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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"What Do The Divils Find To Laugh About" In Melville's The Confidence-Man, Truedson J. Sandberg
"What Do The Divils Find To Laugh About" In Melville's The Confidence-Man, Truedson J. Sandberg
Theses and Dissertations
The failure of identity in The Confidence-Man has confounded readers since its publication. To some critics, Melville's titular character has seemed to leave his readers in a hopelessness without access to confidence, identity, trust, ethical relationality, and, finally, without anything to say. I argue, however, that Melville's text does not leave us without hope. My argument, consequently, is inextricably bound to a reading of Melville's text as deeply engaged with the concepts it inherits from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, an inheritance woefully under-examined by those critics who would leave Melville's text in the mire of hopelessness. In examining …
Absolving The Sin: Redemptive Feminine Figures In Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife Of Bath's Prologue" And John Milton's Paradise Lost, Rory Griffiths
Absolving The Sin: Redemptive Feminine Figures In Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife Of Bath's Prologue" And John Milton's Paradise Lost, Rory Griffiths
Theses and Dissertations
Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton have been ceaselessly studied in isolation to one another, but undergraduate students must begin to study them in conjunction. Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” serves as social critique of medieval misogynist practices that allows students to study social practices as they study his language. Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost reflects the religious and social instability that marked the Interregnum of the English Civil War, allowing Eve to embody the culture’s desire to return to a virtuous Church. Students will learn to examine the space of the authorial paradox, primarily the questions of authority that …