Comparative Literature Commons^™

Review Essay: Johann P. Arnason, Civlization In Dispute. Historical Questions And Theoretical Traditions, Toby E. Huff

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Modernity And The Good Death: Heidegger And Jose, Anna M. Jensen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will analyze José Clemente Orozco's mural The Epic of American Civilization in terms of the problem of suffering. It will focus specifically on two panels, “Human Sacrifice in Ancient Times” and “Human Sacrifice in Modern Times.” This analysis will comprehend not only the works of art within their historical context, but also within Martin Heidegger's philosophical discussion of the question of suffering. Heidegger presents a unique perspective on the question of human suffering when he writes that Western humans have forgotten how to “dwell.” This dwelling is defined by Heidegger's novel conception of ontology as relational rather than …

Map, Manuscript, And Memory: The Emergence Of An Anglo-Saxon Identity Between Origins And Apocalypse, Juliana Marie Chapman

Theses and Dissertations

As the only extant detailed world map of the Anglo-Saxon period, the Anglo-Saxon map, c. 1025, presents a unique opportunity to explore a sense of Anglo-Saxon social identity as evidenced in this graphic worldview. The Anglo-Saxon map has most often been dismissed as an ill-fitting illustration when viewed solely in its manuscript context or an equally poor navigational tool when considered in the context of modern cartography. The purpose of this thesis is to present the argument that the Anglo-Saxon world map is neither simply a bad illustration nor a poorly rendered map intended for travel, but is rather a …

Interpreting The Sacred In As You Like It: Reading The "Book Of Nature" From A Christian, Ecocritical Perspective, Candice Dee Wendt

Theses and Dissertations

Since the advent of the environmental crisis, some writers have raised concerns with the moral influence of Christian scripture and interpretive traditions, such as the medieval book of nature, a hermeneutic in which nature and scripture are "read" in reference to one another. Scripture, they argue, has tended to stifle sacred relationships with nature as a non-human other. This thesis argues that such perspectives are reductive of the sacred quality of scripture. Environmental perspectives should be concerned with the desacralization of religious texts in addition to nature. Chapter one suggests that two questions surrounding the medieval book of nature's history …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2009)

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Adele Lee

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Delno C. West Award (2009)

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Andrea Knox

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

“The Whole Is An Idle Dream:” The Early Modern And Post-Modern Quest For Cathay, Adele Lee

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This article examines how the Renaissance English understood and responded to the land of Cathay. It argues that although Cathay is technically just another name for China it represented a separate conceptual realm in this period. In other words, Cathay must be considered as being, in many ways, a distinct discursive construct. Viewed as the ‘glittering prize’ of the East India Company, Cathay, which fuelled countless (doomed) attempts at discovery, possessed characteristics both Chinese and Tartar. Descriptions of it converged and diverged simultaneously with descriptions of China and Tartary. As well as being a culturally liminal entity, Cathay was also …

Dancing In The Shadows: Ritual, Drama And The Performance Of Baptisms In The Digby Conversion Of St. Paul And Philip Massinger’S The Renegado., Matthew C. Hansen

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The anonymous Digby Conversion of St. Paul aims at historical verisimilitude in order to distance the on-stage baptism the play contains from the rite as performed in early sixteenth-century English churches. Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (published 1624), presenting the conversion and baptism of a Muslim woman, employs specific details to establish the baptism performed on stage as a rite that, while efficacious within the contexts of the play, is markedly different in substantive performance than the form of baptism presented in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. Both plays frame the dramatically significant and sensitive performance of the religious rite …

The Convent As Cultural Conduit: Irish Matronage In Early Modern Spain, Andrea Knox

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Irish catholic women religious who migrated to Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries established a strong tradition of schools, hospitals and charitable institutions. Education and learning were important to Irish communities, and were recognised within Spain. Irish nuns and their convents were not part of an enclosed tradition and outreach work was a central aim. Sponsorship links between women were part of a collective plan, and cultural matronage by and for women appears to have been very effective. Censorship by the Inquisition and tridentine orthodoxy was contested by women’s religious houses which resisted censorship of book collections and art …

Review Essay: “Will In Overplus” A Review Of Shakespeare Biographies, Stephannie S. Gearhart

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Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I that vex thee still

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 135, ll.1-3

It seems to be a kind of Respect due to the Memory of Excellent Men,

specially of those whom their Wit and Learning have made Famous,

to deliver some Account of themselves, as well as their Works, to Posterity.

For this Reason, how fond do we see some People of discovering any little

Personal Story of the great Men of Antiquity, their Families, the common

Accidents of their Lives, and …

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No abstract provided.

Teaching The Black Death, Jennifer Mcnabb

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John Alberth, ed. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348- 1350: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 200 pages. $14.95.

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ed. The Black Death. Problems in European Civilization. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 206 pages. $37.99.

Using John Wilders To Teach Shakespeare’S Second Tetralogy, Edmund M. Taft

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John Wilders. The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978. 154 pp.

“O thoughts of men accurst!

Past and to come seems best; things present, worst.”

(2 Henry 4.1.3.107-108)

Front Matter

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No abstract provided.

Architectural Chastity Belts: The Window Motif As Instrument Of Discipline In Italian Fifteenth-Century Conduct Manuals And Art, Jennifer Megan Orendorf

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Offering advice on a range of topics from the quotidian to the extraordinary, from superstition to scientific, fifteenth-century conduct manuals appealed to readers of all Italian social classes. This essay focuses specifically on manuals which prescribe behaviors for women, and investigates the reception of these precepts and the extent to which these notions informed and transformed women’s lives. Specifically, I examine one piece of advice which recurs throughout instructional literature during this time: the prescribed notion that women should remain far removed from their household windows for the sake of their honor, reputation and chastity. Widely read manuals, such as …

Karlsgrab: The Site And Significance Of Charlemagne’S Sepulcher In Aachen, John F. Moffitt

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The intention of what follows is to clear up one of the mysteries still surrounding the Charles the Great, now most commonly known by his later appellation “Charlemagne.” Born in 742, the son of King Pepin the Short (ca. 714-768), Charlemagne ruled as king of the Franks after 768; he additionally ruled as Emperor of the West, from 800 until his death in 814. Sources in his time presented him as an emulator and successor of Constantine the Great, and successive Western Emperors presented their own personae as successors of Charlemagne. In 1165, 350 years after Charlemagne’s death, Emperor Frederick …

Utopia Transformed: The Calculated Indirection Of Thomas Starkey’S Dialogue Between Pole And Lupset, Robert W. Haynes

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Thomas Starkey’s effort to employ guarded speech and to distance himself from some of the risky views discussed in his Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (1529- 1536?) emulated similar features of Thomas More’s Latin Utopia and, in fact, sought to improve on More’s striking dialogue. Though doomed by the break between Henry VIII and Rome (and that between the king and Starkey’s dialogue’s chief speaker), this unfinished work exhibits a particularly ambitious and in some ways quite skillfully wrought humanist project.

The Education Of The Son In Paradise Regained: Milton’S Of Education As A Guide, Alice Matthews

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“The Education of the Son in Paradise Regained: Milton’s Of Education as a Guide” argues that the character of Christ provides a model for effective learning, which is outlined in Milton’s treatise On Education. In the treatise, first published in 1644, some twenty- seven years before his brief epic, Milton explains the purpose for education as strengthening one’s relationship with God, and the best method for acquiring it— gradually, progressing from the easy to the more difficult. In my essay, I will analyze each step in Christ’s education, beginning with his boyhood and culminating in his temptation on …

The Italian, Spanish, And English Fencing Schools In Shakespeare’S England, Stewart Hawley

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Three styles of fencing are were taught in England during the Elizabethan era: Italian, Spanish, and English. Non-historical plays of the Elizabethan period are examined to consider what style of fencing was used on stage, and perhaps taught to the actors in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and others. Historically, scholars have chosen to argue that actors of this period were taught an Italian or Spanish style of fencing, often glossing over the English style. I argue that the unique English style of fencing was probably taught to Elizabethan actors. Showing that these three fencing styles have distinct …

Blurring The Lines: The Intermingling Of Garden And Theater In Seventeenth Century France, Abbie Elizabeth Rufener

Theses and Dissertations

Seventeenth century French society was a time in which the arts flourished and were used to create an eminence of power and absolutism. The gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte were commissioned by Nicolas Fouquet and designed by André Le Nôtre. The gardens created a political and social space through the characteristics of design and standards of order which together conveyed power and absolutism. Louis XIV, newly crowned king, recognized at Vaux the perfect vehicle for the portrayal of power. French theater at the same time was gaining popularity and establishing itself as a great art form. Similar to the gardens at Vaux …

Dakota Land In 1862, A Genocide Forgotten: How Civilizational Transformation Can Get Lost In The Fading Rate Of History, Michael Andregg

Comparative Civilizations Review

The year of 1862 was critical in a process by which a land larger than many nations was transformed from one civilization to another. But the process was not a classic conquest easily recorded in history books. Rather, it was a slow "digestion" of over 20 million hectares of territory by one civilization, accompanied by moments of true genocide or "ethnic cleansing" during long periods of high death rates for one group and high birth rates and immigration rates for the other group. But this was sufficiently gradual that most historians did not record it on their lists of wars …

Demographics In World History—Population Explosion And Implosion, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

About The Gospel Of John: Considering P66: A Literary History, Or A Categorical Hermeneutic, Christopher Ryan Haney

Theses and Dissertations

New Testament text critics are fueled by a search for origins. But in the absence of an autograph, questions of origins are complicated at best. The fruit of that search for origins has resulted in the creation of hypothetical, eclectic texts—texts which have left us translating and interpreting the Bible in a form that no community in human history has before. Far from being failed projects, however, these eclectic versions aptly represent the problem of the One and the many, a problem not easily solved: When faced with hermeneutic duties, can we effectively speak of New Testament texts without speaking …

Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Adaptations Of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Kathryn Hartvigsen

Theses and Dissertations

The theatre in the nineteenth century was a source of entertainment similar in popularity to today's film culture, but critics, of both that age and today, often look down on nineteenth-century theatre as lacking in aesthetic merit. Just as many of the films now being produced in Hollywood are adapted from popular or classic literature, many theatrical productions in the early 1800s were based on popular literary works, and it is in that practice of adaptation that value in nineteenth-century theatre can be discerned. The abundance of theatrical adaptations during the nineteenth century expanded the arena in which the public …

Negotiating Identity In The Transnational Imaginary Of Julia Alvarez's And Edwidge Danticat's Literature, Erik R. Kerby

Theses and Dissertations

The increased contact between nations and cultures in the globalization of the twenty-first century requires an increased accountability for the ways in which individuals and countries negotiate these points of contact. New World and Caribbean Studies envision the cross-cultural and transnational encounters between indigenous, European, and African peoples as important contributors to a paradigm within which identity in relation offers an alternative to identities rooted in national and filial frameworks. Such frameworks limit the ability to construct identity without relying upon static representations of history, culture, and ethnicity that tend to privilege one group over another. In the literature of …

The Conception Of Irony With Continual Reference To Kierkegaard: An Examination Of Ironic Play In Fear And Trembling, Julie Ann Parker Frederick

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the relationship of irony, as defined in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony to the text and subject of Fear and Trembling. Irony is interpreted in this thesis as negative space, which both binds and separates and which assumes meaning equal to or greater than the positive space that binds it. This definition applies to Kierkegaard's Socrates who lived ironically in the space between actuality and ideality. This thesis considers how Abraham also lived in ironic space and why ironic space is a prerequisite for faith. Unlike Socrates, Abraham did not stop with irony, but used irony to …

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Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2008)

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Alice Blackwell

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Gaiwan's Five Wits: Technological Difficulties In The Endless Knot, Alice Blackwell

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Traditionally, the “five wits” of the endless knot on Gawain’s shield in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” have been read as the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The present paper, following recent work by Peter Whiteford, Simon Kemp, and Garth Fletcher, contends that the five wits may be interpreted as the five internal wits, which include imagination and memory and determine perception. This identification of the five wits as the five internal wits calls into question Gawain’s self-identity, predicated as it is upon the five wits’ faultlessness. In this context, Gawain’s self-understanding is really a self-misunderstanding, and …

Politics And Culture At The Jacobean Court: The Role Of Queen Anna Of Denmark, Courtney Erin Thomas

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Until recently, analyses of the Jacobean court marginalized the important role played by James I and VI’s queen consort, Anna of Denmark. While historians and literary critics now acknowledge that Anna was a key player in patronage networks and artistic circles at the time, the extent of her political involvement remains largely unexplored in favor of portraying her solely as a cultural figure. This essay seeks to examine the connections between Anna’s cultural and political activities and suggests that, by viewing Anna’s involvements thorough a dichotomous lens as being either political or cultural, a truly textured and nuanced understanding of …