Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Sidney, Philip, Poets, English'

This dissertation addresses the historical, political, and literary-rhetorical framing of counsel in selected works of Sir Philip Sidney: his Letter to Queen Elizabeth (1579), The Old Arcadia (1580), the first two books of The New Arcadia (1585), and the strikingly different final book of The New Arcadia. In these works, Sidney makes resourceful and varying use of the topos of the mirror. First, I show in what ways Sidney serves as the Queen’s mirror in advising her against the marriage to the Duke of Alençon. In the Letter, Sidney gathers, shatters, and distorts aspects of Elizabeth’s image; he multiplies reflections to discredit arguments of his political opponents and reconstitutes Elizabeth in an imperial, Protestant image. Turning to The Old Arcadia, I argue that, through the presentation of Gynecia, Sidney broadens the conventions of the genre familiarly known as the mirror for princes. Gynecia’s complexity and moral ambiguity complicate the traditional generic categories of virtue to be emulated and vice to be avoided. She serves as both an object in, and a reader of, the mirror for princes text and becomes a means for Sidney’s commentary on the genre and the moral questions it raises. By inviting the reader into an active experience of the mirror’s pedagogical enterprise, Sidney tests and refines the reader’s assumptions and moral judgments. In Books I and II of The New Arcadia, Sidney presents and interrogates poetry as a strategy for overcoming limited human agency and imperfect knowledge, limitations that appear in deployments of the mirror that show stasis and in images of the maze to indicate blocked access and thwarted mobility. By questioning poetry’s capacity to uncover and represent truth, Sidney holds the mirror up to himself. Book III of The New Arcadia restores the mirror as the productive mode of counsel in a mirror for princes text that instructs on a central theme of the Renaissance debate on counsel: discerning the flatterer. Sidney’s New Arcadia in its entirety offers an exemplary mirror of the self-scrutiny that leads to self-knowledge and the consequent authority to offer counsel of worth.<br>English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 1999.<br>Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-257). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9947976.

<p>(Under the direction of R. V. Young.)<BR><BR><BR> Contrary to critics who assert that Elizabethan and Jacobean poets can be categorically differentiated from each other according to their philosophical outlook and style, Sir Philip Sidney' shows them to be contiguous and continuous innovators in the Petrarchan love lyric. <BR><BR>Both terminates with Astrophil trapped within the conditions he has defined. <BR><BR>This novel conclusion, although firmly based in conventional Petrarchan precepts, exposes the issues that constantly loom before any Petrarchan love lyricist; that is, the problematic identities and relationships of images, ideas, and realities; invention, inspiration, and imitation. On the other hand, in their arguments and attitudes toward love and poetry, but several of the most poignant and exploratory poems admit the necessity of idealized image-making while also accepting the inevitable irony in such images. Thus Donne's sequence can be seen as an acknowledgment of Sidney's exposure of the inherent instability involved in poetic attempts to transpose the ideal into the real, but it can also be seen as an innovative response to this problem that entails embracing the instability and irony of Petrarchan lyricism and then using that instability and irony prominently in poems whose speakers are conscious of the limitations of their conceits. As the primary example of this attitude, Donne's speaker in "A nocturnal upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day" explores the inherent irony in idealized images of the union of human lovers while yet recognizing the vision and direction they afford as sacramental foretypes of eternity and divine love.<P>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003.<br>Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-185). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This dissertation explores the development of prose fiction continuations from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia to the novels of Samuel Richardson. Examining instances in which a text was continued by someone other than its original author, I ask precisely what this distinction means historically: what factors create a system of literary value in which certain continuations are defined as ‘spurious,’ and how does the discourse surrounding these texts participate in changing attitudes toward authorship, originality, and narrative closure? My work thus contributes to recent critical efforts to historicise authorship and literary property, using prose fiction examples that have not previously been discussed in this context. Analysing the rhetorical strategies found within paratextual materials such as prefaces, dedications, and advertisements, I establish how writers of continuations discuss the motivations for their works, how these are marketed and received, and how the authors of the source texts (or their representatives) respond to them. Through close reading, the dissertation traces the development of persistent metaphors for literary property across these texts, focusing on images of land, paternity, and the author’s ‘spirit.’ The introductory chapter addresses these metaphors’ significance, defines the main elements of continuations, and situates them within the historical context of a growing print marketplace and developments in copyright law. The dissertation then presents a series of case studies of the most documentarily-rich instances of continuation across the period. Starting with The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, published posthumously in an incompletely-revised form, Chapter 2 shows how its gaps allowed other writers to continue the story, while Chapter 3 studies the metaphorical approaches to authorship taken in the continuations’ paratexts. Chapter 4 examines two Restoration texts, The English Rogue and The Pilgrim’s Progress, which combine the Arcadia continuations’ concern about the author’s honour with issues of commercial competition. The intersection of profit, reputation and copyright protection brought out in this chapter is reflected in the subsequent discussion of the career of Samuel Richardson. Chapter 5 shows him responding to public challenges to his authorial control following the success of Pamela, whereas Chapter 6 explores the more private assertions of authority taking place within Richardson’s correspondence during the publication of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. Finally, my conclusion summarises the subsequent legal and critical privileging of original over continuation, emphasising the historical contingency of this process. The broad chronological scope of the dissertation allows the frames of all these texts to inform each other for the first time, crossing the established critical boundary between the ‘romance’ and the ‘novel.’ This approach reveals continuities as well as differences, enabling me to construct a more nuanced picture of Early Modern approaches to prose continuations and authorial ownership. In establishing links between law and literature, the project also provides an important historical context for contemporary debates about copyright, fanfiction, and literary property.

This thesis evaluates and re-evaluates the relationship between the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis through a detailed examination of their published works, and attempts to locate this relationship in the context of the central moral uncertainties of post-1945 British fiction. Most previous critical studies of these authors have tended to discuss the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis in terms of an opposition between the father's realism and the son's postmodernism, and have debated Philip Larkin's influence upon Martin Amis only tangentially. Against this trend, this thesis argues that these three authors share a commitment to literature as a public, moral act, and, in particular, that their works share the intention of articulating a number of closely related secular 'human values' which map out a potential post-Christian morality in British society. The thesis also examines a common tension within their oeuvres inimical to such hopes - the fear that the possibilities of rational self-scrutiny and of becoming 'less deceived' have been discredited by the history of the twentieth century, and that this history instead evidences the dominance of irrational and self-destructive tendencies in the human. These fears, it is further claimed, are implicated in the works of all three authors in a tendency towards the construction of Edenic myths, deterministic simplifications, and despairing devaluations of the value of human life. Overall, this thesis makes the case for the significance of the common concerns of Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin's works in the context of contemporary literary studies: their efforts to create in art an unpretentiously 'public space' for the address of burning moral and existential issues, and their unresolved struggles with the question of what it might mean to live a good life in a society which no longer possesses religion as a common moral language.

If we consider the representation of the body in the epic-romances of Torquato Tasso, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, certain instances of wounding and laceration emerge as crucial turning points in the development of their respective narratives: Clorinda’s redemptive mutilation, Parthenia’s blood-drenched pallor, Amavia’s disquieting suicide, Venus’s insatiable orifice, Amoret’s “perfect hole.” This thesis affords a detailed comparative study of such passages, contending that the wound assumed a critical metaphoric dimension in sixteenth-century epic-romance literature, particularly in relation to the perceived association between body condition and erotic desire. Along with its function as a marker of martial valor and somatic sacredness, the wound, I argue, increasingly is designated in these epic-romances as an interiorizing apparatus, one liable to accrue at any instance into a surplus of unanticipated meaning. As such, the wound becomes an emblem in these texts of what I call the phenomenology of desire—the equation of consummation and loss—as well as the aesthetic and metaphoric mechanism by which these writers seek to overcome it. The four chapters of this thesis constitute individual but cumulative points of response to the problem of thinking about desire as a type of wound. For Tasso, a wound poses a challenge to physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity, but its remarkable capacity for aestheticization also allows Tasso to envision it as a synthesizer of sacred and erotic affects. For Sidney, the prospect that a wound could define a body as courageous or pathetic, as sacred or corrupt, became both politically and socially troubling, and the New Arcadia, I argue, proleptically attempts to defend Sidney against interpretations of wounds that register them as manifestations of corrupt desire. For Spenser, body fracture and erotic wounding are analogic (indeed, almost indistinguishable), and The Faerie Queene investigates the prospect that confusing these analogies can become an empowering, even revelatory experience. In each of these epic-romances, a wound serves both a literal and a figurative function and, in this way, is established as the foremost image by which these writers imagine strength and mutilation, affect and heroism, epic and romance as being inextricably bound.

This thesis brings to light evidence for the circulation and first-hand reception of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century England. Though the Poetics upended literary thinking on the Continent in the period, it has long been considered either unavailable in England, linguistically inaccessible to the Greekless English, or thoroughly mediated for English readers by Italian criticism. This thesis revisits the evidentiary basis for each of these claims in turn. A survey of surviving English booklists and library catalogues, set against the work's comprehensive sixteenth-century print-history, demonstrates that the Poetics was owned by and readily accessible to interested readers; two appendices list verifiable and probable owners of the Poetics respectively. Detailed philological analysis of passages from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie proves that he translated directly from the Greek; his and his contemporaries' reading methods indicate the text circulated bilingually as standard. Nor was Sidney’s polyglot access unusual in literary circles: re-examination of the history of Greek education in sixteenth-century England indicates that Greek literacy was higher and more widespread than traditional histories of scholarship have allowed. On the question of mediation, a critical historiography makes clear that the inherited assumption of English reliance on Italian intermediaries for classical criticism has drifted far from the primary evidence. Under these reconstituted historical conditions, some of the outstanding episodes in the sixteenth-century English reception of the Poetics from John Cheke and Roger Ascham in the 1540s to Sidney and John Harington in the 1580s and 1590s are reconsidered as articulate evidence of reading, thinking about, and responding to Aristotle's defining contribution to Renaissance literary thought.

This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze John Keats’s “Lamia” and his style of Anti-Romance as informed by William Shakespeare’s own experimentation with Romance and Anti-Romance in “King Lear.” In order to fulfill the purpose of my thesis, I explore both the Romance and the Anti-Romance genres and develop a definition of the latter that is more particular to “King Lear” and “Lamia.” I also look at the source material for both “King Lear” and “Lamia” to see how Shakespeare and Keats were handling the originally Romantic material. Both Shakespeare and Keats altered the original material by subverting the traditional elements of Romance. In conclusion, the thesis suggests that Shakespeare’s Anti-Romance, “King Lear,” and his general reworking of the Romance genre within that play informed Keats’s own experimentation with and deviation from the traditional Romance genre, particularly in “Lamia.”

My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.

In his Defence of Poetry (c. 1580), Philip Sidney argues that poetry—a category in which he includes all imaginative fiction—aims at the education of its readers. Archepollycyes studies the attempts of a loose group of sixteenth-century writers around Sidney to write fiction that lives up to this aim, in order to understand the methods they developed to educate readers and the relationship between this education and the politics of the monarchical state. Sidnean fiction demands long study on the part of its readers because it aims to transform their mental habits and create new internal resources for right action. The works of fiction I study here—Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, George Buchanan’s Baptistes, Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and A Discourse of Life and Death, and Fulke Greville’s Mustapha—were products of their authors’ experiments with genre, narrative, translation, and style as tools to achieve this aim. Through the reading experience these works invite, readers exercise their judgment in the interpretation of fictional examples and reflect explicitly on the mental habits of generalization and application that inform decisions about how to act in new circumstances. Readers also come to see these habits of judgment as shared with others and experience the act of reading as participation in both real and imagined interpretive communities. I argue that these interpretive communities are best understood as loose political institutions, networks of organization and affiliation whose members could think and act together through common habits of judgment and the mutual resolution that results from recognizing this commonality. I adopt the term “archepollycyes” from Gabriel Harvey in order to describe the role of such institutions in monarchical politics. Harvey coins the term to describe the foundational forms of political knowledge, action, and organization, in contrast to the day-to-day work of government and the business of political rule. “Archepollycyes” hold a political community together in spite of changes in its ruler or government; understanding and creating such institutions was thus a means of responding to the escalating crises of succession, absolutism, and civil war that confronted early modern monarchies. By reading and writing fiction, I argue, Sidney and a broader network of writers aimed to act at a distance from contemporary political conflicts by founding “archepollycyes,” loose institutions capable of acting independent of the monarchical state and outside of existing structures of government, but on behalf of the long-term stability of a political community. In this way, I offer a new way of thinking about fiction and political institution in relation to the contested emergence of the modern sovereign state.