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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
A New Language: Apophatic Discourse In John Donne's "Devotions", Jessica M. Farris
A New Language: Apophatic Discourse In John Donne's "Devotions", Jessica M. Farris
Masters Theses
Not much ink has been spilled over John Donne’s relationship to negative, or apophatic, theology. A few scholars have written about apophatic discourse in Donne’s poetry and sermons, but, in general, the subject continues to be overlooked. This thesis seeks to (re)start the conversation by shedding light on Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a text which has yet to be linked to the negative tradition despite its clear engagement in apophatic discourse. Indeed, throughout Devotions, Donne wields several apophatic strategies when speaking of God including via negativa, predicates of action, linguistic regress, paradox, and a consistent reliance upon metaphorical …
Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race And The Form Of Comedy, Yunah Kae
Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race And The Form Of Comedy, Yunah Kae
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation writes a premodern history of race as an alternative literary history of comedy. This project argues that early modern generic changes in comic conventions reflect and produce a logic of race, which assign relational positions of knowingness and unknowing as naturally immutable. Renaissance comedies resembled epistemological laboratories in which to theorize the notion of knowledge itself, and the comedies of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Dekker, Middleton, and Rowley abound in theatrical technologies which create and explore differences in knowing and ignorance. Blackened skin function as a signifier of preclusion from the humanist knowledge-reservoir of “poesy”; the foreign stink wafting …
“To Weigh The World Anew”: Poetics, Rhetoric, And Social Struggle, From Sidney’S Arcadia To Shakespeare’S Theater, David Katz
Doctoral Dissertations
To Weigh the World Anew examines moments of rhetorical exchange in romances written by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Mary Wroth, arguing that these texts portray formal oratory as either unethical or inefficacious, while simultaneously depicting poetic or theatrical discourses as productively intervening between interlocutors of diverse social statuses. These exemplary episodes show fiction successfully mediating between different classes and genders, creating a demarcation between poetry and competing forms of eloquence and participating in the emergence of the poetical from the rhetorical. Ultimately, the repeated depiction of poesis as an efficacious form of mediation in self-reflexive romance shows …
Prosthetizing The Soul: Reading, Seeing, And Feeling In Seventeenth-Century Devotion, Katey E. Roden
Prosthetizing The Soul: Reading, Seeing, And Feeling In Seventeenth-Century Devotion, Katey E. Roden
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation proposes a new context for reading early modern devotional writing’s rich engagement with the language of the body in its focus on the relationship between gendered representations of devotional desire and spiritual ability in the religious poetry of seventeenth-century England. By tracing how somatic speech and bodily conditions are portrayed in the devotional poetry of John Milton, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and An Collins, this project examines how these writers fashion spiritual states through the language of a sometime sorrowful and sometime ecstatic, but always desiring body. My project reveals how early modern authors manipulate or respond to …
The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, And Cultural Performance In English Renaissance Drama, Nathaniel C. Leonard
The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, And Cultural Performance In English Renaissance Drama, Nathaniel C. Leonard
Open Access Dissertations
The critical discussion of metatheatre has historically connected a series of reflexive dramatic strategies - like soliloquy, chorus, dumb show, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue - and assumed that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. This dissertation, by contrast, shows that the efficacy derived from metatheatrical moments that overtly reference theatrical production is better understood in the context of restaged non-theatrical cultural performances. Restaged moments of both theatrical and non-theatrical social ritual produce layers of performance that allow the play to create representational space capable of circumventing …
How Should I Act?: Shakespeare And The Theatrical Code Of Conduct, Ann E. Garner
How Should I Act?: Shakespeare And The Theatrical Code Of Conduct, Ann E. Garner
Open Access Dissertations
This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater’s …