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McGlynn, Michael Patrick. "Epic and law : a theory of epic /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3147827.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 440 -459). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Crawford, Karie. "Turbulent times : epic fantasy in adolescent literature /." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2002. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd41.pdf.
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Crawford, Karie Eliza. "Turbulent Times: Epic Fantasy in Adolescent Literature." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2002. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/84.
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This thesis is a development of the theories presented by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Bruno Bettelheim concerning archetypes, the anima/animus concept, the Hero Cycle, and identity development through fairy tales. I argue that there are vital rites of passage missing in Anglo-Saxon culture, and while bibliotherapy cannot replace them, it can help adolescents synthesize their experiences. The theories of Jung, Campbell, and Bettelheim demonstrate this concept by defining segments of the story and how they apply to the reader. Because of the applicability, readers, despite their age, can use the examples in the book to help reconcile their own experiences and understand life as it relates to them. The works I examine include J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, and David Eddings' Belgariad. Though it is impossible to test the effects of reading such works on readers, the possibility of those effects exists. Bettelheim's work, The Uses of Enchantment, discusses similar themes and he provides scientific support through his use of anecdotal evidence. Following his example, I have tried to include evidence from my own life that exemplifies the effect reading epic fantasy has had on me.
The aspects of epic fantasy in relation to going through adolescence I examine include the concept of responsibility and its relation to progress and maturity; gaining a social identity; and reconciling oneself to the dark side within and without, in society. These aspects are found within the superstructure of the Hero Cycle and the actions and motivations of the characters—archetypes—within the cycle. They are also present in real life and necessary concepts to understand to be accepted into society as a mature contributor.
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Graham, Colin. "Ideologies of epic : empire and nation in the epic poetry of Tennyson, Samuel Ferguson and Edwin Arnold." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.240062.
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Frangoulidis, Stavros Antonios. "Epic imitation in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius /." The Ohio State University, 1990. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu148767844425807.
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Burrow, Colin John. "The English humanist epic 1580-1614." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359594.
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Waki, Fábio 1985. "Os heróis gregos e anglo-saxões ou as transformações de um paradigma." [s.n.], 2015. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270756.
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Orientador: Flávio Ribeiro de OliveiraDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-27T17:51:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Waki_Fabio_M.pdf: 1681620 bytes, checksum: bb4e8d870c882bd426e166f15d5cd3f6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015
Resumo: Esta dissertação apresenta uma leitura do poema anglo-saxão Beowulf a partir de leituras dos poemas homéricos. O objetivo é iniciar uma discussão sobre a natureza do paradigma heroico anglo-saxão confiando em parâmetros normalmente utilizados para discutir a natureza do paradigma heroico grego. Sendo a primeira literatura inglesa em geral menos conhecida ao público brasileiro, essa abordagem cruzada busca esclarecer os principais aspectos dessa literatura valendo-se de características análogas encontradas na mais conhecida literatura grega. Embora o estabelecimento de uma diacronia poética conclusiva entre as tradições grega e anglo-saxã seja impossível por causa da insuficiência de paralelos verbais entre o Beowulf e os poemas homéricos, o método comparativo se mostrou eficiente ao destacar que os protagonistas dos três poemas podem ser qualificados segundo parâmetros neutros comuns que não descrevem uma transformação diacrônico-poética, mas sim uma transformação histórico-social. Esse método evidentemente é sincrônico e a descoberta de que o Beowulf, devido a sua forma, é melhor analisado por meio de um método sincrônico é talvez a maior conquista desta pesquisa. Tanto esse poema quanto os poemas homéricos são oriundos da literatura oral, mas, enquanto esses buscam articular de maneira orgânica diversos mitos de uma tradição longeva e dedicada ao culto heroico, aquele busca glosar os principais mitos da tradição germânica do tempo em que foi composto, um tempo em que essa tradição já era dominada pelo cristianismo. Este estudo é essencialmente em teoria literária, mas confia grande parte de seus argumentos em uma metodologia que pertence igualmente à literatura e à linguística: trata-se do close reading, procedimento de análise textual preferido pelos helenistas contemporâneos, sobretudo os do meio anglófono. Adotando tal metodologia, esta dissertação busca chamar atenção para o pensamento desses helenistas e divulgar a literatura anglo-saxã de maneira didática, bem como aproveita para exercitar técnicas de hermenêutica filológica e literária que são as mais atualizadas dentro dos estudos clássicos e amplamente úteis aos estudos literários em geral
Abstract: This dissertation presents a reading of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf based on readings of the Homeric poems. The objective is to initiate a discussion about the nature of the Anglo-Saxon heroic paradigm relying on parameters normally used to discuss the nature of the Greek heroic paradigm. Because the first English literature is in general less known to the Brazilian public, this crossed approach tries to enlighten the main aspects of this literature by making use of analogous characteristics found in the better known Greek literature. Although establishing a conclusive poetic diachrony between the Greek and the Anglo-Saxon is impossible due to insufficient verbal parallels between Beowulf and the Homeric poems, the comparative method was found efficient for evincing that the protagonists of the three poems can be qualified following neuter and common parameters that do not describe a diachronic-poetic transformation, but rather an historic-social one. This method is, evidently, synchronic and the discovery that the Beowulf, due to its form, is better analysed by means of a synchronic method is perhaps this research¿s greatest achievement. This poem and the Homeric poems are products of oral literature, but, while the latter try to organically articulate many myths of a long-lived tradition dedicated to hero cult, the former tries to gloss the most important myths of the Germanic tradition by the time it was composed, a tradition already overwhelmed by Christianity. This study is essentially one in literary theory, but a great part of its arguments relies on a methodology that is as literary as it is linguistic: close reading, the procedure of textual analysis preferred by contemporary Hellenists, especially those from the Anglophone academic milieu. By adopting such a methodology, this dissertation calls attention to these Hellenists¿ thoughts and discloses the Anglo-Saxon literature in didactic fashion. It also takes this opportunity to exercise techniques of literary and philological hermeneutics that are state of the art in Classics and widely useful for literary studies in general
Mestrado
Linguistica
Mestre em Linguística
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Kanjilal, Sucheta. "Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination in Contemporary Indian Literature." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6875.
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This project delineates a cultural history of modern Hinduism in conversation with contemporary Indian literature. Its central focus is literary adaptations of the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Among Hindu religious texts, this epic has been most persistently reproduced in literary and popular discourses because its scale matches the grandeur of the Indian national imagining. Further, many epic adaptations explicitly invite devotion to the nation, often emboldening conservative Hindu nationalism. This interdisciplinary project draws its methodology from literary theory, history, gender, and religious studies. Little scholarship has put Indian Anglophone literatures in conversation with other Indian literary traditions. To fill this gap, I chart a history of literary and cultural transactions between both India and Britain and among numerous vernacular, classical, and Anglophone traditions within India. Paying attention to gender, caste, and cultural hegemony, I demostrate how epic adaptations both narrate and contest the contours of the Indian nation.
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FERRARI, BRUNO. "MULTIPLE SUBVERVIONS: CLASSICAL-REFERENCED EPIC CONFIGURATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2017. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=34074@1.
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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
PROGRAMA DE SUPORTE À PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO DE INSTS. DE ENSINO
O objetivo principal deste trabalho é investigar sobre a permanência do gênero épico na contemporaneidade, a partir da leitura e análise das seguintes obras: Uma viagem à Índia, de Gonçalo Tavares, Viva o povo brasileiro, de João Ubaldo Ribeiro, A odisseia de Penélope, de Margaret Atwood e A odisseia de Homero (segundo João Vítor), de Gustavo Piqueira. O trabalho parte da premissa de que, assim como todo paradigma consagrado, na contemporaneidade, o épico é retomado e modalizado em diferentes gêneros formando novas configurações. Assim, focaliza o relacionamento que as obras do corpus estabelecem com as matrizes clássicas e seus procedimentos estilísticos, temas e motivos. Ao utilizarem o gênero épico como paradigma, todos os escritores estabelecem um relacionamento intertextual explícito e ambíguo com as matrizes épicas clássicas. A partir da referência a elas, eles promovem sua desconstrução e subversão e evidenciam seus vieses, ora questionando, ora reafirmando sua viabilidade e importância nos dias de hoje.
The main aim of this work is to investigate about the permanence of the epic genre in contemporaneity by analyzing the following works: Gonçalo Tavares s Uma viagem à Índia, João Ubaldo Ribeiro s Viva o povo brasileiro, Margaret Atwood s A odisseia de Penélope, e Gustavo Piqueira s A odisseia de Homero (segundo João Vítor). This thesis departs from the point that the epic genre, like any other established paradigm, is and modalized in diferente genres, forming new configurations. Therefore, it focuses on the relationship that the works in the corpus entail with the classical matrix and its stylistic procedures, themes and motifs. All the writers studied establish an ambiguous and explicit intertextual relationship with the classical epics. Departing from the reference to them, they promote their deconstruction and subversion, evidencing their biases, both questioning and reinforcing their viability and importance nowadays.
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Radway, John North. "The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American Poetry." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718713.
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This dissertation explores the afterlife of the Western epic tradition in the poetry of the United States of America after World War Two and in the wake of high modernism. The ancient, Classical conception of epic, as formulated by Aristotle, involves a crucial, integral opposition between ethos, or character, and mythos, or the defining features, narratives, and histories of the world through which ethos moves. The classical epic and its direct line of succession, from Homer to Virgil to Dante to Milton and even to Joel Barlow, uses the opposition between ethos and mythos to create literary tension and drive. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, Ezra Pound upended this tradition dynamic by attempting to create a new form of epic in which mythos, not ethos, was the principal agonist, and in which large-scale aspects of the political, literary, and economic world struggled for survival on their own terms, thus divorcing epic from its traditional reliance on ethos. Chapter One explores this dubious revolution in terms of Pound’s larger project of breaking away from his nineteenth century forbears. The remaining chapters comprise three case studies of the divergent ways in which later twentieth century poets sought to salvage something of the traditional epic dynamic from the ruin wracked by Pound and his acolytes. Chapter Two explores John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, an epic-like poem that models itself subtly on Dante’s Commedia while placing a profound and deliberate emphasis on ethos even at the expense of mythos. Chapter Three explores Robert Lowell’s career-long effort to expose the terrifyingly inexorable nature of mythos, constructing an inconceivably enormous presence against whom character and divinity alike struggle in vain. Finally, Chapter Four examines Adrienne Rich’s early and middle years as an attempt to outline and enact a politically and socially efficacious means by which ethos might finally overcome mythos and liberate itself not only from the recursive historical traps of Pound, modernism, fascism, and patriarchy, but also from the literary history and tradition that lured humanity into believing that those traps ever existed. Berryman’s intervention in the epic tradition is heavily literary and overtly personal; Lowell’s is cynical, apocalyptic, and descriptively political; and Rich’s is revolutionary and messianic. Together, these three poets represent a meaningful sampling of the afterlife of the epic tradition in late twentieth-century America.English
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Wood, Melanie. "Qualities of movement : travel and environment in modern epic literature." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2003. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11401/.
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Epic literature has often been interpreted as a static genre, conforming to conventional structural and thematic characteristics. This study argues that epic is a genre of movement and transition, in terms of its literary style, and its humanist representation of journeys and geography. Taking a thematic approach, this study draws upon images of movement, modes of transport and perceptions of the environment to argue that modern epic is concerned with describing both an animate universe and humankind's position within it. Chronological discussions of individual narratives focus upon John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805), Lord Byron's Don Juan (1819-24), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Derek Walcott's Umeros (1990), and Aiden Andrew Dun's Vale Royal (1995). This carries the study across the modern period, from the Seventeenth Century to the present day. Literary and philosophical contexts are engaged with, and culturally-specific interpretations of a perceived human condition are drawn out. The study concludes that epic must be perceived as a genre which evolves alongside cultural developments. The epic journey is one of the prime vehicles for expressing change, and for guiding the hero and reader towards new revelations or ways of understanding material and social environments.
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Matthews, S. "Blake's long poems and the contemporary epic revival." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.371688.
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McCloskey, Jason A. "Epic conflicts culture, conquest and myth in the Spanish Empire /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3350507.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2008.Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct. 8, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-03, Section: A, page: 0890. Adviser: Steven Wagschal.
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Callaway, Cathy L. "The oath in epic poetry /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/11449.
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Hefferon, Marguerite Lee. "The nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman and the Romantic epic tradition." The Ohio State University, 1988. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1239108475.
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Naraghi, Akhtar. "The images of women in western and eastern epic literature : an analysis in three major epics, The Shahnameh, The Iliad and The Odyssey." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=70325.
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The central thesis of this work is twofold: (1) contrary to the images perpetuated in works of criticism, there exists no sustained misogyny in the text of exemplar epics by Ferdowsi and Homer, or antagonism toward women rooted in the poets' attitude, and (2) using the principle of androcentric (rather than gynocentric) feminist literary theory we have tried to prove the existence of a "systematic inconsistency" in the roles and images assigned to the women of The Shahnameh, the Iliad, and Odyssey. We have identified the presence of a double structure concerning the question of women. Instead of endlessly praising the female characters, or fully condemning the portrayal of such figures, we have instead tried to turn the issues around and examined opposed aspects in female roles and images. We have examined the conflict of opposites and the systematic inconsistency within each text in which a double structure splits the female image in two directions: one force is represented by exalted, praiseworthy, and positive images endowing women with powerful characteristics such as prowess, courage, wisdom, insight, fearlessness, and a host of other attributes. Yet within the same text, the same woman, through another force, is not only relegated to a subservient role, but also finds imposed upon her the condition of not being taken seriously, severe handicaps regarding her full integration in the social fabric of the story, and not being allowed to use her considerable abilities. Within this paradoxical double structure, it is not that one structure eventually cancels out the other, rather the coexistence of both structures in the same work results in the readers' suspension between the conclusions each of them separately urges.The dichotomy in the characterization of women in epic literature is not limited to a single culture; a consistent thread runs through the universal inconsistency in the make-up of women in epic. The thread runs across the border between the East and the West, wherever that border may be drawn on the map geographically, historically, or culturally.
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Vodoklys, Edward J. "Blame-expression in the epic tradition." New York : Garland, 1992. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/25130912.html.
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Reid, Joshua. "Teaching the Italian Romance Epic in Translation: Materials and Methods." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2018. https://www.amzn.com/1603293663.
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The Italian romance epic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its multitude of characters, complex plots, and roots in medieval Carolingian and Arthurian chivalric romances, was a form popular with courtly and urban audiences. In the hands of writers such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, works of remarkable sophistication that combined high seriousness and low comedy were created. Their works went on to influence Cervantes, Milton, Ronsard, Shakespeare, and Spenser.
In this volume, instructors will find ideas for teaching the Italian Renaissance romance epic along with its adaptations in film, theater, visual art, and music. An extensive resources section locates primary texts online and lists critical studies, anthologies, and reference works.
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Reid, Joshua. "The Figure of the Poet-Translator in the Italian Romance Epic." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/2862.
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Lorenz, Johnny Anderson. "Haunted cartographies : ghostly figures and contemporary epic in the Americas /." Digital version accessible at:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Platt, Mary Hartley. "Epic reduction : receptions of Homer and Virgil in modern American poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9d1045f5-3134-432b-8654-868c3ef9b7de.
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The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.
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陳以德 and Yee-tak Chan. "The epic of sentiment: Hongloumeng and the fictionality of heoric selves." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1998. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31215002.
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Markey, Jennifer Clare. "From history to epic : the Siege of Antioch in chanson de geste literature." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2018. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.743048.
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Murgia, Claudio. "[Beyond] posthuman violence : epic rewritings of ethics in the contemporary novel." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/93366/.
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My research will consist of a literary investigation into changing representations of violence in the contemporary novel in the context of the paradigm shift from humanism to posthumanism, from reality to fiction. The core of my work, developed through the reading of some research in neuroscience, will concern the examination of the brain as metaphor machine. From here, I will argue that the problem of violence in relation to fiction today is due to the struggle in the human body between transcendence and immanence. The individual has a tendency to transcend reality and in so doing lives violence as fiction even when inflicting pain to the other. I will observe how this transcendence is translated in contemporary narrative forms and I will shape a rhetoric of contemporary literary violence. My intention is to conduct comparative research across British, American, French and Italian literary fiction of the past 20 years, with a few exceptions. I will explore whether and how, in a globalizing world, it is both possible and necessary to develop a comparative literary analysis of the forms of contemporary violence. I will observe how the advent of posthumanity or of the fictional man has generated a crisis in the definition of identity and reality in a context in which fiction has taken its place. I will show how the individual re-acts to this condition through violence in order to find authenticity. References will include the works of Deleuze, Badiou, Bauman, Baudrillard, De Man, Agamben, Hayles et alii. In order to explore the different ramifications of the substitution of fiction to reality and its connection to violence, I will focus on what I consider the main three tools for the creation of simulation today: language, desire and information, through the works of Wallace, McCarthy, Miéville, Ballard, Gibson, Palahniuk et alii. Finally, the work will focus on the new emphasis given by contemporary writers to literary responsibility after the irresponsible writing (after the death of the author) of postmodernism through the analysis of the New Italian Epic postulated by Wu Ming but applied to the English Weird Fiction writer China Miéville. I will suggest that an attempt to overcome postmodernism is taking place in contemporary global fiction based on a more ‘serious’ approach (as Wallace would have said), a new ethics of literature, which endeavours to depict the reasons for contemporary violence in fiction and advocates for a balance between the transcendence of fiction and the immanence of reality.
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Titman, Neil Richard. "Deference and dissent : responses to Latin epic in the nineteenth-century French novel." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.245425.
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Pinti, Daniel John. "Gavin Douglas' dialogic epic : translation and the negotiation of poetic authority in the Eneados /." The Ohio State University, 1992. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu148777912090868.
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Taneja, Pria. "Epic legacies : Hindu cultural nationalism and female sexual identities in India 1920-1960." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2009. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/638.
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The thesis investigates the cultural interventions of Hindu nationalist, C. Rajagopalachari (CR), by offering a close reading of his re-tellings of the Hindu epics, The Mahabharata (1951) and The Ramayana (1956). It positions them alongside the writings of M. K. Gandhi and the key responses to Katherine Mayo’s controversial text Mother India (1927). The thesis explores the central female protagonists of the epics – Sita and Draupadi – asking how these poetic representations illuminate the ways in which femininity was imagined by an influential Hindu ideologue during the early years of Indian Independence. Using close textual analysis as my principal method I suggest that these popular-literary representations of sexual identities in Hindu culture functioned as one means by which Hindu nationalists ultimately sought to regulate gender roles and modes of being. I focus on texts emerging in the years immediately before and after Independence and Partition. In this period, I suggest, the heroines of these versions of the epic texts are divested of their bodies and of their mythic powers in order to create pliant, de-sexualised female icons for women in the new nation to emulate. Through an examination of the responses to Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), and of Gandhi’s writings, I argue that there one can discern an attempt in the Hindu Indian script to define female sexual identity as maternal, predominantly in service to the nation. These themes, I argue, were later articulated in CR’s recasting of the Hindu epics. CR’s epics represent the vision of gender within Hindu nationalism that highlights female chastity in the epics, elevating female chastity into an authentic and perennial virtue. I argue, however, that these ‘new’ representations in fact mark a re-working of much older traditions that carries forward ideas from the colonial period into the period of Independence. I explore this longer colonial tradition in the Prologue, through a textual analysis of the work of William Jones and James Mill. Thus my focus concerns the symbolic forms of the nation – its mythologies and icons – as brought to life by an emergent Hindu nationalism, suggesting that these symbolic forms offer an insight into the gendering of the independent nation. The epics represented an idealised model of Hindu femininity. I recognise, of course, that these identities are always contested, always unfinished. However I suggest that, through the recasting of the epic heroines, an idea of female sexuality entered into what senior Hindu nationalist and Congressman, K.M. Munshi, called ‘the unconscious of India’.
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Chan, Yee-tak. "The epic of sentiment : Hongloumeng and the fictionality of heoric selves /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B20666949.
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Kares, Julie Lorraine. "Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: The Everyday Southern Epic." OpenSIUC, 2011. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/386.
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Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (GWTW) has long been termed an "epic" of the American South. The implications of that term, however, have not been fully investigated, particularly as they concern generic criteria. How can we assign the generic characteristics of the epic narrative to GWTW? Using theories of the epic as postulated by Hegel, Lukács, Merchant, and Bakhtin, this study examines the ways in which GWTW writes the Southern nation into history, and how the objective portrayal of its epic heroine reflects the emergence of the New Southern nation. More specifically, it looks at how the depiction of Scarlett O'Hara's "everyday" existence reflects the larger New Southern identity and consciousness. The "everyday" or quotidian experience has been defined by such scholars as Henri Lefebvre, Michel deCerteau and Joe Moran as the space in which the life as lived is developed in all its minutia and the manner by which the state acts upon that existence. Using these ideas as a framework, we begin to see how the narrative of Scarlett's day-to-day existence functions as a voice for the New South. Finally, questions of how GWTW enters into the "everyday" of contemporary American culture are explored.
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Spann, Britta 1979. "Reviving kalliope: Four North American women and the epic tradition." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10356.
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ix, 267 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.In English literary studies, classical epic poetry is typically regarded as a masculinist genre that imparts and reinforces the values of dominant culture. The Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid , after all, were written by men, feature male heroes, and recount the violent events that gave rise to the misogynistic societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, in the twentieth century, women poets have found inspiration for their feminist projects in these ostensibly masculinist poems. The four poets in this study, for example, have drawn from the work of Homer and Virgil to criticize the ways that conventional conceptions of gender identity have impaired both men and women. One might expect, and indeed, most critics argue, that women like H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson invoke their classical predecessors only to reject them and the repressive values that they represent. Close readings of these poets' work, however, demonstrate that, far from dismissing the ancient poems, Helen in Egypt , Annie Allen , Meadowlands , and Autobiography of Red are deeply invested in them, finding in them models for their own social critiques. The work of these four poets emphasizes that the classical epics are not one-dimensional celebrations of violence and traditional masculinity. Indeed, the work of Homer and Virgil expresses anxiety about the misogynistic values of the heroic code to which its warriors adhere, and it urges that war and violence are antithetical to civilized society. In examining the ways that modern women poets have drawn from these facets of the ancient works to condemn the sexism, racism, and heterocentrism of contemporary culture, my dissertation seeks to challenge the characterization of classical epic that prevails in English literary studies and to assert the necessity of understanding the complexity of the ancient texts that inspire modern poets. Taking an intertextual approach, I hope to show that close readings of the classical epics facilitate our understanding of how and why modern women have engaged the work of their ancient predecessors and that this knowledge, in turn, emphasizes that the epic genre is more complex than we have recognized and that its tradition still flourishes.
Committee in charge: Karen Ford, Chairperson, English; Paul Peppis, Member, English; Steven Shankman, Member, English; P. Lowell Bowditch, Outside Member, Classics
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Turner, Robert Charles Grey. "Counterfeit culture : truth and authenticity in the American prose epic since 1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709455.
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Davis, Deryl Andrew. ""A Scottish Milton" : Robert Pollok and epic theodicy in the Romantic Age." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30776/.
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Robert Pollok’s The Course of Time was one of the best-selling long poems of the nineteenth century, outstripping works by much better known contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. Yet today, Pollok and his poem are almost entirely forgotten by scholars and general readers alike. This thesis explores the factors behind the poem’s enormous, decades-long popularity and its later sudden decline, arguing that neither can be understood without a recognition of the poem’s distinctiveness as a Romantic-era Miltonic theodicy written from an evangelical Scottish Calvinist perspective. In contrast with most of his Romantic peers, Pollok used the Miltonic model to defend, rather than to challenge or reinterpret, traditional Christian doctrines under siege in the early nineteenth century, especially biblical authority, final judgment, heaven, and hell. As the first comprehensive examination and close reading of The Course of Time in the modern era, this study begins with an exploration of Milton’s significance for the British Romantics as a whole and compares that with his peculiar importance for Pollok, which lies primarily in the theodicean model of Paradise Lost and Milton’s embodiment of the ideal of the Christian poet. Next, the study considers three figures contemporary with Pollok whose influence may have been decisive for The Course of Time: Lord Byron, whose short lyric “Darkness” inspired Pollok’s poem and whose religious skepticism Pollok sought to challenge; theologian John Dick, who provided a theological framework and polemical stance that Pollok may have adopted; and apocalyptic Scots preacher Edward Irving, who called for a new Milton to affirm biblical understandings of judgment in an epic poem, and who did so shortly before Pollok began The Course of Time. Following, I undertake a close reading of the poem to investigate its larger didactic aims and performance as a “sermon in verse” intended to offer cautionary examples to its readership. The final chapter examines the poem’s reception history through reviews, analyses, and commentaries and considers the reasons behind its dramatic rise to popularity and precipitous decline and near-disappearance decades later, finding both rooted in its deep religiosity and distinctive identity as a traditional Miltonic theodicy in the Romantic age. A comprehensive examination of the poem and its history thus provides valuable insights into the changing relationship between religion and wider culture in the nineteenth century, the uses of literature as a vehicle for theological content and instruction, and the important and often overlooked role that religion played in Scottish Romantic literature.
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Moss, Carina M. "Elegy with Epic Consequences: Elegiac Themes in Statius’ Thebaid." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1592134478208502.
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Armstrong, John Patrick. "Lyric realism to Epic consciousness : poetic subjectivity in the work of Edward Dorn." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/502/.
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This thesis looks at Edward Dorn s work from his early poems in the late 1950 s to Gunslinger, his mock epic of the American West written between 1968 and 1974. The overall background premise to the present study is that, in this period, Dorn s work develops from a form of lyric, in his early work, to the construction of a multiple and epic consciousness within the four books of Gunslinger. Some critics of Dorn see quite radical shifts within this development, which often leads to a periodizing of Dorn s work. But this thesis argues for a strong continuity that runs alongside these shifts, driven by a consistent anti-capitalism that informs Dorn s writing. Chapter 1 assesses several of Dorn s early poems and finds within the construction of his poetic subject, a tendency to undo and undermine the traditional lyric voice of interiority. Comparisons are made with Frost and Thoreau, and Olson is introduced as Dorn s first and foremost major influence. The poet s dealing with otherness is considered, as are the influence of Whitman and Blake among others, with the aim of placing Dorn in a literary sense, and showing how his poetry continues and subverts various traditions and conventions of poetry, In Chapter 2, examples of Dorn s prose works - short stories, sketches and his autobiographical novel By the Sound (1971) - are explored both in their own terms and as experiential backdrop to the poetry. This section is particularly concerned with Dorn s configuration of poverty in his work and how it is consstructed as a form of American otherness. Chapter 3 s primary concern is with Dorn s treatment of the American West in his 1964 volume Hands Up! Particularly important here is Dorn s undemining of myth, its process of privileging certain stories to the detriment of history, and the West s reliance on capitalism. The second half of this chapter continues these ideas through an assessment of 'The Land Below'. Chapter 4 critiquse Geography (1965) through the influence of Charles Olson and the cultural geographer Carl Otwin Sauer. The first half is concerned with Dorn s push for expansiveness in his poetry and his attempts to achieve, what he calls, a 'condition of the simultaneous.' The second half of the chapter however, locates in this collection, a poetics of melancholy and isolation that is more in keeping with his early work and in tension with his development toward epic. Chapter 5 assesses The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), focusing primarily on the two long poems of the volume, 'The North Atlantic Turbine' and 'Oxford.' This section looks at the further expansion in Dorn s poetics with the collection s global reach, and also considers the introduction of the experimentation with made-up voices. The final chapter on Gunslinger looks first at Dorn s treatment of the first-person pronoun as a continuation of his consistent testing of poetic subjectivity. Also explored, are 'The Cycle' and Dorn s creation of Robart as a monstrous manifestation of capiralism and finally, how the poem utilises the genre of eopc. The goal of the thesis is to explore beneath the presumptions about Dorn s development as a poet and understand how the complexities of such a development are played out within the texts themselves. Also, the aim here is to show how the movement from lyric to epic takes place in Dorn s work by very gentle degrees and is inextricably connected to his anti-capitalist politics.
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Armstrong, John Patrick. "'Lyric realism' to 'Epic consciousness' poetic subjectivity in the work of Eward Dorn /." Connect to e-thesis, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/502/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Bodie, Gary John. "A new kind of Beowulf : text, translation and technology /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1453174591&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-254). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Davies, Michael Howard. "'Fierabras' in Ireland : the transmission and cultural setting of a French epic in the medieval Irish literary tradition." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/8164.
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Thirteenth-century France saw the construction of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Crown of Thorns and other Relics of the Passion which had been purchased by King Louis IX. As a result, a fictitious history that explained how Charlemagne had rescued these Relics from the Saracens and brought them to Paris gained widespread popularity in later medieval France. This history was in the form of an epic poem entitled the Chanson de Fierabras, of which English translations were also made. The history was, in addition, taken to Ireland, where the Irish translation, Sdair Fortibrais developed a wide circulation. However, the Irish text had as its source a Latin translation of the French epic poem. This Latin text is preserved only partially in a unique Irish manuscript of the fifteenth century. It is assumed to be the work of an Irish cleric due to the non-appearance of this version of the story outside Ireland. Hitherto unedited, the principal aim of this project is to provide an edition of the Latin text that lies between the French epic and the Irish text, and then to discuss the position of the story in the Irish literary tradition. The first part of this thesis is entitled 'The Irish Fierabras- the Historical and Literary Framework', divided into five chapters. The first chapter asks why a certain selection of literary texts were translated into Irish during the later Middle Ages, and how they were representing the literary tastes of contemporary France. A comparison is then made with the translation literature of English, Welsh and Old Norse, leading to the conclusion that the history of the Relics of the Passion was the major reason for the interest in the Fierabras story in Ireland as in England. The second chapter outlines the spread of the Fierabras story in France, England and Ireland from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, noting any political reasons as to why the story may have been popular at any one time. The third chapter considers how the subjects of the Fierabras story were used elsewhere in the Irish tradition in order to see if any political interpretations may be applied. The results are inconclusive. The fourth chapter demonstrates that the Irish text is a close translation of the Latin, which is itself an economical translation of the French poem. The final chapter notes how the Latin text can be considered a scholastic text of the early fourteenth century, and asks if it was the work of one particular author, by comparison with another datable text. The second part, 'Manuscript, Text and Translation', is centred upon the edition of the Latin text. The edition presents the text as it is written in the manuscript, with appropriate emendations - an 'editio princeps'. The title of the text in the manuscript, Gesta Karoli Magni, is preserved. The edition is prefaced by a description of the manuscript, along with the editorial principles. It is noted how the text is preserved on one quire that would probably have been followed by a similar quire, now lost. The edition is followed by a textual apparatus, in which the editorial corrections are explained, and some further notes. A reasonably literal translation lies at the end, in which the difficulties in the Latin text are clarified as far as possible.
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Mistovich, Joy Lynne. "An In-Depth Exploration of The Faerie Queene: Book 1." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1403194557.
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Hooper, Shelley Wind. "Actors without an Audience? Performance Analysis of the "Borderlands" Live Action Role Playing Epic." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/HooperSW2003.pdf.
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Barrett, Christine. "Navigating Time: Cartographic Narratives in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10320.
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In the sixteenth century, the cartographic revolution was rapidly changing the experience of everyday life in England. Modes of thinking and inhabiting space (such as astronomy, trigonometry, surveying, and cartography) were advanced and refined, and in England, the map went from rarity to ubiquity in less than seventy years. Navigating Time explores how literary strategies changed in response to this rapid shift in the technology of spatial representation. I consider four epics, the epic being the early modern genre most overtly invested in matters of empire (and thus, in matters of space and history). Building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities, I argue that the epic offers a radical critique of the technological innovations of the cartographic revolution and the menace those innovations posed. Alongside this critique, the early modern epic outlined a new poetics centered on navigation. Epics by Holinshed, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton sought to encompass the representational possibilities of the map, but also to highlight and exceed the map's narrative insufficiency. Holinshed's Chronicles reforms the topography of the city, converting its streets and alleys into historical texts and presenting historiography and mapping as competing interpretive frameworks for urban space. The Faerie Queene redefines genre as the conduct of bodies in space, making it thus impossible to fix Faeryland as a mappable terrain, and asserting the continuous interpretation required by allegory against the compression imposed by the map. Drayton's Poly-Olbion seems at first to be a verbal map of Britain, but the poem quietly insists on the power of literature not to mimic but rather to supplant the world it describes, becoming the terrain a map can only represent. Finally, Milton's Paradise Lost creates a form of navigating without a destination, by transforming history into a geographic expanse that cannot be mapped, only wandered.
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Rerick, Michael S. "OdeIS/HeIs and “Homeward, Postmodern Epic Conventions in Eleni Sikelianos’ The California Poem”." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1276528848.
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Phelps, Paul Chandler. "'Wounded Harts' : metaphor and desire in the epic-romances of Tasso, Sidney, and Spenser." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6314229f-2797-4727-91c8-64265a16f6b3.
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If we consider the representation of the body in the epic-romances of Torquato Tasso, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, certain instances of wounding and laceration emerge as crucial turning points in the development of their respective narratives: Clorinda’s redemptive mutilation, Parthenia’s blood-drenched pallor, Amavia’s disquieting suicide, Venus’s insatiable orifice, Amoret’s “perfect hole.” This thesis affords a detailed comparative study of such passages, contending that the wound assumed a critical metaphoric dimension in sixteenth-century epic-romance literature, particularly in relation to the perceived association between body condition and erotic desire. Along with its function as a marker of martial valor and somatic sacredness, the wound, I argue, increasingly is designated in these epic-romances as an interiorizing apparatus, one liable to accrue at any instance into a surplus of unanticipated meaning. As such, the wound becomes an emblem in these texts of what I call the phenomenology of desire—the equation of consummation and loss—as well as the aesthetic and metaphoric mechanism by which these writers seek to overcome it. The four chapters of this thesis constitute individual but cumulative points of response to the problem of thinking about desire as a type of wound. For Tasso, a wound poses a challenge to physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity, but its remarkable capacity for aestheticization also allows Tasso to envision it as a synthesizer of sacred and erotic affects. For Sidney, the prospect that a wound could define a body as courageous or pathetic, as sacred or corrupt, became both politically and socially troubling, and the New Arcadia, I argue, proleptically attempts to defend Sidney against interpretations of wounds that register them as manifestations of corrupt desire. For Spenser, body fracture and erotic wounding are analogic (indeed, almost indistinguishable), and The Faerie Queene investigates the prospect that confusing these analogies can become an empowering, even revelatory experience. In each of these epic-romances, a wound serves both a literal and a figurative function and, in this way, is established as the foremost image by which these writers imagine strength and mutilation, affect and heroism, epic and romance as being inextricably bound.
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Reid, Joshua. "Lyric Augmentation and Fragmentation of the Italian Romance Epic in English Translations." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2017. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/2861.
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The translation and transmission of the Italian romance epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso across linguistic and cultural boundaries also included genre reprocessing. This paper traces how Elizabethan translators and compilers of these texts tended to read epic lyrically, or to read the lyric into (and out of) the epic. For Elizabethan translators of the Italian Romance Epic—Sir John Harington, Edward Fairfax, and Robert Tofte, for example—this transmutation meant amplification or insertion of lyrical material, such as Fairfax’s enhancement of the Petrarchan subtext of the Armida Blazon in Book 4 of Gerusalemme Liberata and Robert Tofte’s injection of his own Petrarchan mistress Alba into Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. Another trend, demonstrated by Robert Allott’s English verse anthology Englands Parnassus (1600), involved extracting lyrical fragments from the romance epic that function as stand-alone poems.
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Platte, Ryan. "Horses and horsemanship in the oral poetry of Ancient Greece and the Indo-European world /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/11480.
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Rice, Andrea. "Rebooting Brecht: Reimagining Epic Theatre for the 21st Century." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1555688903742283.
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Ghosh, Yashowanto Narayan. "Bertolt Brecht's Leben des Galilei: a Mythic Dimension in Epic Theatre." Thesis, Portland State University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10843558.
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The history of Bertolt Brecht’s play Leben des Galilei extends through the writing of its three versions during 1938 to 1955—a period of two decades that also encompassed the entirety of the Second World War. The period also covers the atom bomb from its development to America’s use of the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the beginning of the Cold War, which included the sustained threat that nuclear weapons might be used any day. This thesis traces, and offers interpretations of, changes in Brecht’s Leben des Galilei from its inception in 1938–1939—when the protagonist, a scientist, is portrayed in a positive light—through the play’s American version in 1947, where it bitterly accuses science and scientists of having betrayed society and humanity, and finally to its last version in 1955, where the protagonist struggles to prevent the normalization—the familiarization—of the threat of nuclear warfare.
Next to the writing of the Leben des Galilei, the thesis also focuses on the main critical readings of the play. A large fraction of the critical readings, but not all of them, interpret the play either as a judgment of science or as an invitation to pass judgment on science.
The thesis compares Leben des Galilei with three different groups of other texts. The first comparison is with two other plays that also address the problem of science in the age of nuclear weapons, and the second comparison is with other work of Brecht himself. The first comparison leads to the observation that the muted note of optimism in the final version of Leben des Galilei is exceptional, and the second comparison to the apparently unrelated observation that it was uncharacteristic of Brecht to make explicit a certain literary allusion in Leben des Galilei. The two observations converge to a possible common explanation from a comparison with a still third group of texts, a cycle of Native American myths which appear in the oral traditions of various Native American tribes spread throughout the New World.
Finally, the thesis addresses the question of why a modern-day literary text, addressing the essentially modern problem of nuclear warfare, and addressing that problem using the essentially modern techniques of Brechtian theatre, might have structures parallel to the structures of primitive mythology.
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Ali, Jeanne M. "Feasts of power : how food reveals Eve's influential role in John Milton's epic poem, "Paradise Lost"." FIU Digital Commons, 2004. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1046.
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This writing explores how food in Paradise Lost reflects Eve's power in the story of man's (and woman's) fall from grace. Critics often emphasize Adam in Paradise Lost; however, I challenge the notion of the first man as the most influential character of the poem. By examining Eve's role and her abilities with food, one sees the first woman as a well-rounded, complete being, albeit the first to succumb to temptation. Notwithstanding her transgression, -- certainly no trivial act of disobedience -- Eve should be viewed at least as Adam's equal, if not his superior. Her uncanny understanding of matters related to food points to skills Adam does not enjoy, and even Milton acknowledges Eve's importance in this arena. By studying the food in this epic, we see Eve sheds much light on all the other elements of Paradise Lost, and her personal strengths become obvious.
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Rumbold, Matthew. "Epic relation : the sacred, history and late modernist aesthetics in Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/104944/.
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In order to answer questions about the nature, viability and shape of what would constitute a modernist epic, this thesis explores three very different twentieth century writers, Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. Rather than being a narrowly genre based study, however, I argue that in the twentieth century the ‘epic’ mode has become a malleable form with which to explore troubling legacies of history, empire and, to exhibit a dimension of the sacred in modernity. All three poets penned challenging epic poems (The Bridge, The Anathemata and Omeros respectively) in a condition of modernity. Haunted by the ruptures of history, in various ways, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempted to create an aesthetic which seeks cultural reintegration, recovery and reconciliation with the past. I analyse the formal experimental modernist aesthetic of each poet as they are anxiously and sometimes ambivalently influenced by the increasingly dominant institution of a particular form of metropolitan high modernism. This allows for a critique of modernity whilst contextualising a modernist inscription of imperialism. Finally, I show that the spiritual and religious concerns of these writers are essential in the recuperative or compensatory ideals of the epic. I argue that far from being an obsolete and impossible genre, for poets the epic is the very mode which best captures the transitions and conditions of an uneven and unequal modernity. I seek to show how through the trope of place (bridge, city, ruins, sacred sites and island), journey and the sea and other aesthetic devices, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempt to re-enchant emptied and destroyed cultural heritages.
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Jensen, Anna M. "Modernity and the Good Death : Heidegger and Jose Clemente Orozco's Epic of American Civilization /." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2009. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1905.
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This thesis will analyze José Clemente Orozco's mural The Epic of American Civilization in terms of the problem of suffering. It will focus specifically on two panels, “Human Sacrifice in Ancient Times” and “Human Sacrifice in Modern Times.” This analysis will comprehend not only the works of art within their historical context, but also within Martin Heidegger's philosophical discussion of the question of suffering. Heidegger presents a unique perspective on the question of human suffering when he writes that Western humans have forgotten how to “dwell.” This dwelling is defined by Heidegger's novel conception of ontology as relational rather than individualistic. According to this theory, humans must identify themselves through their associations, both with other people and with things. Without these associations, humans are not be able to escape the anxiety associated with suffering and death brought about by the isolating effects of Western modernity. A discussion of Mexico provides a practical example of the complexities of the question of dwelling in Western thought. At the time Orozco was painting his mural, Mexican identity was rapidly fragmenting. In the decades after the Mexican Revolution, many artists wrestled with the concept of Mexican identity, and it was in this time of flux that Orozco offered his interpretation of the cyclical progress of humanity. The two paintings depict two forms of suffering, which this paper will refer to as a “good” and a “bad” death. This nomenclature is not strictly accurate as neither form could be said to be desirable in any concrete way. Consequently a Rivera painting (“Revolution – Germination”) will also be presented that suggests an ideal death. However, the focus will remain on Orozco's paintings. Of course, in his own paintings Orozco is not endorsing the act of human sacrifice. However, because of differences in their composition, they suggest not only a cyclic pattern to human history, but also a downward progression where the persistent problems of violence and suffering in human societies have grown more difficult and complicated since the advent of modernity. As Orozco's paintings seem to suggest and Heidegger will argue, the solution to the isolating ‘bad death’ is learning to live relationally. These relationships comprehend the social and the cultural, but the focus will be on the ecological and the divine, because, as several critics will argue, these are the greatest deficiencies in modernity.
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Geisz, Camille H. "Storytelling in late antique epic : a study of the narrator in Nonnus of Panopolis' Dionysiaca." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7b323af8-0512-407e-8aed-a0a7970a49ef.
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This thesis is a narratological study of Nonnus of Panopolis' Dionysiaca, focussing on the figure of the narrator whose interventions reveal much about his relationship to his predecessors and his own conception of story-telling. Although he presents himself as a follower of Homer, whom he mentions by name in his poem, the Dionysiaca are clearly influenced by a much wider range of sources of inspiration. The study of narratological interventions brings to light the narrator's relationship with Homer, between imitation and innovation. The way he renews and transforms epic narratorial devices attests to his literary skills as he strives for ποικιλία in his poem. His interventions hint at sources of inspiration other than Homer, such as lyric poetry, historiography, and didactic epic. Another innovation is the way the narrator intervenes not to draw the narratee's attention to the contents of his text, but to underline his own role as story-teller. Some interventions signal a change in tone or the integration of another genre; the expected proems and invocations to the Muse become spaces for a display of ingeniousness, a discussion of the sources and a reflection on the role of the poet. The efforts made by the Nonnian narrator to renew well known devices also denotes his mindfulness of his narratee, whom he involves in the story through metaleptic devices, or by drawing on a shared cultural background to enhance the narrative with allusions to extradiegetic references. The study of narratorial interventions proves that the Dionysiaca were not written only in an attempt to recreate a Homeric epic, but are a compendium of influences, genres, and myths, encompassing the influence of a thousand years of Greek literature.