Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Portuguese poetry – 19th century – History and criticism'

The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.

The early Canadian long poem has often been faulted for its lack of aesthetic integrity, being seen in many cases as little more than poorly "versified rhetoric," but it has never been submitted to a thorough rhetorical analysis. An investigation of the rhetorical devices at work in the early Canadian long poem, however, reveals them to be highly strategic operations of both the imperial-colonial project in British North America and the emerging national consciousness of the new nation of Canada. These operations may be understood more clearly through the close examination of periodic "ruptures" in the texts--inconsistencies, contradictions, anomalies, and deflections--which underscore the frequently conflictual nature of the "unsaid" (the real historical, economic and social conditions) and the surface level of the narrative (the aesthetic and generic constraints). Such an analysis reveals the extent to which the problems of allegiance, anxiety and identity were inextricably involved in the colonial and national projects, an involvement which the poetry, despite its intentions, could neither mask nor resolve.

'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.

From Preface: A reader looking to this study for a charting of the diverse religious views held by Tennyson at different periods in his life may be disappointed. My primary concern has been not with religious forms, but with the numinous impulse. However, though I approached the topic with a completely open mind, I find my own Christian convictions have been strengthened through the study of Tennyson's poetry. As the title indicates, I have not attempted to deal with the plays. To explore both the poetry and the plays in a study of this length would have been impossible. I have perhaps been somewhat unorthodox in attempting to combine several disciplines, especially since I cannot claim to be a specialist in the areas concerned. However, I felt it necessary to approach the subject from a number of points of view, and to see to what extent the results could be said to converge on some sort of central "truth". When I have despaired of being able to do justice to a particular aspect within the imposed limits, I have sometimes found comfort in the words of Alan Sinfield (The Language of Tennyson's "In Memoriam", p.211): "We can only endeavour continually to approach a little closer to the central mystery; the ma j or advances will be infrequent, but most attempts should furnish one or two hints which others will develop. "

This thesis examines the publishing history of Algernon Charles Swinburne during his lifetime (1837-1909). The first chapter presents a detailed narrative from his first book in 1860 to the mid 1870s: it includes the scandal of 'Poems and Ballads' in 1866; his subsequent relations with the somewhat dubious John Camden Hotten; and then his search to find another publisher who was to be Andrew Chatto, with whom Swinburne published for the rest of his life. It is followed by a chapter which looks at the tidal wave of criticism generated by Poems and Ballads but which continued long after, and shows how Swinburne responded. The third and central chapter turns to consider the periodical press, important throughout his career not just for reviewing but also as a very significant medium for publishing poetry. Chapter 4 on marketing looks closely at the business of producing and of selling Swinburne’s output. Finally Chapter 5 deals with some aspects of his career after the move to Putney, and shows that while Theodore Watts, his friend and in effect his agent, was making conscious efforts to reshape the poet, some of Swinburne’s interests were moving with the tide of public taste; how this was demonstrated in particular by his volume of Selections and how his poetic oeuvre was finally consolidated in the Collected Edition at the end of his life. The thesis shows that popular interest was mainly on his earlier poetry, and suggests his high contemporary reputation (which was not fully reflected in sales) was maintained by the periodical press.

This thesis examines how the fortunes of poets and the status of poetry were changing at the end of the sixteenth century in Portugal. Centring on the long-neglected verse epistles in Diogo Bernardes's 'O Lima' (1596), I re-evaluate our sense of what it meant to be a poet when writing verse was not a sure-fire way to earn a living and when lyric poetry was regularly lampooned as trifling and immoral. Bernardes's surprisingly forthright cartas, I argue, offer new insights into the protagonists and procedures of literary patronage in Portugal. I use a combination of close readings and sociological methods to illuminate the practical strategies and rhetorical brinkmanship that Bernardes deployed in his quest for favour and highlight the frustrations and moral dilemmas of seeking the support of powerful, but fickle, patrons. Bernardes was a particularly remarkable writer for having printed his verse during his lifetime, and so I also trace how lyric verse was slowly legitimated as a cultural product during the sixteenth century and offer a case study of how an author's reputation was forged in the collaborative enterprise of print, then re-formed by the work of readers, thereby shedding light on the complex mechanisms of early modern canon formation. Paradoxically, I demonstrate that unequivocal praise of a writer's work can harm, rather than help, their chances of remaining in the canon. Although Bernardes's work is an echo chamber for these deep reverberations from the broader history of literature, this thesis also listens closely to Bernardes's distinctive poetic voice and allows it to speak out. Playful, candid, mercurial, it is a poetic voice that here seeks a wider audience.

The aim of this thesis is twofold: To examine Hopkins's writings on poetics and to relate these to modern theories of poetic stylistics; and to show, through an examination of two sets of Hopkins sonnets, the ways in which Hopkins's writings on language and poetics are reflected in his verse (Introductory outline, p. 5)

In the course of the romantic movement, the vision of the poetic ministry has been expressed by several poets through the figure of Jesus at the Mount of Olives. While Lamartine appropriates the suffering of Christ in order to proclaim himself to be a poet-prophet, Vigny refuses the silence of God. He, thus, accomplishes his poetic mission against God. Whereas Hugo does not take into consideration the meaning of Jesus' agony in order to make the Gethsemane a place of glory, Nerval rejects the notion of a Christlike mission. Hence, by putting into words the death of God, he foretells what Hugo Friedrich will later call an "empty transcendence", which is the very sign of modern poetics. Romanticism carried within itself the signs of the end of transcendence of poetics. Therefore, we will analyse the transition of romanticism to modernity in these four poems1 through the representation of Jesus Christ at Gethsemane.
1"Gethsemani ou la mort de Julia" d'Alphonse de Lamartine, "Le Mont des Oliviers" d'Alfred de Vigny, un extrait (strophes VI, VII et VIII du Chapitre intitule Jesus-Christ) de La Fin de Satan de Victor Hugo et "Le Jardin des Oliviers" de Gerard de Nerval.

This thesis explores the network of relationships among health and healing, the natural environment, and poetry during the Romantic period in Britain, and thus offers a new perspective on the Romantic relation to Nature. The context for this study is both the long and varied history that links literature to ideas of health and disease, and the intersection of the late 18th- and early 19th-century discourses of holistic science and healing that emphasize the synergy between self and world and recognize that our living environments can be either hostile or congenial to body and spirit. For many Romantic poets, illness was a painful reality that became vital to their thoughts about poetry and creativity in general. Through Wordsworth's partnership with Coleridge, a vocabulary of health and disease emerges in relation to poetic production and reception that has influenced critics of the period. It constructs the "natural" as a source of health, and establishes Wordsworth and his poetic celebrations of the therapeutic potential of nature as the often problematic legacy both for Coleridge and for second generation poets like Byron and Shelley. While composing Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III, Byron tests Wordsworth's notion that immersion in the natural world can be spiritually therapeutic from the point of view of poetic production. The intensity of Byron's bodily existence, however, prevents him from fully experiencing the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Wordsworthian nature. As his attempts to disengage the spirit from the body by meditating on nature actually have the reverse effect of bringing him more in touch with his physical identity, he must reject Wordsworth's methodology as a possible vehicle for healing. In refiguring Wordsworth's ideas about "taste," Shelley conceives of his poetry as healthy food for thought. His frequently used metaphors of "literature as food" have their source in his attitudes towards intake first exp

This thesis is a study of themes and genre in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. I have not attempted to present a survey of the body of critisicm on the cycle, nor have I attempted a comprehensive comparison of the poem with any of Tennyson's sources. The first chapter is based on A. Fowler's study of genres and I follow the implications of his work in my reading of the Idylls. Tennyson blends various generic strands in his cycle, in particular allegory, epic, dramatic monologue and the Alexandrian idyll, to create a complex psychological allegory of epic scope which both draws on traditional genres and extends them. I believe the Idylls should be read as a cycle and in the order in which Tennyson finally presented them; the ordering process is as much part of the creative process as the actual act of composition. I have adopted Priestley's sensible division of the twelve poems which he says "falls naturally into three groups of four, corresponding closely to the three acts of modern drama" (1960, p.252-254)" The second chapter begins the sequential examination of the first four "spring" and "summer" poems beginning with the symbolic The Coming of Arthur. This idyll begins Tennyson's Arthurian mythopoeia, creating a poetic kingdom of the mind. The "act" closes with the Geraint and Enid idylls, all four works in this section ending happily. The third chapter deals with the idylls which plot the corrupting and ever-widening influence of the adulterous relationship of Lancelot and Guinevere, one cause of the destruction of the institution of the Round Table. Other causes of the demise of Arthur's order are the pernicious influences of the evil Vivien and Modred and the meaningless and sterile spirituality that prompts the quest of The Holy Grail. The last four idylls chart the final collapse of Arthur's realm, the utter disillusionment of individual idealism - personified by Pelleas, an anachronistic spring figure who appears in Camelot's bleak and hostile winter - and the complete social decay which is demonstrated by the fiasco of The Last Tournament. The tragic denouement of the cycle, on both individual and social levels, is evident in Guinevere, in which Arthur's wretched and traitorous queen understands Arthur's vision, but too late to save Camelot from ruin. In the final framing idyll, The Passing of Arthur, Tennyson's myth is elevated to the level of universal significance, the Idylls of the King becoming "not the history of one man or one generation but of a whole cycle of generations" (Memoir, ii, p.127).

This thesis explores the significance of John Keats's medical Notebook, and his time at Guy's Hospital (October 1815 – March 1817), for the poet's career. As a primary contribution, it offers a new transcription of Keats's medical Notebook (Appendix 1). The transcription reproduces Keats's text and indicates the layout of his notes, but is neither a facsimile, nor a new edition: the visual form of Keats's notes is not reproduced, nor do I offer critical annotations; commentary follows in subsequent chapters. The achievements, limitations and influence of the only edition of Keats's medical Notebook — Maurice Buxton Forman's from 1934 — are the subject of the first chapter, which also considers accounts of Keats's medical career in Keats biography and criticism. Chapter two focuses on the poems Keats wrote while at Guy's to show that the two aspects of his life — medicine and poetry — were mutually influential. Chapter three considers Keats's medical notes in comparison to a fellow-student's, indicating how some characteristics of Keats's note-taking prefigure aspects of his mature poetry. Chapter four finds Endymion suffused with medical knowledge and imagery, and argues that this was a vital aspect of the poem's depiction of passion. Chapter five suggests that the publication of Keats's 1820 volume was greatly influenced by questions of health, medicine, and disease; concerns reflected by the poems in it, which also reveal the extent of Keats's continued awareness of, and interest in, contemporary medical thought. In sum, the thesis argues that the origins of Keats's poetic achievement can be traced in his medical Notebook and ‘hospital' poems, and that the ability to infuse his poetry with medical knowledge was a vital component of Keats's poetic power and achievement.

In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.

Mary Robinson’s perceived entrapment within masculine discourse has led to a somewhat distorted portrayal of this author as ‘victim’: critical focus on how she and eighteenth-century society may have constructed her authorial identity, reflecting her primarily as a historical and cultural product, has contributed indirectly to diminish due recognition of the level of autonomy she attained within her own writing. However, recent political interpretations of Robinson’s work have largely challenged these views, acknowledging her considerable influence within the public realm of the ‘masculine’ Romantic. In this dissertation, I aim to build upon, and argue beyond, those readings which have explored Robinson’s political uses of victimisation, as well as those which have studied her promotion of female authorship. I will argue that, by exploring Robinson’s own portrayal of the female philosopher and author, as well as her manipulation of victimisation within sensibility literature, we may be able to better interrogate modern feminist thinking around the concept of the eighteenth-century female philosopher, and thus begin to situate the value of Robinson’s work within a firmer literary compass. I will focus upon the following novels: Walsingham (2003 b), The False Friend (1799), and The Natural Daughter (2003 a). While I will root my arguments in the abovementioned approach, I will avoid contributing further discussion to Robinson’s use of radical politics and defence or fostering of female authorship. First because these are relatively well explored issues around her writing, and secondly because it is wise to be cautious when affirming Robinson’s radical politics, as ultimately this impulse ties into a modern yearning to portray her as a radical feminist. Robinson certainly adopted a radical political stance in some of her novels; yet, I will argue, we cannot value her writing primarily in terms of its political bent, however tempting this approach may be.
English Studies
M.A. (English Studies)

This dissertation engages in a critical analysis of the poetry of Emily Dickinson which, to me, suggests that the poet suffered from a type of manic-depression known specifically in psychiatric parlance as bipolar disorder. I argue that although Dickinson experienced much pain and suffering she learnt, through time, to address, understand and contain adversity - that ultimately, she transformed these experiences into the raw materials for poetic creation. Dickinson's poetic achievements are often obscured by a misunderstanding of her mental and emotional constitution. This thesis provides an alternative to the views of those commentators who maintain that Emily Dickinson was insane, neurotic or delusional. I intend, ultimately, to offer the reader a fresh insight into Emily Dickinson's poetry by reading it from the assumption that she suffered from bipolar disorder.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

Gerard Manley Hopkins produced poetry in the Victorian era which was noted for its originality of syntax and form. The essence underlying a large body of his poetry was his Catholic religion. His early religious poetry utilized nature-based metaphors to express his love of Christ and trace the immanence of God within nature. He borrowed heavily from the aesthetics of Pater and the philosophy of Duns Scotus. The dissertation explores these early influences and assesses their contribution to the formation of a unique religious interpretation of life and the formulation of an aesthetic congruent with this religion. The dissertation dissects early symptoms of religious doubt within his poetry and finally analyses his `Terrible Sonnet' phase in detail to ascertain whether the crisis so often described as occurring during this period was religious or merely reflected a loss of creative ability.
English Studies
MA (English)

This dissertation examines the nature of epiphanic discourse in three of Robert Browning's religious poems, namely, 'Christmas- Eve', 'Easter-bay' and 'La Saisiaz'. Chapter 1 investigates epiphany from religious, historical and theoretical perspectives, followed by a discussion of Browning's developing Christian beliefs. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the epiphanic moment in the companion poems, 'Christmas- Eve' and 'Easter-Day'. Chapter 4 explores how the double epiphany initiated from Browning's personal experience recounted in 'La Saisiaz', finds its resolution in 'The Two Poets of Croisic'. Browning's 'good minute' or 'infinite moment' originates in Romanticism and reverberates into the twentieth century mainly in the writing of James Joyce, who first used the word 'epiphany' in its literary sense. Because Browning's faith allowed continual interrogation of Christian doctrine, his experience and reading of epiphanic moments avoid any attempt at closure. Thus they offer the reader both a human image for recognition and a coded legend for individual interpretation
M.A. (English Studies)
M.A. (English)