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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature, Medieval. Literature, Modern. Literature, English'
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Breuer, Heidi Jo. "Crafting the witch: Gendering magic in medieval and early modern England." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280400.
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This project documents and analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. The prophet becomes the wicked witch. This dissertation explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation. Chapter Two surveys representations of magic in the texts of four authors within the Arthurian canon: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Layamon. These writers gender magic similarly (representing prophecy and certain forms of transformative magic as masculine and healing as feminine) and use gendered figures to mitigate the threat of masculine power posed by the feudal patriarchy present in England and France in the twelfth century. Chapter Three explores representations of two magical characters who appear in a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romances associated with Gawain: the churlish knight and the loathly lady. The authors of these romances privilege gender conventions radically different from those in earlier models and conjure a figure neglected by the earlier writers, the wicked witch. In particular, representations of the witch as a wicked step-mother reflect the anxiety created by expanding space for women (especially mothers) in previously exclusively male arenas of English society. In Chapter Four, I follow the romance tradition into early modern England, studying the work of Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare. For these authors, the wicked witch (alternately represented as temptress or crone) is connected specifically to maternity; the severe anxiety about maternity in these texts is representative of widespread concern about mothers and motherhood in sixteenth-century England. Chapter Five traces the legislative policy governing prosecution of witches in England and offers suggestions about the relationship between legal climates and literary representations of magic. Though prosecution of witchcraft is now extremely rare in the U.S., filmmakers still rely on medieval and Renaissance models to inform their representations of witches. Once she arrived, the witch never left.
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Avis, Robert John Roy. "The social mythology of medieval Icelandic literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2837907c-57c8-4438-8380-d5c8ba574efd.
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This thesis argues that the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature which pertains to Iceland contains an intertextual narrative of the formation of Icelandic identity. An analysis of this narrative provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between literature and identity, as well as the potency of the artistic use of the idea of the past. The thesis identifies three salient narratives of communal action which inform the development of a discrete Icelandic identity, and which are examined in turn in the first three chapters of the thesis. The first is the landnám, the process of settlement itself; the second, the origin and evolution of the law; and the third, the assimilation and adaptation of Christianity. Although the roots of these narratives are doubtless historical, the thesis argues that their primary roles in the literature are as social myths, narratives whose literal truth- value is immaterial, but whose cultural symbolism is of overriding importance. The fourth chapter examines the depiction of the Icelander abroad, and uses the idiom of the relationship between þáttr (‘tale’) and surrounding text in the compilation of sagas of Norwegian kings Morkinskinna to consider the wider implications of the relationship between Icelandic and Norwegian identities. Finally, the thesis concludes with an analysis of the role of Sturlunga saga within this intertextual narrative, and its function as a set of narratives mediating between an identity grounded in social autonomy and one grounded in literature. The Íslendingasögur or ‘family sagas’ constitute the core of the thesis’s primary sources, for their subject-matter is focussed on the literary depiction of the Icelandic society under scrutiny. In order to demonstrate a continuity of engagement with ideas of identity across genres, a sample of other Icelandic texts are examined which depict Iceland or Icelanders, especially when in interaction with non-Icelandic characters or polities.
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Gubbels, Katherine Gertrude. ""An uncouth love": queering processes in medieval and early modern romances." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/509.
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Most scholars of the romance genre can think of any number of examples in which the tale's hero or heroine finds him- or herself caught up in a rather comic episode resulting from either mistaken identity, cross-dressing, or the "mis-directed" sexual liaisons resulting there-from. At times it seems as if everyone is doomed to stumble across at least a brief period of gendered or sexual confusion as a result of these tropes, a momentary digression into the realm of queer transgression. My project builds off the work of medieval scholar, Tison Pugh, and contends that the protagonist must undergo this brief, contained period of sexual and/or gendered transgression as a kind of requirement or steppingstone necessary in order to eventually achieve his or her goal, most often in these cases, acceptance within the chivalric court and/or heteronormative coupling. In this way, these texts demarcate sexual and gender transgression as not only essential to, but also a very part of, a larger heteronormative paradigm. The presence of these queer transgressions, is not separate, nor oppositional to the overarching heteronormative, chivalric plot, but rather an indispensable part of it. In this way, the tales seem to allow for a temporary suspension of prototypical norms as a means to ultimately reinforce and re-inscribe these exact hierarchies.
My project thus not only illustrates another way of reading the genre of romance, but also examines the notion of a medieval or early modern "queer" subjectivity. I use the work of a number of medieval- and early modern- sexuality scholars (Carolyn Dinshaw, Karma Lochrie, and Valerie Traub, to name a few) to examine four canonical texts (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's "The Tale of Sir Gareth," Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Sidney's The Old Arcadia), and consider to what extent the queer episodes presented therein actually subvert or conform to the larger heteronormative paradigms of that particular culture. There are many examples of medieval and early modern texts in which temporary, controlled transgression is not only endorsed, but encouraged as a means of diffusing rebellious desire, a "getting it out of the system," if you will. The extent to which such controlled transgressions remain contained, however, is debatable. In allowing a period of controlled transgression, one admits that the very act of deviancy and its containment are intrinsically important to the larger power structure. Although these tales present queer transgressions as demons to be exorcised, this exorcism, this period of release, is ultimately part of the larger quest goal; rather than oppositional to the heteronormative ideal, these queer transgressions are an important component of such a model, interwoven and essential to the overall quest.
This topic also engages with a number of issues related to queer and feminist theories, most specifically those posited by Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. For example, when a character switches from his previous normative role to the period of controlled transgression described here, he surely does not abandon his position within the normative sphere entirely, nor does he adopt his new deviant role completely. Rather, his state is that of in-betweeness. During this period he is both Self and Other, pursuing quests in an attempt to be assimilated into heteronormative structures of the chivalric ideal, but also temporarily assuming the "queer," marginalized subject position. Such characters do not move from heteronormative to queer and back again, but rather occupy a space in which they are both heteronormative and queer. Therefore, their time of "controlled transgression" essentially shakes the foundation of binary-based identification as a whole. That is, since such characters occupy a kind of hybrid space between heteronormative and queer roles, they serve as proof that the binaries of Self and Other are not binaries at all, but rather points on a continuum. I argue that even if the "transgression" embraced by these characters is temporary and within a "controlled" environment, it is nonetheless subversive as the mere presence of a character who is both Self and Other threatens to break down this system of hierarchies as a whole.
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Parker, Eleanor Catherine. "Anglo-Scandinavian literature and the post-conquest period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:18aa9912-85f6-4cba-b4d6-4f8f7453402f.
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This thesis concerns narratives about Anglo-Scandinavian contact and literary traditions of Scandinavian origin which circulated in England in the post-conquest period. The argument of the thesis is that in the eleventh century, particularly during the reign of Cnut and his sons, literature was produced for a mixed Anglo-Danish audience which drew on shared cultural traditions, and that some elements of this largely oral literature can be traced in later English sources. It is further argued that in certain parts of England, especially the East Midlands, an interest in Anglo-Scandinavian history continued for several centuries after the Viking Age and was manifested in the circulation of literary narratives dealing with Anglo-Scandinavian interaction, invasion and settlement. The first chapter discusses some narratives about the reign of Cnut in later sources, including the Encomium Emmae Reginae, hagiographical texts by Goscelin and Osbern of Canterbury, and the Liber Eliensis; it is argued that they share certain thematic concerns with the literature known to have been produced at Cnut’s court. The second chapter explores the literary reputation of the Danish Earl of Northumbria, Siward, and his son Waltheof in twelfth-century sources from the East Midlands and in thirteenth-century Norwegian and Icelandic histories. The third chapter deals with an episode in the Middle English romance Guy of Warwick in which the hero helps to defeat a Danish invasion of England, and examines the romance’s references to a historical Danish right to rule in England. The final chapter discusses the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane, and argues that the poet of Havelok, aware of the role of Danish settlement in the history of Lincolnshire, makes self-conscious use of stereotypes and literary tropes associated with Danes in order to offer an imaginative reconstruction of the history of Danish settlement in the area.
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Smith-Laing, Tim. "Variorum vitae : Theseus and the arts of mythography in Medieval and early modern Europe." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0f4305c6-3c62-4f89-a3b2-d8204893fdfb.
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This thesis offers an approach to the history of mythographical discourse through the figure of Theseus and his appearances in texts from England, Italy and France. Analysing a range of poetic, historical, and allegorical works that feature Theseus alongside their classical and contemporary intertexts, it is a study of the conceptions of Greco-Roman mythology prevalent in European literature from 1300-1600. Focusing on mythology’s pervasive presence as a background to medieval and early modern literary and intellectual culture, it draws attention to the fragmentary, fluid and polymorphous nature of mythology in relation to its use for different purposes in a wide range of texts. The first impact of this study is to draw attention to the distinction between mythology and mythography, as a means of focusing on the full range of interpretative processes associated with the ancient myths in their textual forms. Returning attention to the processes by which writers and readers came to know the Greco-Roman myths, it widens the commonly accepted critical definition of ‘mythography’ to include any writing of or on mythology, while restricting ‘mythology’ to its abstract sense, meaning a traditional collection of tales that exceeds any one text. This distinction allows the analyses of the study’s primary texts to display the full range of interpretative processes and possibilities involved in rewriting mythology, and to outline a spectrum of linked but distinctive mythographical genres that define those possibilities. Breaking down into two parts of three chapters each, the thesis examines Theseus’ appearances across these mythographical genres, first in the period from 1300 to the birth of print, and then from the birth of print up to 1600. Taking as its primary texts works by Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate and William Shakespeare along with their classical intertexts, it situates each of them in regard to their multiple defining contexts. Paying close attention to the European traditions of commentary, translation and response to classical sources, it shows mythographical discourse as a vibrant aspect of medieval and early modern literary culture, equally embedded in classical traditions and contemporary traditions that transcended national and linguistic boundaries.
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Basea, Erato. "Literature and the Greek auteur : film adaptations in the Greek cinema d' auteur." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cab79d67-f602-43f4-96b4-4f017b2b8efa.
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The focus of this thesis is to trace the dialogue between the Greek cinéma d' auteur and Greek literature focusing on film adaptations of Greek literature from 1964 to 2001. It is argued that film adaptations are a sensitive prism through which to examine the auteurs’ cultural politics regarding their work and, through that, understand the economy of the auteurist cultural production itself. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One presents the history of the creation of the Greek cinéma d' auteur and traces its developments in relation to the concepts of national and high art. The principle argument is that Greek literature, endowed with notions of high art and national identity, played a key role in the gradual emergence, formation and consolidation of auteurism as a cinema that enunciates national identity and articulates high art values. The next four chapters examine four film adaptations each made by an acclaimed auteur. The chapters endeavour to investigate the identity politics of each director in relation to the categories of high and national art that defined the Greek cinéma d' auteur. Moreover, the chapters aim to study the politics involved in the validation or renegotiation of auteurism itself. The major contribution of the thesis is the exploration of film adaptations of Greek literature in the Greek cinéma d' auteur which has not been systematically discussed so far. Furthermore, the investigation of the two separate components that make up the subject of the thesis, namely cinema and literature, both from a theoretical perspective and within the framework of film studies, aligns the thesis with recent discussions in Modern Greek Studies and theoretical debates about authorship in films, film adaptations as well as peripheral cinemas.
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Stone, Charles Russell. "A dubious hero for the time Roman histories of Alexander the Great in Plantagenet England /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1872217431&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Ardrey, Caroline Anne. "Stéphane Mallarmé : mode de creation/creation de mode : fashion, process and La Dernière Mode." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ec202910-62e3-4a9e-91f8-d9c0de74c7b5.
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This thesis examines the eight issues of Stéphane Mallarmé's 1874 fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, focussing on ideas of process. On the one hand, it views La Dernière Mode as a vital phase in the evolution of Mallarmé's aesthetic and, on the other, it sees the discourse of fashion itself as being in a continual state of trial and re-definition. The thesis begins with a citation from Mallarmé's 1886 article, 'Mimique'; this passage showcases the complex relationship between the interpenetrating themes of Time, Drama and Fiction, which form the three main chapter headings. Taking a thematic and linguistic approach, the thesis will explore literary, theoretical and philosophical mechanisms in La Dernière Mode, assessing ways in which these can be seen to have evolved from ideas established in Mallarmé's early verse and prose writing, and tracing their evolution over the course of the poet's later works. This study will also acknowledge the importance of crisis, both personal and social, and its influence on Mallarmé's aesthetic, showing La Dernière Mode to be part of a dynamic process by which the parameters of literature are tested and re-defined. My study aims to contribute to the development of recent scholarship of Mallarmé, which acknowledges and celebrates his engagement with the material world and his interest in the aesthetic value of the practices of everyday life. Challenging views of Mallarmé as the 'ivory-tower poet' and destabilizing distinctions between his poetic and 'alimentary' works, this thesis thus makes a case for seeing La Dernière Mode as a testing ground for fundamental aspects of the poet's aesthetic with significant implications for the direction his œuvre would take in the 1880s and 1890s. The fashion magazine can thus, I contend, be considered as having a dynamic relationship with the poet's unattainable ideal of the 'Livre'.
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Unterborn, Kelly R. "Negative Representation and the Germination of English Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Travel Narratives." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1607713565270697.
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Dimirouli, Foteini. "Cavafy hero : literary appropriations and cultural projections of the poet in English and American literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:84ca6361-a26c-4269-82da-4deb4b0c4664.
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The present thesis examines the way E.M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Joseph Brodsky, and James Merrill appropriated C.P. Cavafy in writings that were disseminated and consumed amongst culturally dominant literary circles, and which eventually determined the Greek-Alexandrian poet’s international reputation. I aim to contribute a new perspective on Cavafy, by evading the text-based tradition of reception studies, and proposing an alternative method of discussing the production of Cavafy's canonical status. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory, I view literary canonization as involving a variety of factors at play beyond creative achievement: in particular, relationships of 'authorial consecration' whereby writers create and circulate cultural capital through their power to legitimize other artists. The critical and fictional texts I analyse perform readings of Cavafy's poetry alongside imaginative portrayals of the poet's life and personality. I take this complementary relationship - between the image of the poet each author projects and their reading of his work - as a starting point to explore the broader ideas of aesthetics and authorial subjectivity that inform the renderings of Cavafy generated by prominent literary figures. Rather than passive recipients of influence, these figures are considered as active agents in the production of 'Cavafy narratives', appropriating the poet according to their own agendas, while also projecting onto him their own position within the cultural field. Eventually, Cavafy becomes a point of insight into the multiplicity of networks and practices involved in the production of cultural currency; in turn, the study of the construction of Cavafy's authorial identity sheds light on the cumulative processes that have defined the way the poet is read and perceived to the present day. This duality of perspective is essential to a study concerned with the cultural contexts framing the poet's steady rise to international fame throughout the 20th century.
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Reed, Delanna Kay. "Readers Theatre in Performance: The Analysis and Compilation of Period Literature for a Modern Renaissance Faire." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1986. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500784/.
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The thrust of this study was twofold: to research and compile a script of English Medieval and Renaissance literature and to direct a group performance of the script in the oral interpretation mode at Scarborough Faire in Waxahachie, Texas. The study sought to show that a Readers Theatre script compiled of literature from the oral tradition of England was a suitable art form for a twentieth-century audience and that Readers Theatre benefited participants in the Scarborough Faire workshop program. This study concluded that the performed script appealed to a modern audience and that workshop training was enhanced by Readers Theatre in rehearsal and performance.
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Dunn, Abigail. "The depiction of the widow in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:366c6541-25b7-4cb7-a5f1-8889d3b4c1d9.
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This thesis examines the depiction of the widow by men and women in novels and short stories written between 1842 and 1913. The representation of the widow is analysed in the context of dominant views about widowhood at the time, such as those expressed in the writings of politician and statesman, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-1796). These ideas are set out in chapter I. The first chapter also examines the social reality of widowhood in nineteenth-century Germany. In the first chapter of the thesis Hippel argues that real widows are superfluous beings and men’s second-hand goods, but they were also perceived by theologians and moralists of the time as a threat due to their ungoverned lust. Many nineteenth-century widows internalised the idea espoused by Hippel and felt alienated and invisible. In German fiction, however, male writers in the works discussed repeat the latter theory that once deprived of their husbands widows are sexually voracious. In the works written by men, the figure of the widow is generally presented as a dangerous sexual predator. Female authors, however, highlight the invisibility of the widow and portray her as a figure alienated from society and her family. Henriette Hanke is the first author to be examined in chapter II. Her novel, Die Wittwen (1842), portrays five widows, who range from the self-sacrificing Lucie von Gardemer, to the liberated and financially independent Frau von Kleist. Hanke depicts widowhood as a process of education for her two key widows, Lucie von Gardemer and Franzisca Weihland. They must learn to love the right man, and at the end of the story they revert from widowhood to marriage. Fourteen years later, the first version of Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55) was published. Chapter III explores the way in which Keller portrays the threatening sexuality of his widow Judith and emphasises her power to destabilise the narrator. Chapters IV and V also focus on the widow as a predatory and dangerous figure, as exemplified in works by Paul Heyse, Eduard Grisebach, C. F. Meyer and Arthur Schnitzler. In chapter VI Hedwig Dohm presents a contrast to the dominant representations of widowhood in her story Werde, die du bist! (1896). Dohm challenges prevalent stereotypes of the widow, though with limited success. Gabriele Reuter, the final author to be discussed, reverts to male stereotypes of the widow in her stories. This chapter thus shows that women writers are not always more positive, or original, in their representation of the widow. The thesis as a whole demonstrates the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the widow in nineteenth-century German fiction. She is a figure to be at best re-educated and at worst to be feared and guarded against. She is a cynical man-trap in Heyse’s and Grisebach’s stories, a murderess in Meyer’s story, and an incestuous mother in Schnitzler’s texts. Hanke and Dohm, themselves both widows, show from the inside what it is like to be a widow in such a society.
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Harland, Rachel Fiona. "The depiction of crowds in 1930s German narrative fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c8357884-eaf2-4daf-987b-82539148b38b.
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This study of 1930s German fiction adds a new dimension to existing scholarship on the depiction of crowds in literature. Whereas previous surveys on the topic have predominantly focused on the crowd as a revolutionary phenomenon judged on the basis of class perspectives, or as a feature of mass society, this investigation deals specifically with reactions to the crowd in its incarnation as a manifestation of and symbol for political fascism. Drawing on a number of contemporaneous theoretical treatises on crowds and mass psychology, it seeks to demonstrate that war, extreme socio-political upheaval and the rise of Nazism produced intense multidisciplinary engagement with the subject among German-speaking intellectuals of the period, and examines the portrayal of crowds in works by selected literary authors in this context. Exploring the interplay between literature and concurrent theoretical works, the thesis asks how writers used specific possibilities of fiction to engage with the theme of the crowd at a time when the worth of art was often questioned by literary authors themselves. In doing so, it challenges the implication of earlier criticism that authors uncritically appropriated the findings of theoretical texts for fictional purposes. At the same time, it becomes clear that although some literary crowd portrayals support a distinction between the nature of theoretical and literary writing, certain crowd theories are as imaginative as they are positivistic. Extrapolating from textual comparisons, the thesis thus challenges the view held by some authors that knowledge produced by theoretical enquiry was somehow truer and more valuable than artistic responses to the politics of the age.
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Puello, Alfonso Sarah L. "Poetics of the urban, poetics of the self : a comparative study of selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4316585d-51c1-4b79-ae46-f5cdaf4c55d5.
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This thesis explores the poetic representation of Buenos Aires and Paris in selected works by Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Réda respectively. Its primary aim is to analyse the relational phenomenon between the construction of these poets' personal maps of the city and the concomitant formation of the poetic self. The principal point of departure is Jacques Réda's Ferveur de Borges (1987), a collection of essays and poems published individually between 1957 and 1986, where the author expresses his admiration for Borges, shows his broad and critical knowledge of Borges's works and establishes the similarities between their poetics of the urban and poetics of the self. Another important aim of this thesis is therefore to ascertain the extent of Borges's influential role in Réda's poetics, but also how reading Borges through Réda enhances our understanding of Borges's urban poetry. This comparison reveals that Borges and Réda gravitate towards places within the city, but mostly its periphery, characterised by their unpretentious, soulful and heterotopic qualities — places where the poets feel a sense of belonging. Their objective is to restore, through the prism of their minds and their physical investment in space, the provincial spirit of Buenos Aires and Paris, hidden behind the dynamism of the modern metropolises they have become. As a consequence of this communion between self and place they explore the possibility of being on the brink of a revelatory experience that speaks to the enigma of life. The wider scope of the thesis addresses the historical and cultural relationship between Buenos Aires and Paris, Borges's and Réda's redefinition of the centre/periphery dichotomy, the evening as a temporal locale and the distinction between poetic destiny and aesthetic experience.
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Allen, Jason D. "Le theatre d'Aime Cesaire et de Derek Walcott et le 'probleme de la Relation'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7c5d322e-12e9-426a-bd7f-411f75fb515a.
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This thesis considers crucial questions relating to the theatrical works of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott and argues that the authors' quest for identity is framed by a dialectic which Édouard Glissant has termed "philosophy of Relation". I show that it is this "philosophy of Relation" which helps the authors formulate a theatrical vision that transcends the chaotic aspects of Antillean history. By examining the dialectical thrust of Walcott's and Césaire's theatre, the study seeks to develop an overarching theory of modern West Indian drama that accounts for its specific Antillean nature.
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Magnabosco, F. M. M. "Unfading wonder : 'Meraviglia' as a path to poetic knowledge in Dante's Commedia and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8c090321-2fd8-4787-a9c6-50897140f3ab.
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My thesis considers wonder (meraviglia) as a path towards poetic knowledge as it appears in Dante’s Commedia and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. In my textual analyses, I pursue manifestations of wonder as indicative of a specific moment of intellectual and philosophical inquiry that fills the gap between the dimension of the subject and that of the object, namely man and his world. Before embarking on close readings, in chapter one I disentangle the different components of wonder, tracing wonder’s earliest formulations back to Plato and Aristotle, and I re-define the fields of meraviglia’s neighbouring terms (stupore and ammirazione). My research aims to reassess the areas of wonder and of the marvellous, which literary critics have for too long confused, as active parts of the speculative discourses underlying both the Commedia and the Orlando furioso. As a result, in chapters two and three, I offer a picture of wonder which, in the Commedia, leads to experience of the divine dimension, bridging the human and the divine, but, in the Furioso, opens up a new interpretation of the earthly dimension, bridging the distances between men on earth and revealing the gnoseological bearing of its contradictions. This analysis demonstrates how differently the two authors relate to tradition: while Dante offers the first formulation of a redemptive Christian marvellous, linking pagan marvels to divine truth, Ariosto’s marvellous is to be seen as a climax to the liberation of wonder from medieval theological tenets, a process that gives birth to modern wonder. Through a diachronic and comparative investigation, I illuminate nuances of wonder that one could not discern by focussing on just one author or just one cultural period. The comparison between the two texts in light of wonder allows us to discover new paths within the poems, which show the connections between their marvellous features and their speculative drives.
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Guy, Adam. "The nouveau roman in Britain, 1957-73." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3a96e0e2-b007-4981-ad60-e175500089f1.
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This thesis considers the early dissemination and critical/cultural/literary reception of the nouveau roman in Britain, roughly between the years 1957–73. The nouveau roman is considered in its capacity as an avant-garde grouping of writers and texts coming from France, and as articulated at the interface of the novel and its theoretical metalanguage; the main nouveaux romanciers considered are Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the nouveau roman's status as nouveau was presented in Britain in the period in question. One of the major arguments of the thesis is thus: that the question of the nouveauté of the nouveau roman became a nodal point for negotiations over the legacy of modernism, and over the meaning of the 'contemporary' in literature in the postwar period. Part I charts the emergence of the nouveau roman in Britain. It looks first at the origins and the methods of the nouveau roman's initial dissemination, drawing on a range of previously undocumented archival sources. The main focus here is Calder & Boyars – the nouveau roman's main British publisher – and in particular the notions of publics that framed its activities involving the nouveau roman. Subsequently, the nouveau roman's British reception is considered with reference to an extensive survey of periodicals and books. Part II looks at the literary impact of the nouveau roman. First, a range of novels is considered as bridging the critical and the literary response in Britain to the nouveau roman. The authors considered are: Pamela Hansford Johnson, J. I. M. Stewart, Muriel Spark, John Fowles, J. B. Priestley, William Cooper, Rayner Heppenstall, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Then, other novels are considered more directly within the domain of the nouveau roman, seen against the background of Robbe-Grillet's approach to objects and materiality, and with reference to notions of 'project-work' in Butor's novels. Novels are considered by: Brian W. Aldiss, Muriel Spark, Denis Williams, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, and Alan Sheridan. Finally, the nouveau roman is looked at in relation to an emergent avant-garde in the British novel. Here, the nouveau roman is seen as providing terms with which British writing from the period in question was able to present itself as avant-garde beyond the manifestations of individual works. The conclusion briefly surveys more peripheral and non-novelistic British responses to the nouveau roman, considering the way in which they inscribe the nouveau roman as 'contemporary'. The thesis turns finally to the legacy of the nouveau roman for the British novel of the present day.
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Collins, Matthew Graham. "The fiction of Franz Nabl in literary context : a re-examination." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:67478695-5e36-41c3-be68-bd5857e33a2d.
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This thesis re-evaluates the work of the neglected Austrian novelist Franz Nabl. Nabl’s reputation has long been overshadowed by the prestige of Jung-Wien, denigrated by inaccurate association with the Heimatroman, and even unjustly tarnished by his appropriation during National Socialism. My work aims to correct these misconceptions, demonstrating that his best fiction merits rehabilitation not only in its own right, but also for the important questions it raises about conventional narratives of Austrian literary history. Structured chronologically, the five chapters of this thesis provide fresh analyses of Nabl’s texts, many of which have previously received only scant scholarly attention. These close readings are located in a range of relevant literary-historical and cultural contexts, illustrating that Nabl’s writing not only belongs in surprising literary company, but also that his works fit into important, yet often overlooked patterns in Austrian literary history which are often obscured by a tradition of criticism which values ‘modernism’ over ‘realism’, and privileges the aesthetically progressive over the apparently conservative. The first chapter investigates Nabl’s earliest fiction in the literary and cultural context of fin-de-siècle Vienna, revealing unexpected connections between Nabl and acknowledged modernists, such as Schnitzler and Kafka. The second and third chapters engage with Nabl’s novels, Ödhof and Das Grab des Lebendigen, establishing his status as a significant critical realist within a long tradition of Austrian works exploring unhappy family life. The fourth chapter focuses on the misleading view of Nabl as a regionalist, demonstrating that, while not all Heimat novels deserve critical condemnation, Nabl’s narratives of rural life invoke the conventions of the Heimatroman only to disappoint them. In the last chapter, I explore Nabl’s complicated relationship to National Socialism, showing that, although his involvements with the Nazis were ill-judged, Nabl was not committed to their politics and wrote only politically innocuous fiction during the regime.
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Jenkins, Bethan Mair. "Concepts of Prydeindod (Britishness) in 18th century Anglo-Welsh Writing : with special reference to the works of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:02c515c0-7f80-468b-b63c-97ead68fb2f1.
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This thesis presents an analysis of the English-language work of three Welsh writers during the eighteenth century, spanning the period of the 1750s to 1794. During this period, the British state consolidated its power following the last of the significant internal uprisings in 1745, and attempted to create a British nation with internal unity. Such a unity entailed a renegotiation of older national identities as subjects attempted to partake of multiple identities simultaneously. In Wales, the manifestation of multiple identities was especially clear, as the language of the state did not accord with the mother tongue of the majority of Welshmen. Though Welsh literati had written in English since before the Act of Union (1536), choosing to write in English becomes more interesting for the critic during such a time of change. Previously, these works have been treated as aberrations, or literary curiosities less worthy of note than the Welsh-language productions of the same authors. This thesis argues that, instead, they should be analysed as offering an insight into these authors’ conception of Britain, and their place within the state and the new nation, both in the choice of language and the topics considered. As a theoretical basis for these analyses, I consider the concept of Prydeindod from the work of philosopher J.R. Jones, as distinct from the idea of Britishness, and as a way of complicating Anglocentric or binary discussions of Britishness. This in turn informs readings of the English-language productions of Welsh writers in the eighteenth century, and shows that their negotiations of new identities are not as forthright as has previously been assumed.
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Coleman, Judith Claire. "Holy vessels, tyrants, fools, and blind men : performing antinomianism and transgressive agency in English drama, 1450-1671." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1571.
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Over four chapters, this study extends and focuses recent critical work on religious sects in literature to examine five plays and one theatrical prose work from the late medieval period through the late seventeenth century in England. Specifically, this study charts the appearance and conduct of antinomians, or those whose faith in Christ is the sole guide for their actions and who eschew all outward behavioral constraints. Antinomianism is, in some ways, a logical step for newly empowered individual believers with no direct mediator between themselves and the Word, but it represents a dangerous potential for religious and social anarchy. For some of the characters I consider, antinomianism has been mapped onto them by modern literary critics precisely because their transgressive agency is so frightening to their contemporaries. For others, antinomianism is depicted as a positive mode of interacting with the unenlightened, but it is clear that these figures are allowed privilege outside the reach of mainstream believers. A negative parody of these normal believers is also represented in my project, and these characters' buffoonish misinterpretations and selfish motives negate any positive reading of their "liberating" antinomian belief.
All of these characters--whether positive, negative, or even truly antinomian at all--reveal a key anxiety about personal belief and the well-being of civic and religious society in the mercurial landscape of pre- and post-Reformation England and the atmosphere of social and religious uncertainty that preceded the English Civil War. As such, an attention to the interconnections between the works under primary study and those circulating in the culture at the time is crucial to accurately identifying and understanding the myriad shades of religious belief that populate the pages of literature and polemics alike. In part, my project works to create a more complete and nuanced picture of the religious and literary landscapes of early modern England.
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Goodman, Jessica Mary. "La gloire et le malentendu : Goldoni and the Comédie-Italienne, 1760-93." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ec5ab3e3-812e-49f7-92e6-b1eea488cad5.
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Eighteenth-century Paris was the cultural capital of Europe and home to a vibrant network of theatres, not all of which are equally present in modern scholarship. The Comédie-Italienne in particular has frequently been downplayed in historical accounts, and there is no existing work outlining its relationship with its authors. This thesis aims to address this gap through a case study of the Italian author Carlo Goldoni, who began work for the Comédie-Italienne in 1762. His thirty years in Paris hold an ambiguous place in his career: the preface to his autobiography draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but his work for the Comédie-Italienne is dismissed as a failure; a view echoed by many modern critics. This study therefore also sets out to explore this apparent contradiction. Substantial original work on the Comédie-Italienne archives sheds new light on the administration of this theatre, building up the most comprehensive existing account of its finances, audiences and author relations in the 1760s, and situating it in the contemporary cultural field. Dramatic authors are revealed to be at the heart of tensions between symbolic and financial concerns across eighteenth-century theatrical Paris. This re-evaluation also provides a new context for understanding Goldoni’s equivocal account of his Parisian career. He desired a glorious image in posterity, yet the Comédie-Italienne’s collaborative production and lack of publication thwarted the reputation-shaping tactics he had developed in Italy. The only weapon that remained was his French Mémoires (1787), in which he consciously constructed his image and the claim of Parisian glory. Goldoni’s case also raises broader questions about the creation of literary gloire, and the fate of the cosmopolitan artist in a strange land. In modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous foreigner, not the Frenchman he believed he had become. The thesis concludes that this failure in posterity stems from his misunderstanding of how to achieve gloire in his French context: to rely on artificially created image alone is not enough, and yet Goldoni had no choice.
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Cooper, Catherine C. "John Gardner’s Grendel: The Importance of Community in Making Moral Art." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2019. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2599.
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John Gardner’s Grendel examines the ways in which humans make meaning out of their lives. By changing the original Beowulf monster into a creature who constantly questions the conflicting narratives set before him, Gardner encourages us to confront these tensions also. However, his emphasis on Grendel’s alienation helps us realize that community is essential to creating meaning. Most obviously, community creates relationships that foster a sense of moral obligation between its members, even in the face of the type of uncertainty felt by Grendel. Moreover, community cannot exist without dialogue, which perpetually stimulates the imagination to respond to the tensions contained in a plurality of viewpoints. Gardner encourages us to question narratives which no longer serve us and to use our imagination to tell new stories that cultivate positive ideals such as love and hope.
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Passamani, Elise Gabrielle. "Empathy and narcissism in the work of Molière." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:00424b4d-ee60-439d-b136-4eb856c3a5fe.
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The aim of this thesis is to explore the comic art of Molière through the lens of empathy and narcissism, and reciprocally, to show that Molière nourishes Western thought about these phenomena, which can be viewed as opposite ends of a continuum. Every personality has some of each, but the unbalanced egoist has excessive self-love and cannot put himself in another's place. The narcissist is omnipresent in Molière's theatre, but has been heretofore unidentified as such in criticism. This work attempts to fill this gap, and accordingly, my corpus encompasses his 33 extant plays. Furthermore, these psychological concepts are inherently theatrical, especially with respect to whether or not spectators recognize themselves in characters on stage. There is a dialectic relation between reconnaissance and empathy or antipathy, and, therefore, laughter. Hence, empathy and narcissism provide a way of looking at characters on stage and at the interaction between the dramatic action and the audience. To explore the former, I investigate endogenous words Molière uses to convey empathy and narcissism; how he portrays empathizers and narcissists visually through their adherence to and breaking of social codes; and how cognition influences their ability to change. For the latter, I demonstrate how early modern querelles surrounding Molière's plays involve these notions; and how his metatheatrical discourses reveal that Molière transports his spectators 'hors de soi': a state that mirrors romantic love and provides pleasure. Taken in this framework, I argue that Molière's work can be seen as anti-narcissistic; if his spectators knew themselves in the mirror he held up, laughing was a means of precluding blind empathy. Thus, employing tools from modern psychology and neuroscience and notions from the seventeenth century, this thesis evaluates how Molière's characters provide us, today, with a means for better understanding the place of narcissism in our occidental world.
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Lalor, Doireann P. "Italian postwar experimentalism in the wake of English-language modernism." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:238508c2-eb42-460a-b8c1-a01d58f15630.
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After World War II in Italy the cultural scene was in need of resuscitation. Artists searched for tools with which to revifify their works. Central to this, for many key figures in the fifties and sixties, was an engagement with English-language Modernism. This phenomenon has been widely recognised, but this thesis is its first sustained analysis. I draw together the receptions of three English-language Modernist authors – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce – who, as a triad, were instrumental in the radicalisation of the arts in Italy in the fifties and sixties. I show that their works were elevated as models of an experimental approach to language that was revisited by Italian artists – most notably by poets associated with the Neoavantgarde. The specific Modernist linguistic techniques which were adopted by the Italians that we will consider here are the mingling of languages and styles, the use of citations, and the perversion and manipulation of single words and idioms. The poets considered in most depth to exemplify this phenomenon are Edoardo Sanguineti, who was a major exponent of the Neoavantgarde, and Amelia Rosselli, who was more peripherally and problematically associated with the movement. Both poets desecrated the traditional language of poetry and energised their own poetry with recourse to Modernist techniques which they consciously and deliberately adopted from Eliot, Pound and Joyce. An unpicking of the mechanics of these techniques in Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry reveals that their texts necessitate an active mode of reading. This aligns with the intellectual ideas propounded by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, all of whom grounded their theories on readership in analyses of the linguistic experiments of Modernism. Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry fulfil the characteristics of Eco's “open” work, Barthes' “polysemous” work, and bring about Benjamin's “shock-effect” in the reader. These radical linguistic techniques, appropriated from the Modernists, contribute to each poets' overall poetic projects – they enact Edoardo Sanguineti's anarchic and revolutionary impulses, and stage Amelia Rosselli's thematic conflicts.
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Weavil, Victoria. "Community, women and selfhood in the writings of Michel Leiris and Carlo Emilio Gadda." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bd528880-e440-47c7-bc14-ec07c77948a0.
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This study sets out to uncover the thus far unexplored affinities between the works of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Michel Leiris, two key figures of twentieth-century literature whose place within the broader European literary panorama has been largely overlooked. Through an inquiry into three interconnected areas – the question of 'community'; the relationship between male self and female other; and writing as a space in which a fractured experience of subjectivity is both played out and exposed – I argue that their works are underpinned by a parallel tension, between a nostalgia for a lost experience of unity and a recognition of its impossibility within a fractured modernity. Chapter One examines the relationship between the individual and the communal. With a focus on Gadda's Giornale di guerra e di prigionia, and Leiris's involvement in a series of key intellectual, literary and political societies of the 1930s and 1940s, it argues that while both authors were drawn to a form of communal integration, both were ultimately thwarted in their attempts to reinstate it. Chapter Two continues this inquiry into the relationship between self and other through an examination of the dysfunctional relationship between individual (male) self and (female) other. With a focus on Leiris's L'Age d'homme and Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, it questions the extent to which any authentic relationship between male self and female other is ruled out, and examines the association between sexuality and fear that underpins their approach to the sphere of the female at large. The final chapter examines the implications of the authors' shared loss of faith in the notion of a unified, authentic experience of selfhood for their approach to the literary act itself. Through a study of these three key areas, this study thus sets out to respond to the need for further contextualisation of these two key figures of the twentieth-century European literary panorama, in the conviction that a comparative examination will shed new light both on their individual works and on their shared affinity with a number of key tenets of twentieth-century European thought.
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Vanoli, Giancarla. "Nella terra di mezzo : cinema e immigrazione in Italia, 1990-2010." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:62c9c1f7-0252-42e9-b47f-ac41ff3cc5b6.
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The thesis explores the representation of migration to Italy, through the study of a range of films selected for their thematic relevance as much as their aesthetic complexity. Beyond the scope of film analysis, it aims to add a contextualization of the social, political and cultural issues that connect migration and cinema, at the point where film studies and cultural studies converge.
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Mikus, Birgit. "The political woman in German women's writing 1845-1919." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:31c15d04-aa94-4ab8-8b91-368731b77538.
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This thesis analyses the depiction and its function of politically active women in novels by six female authors from the margins of the democratic revolution of 1848 and the first German women’s movement. The thesis asks (i) what their political stance was in relation to democratic developments and women’s rights, (ii) how they rendered their political convictions into literary form, (iii) which literary images they used, criticised, or invented in order to depict politically active women in their novels in a positive light, and (iv) which narrative strategies they employed to ‘smuggle’ politically and socially radical ideas into what were sometimes only ostensibly conventional plots. The thesis combines intertextual analysis with poetic analyses of individual texts in order to highlight deviant elements in narrative strategy, imagery, or text-internal appraisals by the narrator or author. In order to contextualise the chosen texts as well as my analyses, it draws on the historical environment (social and legal developments, revolutions, technological progress) for the definition of what can be considered radical and political in the period 1845-1919. Additionally, the thesis is firmly grounded in feminist theory, which provides the instruments for highlighting the concepts and circumstances in which the six authors’ works are situated. The essays and novels analysed were written before feminist theory was established; however, their proto-feminist observations, demands, and discursive tactics contributed much to the formation and institutionalisation of feminist thought and, ultimately, theory. In their efforts to construct a positive role model for the political woman, the six authors chosen are united in their notion that such a role model should evolve from bourgeois values of family and work ethics, but the examples manifested in their novels show a great variety of degrees of radicalism.
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Williams, Simon J. "Reading between the lines : Arabic fiction in Israel after 1967." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:23a6d929-e16b-4f14-b240-c5cdd2d27933.
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Arabic literature in Israel has evaded critical attention, or has been treated as an uncomplicated part of Palestinian national culture, on a quest for unification and an identity that was devastated in 1948. This dissertation complicates that narrative through close readings of short stories by five Arab citizens of Israel—Imil Habibi, Muhammad ‘Ali Taha, Muhammad Naffa‘, Hanna Ibrahim, and Zaki Darwish—between 1967 and 1983. Focusing on the relationship between geography and fiction, I suggest that literary constructions of “place” and “space” by these authors reveal a range of cultural negotiations that break down entrenched dyads: Palestinian yet Israeli; Palestinian on the one hand, Israeli on the other; spared exile, but suffering occupation. Instead, these writers evoke the hybrid and ambivalent experiences produced in the paradoxical spaces of Israeli-Palestinian life. I develop an analytical framework that incorporates geographic and literary theory. I use the work of humanists such as Gaston Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Edward Casey to suggest that literature mediates geography in a way that communicates belonging, alienation, or personal and collective meaning. The framework is bolstered with the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, along with historical and political sources, to capture the contextual resonance of the texts. After laying out these theoretical guidelines, I offer a historical account of Arabic literature in Israel and embark on four analytical chapters. Chapter Two explores Imil Habibi’s portrayals of anxiety around post-1967 Palestinian reunions. Chapter Three focuses on the themes of Muhammad ‘Ali Taha’s Palestinian collective identity in Israel. Chapter Four takes up the theme of “the land” in the works of Muhammad Naffa‘ and Hanna Ibrahim, in the context of 1970s land expropriations. Chapter Five explores a long story by Zaki Darwish and its depiction of the body’s phenomenological relation to the homeland. Rather than portraying counter-narratives that suggest a binary of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” always at odds, these authors portray the spaces and characters in between. They disclose the anxieties of finding a sense of place in the context of a dispersed Palestinian nation, geopolitical uncertainty, social marginalization within the state, and the subtle geographies of a historic homeland that both is—and is not—one’s own.
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Horn, Matthew Clive. "(En)countering Death: Defenses against Mortality in Five Late Medieval/Early Modern Texts." [Kent, Ohio] : Kent State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=kent1271271799.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2010.<br>Title from OhioLINK ETD abstract webpage (viewed May 17, 2010). Advisor: Susanna Fein. Keywords: Book of the Duchess; Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation; Pericles; Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; Chaucer; Shakespeare; Thomas More; Donne; Bunyan; defenses against mortality.
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Reuter, Victoria. "Penelope differently : feminist re-visions of myth." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4f1ffe10-d690-441d-8726-7fe1df896cb4.
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This thesis examines feminist rewritings of the Penelope myth and the intersections between poetry, myth, and feminist theory. The theoretical framework develops from Rosi Braidotti’s theory of memory and subjectivity which has its roots in the work of Michel Foucault. In Braidotti’s understanding, subjectivity is constructed through narratives of the past including myth. In order to support new, minority, and dissident subjectivities, a re-remembering of mythical narratives needs to happen. This process is linked to Judith Butler’s recent work on narrating the self and to Adrienne Rich’s idea of “Re-vision”. What Butler’s theory adds to Braidotti’s is the notion of dispossession: that as subjects we do not own our identities. We are, instead, dependent on others for recognition. This co-dependence based notion of subjectivity has ethical implications for how we interact with one another and what kind of narratives we iterate and reiterate. The writers discussed in this thesis, namely, Francisca Aguirre, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Gail Holst-Warhaft, and Margaret Atwood, not only rewrite Penelope, but perform Re-visions of the myth. They look back at it with a critical eye and remake it. This thesis further contends that Re-vision provides contemporary feminist writers with a reading and writing strategy that allows them to engage with myth in a way that parallels feminist theory’s efforts to construct new forms of subjectivity. Chapter 1 frames feminist appropriations of myth in a contemporary context and discusses Adrienne Rich’s theory of Re- vision. The next four chapters focus on specific writers who carry out a sustained dialogue with Penelope; they each take an element of the myth and tease it out towards a modern relevance. In looking at how Penelope is revised, this thesis demonstrates that women writers are engaged in a process of remaking canonical, mythic texts in such a way that speaks to contemporary issues of ethical subjectivity and self-making.
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Elder, Lara Frances. "Heinrich Heine in Paris : the poetics and politics of self-fashioning." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a41acb1e-84bd-4687-abc8-331bdacd30e5.
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Drawing on the concept developed in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, this thesis presents Heinrich Heine as an extreme case of the ‘self-fashioning’ writer. I argue that his preoccupation with self-construction determines what and how he writes, how he treats his reading public and, crucially, how he perceives and evaluates his own career. Though self-fashioning occurs in his earliest works, Heine’s decision to move to Paris (1831) was the single biggest self-determining act of his life; he constructs it as a moment of rebirth. Inspired by the July Revolution, he sought a new authorial identity in harmony with the supposed new world order and his own social, political and artistic ideals. However, the reality of juste-milieu society—a continual seesawing between modernisation and restoration—cast doubt on the possibility, even the desirability, of novelty and progress, the goals of revolution. In this context, Heine cultivates the identity of a perpetually embattled writer through confrontational dialogue with contemporary ideologies and his readership alike; ever ambivalent in his attitude to the role of art in a modernising world, he is also engaged in an internal battle with the self. First I show how he establishes himself in the role of cultural correspondent in the early journalism by developing a mode of self-conscious spectatorship which enables him to negotiate between contemporary French conditions and German readership expectations. Second I investigate the strategies he uses to free himself from his Buch der Lieder legacy and redefine his identity as a poet in Paris; I show how the Neue Gedichte (1844) are assembled to record and reflect on this transitional process, making the collection a monument to his self-fashioning tendencies. Finally I explore how Heine manipulates the relationship between public and private within a concept of self to construct his authorial identity; I consider a number of self-editing and self-reconstructive practices in prefaces, letters and autobiographical writing.
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Souleau, Pauline. "Writing (hi)story : Gascony in Jean Froissart's chroniques." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:42e4a888-0d08-486b-bf0d-1d67713f89e5.
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Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, composed of four Books, relate the first stages of the Anglo-French conflict later known as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). This thesis explores Froissart’s textual journey(s) to Gascon lands (south-west of modern-day France) and history/stories. Relying on Gérard Genette’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theories, it uses literary and narratological tools to analyse three passages from Book I and III concerned with Gascony: the Earl of Derby’s Gascon campaigns (Chapter 1); the Black Prince’s Gascon campaigns and the principality of Aquitaine (Chapter 2); Froissart’s personal journey to and stay at the court of Gaston Fébus, count of Foix-Béarn (Chapter 3). One aim of the study is to investigate the representation of the region but it also argues that the Gascon passages have wider implications for the Chroniques, Froissart’s work as a whole, and the writing of history in the fourteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, Froissart’s ‘history’ was often disparagingly discussed by scholars due to factual inaccuracy and literary embellishments: such a ‘historical narrative’, it was felt, fell short of history and was nothing more than an entertaining story presenting outdated chivalric ideals. Although this approach has been partly revised, some critics still view the Chroniques’ earlier Books as being a narratively straightforward reflection of such a chivalric ideology, lacking critical hindsight on fourteenth-century events and society, and thus presenting paradoxical and irreconcilable tensions with later Books to the extent that they are occasionally deemed to be an entirely different kind of work than their later counterparts. The narrative thread of Froissart’s Gascon (hi)story explored here allows the revision of such views and shows that Froissart’s narrative is far from narratively and ideologically straightforward. This complexity is present as early as the first versions of the Book I, which should be envisaged in parallel, not in opposition, with the ‘later’ Chroniques. Similarly, the various tensions (e.g. fiction/history; ideal/real) underpinning the whole work, manifested in the portrayal of Gascony/the Gascons, are best approached in terms of co-existence, not antagonism. Such a multi-faceted work (a mirror and/or product of the fourteenth century?), à mi-chemin between history and fiction, between conflicting yet co-existing perspectives, is precisely what makes Froissart’s Chroniques valuable to literary critics, philologists, and historians alike.
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Murray, Kylie Marie. "Dream and vision in Scotland, c.1375-1500." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669934.
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Clark, Colin. "Cross-cultural poetics in Kateb, Salih, Djebar and Dib." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:436b2243-7b55-4f4c-9c61-6ce94f1ca300.
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The present study elaborates a poetics of cross-cultural writing. Its primary theoretical reference is the ‘cross-cultural poetics’ (poétique de la relation) of Edouard Glissant: a set of poetic tropes and narrative structural strategies that he identifies in the mixed cultural setting of the Caribbean, in Le Discours antillais. My thesis argues that if these poetic strategies are indeed a response to specific social, cultural and political situations, then if analogous situations were considered elsewhere, we might expect an analogous poetics to arise. Taking North Africa as an example context, and specifically the novels of the Algerians Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, and the Sudanese Tayeb Salih, I argue that these writers’ complex poetic strategies engage with – indeed, help to articulate – analogous socio-political concerns arising in their homelands. The formal poetical analysis of these authors is based on several key thematic tropes and structural strategies that Glissant advocates in his cross-cultural poetics. My five chapters consider roots and origins, living landscapes, silence and screams, literary opacity, and structural polyphony. They also develop a new critical vocabulary to describe how Glissant’s poetical strategies might take form at a close textual level; my analysis reveals a complex, and reciprocal, relationship between poetic expression and socio-political context. Glissant’s work is therefore shown to be more broadly relevant, but the founding tenets of his theory are also interrogated and questioned; the comparison with a North African setting entails a (re)assessment of the underlying conceptions of Glissant’s poetics – of the implicit logic by which he connects poetic form to social, cultural and political factors. These factors, for Glissant, also display a clear overlap with the (post)colonial; in studying cross-culturality, the postcolonial, and the poetics engendered by their overlapping, my thesis presents a specific critical focus for the postcolonial literary field.
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Yardy, Danielle. "Stake and stage : judicial burning and Elizabethan theatre, 1587-1592." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c90c5635-2258-4213-a445-4bfaf67d24d7.
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This thesis is the first sustained analysis of the relationship between Elizabethan theatre and the judicial practice of burning at the stake. Focusing on a five-year window of theatrical output (1587-1592), it argues that polemical literary presentations of burning are the key to understanding the stage's negotiation of this most particular form of judicial violence. Unlike other forms of penal violence, burning at the stake was not staged, and only fourteen incidences of the punishment are recorded in Elizabethan England. Its strong literary presence in Protestant historiography is therefore central to this study. Part I explores the tragic and overtly theatrical rhetoric that the widely available Acts and Monuments built around the burning of heretics in the reformation, and argues that the narrative of this drama of injustice intervened in the development of judicial semiotics over the late-sixteenth century. By the time that Tamburlaine was first performed, burning at the stake was a pressing polemical issue, and it haunts early commercial theatre. Elizabethan historiography of the stake was deeply influential in Elizabethan theatre. In Part II, I argue that Marlovian fire spectacles evoke tableaux from the Acts and Monuments to encourage partisan spectatorship, informed by the rhetoric of martyrdom. Dido's self-immolation courts this rhetoric by dismissing the sword from her death, while Tamburlaine's book burning is condemned through its emphatically papist undertones. These plays court the stake through spectacles utilizing its rhetoric. In Part III, I show that characters historically destined to face the stake required thorough criminalization to justify their sentence. Alice Arden is distinguished from female martyrs celebrated for their domestic defiance, while Jeanne d'Arc's historical heresy is forcefully rewritten as witchcraft and whoredom to condemn 1 Henry VI's Joan la Pucelle. Both women are punished offstage, and the plays focus instead on the necessary task of justifying the sentence of burning. Though rare in practice, burning at the stake was a polemical issue in Elizabethan England. Despite the stake's lack of imitation in the theatre, I argue that widely available Protestant historiography - propaganda at the heart of debates about burning and religious violence - affected both how plays were written, and how they could be viewed.
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García-Liñeira, María. "Literary citizenship and the politics of language : the Galician literary field between 1939 and 1965." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b247a80b-2676-4d0b-b2c3-0c63e3e68bc0.
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My thesis, Literary Citizenship and the Politics of Language: The Galician Literary Field between 1939 and 1965, is the first attempt to examine the building process of Galician national literature by focusing on one of its constitutive elements, the linguistic criterion. Drawing on Mario Santana's concept of literary citizenship, which can be defined as membership of a literary community, it pays attention to the development of the idea that Galician literary citizenship is language specific, in other words, that to be a member of the national literature, writers have to write in Galician. It does so by focusing on one of the most neglected periods in Galician and Spanish Studies (1939–1965). Chapter one, 'Going Public: The Adventure of Galician Publishing, 1939–1965', presents the first ever account of the publishing world in the studied period. Chapter two, 'From Region to Nation: Galician Literary Studies', argues that the main battleground in the definition of Galician literary citizenship was the field of Galician literary studies, where the concept of literary citizenship was naturalised and then institutionalised. Chapter three, 'Negotiating Identities', explores writers' language choices, paying special attention to those who wished to earn a language-specific Galician literary citizenship. Apart from native and exophonic writers, the chapter addresses writers who did so through translation. Chapter four, 'No Man's Land: Female Writing and Language', argues that female writers had a double-edged experience in the literary field. The patriarchal literary institutions were interested in their symbolic capital but they exercised firm control over them. The conclusion, 'A New raison d'être for Galician Literary Studies', summarises the main argument put forward by this thesis, that to understand fully the development of Galician literary citizenship, literature must be studied outside the national framework.
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McMurtry, Aine. "Crisis and form in Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose : an aesthetic examination of the poetic drafts of the 1960s." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bdad508f-d96c-4480-8fa3-87f1b648e41d.
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This thesis demonstrates the aesthetic impact of crisis on Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose. It examines poetic drafts written during a period of personal breakdown in the 1960s, which have largely been received as documents of personal suffering, and identifies these texts as a radical stage of writing that was to prove formally significant for Bachmann's development of the prose "Todesarten"-Projekt. This thesis draws on the new material made available with the publication of these poetic drafts to chart the genesis of Bachmann's acclaimed late oeuvre. By selecting and grouping lyric fragments, the thesis defines recurrent features in this verse and accounts for the texts as a body of writing that forms a radical, yet undocumented, part of this oeuvre. In terms of both their form and of their content, the fragmentary drafts are shown to reflect new engagement with aspects of experience conventionally excluded from High Art. In light of Bachmann's growing preoccupation with the need for aesthetic engagement in the post-war era, close readings reveal how she set about taking her subjective suffering as a basis for a critique of the social order. The thesis outlines how, during the 1960s, Bachmann pioneered a symptomatic expressive mode that - in the disrupted form of the writing - found an indirect means of manifesting the wider origins of subjective disturbance. The ambiguous aesthetic status of these poetic drafts, which were never finished by Bachmann, is related to an inability to establish structural distance from crisis in lyric form. Building on its readings of the poetic drafts, the thesis traces Bachmann's prose experimentation with the same motifs. It identifies how, ultimately, the prose medium enabled the author to resolve problems of aesthetic form raised in the verse. Parallels with the work of other writers and thinkers illuminate the development of a reflexive mode where sophisticated aesthetic strategies enable the oblique expression of cultural critique.
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Volckmer, Katharina Barbara Emmy. "Society and its outsiders in the novels of Jakob Wassermann." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:84e42410-5b61-4299-a2c3-f69d89b4921e.
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This thesis looks at a number of Jakob Wassermann’s novels and the ways in which society is depicted in them. Seen as a whole, Wassermann’s oeuvre can therefore be understood as an attempt to portray (mostly) German society at different historical stages. The periods in question are Biedermeier Germany, the Wilhelmine era, the years of the Great War and finally the Weimar Republic, the depiction of all of which reveal Wassermann as a fierce critic of his time. In addition to this interest in society, this thesis will examine Wassermann’s concern with various outsider figures which complement his portrayals of society. The outsider figures Wassermann seems to be mostly interested in are the Jew, the woman, the child and the homosexual man. However, Wassermann is not just interested in these outsiders on their own but also draws extensive parallels between the various forms of exclusion they experience in a society dominated by the Gentile man or, as in the case of the child, by the adult. These parallels have proven to be revelatory and have led to new insights into Wassermann’s works. The dynamic of the outsider vs. society is, however, in many ways no longer applicable to those novels written during and after the Great War. Instead Wassermann now combines his interest in the figure of the outsider with an interest in the depiction of character. At the same time character becomes a mirror not only for the society Wassermann portrays in his writing but also for the society he lived in. This makes for an altogether more complex but also more intriguing structure of his later writing. This thesis will examine how all these different elements when combined offer new ways of looking at Wassermann’s writing.
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Brook, Madeleine E. "Popular history and fiction : the myth of August the Strong in German literature, art, and media." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cb7df46e-ab52-4f27-a084-41d7fab5b54e.
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This thesis concerns the function of fiction in the creation of an historical myth and the uses that that myth is put to in a number of periods and differing régimes. Its case study is the popular myth of August the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, as a man of extraordinary sexual prowess and the ruler over a magnificent, but frivolous, court in Dresden. It examines the origins of this myth in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and its development up to the twenty-first century in German history writing, fiction, art, and media. The image August created for himself in the art, literature, and festivities of his court as an ideal ruler of extremely broad cultural and intellectual interests and high political ambitions and abilities linked him closely with eighteenth-century notions of galanterie. This narrowed the scope of his image later, especially as nineteenth-century historians selected fictional sources and interpreted them as historical sources to present August as an immoral political failure. Although nineteenth-century popular writers exhibited a more varied response to August’s historical role, the negative historiography continued to resonate in later history writing. Ironically, the myth of August the Strong represented an opportunity in the GDR in creating and fostering a sense of identity, first as a socialist state with historical and cultural links to the east, and then by examining Prusso-Saxon history as a uniquely (East) German issue. Finally, the thesis examines the practice of historical re-enactment as it is currently employed in a number of variations on German TV and in literature, and its impact on historical knowledge. The thesis concludes that, while narrative forms are necessary to history and fiction, and fiction is a necessary part of presenting history, inconsistent combinations of the two can undermine the projects of both.
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Hendrickson, D. Scott. "Golden Age Jesuit : Juan Eusebio Nieremberg and the rhetoric of discernment in seventeenth-century Spain." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:484fe9c8-8ece-4c9d-b5e7-79523560656c.
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This thesis examines the Jesuit and Ignatian influence on the works of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), who was a prolific and widely published author and a member of the Society of Jesus in Spain. He wrote several works across different literary genres both in Spanish and Latin, but was best known for his popular works in Spanish: two miscellanies of natural philosophy, Curiosa filosofía (1630) and Oculta filosofía (1633); a catechism, the Práctica del catecismo romano (1640); his ascetical treatises, especially De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno (1640); and his ‘advice-books’ to princes and nobles, most notably Causa y remedio de los males públicos (1642). As a member of the Jesuit Order, Nieremberg wrote these works with the intention to ‘save souls’, this being the main apostolic goal of the Society. While they provide people with knowledge (‘noticia’) – whether doctrinal, natural, spiritual, or political – these works teach readers to view human existence according to its true end: God’s will of salvation. All things of the temporal world are portrayed as a means to that end. In order to accomplish this goal, Nieremberg incorporates elements from Loyola’s Ejercicios espirituales (1548), the spiritual foundation of the Jesuit Order, and develops a rhetorical strategy which encourages readers to discern the will of God in the world they inhabit. He also develops this rhetoric according to some of the principal literary and artistic conventions of the seventeenth century, and provides an important example of how a prominent Jesuit writer came to express the apostolic and spiritual principles of his Order, but in the language and imagery of Spain’s Siglo de Oro.
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Rogozhina, Anna. "'And from his side came blood and milk' : the martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch in Coptic Egypt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:35b8fd5c-5c85-4b5f-81c8-77e0b66a165d.
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My thesis examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt. For this purpose I focus primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically - the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. This thesis examines the literary and historical background of the Martyrdom of Philotheus and similar hagiographical texts. It also explores the goals and concerns of the authors and editors of Coptic martyr passions and their intended audience. I am arguing that these texts were produced in order to perform multiple functions: to justify and promote the cult of a particular saint, as an educational tool, and as an important structural element of liturgical celebrations in honour of the saint. Another aim of this work is to stress the entertainment value of such texts. I explore the sources used by Coptic hagiographers for creating such entertaining stories, as well as the methods they used to re-work certain theological concepts and make them more accessible to the audience. The thesis begins with description of the manuscript tradition of Philotheus and a brief outline and comparison of its main versions. The second chapter discusses the place of the Martyrdom of Philotheus in Coptic hagiography and its connection to the so-called cycles. The next two chapters explore the motifs and topoi characteristic of Coptic martyr passions, especially the legend of Diocletian the Persecutor and the image of Antioch as the Holy City in Coptic hagiography, as these two motifs appear in one way or another in the majority of the martyr passions. Chapter 5 is dedicated to one of the focal points in the Martyrdom - the miracle of resurrection and the tour of hell – and its literary and theological background. Chapter 6 discusses representations of magic and paganism in Coptic hagiography and some of the concerns of Coptic hagiographers. In the last chapter I explore the geography of the cult, its iconographic and hymnographic dimensions and the transformation of the perception of the saint; the second part of this chapter discusses the questions of performance, authorship and audience.
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Hofmann, Petra. "Infernal imagery in Anglo-Saxon charters." Thesis, St Andrews, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/498.
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Waller, C. D. "The poetry of Anton Schnack." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:354fe0a5-68d5-4a9e-b051-b5f77ab74acc.
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This thesis is the first academic treatment of the poetry of Anton Schnack (1892-1973): his work is not well known, even in Germany. Methodologically the thesis takes a combined literary, historical and biographical approach, exploring the complex and sometimes deceptive relations between his poetry and the turbulence of his time. The primary aim of the thesis is to show that Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier (1920) is a uniquely innovative volume of war poetry which, to be fully appreciated, needs to be assessed against the background of previous German war poetry and the development of the sonnet cycle. It is placed in the context of Schnack’s other lyrical work, particularly of the three volumes of Expressionist poetry which immediately preceded it and which themselves are analysed as examples of a very powerful kind of Expressionism. Schnack did not publish his next volume of verse until 1936, and three further collections emerged in quick succession between 1947 and 1953. These four collections are examined in detail in the context of Schnack’s decision to stay in southern Germany and to maintain a consistently low profile. The thesis begins with a general introduction to Schnack’s life and work and makes specific reference to his contemporary and current standing among literary historians and critics. Chapter Two focuses on the three volumes of Expressionist verse and documents the cultural circles which he frequented in Munich and the numerous Expressionist magazines and periodicals to which he contributed. The next three chapters are dedicated to Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier and examine it with reference to its poetic form as a cycle of sonnets and of its merits and status as war poetry. The final chapter pays particular attention to Schnack’s life in the Third Reich, situating the single collection he published during that era among the literary works of Inner Emigration, before analysing his three post-war collections.
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Mathias, Manon Hefin. "'Apprendre à voir' : the quest for insight in George Sand's novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2987dce0-0e41-4d32-9da8-35b3c8284703.
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This thesis examines the novels of George Sand (1804-1876) and analyses representative examples from her entire œuvre. Its overall aim is to re-evaluate Sand’s standing as a writer of intellectual interest and importance by demonstrating that she is engaging with a cultural and intellectual phenomenon of particular relevance to the nineteenth century: the link between different ways of seeing and knowledge or understanding, which I term ‘insight’. The visual dimension of Sand’s novels has so far been overlooked or reduced to a rose-tinted view of the world, and my study is the first to examine vision in her work. I argue that Sand demonstrates a continuous commitment to ways of engaging with the world in visual terms, incorporating conceptual seeing, prophetic vision, as well as physical eyesight. Contesting the prevailing critical view of Sand’s œuvre as one which declines into blandness and irrelevance after the 1850s, this thesis uncovers a model of expansion in her writing, as she moves from her focus on the personal in her early novels, privileging internal vision, to wider social concerns in her middle period in which she aims to reconfigure reality, to her final period in which she advocates the physical observation of the natural world. Rejecting the perception of Sand as a writer of sentiment at the expense of thought, this study argues that her writing constitutes a continuous quest for understanding, both of the physical world and the more abstract, eternal ‘vérité’. I show that Sand transcends binary divisions between science and art, the detail and the whole, the material and the abstract, and that she ultimately promotes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the world. This also enables me to reassess Sand’s poetics by arguing that her rejection of the mimetic model is founded on her conception of the world as multiple and constantly evolving.
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Connolly, Margaret. "An edition of 'Contemplations of the dread and love of God'." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2786.
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This thesis presents an edition of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, a late Middle English devotional prose text for which no critical edition is currently available. I have transcribed and collated the text from all sixteen extant manuscripts and the 1506 printed edition. An investigation of the errors and variants according to the classical method of textual criticism has yielded little in the way of conclusive results, and it has therefore not proved possible to construct a stemma of manuscripts from the corpus of evidence as it now exists. My edition therefore uses one manuscript (Maidstone MS Museum 6) as a base; I emend the text of Maidstone where necessary, and cite variants from all the other witnesses to show all differences of substance. A full critical apparatus is provided, comprising: the text with variants, textual notes and glossary. The introduction includes a full description of all the manuscripts and the two early printed editions, an outline of the methods of textual criticism applied and their results, and an explanation of the choice of base manuscript; information about the language of the Maidstone manuscript and the date of the text are also provided, as is an outline of my editorial principles. The thesis also contains two appendices. The first of these deals briefly with the twenty-two instances where individual chapters of Contemplations appear in other manuscript compilations; the second discusses the English and Latin prayers which follow the full text in some manuscripts.
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Lingscheid, Claudia. "Das 'Buch von den Neun Felsen' : Textgeschichte und Überlieferung mit einer kritischen Edition." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7194d405-a68a-47c1-89f6-145f826921ad.
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Subject to this study is the Neunfelsenbuch ('Book of the Nine Cliffs'), an account of a vision, which is assumed to have originated in Strasbourg after 1352. Initially written in the German vernacular, it was widely circulated in various German dialects and in Dutch and Latin translation. The text exists in two versions: a long version, which is thought to be the work of Rulman Merswin (1382), a citizen of Strasbourg and founder of the convent at the 'Gruner Worth' (1367); and a short version of unknown authorship. Previous scholars have considered the long version to be Merswin's reformulation of the shorter text, which was presumed - though not proven - to have been the original. By investigating the transmission and the textual history, this study aims to solve the questions of authorship and original form. It provides an overview of the entire transmission of both versions in prints and manuscripts, particularly focusing on the southern German short version. For the first time the short version is made available in a critical edition, as a basis for a systematic comparison with the long version. The comparison reveals that, in fact, the long version is the original and thus confirms Rulman Merswin as the true author. Written in 1352, the text not only belongs to the oldest works of the Tauler reception, but also stands at the beginning of the literary production at the 'Gruner Worth'. As a result, this text provides new insights into the spiritual development and the literary heritage of one of the most important centres of spiritual literature in the German vernacular of its time.
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Hodder, Mike. "Petrarch in English : political, cultural and religious filters in the translation of the 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta' and 'Triumphi' from Geoffrey Chaucer to J.M. Synge." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:49cdf913-cd2a-48c6-bf1e-533052018285.
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This thesis is concerned with one key aspect of the reception of the vernacular poetry of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), namely translations and imitations of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf) and Triumphi in English. It aims to provide a more comprehensive survey of the vernacular Petrarch’s legacy to English literature than is currently available, with a particular focus on some hitherto critically neglected texts and authors. It also seeks to ascertain to what degree the socio-historical phenomena of religion, politics, and culture have influenced the translations and imitations in question. The approach has been both chronological and comparative. This strategy will demonstrate with greater clarity the monumental effect of the Elizabethan Reformation on the English reception of Petrarch. It proposes a solution to the problem of the long gap between Geoffrey Chaucer’s re-writing of Rvf 132 and the imitations of Wyatt and Surrey framed in the context of Chaucer’s sophisticated imitative strategy (Chapter I). A fresh reading of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is offered which highlights the author’s misgivings about the dangers of textual misinterpretation, a concern he shared with Petrarch (Chapter II). The analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion in the same chapter reveals a hitherto undetected Ovidian subtext to Petrarch’s Rvf 190. Chapter III deals with two English versions of the Triumphi: I propose a date for Lord Morley’s translation which suggests it may be the first post- Chaucerian English engagement with Petrarch; new evidence is brought to light which identifies the edition of Petrarch used by William Fowler as the source text for his Triumphs of Petrarcke. The fourth chapter constitutes the most extensive investigation to date of J. M. Synge’s engagement with the Rvf, and deals with the question of translation as subversion. On the theoretical front, it demonstrates how Synge’s use of “folk-speech” challenges Venuti’s binary foreignising/domesticating system of translation categorisation.
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Curtis, Florence Sally Haines. "The intellectual scope of the 'mester de clerecía'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ac9a4eb0-567f-4668-983e-897dce15bfff.
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This thesis investigates the first poetry written in Castilian by intellectuals, the 'mester de clerecía', ‘craft of clerics’. Exploring the unique circumstances of Iberia in the Middle Ages as a hub for the intellectual vanguard and a holy territory for encounters with saints, pilgrimage and Reconquest, I examine the canonical texts of an alleged thirteenth-century poetic school as the Castilian bedrock of a wider Iberian and European literary movement. Notably including analysis of the fourteenth-century "Libro de buen amor", a canonical work in its own right thought to parody the earlier poems, I also reassess the significance of the verse form 'cuaderna vía' for the 'mester de clerecía', in which the thirteenth-century poems are exclusively written. Over an introduction and four chapters, I combine close reading of the "Libro de Alexandre" (Chapter 1), Berceo’s Vidas of Millán, Domingo and Oria (Chapter 2), the "Libro de Apolonio" and "Poema de Fernán González" (Chapter 3), and the "Libro de buen amor" (Chapter 4), with research into intellectual, pedagogical, and religious contexts. Notably, I have found the poems analyzed to be especially concerned with the landscape of the reading mind. The result is an expanded view of the 'mester de clerecía' as theological and philosophical poems that offer ways of understanding and approaching the life of the mind as well as that of the body that are thought-provoking and informative to this day. Concluding that the thirteenth-century, canonical poems are the witnesses of a 'textual community' of authors rather than a poetic school, I advocate an inclusive definition of the 'mester de clerecía'. The 'mester de clerecía' are of extremely rich intellectual scope and are of potential interest to scholars of all European literatures, and literary, intellectual, and social history, as well as theology and philosophy.
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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.
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Turner, Sophie. "Cyrano de Bergerac : battling with narrative burlesque." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a589190d-3abd-48f2-82d3-95b0b6ce0663.
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This thesis considers the burlesque literary forms in the work of the seventeenth-century writer, Cyrano de Bergerac. It challenges current scholarship by looking beyond libertinism to consider the importance of Cyrano's comic writing practices. While it does not deny the philosophical and scientific focus of Cyrano's oeuvre, it suggests that the burlesque is a defining characteristic. By taking into account the literary context in which Cyrano was writing – notably the querelle des Lettres and the rise of the histoire comique – as well as looking at other comic writers that could have influenced Cyrano, and through close textual readings, this thesis reveals that burlesque forms are often used in excess in Cyrano's work – forms compete against forms – producing destructive effects; burlesque forms can, in effect, be self-defeating. This project then asks whether it is possible to consider Cyrano a comic writer at all. It does demonstrate, however, that, in ridiculing everyone and everything, Cyrano too makes a mockery of the very idea of a dissimulative text. In questioning the literary gesture that Cyrano makes through his battling burlesque forms, this thesis suggests that libertinism can appear to be one of many playful masks the author assumes in his work. Is Cyrano a burlesque libertine? If so, this thesis raises the wider question of whether there are other imposters within the ranks.