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Tomioka, Noriko. "Inescapable choice : Wallace Stevens's new Romanticism and English romantic poetry." Thesis, Durham University, 2006. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2607/.
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The aim of this thesis is to investigate how Stevens creates a new Romanticism. It argues that Stevens demonstrates a double view of Romanticism as having positive and negative aspects and it relates discussion of this double view to the development of his poetry and theories of poetry. Stevens shares with the Romantics the belief that through the power of imagination the problem of dualism - especially the split between art and existential reality - can be solved. Prom Stevens's perspective, thinking about what should be respected and what should be corrected in Romanticism provides grounds for the creation of his own new Romanticism. In chapters one and two, by examining the conflict between imagination and reality in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, I explore the intertextual relations between Stevens and the Romantics from a perspective informed by the implications of Stevens's work and thought. In chapters three and four, focusing on Stevens's treatment of the relation between imagination and reality, I examine the nuanced differences between his work and that of the Romantics. Chapter five provides a prologue to 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction', the culmination of Stevens's concern with imagination and reality. In the final chapter I examine how Stevens's new Romanticism, especially its emphasis on the imagination's activity, is concretised in 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction'. I also explore how the later development of his sense of reality affects his poetic creativity. By examining the influence of the Romantics on Stevens and his response to them, the nature of his poetry can be more accurately understood. Throughout the thesis, I engage, as appropriate, with the work of many critics who have written on Stevens. It is my hope that my own approach gives a folly considered and detailed account of a topic often addressed more briefly by other commentators.
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Vardy, Alan Douglas. "Romantic ethics /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9362.
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Ashraf, Ammara. "Romantic poetologies : collaboration and interdisciplinarity in early Anglo-German Romanticism." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2013. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8366.
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This thesis reads seminal texts such as Wordsworth’s prose, Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and The Excursion alongside Coleridge’s poetic theory and practice and Novalis, Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel’s philosophical novels and fragments, as ‘poetologies’. My initial research aim is to test how successfully Wordsworth can be read as part of this Anglo-German comparative framework, from which criticism has tended to exclude him. This is done through demonstrating the centrality of irony and drama to the philosophical character of Wordsworth’s poetry. Drawing on the theory of the Frühromantiker, I demonstrate that Wordsworth’s revisionary habit and his use of ballads and epitaphs shape a poetics constantly ‘in the process of becoming’ (F. Schlegel), the vehicle of the poet’s aspirations to dramatize a potentially infinite self-consciousness. Secondly, my thesis investigates the ways of reading these seminal texts which give us a clearer idea of how Romantic writers internally situate their own work through their use of contrasting genres. This investigation expands to examine how the collaborative, interdisciplinary ventures proposed by Romantic writers elaborate the concept of ‘poetology’ as a practicable theory. This leads to my final research aim: to make apparent that these methodologies result in the Mischgedicht, the ‘mixed poem’ which Schlegel theorizes as the ultimate incarnation of modern, ‘Romantic’ literature. The thesis concludes by drawing theories, methodologies and texts together and making sense of that ultimate continuity sought by the Romantic project. I do this by turning to the poetologizing of immortality (which supersedes death as a Romantic preoccupation) and arguing that to poetologize immortality – to poeticize and philosophize it simultaneously – is the test-case for producing the infinite from the finite. I suggest the necessity felt by Romantic writers to achieve this transformation in order to legitimate the permeable philosophical poetry and poetic philosophy – ‘poetologies’ – which made it possible.
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Ingram, Catherine. "Word and Song: The Paradox of Romanticism." TopSCHOLAR®, 1996. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/805.
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Among the various outcomes of the Romantic period, an interest in the relationship of the arts remains a widely recognized yet rarely examined field of study. Music and literature seemed to develop a particular kinship, yet to identify the exact relationship is as difficult as defining Romanticism itself. In this study, I attempt to do both. In exploring the concept of Romanticism, its paradoxical development from Classicism is examined through the comparison of six great composers and poets of the period. By tracing the similarities and differences in style of Beethoven/Wordsworth, Schumann/Keats, and Brahms/Tennyson, hopefully a clearer understanding of the evolution of Romanticism is achieved. These artists, although creating through different mediums, address the apparent rejection of Neoclassicism, the apex of Romanticism, and the realization of its limitations. The result is the revelation of the paradox of Romanticism. For each artist, the realization of the Romantic spirit presents contrasts. Ultimately, the rejection of Neoclassic thought becomes as important to Romanticism as its dependence on Neoclassic form. These six artists achieved success not only because of their talents but also because of their acknowledgement of this fact. In this study, I trace their development through the rise and fall of Romanticism as more than instances of shared techniques or borrowed texts; the similarities in thought, poetic vision, and style shared by these artists are explored as well. The paradox of Romanticism is revealed through the interrelationship of poetry and music.
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Slagle, Judith Bailey. "Joanna Baillie and the Poetry of Intellectual and Historical Romanticism." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2012. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/459.
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Book Summary: The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities
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Cherry, Thomas Hamilton. "Variation Within Uniformity: The English Romantic Sonnet." TopSCHOLAR®, 2014. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1396.
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The English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century wrote numerous poems from genres and styles all across the poetic spectrum. From the epics of ancient origin concerning kings and fanciful settings to the political odes on fallen leaders and even the anthropological histories of what it meant to live in their time, these poets stretched their stylistic legs in many ways. One of the most interesting is their use of the short and rule-bound sonnet form that enjoyed a reemergence during their time. Though stylized throughout its existence, the sonnet most often falls into a specific form with guidelines and rule. What makes the Romantic interest in this form noteworthy is that like the other forms, they found new ways to use the sonnet as a means of poetic experimentation and creative expression. Exploring the various internal and external variations, those changes that took place within the lines and phrases of the sonnet and those that form the organizing and rhyming portions of the poem, this study seeks to establish the ways the Romantics took the uniform techniques of the sonnet and stretched its bounds to find new means of creativity. Close reading of the poems of William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals the variant use of caesura, creative dissonance, as well as original organization and rhyme scheme to accomplish purely Romantic goals within the uniformity of the sonnet form.
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Hussein, Ronak Hassan. "Nature and death in the poetry of al-Malā'ika, al-Shābbī and Shukrī, and certain English Romantic poets : a comparative study." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7138.
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The first part of this thesis, divided into two chapters, deals with the early background of European Romanticism; the reasons behind its appearance and problems of definition. There follows a discussion on the question of the originality of Arabic Romanticism, with ,a brief review of the roots and main literary groups of this movement in Arabic poetry. Part two examines the influence of English poetry and thought on three Arab Romantic poets: Nāzik Sādiq al-Malā'ika, Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī and Abd aI-Rahmān Shukrī. This is discussed parallel with the channels of this influence. The main focus of this research is however, to show the ways in which al-Malā'ika, al-Shābbī and Shukrī perceived and reflected nature and death in their poetry. Their attitudes towards certain phenomena in nature such as the countryside, night, the sea, childhood and moral and social lessons of nature are compared with certain attitudes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. Themes such as life and death, fear of death, fatalism, immortality and death as a welcome experience are also the concern of this thesis, with a comparison of these themes in the poetry of the Arab and English Romantic poets. However, owing to the popularity of Keats and Shelley with the three Arab Romantic poets, this thesis concentrates on their poetry. This research has selected only certain phenomena and themes from nature--and death because of the dominance of these subjects in the poetry of al-Malā'ika, al-Shābbī and Shukrī. The translations of Arabic poetry in this thesis are intended to convey the general sense of the source texts, rather than to give a precise rendering of these texts into English.
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Cox, Octavia. "Pope's poetic legacy, 1744-1830." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:236ec8eb-4d21-43c6-b4eb-8c7b349447ef.
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Jerome McGann observes that 'Deceptive apparitions haunt romantic writing'. This thesis investigates one such haunting apparition; it analyses the ways in which selected eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets engage with the poetry of Alexander Pope. The received view of "Romantic" anti-Popeanism is expressed in comments such as that of William Hazlitt's 'I do not think there is any point of sympathy between Pope and the Lake School: on the contrary, I know there is an antipathy between them'. There is plenty of evidence to suggest some Romantic writers had an aversion to the previous literary age. In a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in March 1819, for example, Keats reviews a play by mocking that it 'was bad even in comparison with ... the Augustan age'. Pope had been the pre-eminent figure of Augustan poetry. Hence, the argument runs, Pope was rejected wholesale by Romantic poets. Such an understanding of literary history is, however, too dogmatic. Rather than accepting the view that the progression from Pope's era to the Romantic period involved a sudden pivot in taste, I explore how Popean poetic principles filtered into the development of his successors' literary aesthetics and ideas about poetry. The central questions I ask are how, and in what ways, Pope's successors used Pope's poetry to formulate their own poetic visions. I address these questions in four main chapters. In the first, I analyse Joseph Warton's An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. I show that Warton's Essay on Pope should not be taken as a denigration of Pope's poetic achievement, and suggest ways in which Pope's work permeates his, and his brother Thomas', poetry. In the second, I examine the response to Pope's Iliad, a text which prompted conflicting reactions among his successors. In particular, I appraise William Cowper's response to Pope's translation, not only as contained in his prose discussion of it, but also as revealed by his own translation. My third chapter considers ways in which Wordsworth plays with Pope's poetic legacy, and acknowledges Pope's contribution to the formulation of his own ideas of what constitutes good poetry. In the final chapter, I illustrate that even in the poetry of Keats - who, at times, vociferously rejects Pope as a mere handicraftsman - there is a sympathy in song between brother-poets. Literary criticism has often stressed the prominence of authors such as Lord Byron, Erasmus Darwin and George Crabbe in Pope's poetic reception and legacy. Yet Pope haunts other writers in subtler, but no less compelling, ways. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge observes, in Biographia Literaria, 'many ... formed ... their notions of poetry, from the writings of Mr. Pope'. What I try to give colour to here are some of the ways in which subsequent 'notions of poetry' were 'formed' from 'the writings of Mr. Pope'.
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Ward, Matthew. "The sound of laughter in Romantic poetry." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6814.
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This thesis offers the first critical examination of the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry. Part one locates laughter in the history of ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and explores the interplay between laughter and key intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and social issues in the Romantic period. I chart a development in thinking about laughter from its primary association with ridicule and the passions up to the early decades of the eighteenth century, to its emerging symbiosis with politeness and aesthetic judgement, before a reassertion of laughter's signification of passion and naturalness by the end of the eighteenth century. Laughter provides an innovative means of mapping cultural markers, and I argue that it highlights shifts in standards and questions of taste. Informed by this analysis, part two offers a series of historically aware close readings of Romantic poetry that identify both an indebtedness to, and refutation of, earlier and contemporaneous ideas about laughter. Rather than having humour or comedy as its central concerns, this thesis identifies the pervasive and capricious influence of the sound of the laugh in the writing of Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. I detect the heterogeneous representations of laughter in their work that runs across a diverse range of genres, poetic forms, themes, and contexts. As such, I argue against the serious versus the humorous binary which prevails in literary criticism of Romanticism, and suggest that laughter articulates the interplay between the elegiac and the comic, the sublime and the ridiculous, the solitary and the communal. Moreover, I detect a double-naturedness to the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry that registers the subject's capacity to signify both consensus and dispute. This inherent polarity creates a tension in the poems as laughter ironically challenges what it also affirms. Never singularly fixed, the sound of laughter reveals the protean nature of Romantic verse.
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Louw, Denise Elizabeth Laurence. "A literary study of paranormal experience in Tennyson's poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002292.
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My thesis is that many of Tennyson's apparently paranormal experiences are explicable in terms of temporal lobe epilepsy; and that a study of the occurrence, in the work of art, of phenomena associated with these experiences, may be useful in elucidating the workings of the aesthetic imagination. A body of knowledge relevant to paranormal experience in Tennyson's life and work, assembled from both literary and biographical sources, is applied to a Subjective Paranormal Experience Questionnaire, compiled by Professor V.M. Neppe, in order to establish the range of the poet's apparently "psychic" experiences. The information is then analysed in terms of the symptomatology of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and the problems of differential diagnosis are considered. It is shown, by means of close and comparative analyses of a number of poems, that recurring clusters of images in Tennyson's poetry may have their genesis in TLE. These images are investigated in terms of modern research into altered states of consciousness. They are found to be consistent with a "model" of the three stages of trance experience constructed by Professor A.D. Lewis-Williams to account for shamanistic rock art in the San, Coso and Upper Paleolithic contexts. My study of the relevant phenomena in the work of a nineteenth century English poet would seem to offer cross-cultural verification of the applicability of the model to a range of altered-state contexts. This study goes on to investigate some of the psychological processes which may influence the way in which pathology is manifested in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. But, throughout the investigation, the possible effects of literary precursors and of other art forms are acknowledged. The subjective paranormal phenomena in Tennyson's poems are compared not only with some modern neuropsychiatric cases, but also with those of several nineteenth-century writers who seem to have had similar experiences . These include Dostoevsky and Edward Lear, who are known to have been epileptics, and Edgar Allan Poe. Similarity between some aspects of Tennyson's work and that of various Romantic poets, notably Shelley, is stressed; and it is tentatively suggested that it might be possible to extrapolate from my findings in this study to a more general theory of the "Romantic" imagination.
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Friedlander, Keith. "Born In a Crowd: Subjecthood Across Authorial Modes In the Nineteenth-Century Writer's Market." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/35054.
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This dissertation examines representations of authorship and subjecthood in the Romantic period as products of market position and publishing mode. In doing so, it views the traditional concept of Romantic individualism commonly associated with the solitary poet as a strategy developed to help the author navigate a complex writer’s market. Rather than focusing upon individualism as the defining authorial model for this period, however, my project presents it as one example of a diverse range of representational strategies employed by different authors operating from different positions within the market. To this end, this study compares the authorial model of the independent poet with authors engaged in a variety of other modes of publishing, including hack essayists, serialized poets, periodical editors, and celebrity authors.
By examining authors operating across different publishing modes, I demonstrate that each one’s concept of public identity is shaped principally by his or her particular market position, as defined by working relationships with peers, involvement in the particulars of publishing, exchanges with the critical press, and engagement with readers. These authors include William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charles Lamb, and Francis Jeffrey. By juxtaposing their different models of authorship, this study seeks to bridge the longstanding discourse regarding the social isolation of the Romantic poet with more contemporary streams of scholarship into the material realities of the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Drawing upon the social philosophy of the Frankfurt School and Eric Gans’ theory of Generative Anthropology, I examine how different strategies of representation were developed to preserve personal meaning and sustain public attention. By comparing responses to the rise of the writer’s market and the ubiquity of print culture, this dissertation argues that Romantic period authors demonstrate a distinctly modern understanding of public identity as a product of mediation in mass media culture.
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Sage, Geoffrey Brandon. "The muwashshah, zajal, and kharja : what came before and what became of them." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/32454.
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There have historically been numerous connections between the way that medieval Iberian Muslims conceptualized love, lust, and desire and the ways in which Western Europeans have expressed those same concepts, especially as potentially derived from the literary genre of the muwashshah, a particular form of (primarily) medieval Hispano-Arabic poetry. Specifically, the muwashshah and its particular expression(s) of romantic love have helped in causing a series of paradigm shifts (with a definition borrowed from Kuhn to apply to the humanities) within Western ideology. This thesis focuses on the transformative effect of such Hispano-Arabic poetry within Western culture, as well as its connections with the following: Greco-Roman concepts of poetics, earlier Arabic poetry, and post-Hispano-Arabic Arabic poetry. It explores the concept of intersectionality within Hispano-Arabic culture, demonstrating how Hispano-Arabic sources may have influenced European interpretations of romantic relationships as well as how the muwashshah survived within an Arabic context. While mostly existing as a substratum within European culture, the muwashshah has had lasting influence upon European culture. The domains of love and desire provide a particularly apt example, as they involve not simply technology (civilian or military) but demonstrate the origin of a distinct change in the expression of emotion within European culture. At a fundamental level, Western Europe has adopted some of these Hispano-Arabic (as derived from a Muslim viewpoint) values. Regardless of further conflict between Europeans and Muslim cultures, they share parts of a common heritage, expressed differently, but with partial derivations, large or small, from a single source. Such exploration demonstrates the deep interconnectedness of what has heretofore been considered a separated, solely Western (Christian) European culture and that of the Islamic world, derived from one of the original points of intersection between Muslim culture and Western Christian culture, as well as how Arabic culture addressed its outliers.
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Squires, Matthew Lorin. "The Byronic Myth in Brazil: Cultural Perspectives on Lord Byron's Image in Brazilian Romanticism." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2005. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd758.pdf.
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McGhee, Caleb. "Samuel Daniel’s Lyric Reception: The Role of Poet-Critics from Wordsworth to Winters." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2020. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3826.
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The Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel was popular in his day, producing lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems. Contemporary anthologies, however, memorialize him primarily as a lyric poet, one that usually gets few entries. My thesis shows how Daniel had a minor reputation as a lyric poet by the 1960’s, despite having high-profile admirers. These well-known poet-critics who engaged with his work are essential to analyzing his lyric reputation: owing to the Romantic emphasis on the lyric, I begin with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reception of his lyrics in the 19th century. I then analyze the turn of the century poet A.E. Housman’s glowing praise and end with the lukewarm reception of two 20th century Modernists, T.S. Eliot and Yvor Winters. I argue that, despite the enthusiasm of Coleridge and Housman, his lyrics failed to attract enough admirers, in part contributing to the current status of these poems.
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Kim, Joanne S. "Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1523659373305353.
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Nestrovski, Sofia Scarinci. "O único lugar, afinal, onde podemos encontrar a felicidade: o mundo e William Wordsworth." Universidade de São Paulo, 2018. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8151/tde-25032019-111239/.
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Esta pesquisa é uma introdução à obra do poeta inglês William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Ela se estrutura em seis capítulos, divididos em dois eixos paralelos. Os capítulos de número par são voltados exclusivamente a obras do poeta: o primeiro é sobre o livro Baladas líricas (1798), analisado em contraponto com o cenário da poesia inglesa da época. O segundo é sobre o poema conhecido como \"Tintern Abbey\", e se volta mais detalhadamente à singularidade do autor, passando por questões teóricas sobre a representação do pensamento na poesia e a invenção do \"eu\" no poema. O último capítulo da série é sobre o livro O prelúdio (1805/1850), autobiografia do poeta; o capítulo é uma breve discussão sobre o que são livros. O segundo eixo -- o dos capítulos de número ímpar --, compõe um ambiente para a leitura do poeta: são retratos de pessoas que participaram de seu círculo íntimo. O primeiro é sobre sua irmã, Dorothy Wordsworth, e os diários que escrevia; o segundo, sobre o poeta S.T. Coleridge, coautor das Baladas líricas; o último é sobre o utopista e viajante John \"Walking\" Stewart.This dissertation is an introduction to the works of William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It is divided into six chapters, organized under two main lines. Chapters 2, 4 and 6 focus exclusively on William Wordsworth\'s poems: chapter 2 discussing the Lyrical Ballads (1798) in comparison to the different literatures of the period; chapter 4 focusing on Tintern Abbey and the poet\'s uniqueness, while at the same time researching the modes of thought that occur in poetry, and the invention of the poetic \"I\". The last chapter of this triad focuses on the author\'s autobiography, The prelude (1805/1850); it is a short text, concerned with the notion of what books are. The second triad chapters 1, 3 and 5 creates an environment for the reading of the poems: three portraits of people who were part of the poet\'s circle of friends and influences. The first one is on the poet\'s sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, and on her diary-writing. The second one is on S.T. Coleridge, who co-wrote the Lyrical Ballads. The last one is on John \"Walking\" Stewart, an utopian as well as a literal fellow-traveler.
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Sultana, Fehmida. "Romantic orientalism and Islam : Southey, Shelley, Moore, and Byron /." Thesis, Connect to Dissertations & Theses @ Tufts University, 1989.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1989.Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-215). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;
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Clucas, Tom. "Romantic reclusion in the works of Cowper and Wordsworth." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6fecb323-7ddc-43bd-a592-35694f8addaf.
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The end of the eighteenth century witnessed an imaginative mass migration as authors wrote about withdrawing from society. This thesis traces the origins of 'Romantic reclusion' in the works of Cowper and Wordsworth, particularly Cowper's poem The Task and Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork The Recluse, which epitomise the tradition. Romantic reclusion differs from 'solitude' and 'retirement' in that its motives were social. Cowper and Wordsworth wrote about withdrawing in order to criticise the increasing commercialism and competition they saw in British society. Both poets imagined seceding into a community of individuals who would care for a shared set of values, envisaging this as a form of non-violent political protest leading to reform. The thesis builds on recent studies of Romantic community, and develops Raymond Williams's cultural criticism, to refute the New Historicist position that Romantic writing elides history. It proceeds by historicising Cowper's and Wordsworth's concepts of reclusion, tracing echoes of their extensive reading about this subject in what they wrote. Romantic reclusion emerges as an artistic attempt to defend the individual against the dehumanising effects of contemporary society. Its aims can be grouped under four interrelated headings-'creative', 'medical', 'political', and 'natural'-which form the basis of the chapter divisions. Chapter One argues that Cowper and Wordsworth both presented Milton as a precedent for their poetic reclusion. They withdrew from literary society and cut themselves off from the diction of eighteenth-century poetry, because they believed that it turned words into luxury items which could only be purchased by the imaginations of a few. Cowper's translations of Madame Guyon and Wordsworth's modernisations of Chaucer both attempted to develop a plain style which would unite a wider, non-hierarchical community of readers. Chapter Two explores the origins of Cowper's reclusion in his spiritual crisis of 1763-5. Beginning with a study of medical books owned by Cowper's doctor, Nathaniel Cotton, it argues that Cotton regarded Cowper's illness as a product of eighteenth-century models of sociability. Both Cowper and Wordsworth employed Robert Burton's concept of 'Honest Melancholy', or sorrow for the state of one's country, to critique social competition and call for new models of community. Chapter Three examines Cowper's and Wordsworth's presentations of reclusion as the best response to the violence of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on the works of Classical and modern historians, both poets argued that political revolutions would only succeed once individuals learned to renounce self-interest and govern their selfish passions. The 'retired man' becomes the unexpected political hero of The Task, which in turn forms the basis for Wordsworth's conception of The Recluse. Finally, Chapter Four explores Cowper's and Wordsworth's interests in natural theology, arguing that both poets built on the works of writers including Calvin, David Hartley, and Joseph Butler to explain the psychological mechanism by which reclusion in nature could help to reform the mind, eliminating the selfish passions and teaching individuals to live in an active, mutually responsible community.
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Hussein, Amal Ragaa Bassyouni. "Transatlantic Romanticism : the English Romantics and American nineteenth−century poetic tradition." Thesis, Durham University, 2011. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3197/.
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This thesis explores the Romantic origins of nineteenth-century American poetic tradition; it looks at the relationship between the English Romantics and major nineteenth-century American poets. My research focuses on the Romantic lines of continuity within nineteenth-century American poetry, identifying them as central to the representation of American cultural and literary identities. American poets shaped their art and national identity out of a Romantic interest in their native nature. My study particularly explores the diverse ways in which major American poets, of this time, reacted to, adapted and reformulated Romantic ideals of nature, literary creation, the mission of the poet and the aesthetic category of the sublime. It traces connections and dialogues between American poets and their Romantic predecessors, including Blake, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. This thesis is inspired by the strong and abiding academic interest in Romantic studies, and aims to advance new readings of nineteenth-century American poetry in a transatlantic literary and cultural context. It attempts to cover a wide range of nineteenth-century key poetic works in relation to Romantic visions, ideals and forms. Developing a chronological line of enquiry, my thesis highlights the paradox of writers seeking to establish an original, distinctive American literary canon while still heavily deriving ideas and techniques from other, non-American sources. An introductory chapter outlines the historical and cultural framework of the Anglo-American literary relationship, focussing on its sensibilities, tensions and affinities. Chapter two considers how Bryant and Longfellow reformulated the Romantic pastoral tradition in their representations of American landscape, which helped toward shaping a peculiar national poetic canon. Through examining Emerson’s poetic achievement in the light of the Romantic tradition, chapter three challenges Emersonian claims of originality and self-reliance. Chapter four addresses Whitman’s Romantic preoccupations and interests alongside his groundbreaking innovations manifested in his attitudes towards nature, human body and urban landscape as well as his experiments with poetic language and form. Chapter five attempts to interpret the seeming idiosyncrasy of Dickinson’s work in the light of the poet’s dialogues with her Romantic precursors. Above all, this study examines how Romanticism worked upon the minds and art of nineteenth-century American poets, aiming to provide refreshing interpretations of nineteenth-century American poetry in the context of the broader transatlantic Romantic tradition.
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Mizukoshi, Ayumi. "Keats, Hunt and the aesthetics of pleasure." Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York : Palgrave, 2001. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/hol051/00048339.html.
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Ghosh, Hrileena. "John Keats's medical notebook and the poet's career : an editorial, critical and biographical reassessment." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/8247.
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This thesis explores the significance of John Keats's medical Notebook, and his time at Guy's Hospital (October 1815 – March 1817), for the poet's career. As a primary contribution, it offers a new transcription of Keats's medical Notebook (Appendix 1). The transcription reproduces Keats's text and indicates the layout of his notes, but is neither a facsimile, nor a new edition: the visual form of Keats's notes is not reproduced, nor do I offer critical annotations; commentary follows in subsequent chapters. The achievements, limitations and influence of the only edition of Keats's medical Notebook — Maurice Buxton Forman's from 1934 — are the subject of the first chapter, which also considers accounts of Keats's medical career in Keats biography and criticism. Chapter two focuses on the poems Keats wrote while at Guy's to show that the two aspects of his life — medicine and poetry — were mutually influential. Chapter three considers Keats's medical notes in comparison to a fellow-student's, indicating how some characteristics of Keats's note-taking prefigure aspects of his mature poetry. Chapter four finds Endymion suffused with medical knowledge and imagery, and argues that this was a vital aspect of the poem's depiction of passion. Chapter five suggests that the publication of Keats's 1820 volume was greatly influenced by questions of health, medicine, and disease; concerns reflected by the poems in it, which also reveal the extent of Keats's continued awareness of, and interest in, contemporary medical thought. In sum, the thesis argues that the origins of Keats's poetic achievement can be traced in his medical Notebook and ‘hospital' poems, and that the ability to infuse his poetry with medical knowledge was a vital component of Keats's poetic power and achievement.
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Ogden, Rebecca Lee Jensen. "Merit Beyond Any Already Published: Austen and Authorship in the Romantic Age." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2010. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2417.
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In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield impressive insights into the timeliness of her fiction, they haven't fully addressed Austen's participation in some of the most crucial literary debates of her time. Thus, it is my intention in this essay to extend the discussion of Austen as a Romantic to her participation in Romantic-era debates over emergent literary categories of authorship and realism. I argue that we can best contextualize Austen by examining how her model of authorship differs from those that surfaced in literary conversations of the time, particularly those relating to the high Romantic myth of the solitary genius. Likewise, as questions of solitary authorship often overlap with discussions of realism and romance in literature, it is important to reexamine how Austen responds to these categories, particularly in the context of a strictly Romantic engagement with these terms. I find that, though Austen's writing has long been implicated in the emergence of realism in literature, little has been written to link this impulse to the earlier emergence of Romantic-era categories of authorship and literary creativity. I contend that Austen's self-projection (as both an author and realist) engages with Romantic-era literary debates over these categories; likewise, I argue that her response to these emergent concerns is more complex and nuanced than has heretofore been accounted for in literary scholarship.
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Hickman, Ben. "John Ashbery and English Poetry." Thesis, University of Kent, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.504659.
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Cavill, Paul. "Maxims in Old English poetry." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1996. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11063/.
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The focus of the thesis is on maxims and gnomes in Old English poetry, but the occasional occurrence of these forms of expression in Old English prose and in other Old Germanic literature is also given attention, particularly in the earlier chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 are general, investigating a wide range of material to see how and why maxims were used, then to define the forms, and distinguish them from proverbs. The conclusions of these chapters are that maxims are ‘nomic’, they organise experience in a conventional, authoritative fashion. They are also ‘proverbial’ in the sense of being recognisable and repeatable, but they do not have the fixed form of proverbs. Chapters 4 to 7 are more specific in their focus, applying techniques from formulaic theory, paroemiology and the sociology of knowledge to the material so as to better understand how maxims are used in their contexts in the poems, and to appreciate the nature and function of the Maxims collections. The conclusions reached here are that the maxims in Beowulf 183b-88 are integral to the poem, that maxims in The Battle of Maldon show how the poet manipulated the social functions of the form for his own purposes, that there is virtually no paganism in Old English maxims, and that the Maxims poems outline and illustrate an Anglo-Saxon world view. The main contribution of the thesis is that it goes beyond traditional commentary in analysing the purpose and function of maxims. It does not merely focus on individual poems, but attempts to deal with a limited aspect of the Old English oral and literary tradition. The primary aim is to understand the general procedures of the poets in using maxims and compiling compendia of them, and then to apply insights gained from theoretical approaches to the specifics of poems.
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Suarez, Veronica. "Nights in The City Beautiful." FIU Digital Commons, 2018. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3851.
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Nights in The City Beautiful is a collection of confessional, free verse poems that explores sexual trauma, mental health, the exigencies of marriage, and the complexities of human desire. These interconnected poems are grounded with a braided narrative and tackle taboo themes. In Part 1: Monogamy, the reader journeys into the world of Vincent and Victoria, their profound love, and their anxiety disorders. In Part 2: Polyamory, Victoria gets caught in a love triangle when she meets her publishing coworker, Peter Langley.
The book evokes the movement of Romanticism and first-and-second-generation Romantic poets such as William Blake and Lord Byron. Contemporary influences on this collection include Aaron Smith’s Primer, Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography, and Tracy K. Smith’s The Body's Question.
Nights in The City Beautiful merges lyricism with narrative, the ethereal with the physical. It is a novella in verse that delves into the boundaries of sexuality, love, and intimacy.
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Malby, Mark Edward. "Hong Kong poetry a comparison of the developmental experience of Chinese writers writing in English and native speakers of English writing in English and their works /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B38725496.
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Momma, H. "The composition of Old English poetry /." Cambridge [GB] : Cambridge university press, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb366995688.
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Brown, Raymond David. "Apo koinou in Old English poetry /." The Ohio State University, 1990. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487684245465626.
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Eichel, Andrew Timothy. "Translating Anglo-Saxon poetry : foreignized translations of "The seafarer" and "The wanderer" /." View online, 2009. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211131566903.pdf.
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Leduc, Natalie. "Dissensus and Poetry: The Poet as Activist in Experimental English-Canadian Poetry." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/38773.
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Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.
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Jenks, Tom. "Digital technology and innovative poetry." Thesis, Edge Hill University, 2018. http://repository.edgehill.ac.uk/10086/.
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This is a thesis investigating the use of digital technology in creative writing, with a focus on innovative poetry. Three research areas explore this through theory, practice and reflection. These are preceded by an introduction to digital poetry, including an overview of the field. Chapter 1 describes the use of digital technology in appropriative writing, using digital methods to collect and re-organise text from social media to produce two books. Appropriative, allegorical or conceptual writing is discussed in relation to these books and more generally. This discussion includes reflections on the ethics of appropriative methodologies, with reference to writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Chapter 2 explores the possibilities of digital technology for procedurally transforming existing texts to produce new ones. Two creative projects are discussed, the first using spreadsheets to transform by mechanistic word substitution and the second using databases to transform by reduction and ‘writing through’. These are contextualised and discussed in relation to the work of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, the Oulipo and others. Chapter 3 investigates permutational and combinatory works and the use of machine methods to introduce programmatic randomness. A range of online works are described premised on aleatory selection from lists. The poetics of chance is discussed in relation to digital and non-digital combinatory works including Raymond Queneau, Alison Knowles and Nick Montfort. The human-machine dynamic is viewed as collaborative rather than competitive, with the machine envisaged as an adjunct to rather than an alternative to human practice. Processual methods are regarded as having most value when combined with non-processual and non-schematic elements. Originality is considered as a valid concept for procedural works, residing at the level of ideas and design. The procedural works discussed in the thesis are contextualised within a broader personal poetics of inclusivity, playfulness and humour.
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Simpkins, Scott Keith. "The semiotic dilemma of English romantic poetry /." Access abstract and link to full text, 1986. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.library.utulsa.edu/dissertations/fullcit/8611951.
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Loxley, James William Stanislas. "Royalist poetry in the English Civil War." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.319509.
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Emig, Rainer. "The end of modernism in English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c02149d4-6f3b-4368-b20e-d8e669514ccf.
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'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.
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Grummitt, Elaine Jennifer. "Heraldic imagery in seventeenth-century English poetry." Thesis, Durham University, 2000. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4333/.
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The significance of heraldic references in literature has been the subject of both antiquarian interest and recent scholarship. In the field of seventeenth-century poetry, there exists a small body of published work concerned with the use of heraldry by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Jolin Cleveland. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the existence and significance of heraldic references in a wider range of seventeenth-century verse and poetry. It eschews assumptions regarding the use of heraldry by, or with reference to, a narrow social elite, and examines heraldic references published in broadsheets and used in songs, as well as in the privately- circulated manuscripts of the nobility. Chapter One offers a critical examination of a range of current scholarship concerned with heraldic readings of literature. Chapter Two demonstrates that formal heraldic references, affirming or celebrating their subject’s identity, were used in diverse genres, including dedicatory verses, encomia, epitaphs, elegies, epithalamia and anagrams. Chapter Three determines the social implications of the use of heraldry, with particular reference to epic and satirical verse, arguing that heraldic references in this period develop beyond their traditional, chivalric associations. Chapter Four discusses those works that include heraldic references as expressions of authority or political power, and considers their use in different contexts to affirm or undermine the position of individuals and groups within society. Chapter Five establishes the use of heraldry within religious or spiritual poetry and addresses whether its vocabulary was regarded as an expression of particular Christian values. Chapter Six explores the engagement of women writers with heraldry and considers how far their use of the language offered a challenge to the prevailing patriarchal culture. The Conclusion draws attention to the significance of the evolution of heraldry from the seventeenth century to the present day.
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Reynolds, Matthew Osmund Royle. "English poetry and European nationalism, 1830-1870." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364175.
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Terry, Richard Gordon. "Studies in English burlesque poetry, 1663-1785." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1989. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250956.
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Howard, William Scott. "Fantastic surmise : seventeenth-century English elegies, elegiac modes, and the historical imagination from Donne to Philips /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9527.
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Quint, Arlo. "Nine New Poets: An Anthology by Arlo Quint." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2004. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/QuintA2004.pdf.
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Weaver, Sarah Anne. "Fossil poetry : Tennyson and Victorian philology." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708871.
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Malby, Mark Edward. "Hong Kong poetry: a comparison of the developmental experience of Chinese writers writing in English andnative speakers of English writing in English and their works." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B38725496.
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Spalding, Mary Caroline. "The Middle English charters of Christ." Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan Library, 2006. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;view=toc;idno=AFW1075.0001.001.
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Henderson, Dave. "The medieval English begging poem." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5580.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008.The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on June 8, 2009) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Rybak, Charles A. "Human Rooms." Cincinnati, Ohio : University of Cincinnati, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=ucin1052328743.
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Updegraff, Derek Kramer Johanna Ingrid. ""Fore ðære mærðe mod astige" two new perspectives on the Old English Gifts of men /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri--Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5623.
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The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 6, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Johanna Kramer. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.
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Ransom, Emily Ann. "Fingerprints of Thomas More's Epigrammata on English Poetry." NCSU, 2009. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11122009-145232/.
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Thomas Moreâs Latin epigrams, published with the second edition of Utopia in 1518, were apparently widely read both among contemporary European intellectuals and during the subsequent development of English poetry. With a humble audacity that could engage Classical authors in a Christian posture, More cultivated a literary climate that could retain the earthiness of the middle ages in dialogue with the ancients, and is more responsible for the ensuing expansion of vernacular poetry than perhaps any other Henrican author. This thesis probes the Classical influences and Humanist practices at work in the epigrams, explores their contemporary reception on the continent, and traces their legacy among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets.
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Taher-Kermani, Reza. "The Persian 'presence' in nineteenth-century English poetry." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.658568.
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This thesis examines the 'presence' of Persia' in nineteenth-century English poetry. The focus is not on translations of Persian poetry as such, but on the ways in which knowledge of Persia, derived from a variety of sources including classical and biblical texts, history, and travel-writing, entered into English poetry in the period. Such knowledge may shape the structure of a poem, or Its verbal texture, and may do so at different levels of intensity and significance. This complex phenomenon cannot fully be covered by the term 'influence'; the term 'presence' encompasses a variety of . literary engagements including translation, imitation, interpretation, representation, conscious allusion, and indirect borrowing. The methodology of the thesis is neither that of conventional literary history, in which questions of influence and intertextuality are of primary concern, nor of cultural history, in which literature is seen as part of a broader analysis of the history of ideas. While recognising the importance of recent cross-cultural theories, notably Edward Said's Orientalism, it does not follow ,any theoretical model in its analysis of the poetic adaptation and appropriation of Persian stories, themes, and tropes. The poems themselves, whether considered in categories or as individual works, are the object of attention; particular emphasis is laid on elements that might be less 'visible' to English readers who lack knowledge of Persian literature in its original forms. The aim is to define the nature, and degree, of 'Persian-ness' in nineteenth-century English poetry. The term itself has multiple and shifting associations, but one strong connecting thread may be discerned in the poems discussed: the persistence, through a period in which British encounters with 'modem' Persia were increasing in the areas of diplomacy and trade, and in which knowledge of the country's history, language, and culture was becoming more exact and more detailed, of a fantasised 'Persia', or Persian 'imaginary', compounded of ancient and in some cases mythic elements. Structurally the thesis moves from context to text, and from general to specific: it begins with the provision of necessary contextual information about Anglo-Persian contacts before the nineteenth century, moves on to survey and classify the 'Persian tendency' in poetry of the period, and then offers case-studies of three central works: Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (1853), Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat ofOmar Khayyam (1859), and Robert Browning's Ferishtah's Fancies (1884).
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Waller, Benjamin. "Metaphorical Space and Enclosure in Old English Poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/17893.
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While the political and social spaces of Old English literature are fairly well understood, this project examines the conceptual spaces in Old English poetry. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a richly metaphorical understanding of the world, not merely in the sense of artistically ornamental metaphor, but in Lakoff and Johnson's sense of conceptual metaphor, which reflects the structures of thought through which a culture understands their world. Three domains exhibit developed systems of conceptual metaphor for the Anglo-Saxons: the self, death, and the world. First, the Anglo-Saxon self is composed of four distinct entities--body, mind, soul, and a life-force--which each behave independently as they compete for control in poems like The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Soul and Body. Second, death for the Anglo-Saxon is expressed through a number of metaphors involving the status or placement of the body: removal to a distant place; separation of the body and the soul; location down on or within the earth; and the loss of life as a possession. Predominance of a particular metaphor contributes to the effects of individual poems, from The Fates of the Apostles and Beowulf to The Battle of Maldon and The Wife's Lament. Third, the Anglo-Saxon world is a large structure like a building, with its three primary components--heaven, hell, and earth--each themselves presented as building-like structures. Old English poetry, including native versions of Genesis, reveal heaven to be a protective Anglo-Saxon hall, while hell is a cold prison. The earth, in poems like Christ II and Guthlac B, is either a wide plain or a comforting house. Christ I connects these worlds through gates, including Mary, characterized as a wall-door. Finally, the apocalyptic Christ III employs metaphorical spaces for all three conceptual domains treated in this study but dramatizes their breakdown even as it reveals spatial enclosure the overarching structure of metaphorical concepts in Old English poetry.
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Runstedler, Curtis Thomas. "Alchemy and exemplary narrative in Middle English poetry." Thesis, Durham University, 2018. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12593/.
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This thesis examines the role of alchemy in Middle English poetry from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, particularly how these poems present themselves as exemplary narratives to raise moral points about human behaviour, fallibility, and alchemical experimentation. The introduction suggests the compatibility between the emergence of the vernacular exemplum and the development of alchemical practice and literature in late medieval England. I follow J. Allan Mitchell’s ‘ethics of exemplarity’ for reading the alchemical poems in this study, extending his reading of Middle English poetry to understand the exemplary and ethical values of alchemy in poetry, which in turn helps the reader to understand the good of alchemical examples in medieval literature. Reading these alchemical poems as exemplary reassesses the role of alchemy in medieval literature and provides new ways of thinking about the exemplum as a literary framework or device in Middle English poems containing alchemy. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the history of alchemy in the classical world, particularly its connection to metallurgical techniques and early theoretical developments, through to its transmission into the Arabic world before reaching late medieval Europe. The second chapter continues this history, focussing on the development of alchemy in medieval England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I examine the importance and impact of several key alchemical figures or poets who write about alchemy including Roger Bacon, William Langland, Thomas Norton, and George Ripley, as well as discussing the legal and societal responses to alchemical practice in England. These chapters contextualise the role of alchemy in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry, and explore the growing interest in writing vernacular alchemical poetry. The third chapter concentrates on John Gower’s use of alchemy in the Confessio amantis, in which it is presented as a model for ideal yet unattainable labour. Following R.F. Yeager’s reading of Gower’s ‘new exemplum’ in the Confessio amantis ̧ I suggest that Gower’s alchemical section follows this new, emerging style of vernacular exemplary writing and can also be read on its own as an exemplary narrative, which recognises alchemical failure as a post-lapsarian decline and a sign of human shortcomings. In the fourth chapter, I examine Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, linking it to Gower’s use of the ‘new exemplum’ in the previous chapter to show how alchemy can be used within an exemplary framework to make points about moral blindness and human fallibility. The Canon’s Yeoman’s unreliability and dubious nature as a narrator suggest Chaucer’s subversion of the exemplary format, yet he still uses alchemy and exemplary narrative for moral purposes. The fifth chapter of this dissertation examines an alchemical version of John Lydgate’s The Churl and the Bird found in Harley MS 2407. Following Joel Fredell’s reading of the poem and Mitchell’s exemplary reading of Lydgate’s poem, I discuss the anonymous author’s use of alchemy as subject matter within the poem, particularly its presentation as an exemplum and how these added alchemical stanzas affect its exemplary reading. The sixth and final chapter focusses upon two fifteenth-century Middle English alchemical dialogues: one between Morienus and Merlin, and the other between Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves. Through the dialogue form, the characters in these poems collaborate in their alchemical pursuits, forming the moral examples that are consistent throughout the works studied in this dissertation. These identify the ‘right path’ to moral well-being and healthy living as well as successful alchemical practice and experimentation.
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O'Neill, Helen Josephine. "Once preferred, now peripheral : the place of poetry in the teaching of English in the New Zealand curriculum for year 9, 10 and 11 students : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, The University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand /." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Culture, Literature and Society, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/950.
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A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his (or her) feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn't ... . It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel. e. e. cummings: 'A Poet's Advice'. (1-3, 27-28) Fifty years ago poetry was a key element in the English programme in most secondary schools. Today it is marginalised, with many teachers avoiding teaching poetry as far as possible. The consequence is a cycle of disadvantage whereby many students, never having studied, let alone attempted to write a poem in school, leave without having encountered literature at its most intense and concentrated. Since the study of poetry can also be avoided almost entirely in university English departments, such students will, in their turn, when they themselves become educators of the next generation, similarly avoid teaching poetry. This thesis investigates the pedagogical and curricular contexts within which English has been taught in New Zealand since 1945, and within which poetry has become increasingly marginal. Surveys of and interviews with students past and present, teachers and teacher-educators enable me to identify a range of reasons why this has happened, and a cycle of deprivation has developed. The thesis also identifies, however, ways in which the cycle of deprivation can be broken, and the teaching of poetry made central to the teaching of written, oral and visual language in accordance with the principles of the current New Zealand curriculum for the teaching of English.