Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Re-Examining The Female Voice In Chaucer's Italian-Sourced Works: A Study In Paleography, Textual Transmission, And Masculinity, Stacee Bucciarelli

Dissertations

Research on women in medieval literature is abundant but often focused on broad questions of narrative and character development. Among the areas seldom examined is what I will term "female voice," a term that encompasses the thoughts and speech of women in literature. This project analyzes the representation of female voice in Chaucer's work, and it explores alterations to female voices within the largely male worlds (both actual and literary) in which they were created.

This study broadens the analysis from the restrictive and traditional realm of women's studies and contextualize these alterations on a grander scale of textual and …

Diplomatic Solutions: Land Use In Anglo-Saxon Worcestershire, Kevin Anthony Caliendo

Dissertations

My dissertation is a study of the charters of the Worcester diocese from its foundation in approximately 680 to the tenth century. Bishops of Worcester, men is control of one of the wealthiest sees in Anglo-Saxon England, used charters to acquire land, obtain rights and privileges for their existing estates, and manage trade within limits imposed by the king. Rights associated with bookland, land held by charter, gave bishops and their agents the ability to direct settlement and field systems in order to maximize estate productivity and encourage trade through a system of urban and rural marketing of timber, salt, …

Neuroscience And Galen: Body, Selfhood And The Materiality Of Emotions On The Early Modern Stage, Devon Wallace

Dissertations

From antiquity until the turn of the nineteenth century, temperament, mood and personality were believed to exist within, be managed by, and interact with material substance. Before the medical revolution of the late seventeenth century, early modern theories of anatomy and medicine were primarily based on the writings of Galen, who lived in the second century but was him influenced by a much older medical and philosophical tradition. In this period, the playwrights raise the same central question that now appears in so many reactions to the increasingly accepted "neurocentric" world view: "to what extent do I have an emotional …

Luxury Romanticism: The Quarto Book In The Romantic Period, Matthew Hale Clarke

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the cultural presence of the quarto book in Romantic-era Britain and argues that the format classed the period's defining literary ideologies--from sentimentalism, to liberalism, to Wordsworthian Romanticism, to orientalism--as luxuries meant exclusively for the nation's wealthiest consumers. Chapter 1 situates the quarto within the context of the period's luxury debates and advances a conception of the quarto as the era's predominant luxury format. Focusing on Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, Chapter 2 argues that early quarto editions of the poem classed the sympathetic feeling it celebrated as the unique privilege of a readerly elite and describes how …

Pirates Of Romanticism: Intellectual Property Ideology And The Birth Of British Romanticism, Jason Isaac Kolkey

Dissertations

This dissertation traces the role of unauthorized publication in the posthumous construction of British Romanticism as a literary movement. It argues that Romantic ideology emerged from conflicting claims about the nature of intellectual property and the circulation of political and artistic ideas, apparent in the texts and paratexts of pirated books. I examine how these disputes play out in reprints of the works by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Southey that became cornerstones of radical culture. The dissertation goes on to discuss how the underground economy of literary piracy affected Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron's publication strategies, the significance …