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Orpheus And The Harrowing Of Hell In The Tale Of Beren And Lúthien, Giovanni Carmine Costabile 2024 Independent

Orpheus And The Harrowing Of Hell In The Tale Of Beren And Lúthien, Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Critics have observed that Beren and Lúthien’s tale is a Christian retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The “Harrowing of Hell” tradition is widespread in Italy as attested by the mosaic of San Marco among others, but it is in France that the Ovid Moralized reconnects it to Orpheus who descended into the Underworld to save Eurydice (an already late antique parallel) and therefore attests a happy ending version of the story that can be found in medieval England and also in various classical sources, perhaps even in the original legend of Orpheus. The apocryphal Harrowing is also …


The Controversy Of Teaching World Literature And The Importance Of Translation In The Field Of English Studies, Samirah Almutairi 2024 Old Dominion University

The Controversy Of Teaching World Literature And The Importance Of Translation In The Field Of English Studies, Samirah Almutairi

English Faculty Publications

For literary texts to be taught in World Literature courses in the Departments of English Literature, they must be translated into English as a general rule. Some scholars advocate for translating literary texts, and others believe that translation as a methodology does not do justice to these texts. This study aims to lay out the arguments for each position and evaluate them. The significance of this study is to show that World Literature remains an essential field and to highlight the importance of translation. This study questions the modes and purpose of translating literary texts. The result of this study …


Milton's "Lycidas": Elevating The Human Condition, Haylee Edwards 2023 James Madison University

Milton's "Lycidas": Elevating The Human Condition, Haylee Edwards

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

John Milton’s 1637 poem “Lycidas” is a pastoral elegy told from the point of view of a shepherd grieving the loss of his friend, Lycidas. Written in honor of Milton’s late classmate, Edward King, “Lycidas” is a Christian allegory. This essay situates “Lycidas” within the history and characteristics of the pastoral elegy before analyzing how the poem at once inhabits and progressively deviates from the traditional form. Milton combines the traditional pastoral form with Elizabethan ideals and imagery to affirm his own religious, political, and existential views about death and the afterlife. The poem becomes increasingly complex, increasingly modern, and …


Medieval Manuscripts At Loyola University Chicago, Ian Cornelius, Kathy Young 2023 Loyola University Chicago

Medieval Manuscripts At Loyola University Chicago, Ian Cornelius, Kathy Young

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article provides a summary overview of the collection of pre-1600 western European manuscripts in Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections. The collection presently comprises four manuscript codices, at least 38 fragments, and four documents. The codices are a thirteenth-century Book of Hours from German-speaking lands; a fifteenth-century Dutch prayerbook; a preacher’s compilation written probably in southern Germany in the 1440s; and two fifteenth-century Italian humanist booklets, bound together since the nineteenth century, transmitting Donatus’s commentary on the Eunuchus (incomplete) and an anthology of theological excerpts, respectively. The fragments consist of thirteen leaves from books dismembered by modern booksellers …


Who Sings And Who Falls Silent? A Spatial And Social Analysis Of Virgilian Graffiti In Pompeii, Rachel Murray 2023 University of Arkansas-Fayetteville

Who Sings And Who Falls Silent? A Spatial And Social Analysis Of Virgilian Graffiti In Pompeii, Rachel Murray

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes Pompeian domestic spaces in which graffiti that quote the works of Virgil have been found. This is particularly compelling because of the Aeneid’s status as a ‘national epic,’ simultaneously ‘high’ culture and seemingly part of the ‘common’ imagination. In the past scholars have argued that the presence of Virgilian graffiti was not indicative of widespread interaction with Virgil, and that a select few individuals were responsible for these quotations. Drawing from ideas proposed by modern graffiti studies and spatial theorists and employing the methodology developed by the Virtual Pompeii Project, this study uses network analysis measures to …


Quid Multa?: What More? A Translation And Digital Annotation Of Selected Letters From Cicero To Atticus, Kelly Zach 2023 University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Quid Multa?: What More? A Translation And Digital Annotation Of Selected Letters From Cicero To Atticus, Kelly Zach

Honors Theses

Modern Classicists are modernizing and digitizing the field of Classical Studies with great success. Philology, translation, and annotation are all aspects that have been evolved using techniques from the Digital Humanities. This project is a foray into the intersection between Classics and Digital Humanities combining traditional Classical work with a digital aspect. This digital aspect of annotation using a dependency grammar-based approach and intuitive software enhances the understanding and translation of selected letters from Cicero to Atticus.


The Desert A City: A Study Of Antony The Great’S Life, Hanyang Chen 2023 New York University

The Desert A City: A Study Of Antony The Great’S Life, Hanyang Chen

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper attempts to provide an insight of asceticism and its development in Egypt through the literal work Athanasius's Life of Antony. It sets out to explain how the peculiar geography and environment in Egypt contributed to the development of asceticism and how the practices of St. Antony reflected the contemporary ideas on soul and body.


Enigmatic, Tragic, Crip; Or, Crip Time In Sophocles’S Oedipus And Aristotle’S Poetics, Maxwell Gray 2023 Marquette University

Enigmatic, Tragic, Crip; Or, Crip Time In Sophocles’S Oedipus And Aristotle’S Poetics, Maxwell Gray

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

Tragedy represents a classical literary genre the field of disability studies often prefers not to approach too closely, lest disability also be called a tragedy by association. At the same time, my thinking is organized around my personal experience of chronic illness, pain, and disability that appear in early adulthood, when it’s maybe least expected and most difficult to comprehend; or, in a word, tragic. I turn to the literary genre of classical Greek tragedy to think about/with more enigmatic and tragic forms of disability and crip temporality. In particular, I read Sophocles’s classic tragedy Oedipus and Aristotle’s foundational interpretation …


A Case For Tolkien As Master Of The Sublime, Graham A.C. Scheper 2023 University of Maryland, College Park

A Case For Tolkien As Master Of The Sublime, Graham A.C. Scheper

Journal of Tolkien Research

The present article aims to reconcile Tolkien with the Literary Critics through an exploration of Tolkien's use of the sublime. First, an explanation of the sublime is given, with a summary of its evolution over the past two millennia. Subsequently, three key thrusts of the sublime's manifestation in Tolkien's work are identified: his use of depth and incompleteness, his use of vastness and grandeur, and his usage of shadows and death. Investigating Tolkien's usage of these devices in turn illuminates his skill as an artist and as an author.


In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino 2023 Rhode Island School of Design

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …


What Our Hearts Crave For: An Examination Of The Paradoxical Attraction To Dante’S Inferno, Ketzalt E. Marquez 2023 Seattle Pacific University

What Our Hearts Crave For: An Examination Of The Paradoxical Attraction To Dante’S Inferno, Ketzalt E. Marquez

Honors Projects

This paper serves to analyze and explain why audiences are attracted to stories with elements of Horror in them, using Dante’s Inferno as the vehicle for this conversation, as the Inferno’s setting is in the worse possible place imaginable. Horror narratives arise feelings of fear and disgust in its audiences through the use of monsters, as audiences relate to the fear and disgust the positive characters in the narratives are feeling because of the monster’s presence. Since these emotions arise in a safe space, such as in literature or film, where the source of the emotions is not endangering the …


How To Grow Blurry: Poems, Nathaniel Metz 2023 Santa Clara University

How To Grow Blurry: Poems, Nathaniel Metz

Canterbury Scholars

In this collection of poems, Nathan D. Metz explores the distance between the word for a thing and the touch or feeling of a thing. Using a variety of forms both established and innovative, as well as free verse and ekphrastic response, these poems are a celebration of art, color, and the sounds of words. After the collection is a series of poems translated both from the original Japanese and Haitian Creole.


A Typological And Chemical Analysis Of Roman Oil Lamps From Poggio Del Molino, Brandon Tejo 2023 The Graduate Center, City University of New York

A Typological And Chemical Analysis Of Roman Oil Lamps From Poggio Del Molino, Brandon Tejo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Terracotta lamps, known to the Romans as lucernae, are small, handheld, often decorated objects which provided ancient people light. To modern researchers, they serve as tools for dating stratigraphy and iconographic studies. Beyond their immediately apparent aesthetic and symbolic value, the chemical compositions of the clay of these lamps reflect their origin. This study complements archaeological typologies with chemometric analyses to describe 16 Late Republican and Imperial Roman lamps recovered from the villa at Poggio del Molino (PdM), Tuscany. These finds were recovered from the 2021 and 2022 PdM excavations. The combined approach of typology with X-ray Diffraction (XRD) …


Plato's Republics: A Dramatic Interpretation Of The Early Cities In Plato's "Republic", Simeon Burns 2023 Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

Plato's Republics: A Dramatic Interpretation Of The Early Cities In Plato's "Republic", Simeon Burns

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation will demonstrate a new methodological approach to reading Plato’s Republic. I develop and apply a dramatic, dynamic hermeneutic to Book II and part of Book III in the text. This method holds that each speech is the product of a preceding agreement or disagreement between two speakers. Agreements lead to the argument’s advancement and disagreements result in a regression to a previous agreement from which to restart the exchange. The focus section is largely on the early exchange Socrates has with Adeimantus. I argue that Socrates is an unwilling participant in the famous discussion on the meaning …


“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas 2023 Cleveland State University

“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas

The Downtown Review

When Charlotte Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," was first published in New England Magazine in 1892, staff illustrator Joseph Hatfield created three realistic-style images to accompany the text. Research suggests that Gilman had no control or influence over these images, which altered readers' perception of her story about the dangers of the rest cure for female hysteria. While Hatfield faced artistic limitations and his intentions are not discoverable today, the choices and details in his illustrations support interpretations of the short story as a piece of horror fiction in which his cohesive series of images is a more reliable …


"Beowulf": Interpretation And Supplementation, Abigail Martin 2023 University of Mississippi

"Beowulf": Interpretation And Supplementation, Abigail Martin

Honors Theses

This thesis investigates the various ways in which Beowulf has been interpreted across time, explaining how factors, called paratexts, have played a large part in shaping these interpretations and how, especially in reading the Beowulf manuscript, we inherit the sum of these influences. In order to demonstrate this, I present a variety of arguments and perspectives on the text that have been developed by scholars over the years based on different types of paratexts (physical, intangible, and translational) in the absence of a known author. At each stage of Beowulf’s life, there have been opportunities for individuals with authority …


The Development And Adoption Of The Codex, Rutherford Allison 2023 Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH

The Development And Adoption Of The Codex, Rutherford Allison

Honors Bachelor of Arts

One of the longest-lasting and least recognized changes that occurred under the Roman Empire is the transition from scrolls as a vessel for literature to codices, the format which, in some way, is still used today. Indeed, until the invention of the printing press, texts had not undergone as impactful a shift as was experienced during the period between 250 and 450 AD. This shift was tied closely to the spread of Christianity; the codex’s rise to dominance maps closely to the spread of Christianity, and this is no accident. As will become apparent, Christians possessed a strong and distinctive …


Woven Together: Women Creating Stories Through Textiles, Jamie Eason 2023 Skidmore College

Woven Together: Women Creating Stories Through Textiles, Jamie Eason

Self-Determined Majors Final Projects

A series of textile art pieces exploring the relationship between women, textiles, and storytelling.


Heroic (Im)Maturity: Domestic Rupture And The Myth Of Telemachus' Coming Of Age, Mary Whitney 2023 College of the Holy Cross

Heroic (Im)Maturity: Domestic Rupture And The Myth Of Telemachus' Coming Of Age, Mary Whitney

College Honors Program

As one of the most enduring narratives discussed in the field of Classics, extensive research has been written about Homer’s Odyssey. The universal and flexible maxims of the desire for homecoming (νόστος) make the events of this epic so compelling. One central aspect of Odysseus’ νόστος is the return of his son Telemachus to a specific role as the obedient prince. This implies that before the resolution of Odysseus’ νόστος, there exists the rupture of the domestic sphere that allows for freedom and chaos, both of which are removed and checked when Odysseus returns to Ithaca. For as long …


Sing Of Arms And Disobedience: Reading Vergil's Aeneid In Milton's Paradise Lost, Brooke Braden 2023 William & Mary

Sing Of Arms And Disobedience: Reading Vergil's Aeneid In Milton's Paradise Lost, Brooke Braden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the extent to which Vergil’s Aeneid influences the characters, themes, and epic style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Focusing primarily on the Carthage episode of the Aeneid in which Aeneas meets and falls in love with queen Dido, this thesis explores how the figures of Aeneas, Creusa, Dido, and Sychaeus parallel those of Milton’s Satan, Sin, Eve, and Adam, respectively. This thesis also shows how the appearance of epic themes such as fate in both texts affects characters’ personal motivations in similar ways, such as Dido’s suicide and Eve’s consumption of the infamous apple. Through an exploration of …


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