Comparative Literature Commons^™

Willa Cather: Male Roles And Self-Definition In My Antonia, The Professor's House, And "Neighbor Rosicky", Kristina Anne Everton

Theses and Dissertations

Gender roles are a tool used by society to set acceptable boundaries and ideals upon the sexes, and during the early part of the twentieth century in America those gender boundaries began to blur. As a result of the 19th Amendment, men must have felt their decreasing importance because women were no longer solely dependent upon them, and gender roles shifted as woman began to occupy territory that was traditionally held by men. The “New Woman" entered the workforce, and refused to accept traditional female gender conventions. In response to the “New Woman," Theodore Roosevelt and other leading males sought …

Animism In Whitman: "Multitudes" Of Interpretations?, Rachelle Helene Woodbury

Theses and Dissertations

Walt Whitman used animistic techniques in his poetry and prose, specifically "Song of the Redwood Tree," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and Specimen Days. The term animism can be traced to the Latin root of the word, anime, which connotes a "soul" or "vitality." So, when one is talking about animistic techniques, one is speaking of the (metaphoric or realistic) ensoulment of natural objects. In the wake of a growing global crisis modern scholarship has begun reexamining the implications of this belief; often it introduces ambiguities into an otherwise comfortable relationship of unquestioned human domination. In Specimen Days, Whitman …

Three Kinds Of Culture In Mainstream Civilizations, Kazutake Miyahara

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Okolie Animba, Ed. Glimpses Of Igbo Culture And Civilization, Michael Andregg

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Lee Harris, Civlizations And Its Enemies: The Next Stage Of History, Laina Farhat-Holzman

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: Rodney Stark’S Vision Of Medieval Christianity, Elspeth Whitney

Quidditas

Rodney Stark. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, 504 pages, and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005, 304 pages.

Enchanted Islands Floating On The Foam Of Perilous Seas, Jean Macintyre

Quidditas

In localizing The Tempest on “an uninhabited island,” the 1623 Shakespeare Folio associates the setting with the floating island that some masque machines represented. Such machines acted as movable stages to transport masquers from within the set to the spot from which their dances would begin; other masques allege that their immobile sets were also floating islands. Though the stages, permanent or temporary, on which The Tempest was performed were not mobile, they nonetheless were a kind of island surrounded by spectators, on which the magician Prospero, aided by Ariel, writes, casts, and directs a play whose roles are unwittingly …

Romancing The Chronicles: 1 Henry Iv And The Rewriting Of Medieval History, Bradley Greenburg

Quidditas

This essay explores the ways Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV deploys Welshness as a counterforce to English national stability. I argue that the critical habit of equating the genre of romance with untruthfulness or silliness does not pay close enough attention to what Shakespeare does in his history plays. The Hal he gives us, whose youth and military training in Wales he suppresses, is, generically, a romance character. But, instead of a knight in his father’s service (where his adventures would be securely in the service of the realm), or knight errant, he is an errant haunter of bad company, an …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2004)

Quidditas

James H. Forse

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

Delno C. West Award Winner (2005)

Quidditas

Susan Stakel

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

Monasteries As Financial Patrons And Promoters Of Local Performance In Late Medieval And Early Tudor England, Christine Sustek Williams

Quidditas

The elaborate cycle plays produced in the larger, wealthy municipalities of York, Chester, Wakefield and Coventry receive the lion’s share of attention among scholars of medieval theatre. Until recently, performance activities in smaller communities have received little or no attention, except perhaps as something of antiquarian interest. And one area of theatre history that has been largely overlooked is the involvement of monasteries in local performance activities. Yet the precious few, fragmentary, monastic records that survived the dissolutions of the monasteries under Henry VIII and Edward VI, suggest that several monasteries gave active financial support to local theatre in England …

Everyman In Production: A Dance Of Death A Staging At California State University, Chico (2004), Jan Hawkley

Quidditas

Medieval dramatic works, while historically significant and intellectually interesting, may seem irrelevant and even incomprehensible in our day. The language is problematic in pronunciation, phrasing and word meaning. Allegory today often is considered didactic and overly simplistic, yielding only one- dimensional characters. Medieval society appears obtuse to modern students, functioning with a totally different worldview and social hierarchy; medieval concepts of comedy and religion are difficult for us to grasp today. Additionally, we obviously have no recordings of actual performances, so we do not know how a given play was staged; we must surmise medieval staging from descriptions of performances …

Entertaining Yet Erudite Social History, Ginger L. Guardiola

Quidditas

Barbara A. Hanawalt. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 300 pages. $18.95.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2005)

Quidditas

Bradley Greenburg

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

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Representing A Bigger Middle Ages, Carol Neel

Quidditas

Barbara H. Rosenwein. A Short History of the Middle Ages. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2002. 362 pages. $42.95.

Colin McEvedy. The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History. London: Penguin Books, 1992. 112 pages. $13.95.

Patrick J. Geary. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. 261 pages. $19.95.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2004)

Quidditas

Jennifer McNabb

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

Getting Your Name Out There: Traveling Acting Companies And Royal And Aristocratic Prestige In Tudor England, James H. Forse

Quidditas

Records published to date concerning early English drama suggest that in the first third of the sixteenth century touring activity by municipal, amateur acting companies exceeded that of royal and aristocratic troupes. But after about 1535, the religious, social, and economic policies of Henry VIII, and Edward VI, severely limited locally based performances. At the same time tours by royal acting troupes substantially increased. Yet of all the Tudors, it was Elizabeth who seems to have realized the potential of her acting troupe representing the monarch's presence throughout the kingdom. From the beginning of her reign the Queen’s Men appeared …

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Fame And The Making Of Marriage In Northwest England, 1560-1640, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

Because England did not enact a comprehensive reform of its medieval marital law until Lord Hardwicke’s Act in 1753, it was possible to construct a binding marriage outside the authority of the Church of England during the Tudor and Stuart periods. Marriages created by the exchange of present-tense consent, even if they failed to follow the church’s suggested rules concerning time and place, its emphasis on clerical presence, and its stress on publicity (through three readings of the banns or the procurement of a marriage license), were considered spiritually legitimate throughout the eight decades prior to the civil wars. An …

Tenth-Century Drama In The Twenty-First Century A Staging Of Three Plays By Hrotsvit Of Gandersheim At Stetson University (2005), Julia Schmitt

Quidditas

During the fall semester of 2005, the Department of Communication Studies and Theatre Arts at Stetson University undertook a unique, but highly rewarding production challenge. Professor Ken McCoy and I were asked by The English Department of Stetson University to stage a medieval play in conjunction with the Southeast Medieval Association Conference to be held at Stetson during the month of September. The English Department was eager to offer conference attendees an opportunity to experience a live production of a medieval play.

P. Herc. 1570 Pieces 4, 5, 6a, 6b: [Philodemi] [De Divitiis], Joseph Anton Ponczoch

Theses and Dissertations

P. Herc. 1570 is an unedited papyrus extant in seven pieces that together measure ca. 1.6 m. long; these are contained in five frames in the Officina dei Papiri Ercolanesi “Marcello Gigante” at the Biblioteca Nazionale “Vittorio Emanuele III&rduo; in Naples, Italy. Like many of the Herculaneum papyri, P. Herc. 1570 has remained unedited largely because of the great difficulty with which traces of letters can be discerned on its surface. It was unrolled more than fifty years after its discovery, as one of ca. 1,100 papyri that were unearthed during the excavation of first-century Herculaneum (1752-1754); but it was …

Through The Eyes Of Shamans: Childhood And The Construction Of Identity In Rosario Castellanos' "Balun-Canan" And Rudolfo Anaya's "Bless Me, Ultima", Tomas Hidalgo Nava

Theses and Dissertations

This study offers a comparative analysis of Rosario Castellanos' Balún-Canán and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, novels that provide examples on how children construct their identity in hybrid communities in southeastern Mexico and the U.S. southwest. The protagonists grow and develop in a context where they need to build bridges between their European and Amerindian roots in the middle of external influences that complicate the construction of a new mestizo consciousness. In order to attain that consciousness and free themselves from their divided selves, these children receive the aid of an indigenous mentor who teaches them how to establish a …

Ashok Kumar Malhotra. Instant Nirvana: Americanization Of Mysticism And Meditation., Michael Andregg

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Ironic Multiplicity: Fernando's "Pessoas" Suspended In Kierkegaardian Irony, Michelle Pulsipher Hale

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies Søren Kierkegaard's understanding of irony as outlined in his master's thesis, The Concept of Irony, to the literary works of Fernando Pessoa. Recently Kierkegaardian scholarship has opened possibilities for non-traditional interpretation of Kierkegaard's dissertation and pseudonymous "aesthetic" texts by reading them in the ironic tone in which they were written. This paper offers a similar re-reading of the poetic and prose works Pessoa attributes to his heteronyms.

Kierkegaard's presentation of Socrates as irony serves as a model for how Pessoa sustains the heteronymic project by balancing the use of rhetorical irony within the works of the heteronyms …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2003)

Quidditas

James K. Otté

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

The Morality Of Misogny: The Case Of Rustico Filippi, Vituperatore Of Women, Fabian Alfie

Quidditas

At the outset of his influential study on Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin makes an interesting observation. The scholar dedicates several pages to detail how the French author’s critical reception changed over time. Bakhtin illustrates how the attempt to comprehend an author can frequently be stymied by the cultural changes that occur across the centuries. As scholars analyze writers of earlier periods, the investigation of the cultural and textual background can become increasingly difficult.

Wedding Vows And Coffins: Canticles' Rhetoric, The Liturgical Form Of Matrimony And Middleton's A Chaste Maid In Cheapside (1613), Lisa Beauchamp

Quidditas

The concluding scene of Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside begins as a double funeral procession and turns into a wedding as the lovers rise from their coffins to be married; but what are coffins doing in a wedding scene? The coffins, as an onstage sign of the metamorphosis of funeral into wedding, are the emblematic focus for this paper. This investigation exposes the resonances of Canticles’ erotic betrothal and Revelation’s matrimonial fulfilment as a rhetoric common to both theatrical rituals and to ecclesiastical scriptures. After briefly introducing what I call Canticles’ rhetoric – Canticles itself, its exegesis, and …

Betwixt War And Peace: The Dual Function And Substance Of The Bell, James K. Otté

Quidditas

This paper owes its inspiration to Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and to its protagonist, Henry Fleming, who

One night, as he lay in bed, the winds had carried to him the clangoring of the church bell as some enthusiast jerked the rope frantically to tell the twisted news of a great battle. This voice of the people rejoicing in the night had made him shiver in a prolonged ecstasy of excitement. Later, he had gone down to his mother’s room and had spoken thus: ‘Ma, I'm going to enlist.’ ‘Henry, don't you be a fool,’ his mother had …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.