Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Pirates literature'

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.<br>Document formatted into pages; contains 299 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2007 June 17.

In modern pop-culture, the prevalence of tropes is eminent. Without a knowledge of common themes and overgeneralizations, an author’s work will fail to attract a sufficient audience. One of these encompassing tropes includes the pirate trope. Pirate tropes range from physical aspects, such as eyepatches and tricornes, to the psychological implications of greed and villainy. Understanding the origin of tropes helps eliminate the over usage and transformation of tropes. The current study, a textual analysis, examines the popularized pirate novel Treasure Island and compares its’ tropes to the first collection of pirate biographies, A General History of Pyrates. The researcher hopes to discover many, if not all, of the tropes found in Treasure Island originated, through explicit evidence or variances, from A General History of Pyrates. The study will also utilize the New Historicism approach. Through New Historicism, the researcher will examine what historical accounts, including political, cultural, and economic strife, led Treasure Island to emerge as the most well-known pirate novel, rather than its predecessors. Thus far, the research has indicated that Treasure Island emerged as the prime pirate novel due to several factors, including America’s proximity to piracy during the 18th century. These associations include, but are not limited to: America’s trade system with pirates, proximity to pirate dwellings in North America, Americans’ desire of freedom associated with pirates, and democracy based politics practiced among outlaw captains and crewmembers. Stevenson illustrated these points in Treasure Island, which ties the novel’s timeless tropes with today’s conceptions of piracy. In addition, Stevenson used tropes from other novels associated with pirates including: Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate; Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller; Captain Frederick Marryat’s “The Pirate”; Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold-Bug”; and several works by Daniel Defoe. Stevenson combined these tropes in Treasure Island while also using A General History of Pirates as a guide to ensure creditability. These tropes, brought to attention by Stevenson, continue to flourish in modern depictions of 18th century pirates.

Piracy has a big mysterious stamp. In the west, we have a clear picture of the 17th and 18th century pirates through stories about prostheses, planks, parrots and eyepatches. These stories come from one source, Captain Charles Johnson's legendary work that addresses a large number of pirates and their lives on the seven seas. This study investigates how modern historians relate critically to Captain Charles Johnson's work and how they interpret his stories about the fictional pirate utopia, Libertalia. What are their purposes and what have they been affected by? By applying a social-constructive theory, the purpose of course becomes evident by seeing what truths these historians created and carried on and how Charles Johnson's work was used in history. Through a social constructive study influenced by source criticism of the works of Marcus Rediker, David Cordingly and Philip Gosse, their interpretations have been perceived as very different. The different historians seem to have their own personal agendas and perceptions and have through their expertise created perceptions and stories that may characterize future generations' perception of the golden age of the piracy and, in particular, their image of Libertalia as a fair society without rulers.   The researchers' source-critical approach varies from seeing Johnson's work as narrative stories for future generations to the fact that Johnson primarily had a profit interest in the authorship. These ideas, however, are something that the historians themselves have concluded and thus become part of the social construction we call reality, in which we exist.

Most books written about American drama concern definitions of masculinity, the American dream, and the family in a society that encourages people to surpass their competences and limits. American playwrights of the twentieth century reveal the anxiety and insecurity of men who do not rise up to the standards of the American dream. In concentrating on these themes, most critics have analyzed the main characters and plots but have left aside hints about other myths. This study aims to analyse the extended use of the cowboy, of salesman, and of pirate in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The recurrence of these three myths touches on the core of American drama that playwrights and critics have tried to define endlessly: the definition of the male in the American society.

Nous savons tous à quoi ressemble un pirate. Ce que nous savons moins, c'est la raison de ces succès, les causes de notre engouement - voire de notre fascination pour ce Fame Monster. La formule permet de caractériser l'ambiguïté d'un personnage dont chaque fortune connaît un revers, révélant notre soif de transgression et notre tentation pour l'envers de la morale. L'approche littéraire comparatiste, augmentée d'emprunts à l'image, à la sociologie, à la philosophie politique et à l'histoire des mentalités, permet non pas de simplement décrire un phénomène, mais d'essayer d'en extraire les sens, les besoins, les attentes, en prenant pour hypothèse que la fiction pirate constitue un jalon spécifique dans l'histoire des mentalités occidentales, et autorise l'exploration d'un état de nos désirs : d'aventure, de danger, de transgression, d'insurrection ; mais aussi de conformisme, dans un mythe continuellement répété. Histoire dans l'histoire, fiction en négatif, le pirate marginal se donne à lire comme une part retranchée de la société qui l'évacue, et partant comme l'idéal révélateur du sang et de l'or de nos virtualités, de nos " occasions manquées ".C'est ainsi que l'étude du pirate traditionnel conduit non seulement à une analyse du personnage mais encore aux enjeux fictionnels qu'il engage. Piraterie et piratage, ses deux corollaires directs, mettent en œuvre des problématiques particulières de création et de réception, et amorcent une reconversion sémantique du personnage : le pirate connaît une nouvelle fortune numérique, tandis que, devenu comportement par le truchement du piratage, il conduit à repenser le champ de la fiction. Alors : tous pirates ? Ou plutôt : tous (déjà) piratés ?

O currículo-nômade é produzido no acontecendo. Ele escapa do planejamento e do controle. Seus percursos são marcados por esta cartografia, uma geografia curricular, que indica alguns movimentos de desterritorialização e reterritorialização, assinalando os devires do conceito currículo - nômade e programa - com outros conceitos. Estes movimentos são disparados pelos bonecos de pano, inventados em uma Escola Municipal Infantil na periferia de Porto Alegre. Os bonecos, Bruxela e Roberto, passam de arranjamentos maquínicos a personagens conceituais, traçando um plano de imanência e criando conceitos. Os conceitos avizinham-se e se atualizam nas redes de relações de forças, conectando bruxa, bruxaria, pirata e pirataria a diferentes elementos que os compõem. Os personagens conceituais deslizam para outros planos: de composição, transformando-se em figuras estéticas; e de referência, tornando-se observadores parciais. A educação é tratada como um plano de imanência, uma máquina diagramática, cujos traços atravessam outras máquinas. Neste plano, a Educação Infantil institui uma organização, conformando um organismo. Os traços diagramáticos, também, perpassam os eixos de significação e de subjetivação, constituindo um rosto que se desfaz em uma paisagem. As trajetórias da Bruxela e do Roberto indicam possibilidades de afirmar uma não-filosofia, no sentido de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Seus deslocamentos produzem um exercício de vida, uma experimentação em que crianças, professoras, monitoras e famílias filosofam.

Orientador: Guita Grin Debert<br>Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas<br>Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-14T00:31:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bertho_AngelaMariadeMoraes_M.pdf: 5103941 bytes, checksum: 75bf98190a6981366dbb24b9bccd75dd (MD5) Previous issue date: 1991<br>Resumo: Não informado.<br>Abstract: Not informed.<br>Mestrado<br>Mestre em Ciências Sociais

I denna studie problematiseras manlighet, klass och makt hos pojkar i Fritiof Nilsson Piratens debutroman Bombi Bitt och jag. Genom att analysera de olika uttryck för manlighet som finns i romanen så undersöks hur pojkarna i romanen väljer att konstruera sin egen manlighet och hur deras vuxenblivande ser ut. Huvudkaraktärernas manlighet analyseras utifrån deras relationer till de andra karaktärerna, till varandra och utifrån deras klasstillhörighet.

My thesis explores the potential and the peril of Romantic literature's increasingly complex forms through a close comparative study of the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. These writers exemplify the Romantic predicament of how to make vision manifest – how to communicate one's imaginative and intellectual expansiveness without diminishing it. They sought different strategies for increasing the capacity of literary form, ostensibly in the hope of communicating more: clarifying meaning, increasing accessibility and intensifying original experience. But textual expansion – materially, stylistically and intellectually – often threatens more opportunities for confused and partial meanings to proliferate, overwhelming the reader by dividing texts and undermining attempts at coherent thought. Expansion thus becomes excess, with all its worrying associations of superfluity. To further complicate matters, Burke's influential tenet of the Sublime makes a virtue out of excess and obscurity, raising the problematic spectre of deliberately confused/confusing texts that embody an aesthetic of incomprehension. I explore these paradoxes through four types of 'textual excess' demonstrated by the writers under discussion: firstly, the tension between poetry and prose adjuncts, such as prefaces and notes, in Wordsworth and Coleridge; secondly, De Quincey's indulgent verbosity and struggle to control the freeing shapelessness of prose; thirdly, Wordsworth's and De Quincey's parallel experiences of revision as both uncontrollably diffusive and statically concentrated; and lastly, Blake's more deliberate, systematic attempt to enact a literary Sublime in which the reader is forced out of passivity by the competing demands of verbal and visual media. All are motivated and thwarted in varying degrees by their anxious preoccupation with saying "Enough", and the difficulty of determining when this becomes “Too much”. These authorial dilemmas also incorporate larger concerns with man's (over)ambition at a time of rapid and unprecedented economic, social and intellectual acceleration from the Enlightenment to industrialism. The fear that the concept and process of 'progress', or 'improvement', marks deficiency rather than fulfilment haunts Romantic writers.

In this dissertation, “Travelers, Traders, and Traitors: Mapping and Writing Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean (1570-1620),” I contend that an array of early modern authors wrote about piracy in order to discuss the meanings of property, articulate jurisdictional boundaries of geographic space, and negotiate the limits of sovereignty. Drawing on a diverse corpus that includes historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, epistles, travelogues and maps, I argue that individuals and institutions used the term “the pirate” with constantly changing definitions to stage political, economic, and religious polemics. While following the course of the attacks carried out by the English Captain Francis Drake and primarily focusing on the language and vocabulary employed by national and colonial stakeholders to describe piracy, the project demonstrates that as piracy grew less ambiguous through legal and linguistic standardization, it lost its polemical utility. Challenging classical notions of the pirate as “the enemy of all,” I reexamine the construction of piracy as a social and transatlantic category that overlaps with political, religious and economic affairs. In this way, the project emphasizes the role of piracy as a tool of imperial narratives of power and the development of geopolitical identities in both sides of the Atlantic during the sixteenth century. The overarching narrative of my dissertation chronologically registers the process by which piracy went from being an unregulated phenomenon—evinced by the instability of the categories employed to refer it— to becoming a legally defined and controlled practice by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The first chapter, “The Plasticity of the Pirate,” addresses the unstable conceptualization of piracy, contraband, and ransom (rescate) in European legal documents, English, Spanish and Caribbean colonial accounts and literary production. The first part of this chapter analyzes Balthazar de Ayala’s De Iure et Officiis bellicis et disciplina militari (1584), Alberico Gentili’s Hispanicae advocationis (c1613) and Jean Bodin’s On Sovereignty (1576), while the second part studies the various meanings of “rescue” and “ransom” (rescate) in the Caribbean context that also account for piracy’s semantic flexibility. In Chapter 2, “Cruising Outer Spaces,” I put into dialogue the narrative and visual construction of Drake’s figure as a maritime knight—after his circumnavigation of the globe (1577-80)—with European territorial claims of possession displayed by the cartographical representation of the Caribbean archipelago. By analyzing the work of sixteenth-century Flemish, Italian, and Spanish cartographers and sailors—such as Giovanni Battista Boazio, Gerard Mercator, Juan Escalante de Mendoza, and Baltasar Vellerino de Villalobos—I reassess the role of piracy in depictions of Caribbean islands and identify contra-cartographies that dispute the Spanish Crown’s territorial order. Turning to the narrative representations of the Caribbean archipelago, the third chapter, “Setting Sails to Rhetorical Piracy: Francis Drake’s Caribbean Raid (1585-1586),” explores the mechanisms employed by Spanish, English, and colonial authors who at the time, took advantage of Drake’s attack to project varied collective and individual ambitions by appealing to and entwining the religious, economic, and political discourses. By exploring the relationship between piracy and entrepreneurship, found in English, Spanish Peninsular and colonial sources, such as Richard Hakluyt’s compilation, Principall Navigations (c1598-1600), Walter Bigges’s travelogue, A Summary (1589) and Juan de Castellanos’s heroic poem, Discurso del capitán Francisco Draque (c1587) among others, the first part of this chapter emphasizes the tensions and nuances of describing maritime predation as an economic transaction or as a multifaceted concept that moves across religious and political realms. By revisiting Spanish chroniclers of the Indies—such as Bernardino de Sahagún, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and Bartolomé de las Casas—Dutch, English, and Portuguese jurists—such as Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Serafim Freitas—alongside Iberian legal documents, the second part of the chapter evaluates the debates and descriptions of piracy, in both Caribbean and European waters, to showcase the articulation of the terms “infection” and “infestation” as a means to either legitimize or condemn the right of maritime and territorial possession. Addressing the factual discrepancies, found in historical and literary texts about Drake’s Caribbean raid, the last part of this chapter showcases the production of polemical narratives of blame and their political repercussions in English, Spanish Iberian, and Caribbean scenarios. Chapter 4, “Dropping Anchors: Francis Drake’s Three Deaths and the Beginnings of an End,” tackles the moral, political, and economic considerations that structure the notions of libel and piracy, while also stressing their parallel processes of standardization and criminalization. Through the close-reading of literary texts and divergent historical reports that portray the defeat of King Philip II’s Armada (1588) and Drake’s last Caribbean raid (1595-96) alongside English legal treatises on libeling, the first two parts of this chapter trace the discursive overlapping of piracy and libeling driven by ulterior political and imperial aspirations. In this way, by analyzing Félix Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea (c1598), Henry Savile’s A Libell of Spanish Lies (1596), Thomas Maynarde’s Sir Francis Drake, his voyage (1595) among others, these two parts showcase the textual battles underpinned by English and Spanish disputes of power. Chronologically situated after Drake’s, Phillip II’s, and Elizabeth I’s deaths—1596, 1598, and 1603 respectively— and analyzing legal documents and other material evidence, such as the Treatise of London and Sir Henry Mainwaring’s text Of the Beginnings, Practices, and Suppression of Pirates (c 1617), the last part of this chapter highlights and registers the predominant role played by economic interests within the legal standardization of English libeling and the political agreement between Spain and England to criminalize piracy.