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Perceval's Sister And Juliet Capulet As Disruptive Guides In Spiritual Quests, Joanna Benskin

Open Access Dissertations

Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters.

Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the …

Chinese Eco-Films And Their Pastoral Myth, Runlei Zhai

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is a cross-cultural study of Chinese ecocinema after 1978. It begins by introducing the Hollywood practice in simplifying the conflicts between garden and machine, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, and Tityrus and Meliboeus in American pastoralism, then explains why such simplification does not work on Chinese screen, and finally studies how Chinese filmmakers reconstruct their pastoral myth in three major steps: first, to recognize Chinese social and cultural realities; second, to establish the human-nature connection, and third, to affirm the nature-culture unity. The conclusion is that Chinese eco-cinema exists in a hybrid form. While Hollywood influences Chinese eco-cinema in terms …

The Quixote Code: Reading Between The Lines Of The Cervantes Novel, Massimiliano Adelmo Giorgini

Open Access Dissertations

This study in two parts reexamines the notion that Don Quixote was originally seen as no more than a humorous story, and suggests that due to a variety of factors, a closer, more exegetical reading of the text may well be appropriate. In the first section of this work, focus is placed on the long history of the reception of the Cervantes novel as containing some deeper truth beneath the literal surface of the novel. This is complemented by a review of some examples of when several esoteric readings—done without academic rigor and adequate contextual research—have struck dramatically off-target and …