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Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Shakespeare And Chaucer: Dream Visions And Dramatic Designs, Michael Plunkett
Shakespeare And Chaucer: Dream Visions And Dramatic Designs, Michael Plunkett
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation explores echoes of Chaucer's dream visions in two of Shakespeare's late plays, Cymbeline and The Tempest, and in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare turns to Chaucer's dream visions, particularly The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame, not to use them as narrative sources, but to appropriate conventional elements of artistic self-exploration and self-definition in them. Chaucer's dreamers, who are also writers, read classic stories in bed, dream dreams that react to those stories, and then wake up and write new poems that report on what they have read …
Dear Son Of Memory: Milton's Engagement With Shakespeare, Bradley Fox
Dear Son Of Memory: Milton's Engagement With Shakespeare, Bradley Fox
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Dear Son of Memory establishes new lines of inquiry into Milton’s engagement with Shakespeare, exploring explicit verbal allusions to Shakespeare’s plays in Milton’s works, as well as echoes of characters, scenes, and themes. It argues that Milton viewed Shakespeare sympathetically, rather than as a rival and it therefore revises the legacy of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” model, which still dominates scholarship in Milton studies today. More specifically, this project offers evidence from Milton’s early poems to show that Milton regarded Shakespeare as a fellow vatic poet and a friendly influence who helped him to dramatize the two central tenets …
Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt
Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …
Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, And The Question Of Europe In Early Modern England, Joseph Bowling
Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, And The Question Of Europe In Early Modern England, Joseph Bowling
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Throughout medieval Europe, royal families traced their genealogies back to the ancient Trojans. Beginning in the Carolingian court, this practice persisted into the early modern period, when narratives of ancient Troy—from accounts of the war to rewritings of Virgil—saturated literary production. Constituting the translatio imperii tradition, in which civilization “translates” from east to west, these legends of Trojan descent allowed European monarchs to legitimize their authority, or imperium, as derived from the Roman Empire, which Virgil famously celebrated as descending from Trojan Aeneas. This tradition formed what I call feudal cosmopolitanism: an affiliation among nobility premised on shared descent …
Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder
Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …
How And Where To Make A Fortune: Mapping The Fictions Of Economic Mobility Through Work In British Literature, 1719–1809, Heather Zuber
How And Where To Make A Fortune: Mapping The Fictions Of Economic Mobility Through Work In British Literature, 1719–1809, Heather Zuber
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation traces the literary history of a particular plotline in eighteenth-century British Literature—that of a poor individual who climbs the economic ladder through hard work (as opposed to marriage or inheritance). This plot features prominently in the earliest novels (written by Daniel Defoe) but quickly fades from that genre, only to reappear in others such as children’s literature and life-writing. This dissertation collects for the first time the wide variety of eighteenth-century texts that contain this economic mobility through work plot and analyzes them using a variety of methodologies, including single author studies, genre studies, multi-genre studies, engagement with …
Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian
Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, …
“Community In Solitude”: The Solitary Self, Social Critique, And Utopian Longing, Colin S. Macdonald
“Community In Solitude”: The Solitary Self, Social Critique, And Utopian Longing, Colin S. Macdonald
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation argues that the discourse of solitude in early modern English literature was used to construct a fantasy of resistance to political and social corruption and internecine conflict. Furthermore, the rhetoric of solitude and the positioning of oneself as an outsider, as “uniquely separate from society,” in Andrew Bennett’s terms, led to the development of an early modern authorial identity in opposition to the world, opening a space that allowed social critique and utopian desire to flourish. The notion of disengaged resistance, or what we might call disengaged engagement, is the key component of the rhetoric and practice of …
Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley
Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …
"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma
"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This study focuses on the discovery of subjectivity through the recovery of lost paradise in Milton’s late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This theme revolves around the tension between the affective and the empirical, which also configure the spheres of the sacred and the profane. I explore how the irresistibly emancipatory impulse of recovering lost paradise compels Miltonic subjects to seek ways to return to their originary state or the divine ensemble. During this process, the subject is engaged with his own incapacity or privation while reaching into the sphere of unknown potentiality. In …
Tragedy And Theodicy: The Role Of The Sufferer From Job To Ahab, Nora Carroll
Tragedy And Theodicy: The Role Of The Sufferer From Job To Ahab, Nora Carroll
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The character of Job starts in literature, a trope and archetype of the suffering man who potentially gains wisdom through suffering. Job’s characterization informs a comparison to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and finally Melville’s Moby-Dick. These versions of Job rally, fight, and rebel against a universe that was once loving and fair towards a more chaotic and nihilistic one. Job’s suffering is on the mark of all tragedy because he not only experiences a downfall, he gains wisdom through universalizing his torment. The Job trope not only stresses the role of suffering, it …