embarks on the utopian endeavour of reconstructing and improving the Christian afterlife of salvation. In Chapter 3, the narratives under investigation discard the surface details of religious afterlives, and reimagine the hereafter against a contemporary backdrop. I argue that they conform, in several significant ways, to the mode of magical realism. Furthermore, despite their disinclination for evident religiosity, these texts nevertheless find problematic encounters when they break this mode and invoke higher authorities to intervene in the unfolding narratives. Chapter 4 focuses on Philip Pullman’s high fantasy trilogy, which enacts open war between the secular and religious and uses the afterlife as an integral part of the secularising agenda. With the literal battle lines drawn, this text depicts a clear distinction between what is included as secular, or renounced as religious. Finally, I turn to science fiction, where the notion of the virtual afterlife of the future has come to be depicted, with its foundations in human technologies instead of divine agencies. They rely on the ideology of posthumanism in a reimagining of the afterlife which constitutes a new apocalyptic tradition, a virtual kingdom of heaven populated by the virtual dead. Ultimately, I identify three broad, delineating aspects of secularity which become evident in these narratives and the meaningful distinctions they draw between religious and secular ideologies. I find further significance in the way in which these texts engage with the very foundations on which fictions of the afterlife have been constructed. Throughout these texts, I then find a secular approach to death as a developing alternative to that which has traditionally been propagated by religion.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek tekste wat alternatiewe uitbeeldings van die hiernamaals bevat, wat dan geargumenteer word dien as voorbeelde van sekulêre konsepsies van die nadoodse toestand. My argument berus op die manier waarop hierdie tekste met die dood omgaan, asook die verskeie maniere waarop hul tot die religieë van die Westerse wêreld spreek. Die tekste wat ondersoek word sluit in: Mark Twain se Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1907), sy onvoltooide satire van die Christelike hemel; Kneller’s Happy Campers deur Etgar Keret (1998), die verfilmde weergawe daarvan, Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), asook die Noorweegse film A Bothersome Man (2006), waarin die hiernamaals uitgebeeld word as ‘n lewelose weergawe van kontemporêre samelewing; Philip Pullman se fantasie trilogie His Dark Materials (1995, 1998, 2000) waarin hy ‘n sekulêre oorlog teen die onderdrukkende magte van religie uitbeeld; en laastens die wetenskap-fiksie verhale Neuromancer (1984), deur William Gibson, en Feersum Endjinn (1994), deur Iain M. Banks, waarin die sekulêre, virtuele hiernamaals van die toekoms vervat word. Hierdie tekste is gekies en ook so gerangskik om ‘n duidelike sekulêre progressie te toon, met elke opeenvolgende teks wat in ‘n meer omvattende wyse die tradisioneel religieuse konvensies herdink of vervang met sekulêre alternatiewe. Twain se teks dryf die spot met die Christelike idee van die hemel en om aandag te trek na die irrasionele ideologieë wat daarin vervat is. In die proses poog Twain egter om te verbeter op die model en gevolglik ondervind die teks probleme wat met die utopiese literatuur gepaard gaan. In hoofstuk 3 word die hiernamaals gestroop van alle ooglopend religieuse verwysings en vervang met die ewigheid as ‘n kontemporêre landskap deurtrek met morbiede leweloosheid. Ek argumenteer dat hulle op verskeie belangrike manier ooreenstem met die genre van magiese realisme en dat, ten spyte van die pogings om religie te vermy, die tekste steeds probleme teëkom wanneer hoër outoriteite by die verhale betrokke raak. Hoofstuk 4 draai om Pullman se sekulêre oorlog wat daarop gemik is om die wêreld te sekulariseer. Die duidelikheid waarmee die tekste onderskeid tref tussen die magte van religie en die weerstand vanaf sekulariteit, maak dit insiggewend om te bepaal wat Pullman in ‘n sekulêre wêreldbeeld in-of uitsluit. Laastens ondersoek ek wetenskap-fiksie, waarin die hiernamaals omskep is in ‘n toestand wat bereik word deur menslike tegnologiese vooruitgang, in stede van religieuse toedoen. Hier word daar gesteun op die idees van posthumanisme, wat beteken dat hierdie uitbeeldings van die ewigheid ‘n oorspronklike verwerking van religieuse apokaliptiese verhale is, waar ‘n virtuele hemelse koninkryk geskep word vir die virtuele afgestorwenes. Uiteindelik identifiseer ek drie breë ideologiese trekke wat deurgaans in al die tekste opduik, en waarvolgens betekenisvolle onderskeid getref kan word om definisie te gee aan die begrip van sekulariteit. Verder vind ek dat die sekulêre hiernamaals in ‘n unieke wyse met die dood omgaan, en dat dit ‘n alternatiewe uitkyk gee op die fondasies waarop verhale van die hiernamaals oorspronklik geskep is. Derhalwe argumenteer ek dat ‘n sekulêre wêreldbeeld ‘n alternatiewe uitkyk op die dood ontwikkel, een wat die tradisies van religie terselfdertyd inkorporeer en verwerp.
43
Williams, Andrew Jerome. "Tolerable faiths: religious toleration, secularism, and the eighteenth-century British novel." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6521.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of my research was to understand the role that the novel played in the development of religious toleration in eighteenth-century Britain. In my first chapter, I draw on an archive of polemical texts, legal documents, correspondence, sermons, and novels to reconstruct the historical and ideological transformations that occurred between the English Civil War (1642) and Catholic Emancipation (1829). I demonstrate the centrality of anti-Catholicism to the construction of British identity and arguments for the toleration of Protestant Dissenters. Throughout my dissertation, I argue that the novel served as a site for the articulation of new concepts and identities, and functioned as a mechanism for transforming readers’ subjectivities. One of the most important transformations to which the novel contributed was the elaboration of the concept of tolerance as a supplement to toleration. As an individual, private affect, tolerance depoliticizes religious difference, shifting emphasis away from the existential threat that toleration could potentially pose to the state and established church. The most surprising finding of my research was the extent to which novelists drew on a contemporary theological discourse of charity in developing this idea. My readings demonstrate the need for an understanding of secularization that would see it not only as a separation out of church and state, but also as a set of corresponding changes within religion, and a process whereby religious ideas are brought into what we normally think of as secular political ideas, like tolerance.
Daniel Defoe plays a pivotal role in my dissertation, as both a prolific polemicist and one of the first novelists. My second chapter explores his polemical arguments for toleration, before moving on to examine how the political philosophy he develops in them informs the Robinson Crusoe novels (1719-1720). I argue that the liberty of conscience that Crusoe offers is tenuous and fragile in the first novel because of contradictions in Defoe’s political thought. In The Farther Adventures (1720), he is able to offer a more robust vision of toleration, by placing the relationship of charity between the Protestant Crusoe and a French priest at the center of his novel. In chapter three I shift my focus to the formal features of the Crusoe novels, arguing that the first novel urges its readers to undergo a series of identifications that lead them toward the charitable tolerance that the second novel thematizes. The second novel disperses the narrative function between characters, highlighting the role of perspective in religious knowledge. My fourth chapter argues that in Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Samuel Richardson demonstrates that tolerance can function as a bulwark, rather than a threat, to British identity. Richardson simultaneously offers a positive representation of Catholic characters and shows how tolerance in the face of intolerance can found a new identity secured by a dynamic of moral and epistemological condescension. My final chapter turns to an exploration of how the Gothic novel could mediate changes in the political and ideological context at the end of the eighteenth century, as toleration was first being extended to Catholics in Britain. I argue that Lusignan (1801) represents Catholic monasticism in a way that makes it not only newly tolerable, but also newly desirable for British readers. At the same time, the novel demonstrates more forcibly than any of the preceding texts, the secularizing negotiations that not only Catholicism, but religion itself, underwent during the increasing modernization and liberalization of Britain through the eighteenth century.
44
Robinson, Arabella Mary Milbank. "Love and drede : religious fear in Middle English." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/280671.
Full textAbstract:
Several earlier generations of historians described the later Middle Ages as an 'age of fear'. This account was especially applied to accounts of the presumed mentality of the later medieval layperson, seen as at the mercy of the currents of plague, violence and dramatic social, economic and political change and, above all, a religiosity characterised as primitive or even pathological. This 'great fear theory' remains influential in public perception. However, recent scholarship has done much to restitute a more positive, affective, incarnational and even soteriologically optimistic late-medieval vernacular piety. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the positive and recuperative approach of this scholarship, it did not attend to the treatment of fear in devotional and literary texts of the period. This thesis responds to this gap in current scholarship, and the continued pull of this account of later-medieval piety, by building an account of fear's place in the rich vernacular theology available in the Middle English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It takes as its starting point accounts of the role of fear in religious experience, devotion and practice within vernacular and lay contexts, as opposed to texts written by and for clerical audiences. The account of drede in Middle English strikingly integrates humbler aspects of fear into the relationship to God. The theological and indeed material circumstances of the later fourteenth century may have intensified fear's role: this thesis suggests that they also fostered an intensified engagement with the inherited tradition, generating fresh theological accounts of the place of fear. Chapter One begins with a triad of broadly pastoral texts which might be seen to disseminate a top-down agenda but which, this analysis discovers, articulate diverse ways in which the humble place of fear is elevated as part of a vernacular agenda. Here love and fear are always seen in a complex, varying dialectic or symbiosis. Chapter Two explores how this reaches a particular apex in the foundational and final place of fear in Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and is not incompatible even with her celebratedly 'optimistic' theology. Chapter Three turns to a more broadly accessed generic context, that of later medieval cycle drama, to engage in readings of Christ's Gethsemane fear in the 'Agony in the Garden' episodes. The N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York plays articulate complex and variant theological ideas about Christ's fearful affectivity as a site of imitation and participation for the medieval layperson. Chapter Four is a reading of Piers Plowman that argues a right fear is essential to Langland's espousal of a poetics of crisis and a crucial element in the questing corrective he applies to self and society. It executes new readings of key episodes in the poem, including the Prologue, Pardon, Crucifixion and the final apocalyptic passus, in the light of its theology of fear.
45
Macy, Alexandra G. "The Socio-economic and Religious Aspects in Robinson Crusoe." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2011. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/199.
Full textAbstract:
In the novel, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe examines a wide range of complex issues. Defoe takes the typical adventure theme and transforms it into a thought-provoking reflection of many issues involving society. A blending of economic and religious issues is created by first focusing on economy, then bringing the issue of religion in, and finally allowing for the portrayal of the interpenetration between each. Defoe proves that it is possible to live by economic practices and monetary values while still maintaining a good, moral character. The emphasis on economic issues is extremely apparent, as Defoe calls into question the concept of money and its value, as well as its place in society. Crusoe is first portrayed as a man defined by money and ruled by economic principles. Even when removed from society, he is impelled to practice many economic conventions, such as investment, moderation and the idea of profit. Defoe creates Crusoe to be so greatly influenced by money and the economy in the beginning so as to better emphasize the intertwining of his economic side with his religious side. The Christian values and morals of Crusoe dominate the latter part of the novel. He rediscovers the Bible and its teachings and learns the importance of repentance and giving thanks. The provocative progression in unveiling the many layers of Crusoe allows for the reader to see that the man they thought to be defined by money is rather a man trying to live by the Word of God.
46
Kumar, Priya Haryant. "Ruptured nations, collective memory & religious violence : mapping a secularist ethics in post-partition South Asian literature and film." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=37904.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation maps the emergence of a 'secularist ethics' in post-independence South Asian literature and film, an ethics which is a deeply felt poetic response to particular historical conjunctures marked by religio-nationalist conflict in the Indian subcontinent. It is my argument that literary and cultural productions, in striving to dream and envision a world free of violence, terror and religious intolerance, have some central contributions to make to contemporary intellectual and political debates on secularism. Through close readings of fictions by Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Bapsi Sidhwa, Saadat Hasan Manto, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Jamila Hashmi, Jyotirmoyee Devi, and Lalithambika Antherjanam, as well as films by M. S. Sathyu, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Khalid Mohamed and Shyam Benegal, which are concerned to address the issue of peaceful co-existence between different religious communities and nations in the Indian subcontinent, I argue that literary and imaginative endeavors by way of their alternative secularist imaginaries enable us to begin to imagine the possibilities of more habitable futures. Significantly, the 'secularist' fictions and films I invite attention to in my project enable a revisioning of the secular in terms quite different from normative understandings of liberal secularism. Such a renewed secularism seeks to make visible the normalization and neutralization of majoritarian religious beliefs and practices as constitutive of the representative secular-nationalist self in post-Partition India; it also emerges, significantly, from a gendered critique of the deep-seated patriarchal norms underlying most religious communities. Responding to different moments of crisis, predominantly the Partition of India in 1947, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the radical secularist poetics of these works call attention to the fundamentalist agenda of Hindu nationalism, the limit
47
Ashley, Annette Maria. ""In this moment of alarm and peril" : female education, religion and politics in the late eighteenth century, with special reference to Catharine Macaulay and Hannah More." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2003. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1858.
Full textAbstract:
Catharine Macaulay and Hannah More are conventionally represented as ideological opposites. Through an analysis which centres on their writings, this thesis critically examines that representation, and more broadly explores contemporary perceptions of the roles of women of the middling sort in the late eighteenth century. It argues that revolution, particularly the French Revolution, created a climate wherein the duties of women became the subject of increasing debate. The discussion challenges and builds upon recent work on women's writing and history, by examining how and why the role of women changed at this time. This work is concerned with contemporary representations of women, and concentrates on analysis of primary texts and archival material over a wide range of genres, including educational treatises, plays, popular tracts, political pamphlets, historical writing and newspapers - the latter proving a major resource. Following a critical introduction, the thesis falls into four chapters. Chapter one discusses the reputation, critical reception and public fame of Macaulay and More, thereby providing insights into contemporary sexual and social politics. Women were considered arbiters of morals and manners - believed to play a vital role in ensuring social stability - and the second chapter examines how the threat of revolution led to increasing anxiety and debate about the nature of female education. The third and fourth chapters discuss religion and politics respectively, and argue that beliefs about the interdependency of Church and State, together with the feminization of religion, legitimized women's involvement in politics and enlarged their sphere of influence. 3 The conclusion argues that the political and religious climate provided opportunities for women to reassess and redefine their roles; while often remaining within parameters defined by commonly held perceptions of femininity, they politicized the domestic, extended female agency, and elevated the status of women.
48
Wright, Margaret S. "Private vs. public conscience the contradiction between George Eliot's atheism and her use of traditional Christianity in her fiction /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2007.
Find full text
49
Schrum, Ethan D. "James Marsh and the theological origins of academic English studies in the United States." Online full text .pdf document, available to Fuller patrons only, 2003. http://www.tren.com.
Full text
50
Pilz, Anna. "'The return to the people' : empire, class, and religion in Lady Gregory's dramatic works." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2013. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/14315/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines a selection of Lady Gregory’s original dramatic works. Between the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and the playwright’s death in 1932, Gregory’s plays accounted for the highest number of stage productions in comparison to her co-directors William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. As such, this thesis analyses examples ranging from her most well-known and successful pieces, including The Rising of the Moon and The Gaol Gate, to lesser known plays such as The Wrens, The White Cockade, Shanwalla and Dave. With a focus on the historical, bibliographical, and political contexts, the plays are analysed not only with regard to the printed texts, but also in the context of theatrical performances. In order to re-evaluate Gregory’s contribution to the Abbey, this thesis is divided into three chapters dealing with dominant themes throughout her career as a playwright: Empire, class, and religion.