English Language and Literature Commons^™

Gollum From Medieval Tragedy To Liberal Tragedy In J. R. R. Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Masoud Tadayoni, Mohsen Hanif

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

J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium represents different archetypal myths that constitute a diverse treasury of literary genres. Tragedy in variegated forms also appears in many of his mythological tales and characters. Gollum in The Lord of the Rings experiences a unique instance of tragedy when it is compared with Tolkien’s earlier sketches of the genre. We demonstrate that the character Gollum sustains a twofold type of tragedy that originates from Tolkien’s perception of medieval and modern spirits of thought. Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy draws upon historical traditions of tragedy to survey different characteristics of “modern tragedy”. According to him, the cornerstones …

Exquisite Corpse, Tuxedo Literature And Arts Journal

The Tuxedo Archives

No abstract provided.

English Renaissance Tragedy: Kyd’S The Spanish Tragedy And Marlowe’S Doctor Faustus In Perspective, Fuad Abdul Muttaleb

Jerash for Research and Studies Journal مجلة جرش للبحوث والدراسات

In this paper, I shall be trying to investigate the nature of the English Renaissance drama through two prominent examples: Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1556-1857) and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1588-1593). In order to carry out this aim Kyd's play (probably performed 1586–7), will be looked at as the first successful English example of tragedy, for its force and originality was widely acknowledged, and Marlowe's play (probably performed 1592) as an artistic expression of the Renaissance spirit, a recreation of the Faust legend. The English idea of a Renaissance tragedy seems here to be a mixture of the ideas …

Macbeth's Political Imagination: The Struggle For Kingship In Macbeth, Fuad Abdul Muttaleb, Mohammad Khair Rawashdeh

Jerash for Research and Studies Journal مجلة جرش للبحوث والدراسات

Ambition and regicide are two types of evil examined very closely in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. Hence, ambition is seen in the play as a sin, an attempt to jump the natural order and make a new one, a desire so intense it can lead a person into the hands of evil. Regicide, according to medieval European conventions, is to kill God's anointed king, and so likewise to disrupt the natural and divine order. Macbeth's illegal and immoral kingship brings death, destruction, and suffering to Scotland, whilst the good kingship of Duncan and Malcolm brings victory and happiness; the …

Disaster And Hope In The Comic Universe Of 'Gardening In The Tropics', Molly Mosher

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I explore ideas of dominion and how Western canon has helped propagate ideas of human domination of the natural world. Using Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, I trace a line from the advent of the literary tragedy to the climate crisis. To contrast, I use his idea of comedy as the antidote to domination — a way of thinking that might inspire collaboration with the natural world. I will explore the comic with, predominately, Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening studies and Mona Lisa Saloy’s essay on environmental destruction. To …

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Counterfactuals And Prefactuals In Shakespeare: Understanding The Human Mind And Human Behavior Through The Literary Analysis Of Conditional Mental Simulation Thoughts In The Narratives Of Plays, Cierra R. Cowan

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

"The Double Sorwe Of Troilus": Experimentation Of The Chivalric And Tragic Genres In Chaucer And Shakespeare, Rena Patel

Scripps Senior Theses

The tumulus tale of Troilus and his lover Cressida has left readers intrigued in renditions written by both Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare due to their subversive nature of the authors’ chosen generic forms. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde challenges the expectations and limitations of the narrative of the chivalric romance. Shakespeare took the story and turned Troilus and Cressida into one of his famous “problem plays” by challenging his audience’s expectations of the tragic genre. I endeavor to draw attention to the ways in which both Chaucer and Shakespeare use the conventions of the chivalric romance and tragedy to play …

Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …

The Struggle To Re-Establish Anglo Superiority In American Modernism And Its Collapse Into American Tragedy, Jeff Brelvi

Dissertations and Theses

A study of the impact Anglo race assertion had on American Modernism through the work of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot shaping the discourse on American cultural identity. Arthur Miller and his "Tragedy and the Common Man" put an end to Modernism's Anglo stronghold and brought about the next period of American literature, ushering it into the era of American tragedy.

Manfred, Don Juan, And The Romantic Tragedy Of The Subject, Trenton Robert Leinenbach

Theses and Dissertations

While the Romantic lyric has long been understood as an exploration of human subjectivity, the era's dramatic works have been viewed as more oriented toward objective or mimetic representation. As such, scholarship on Romantic subjectivity from Harold Bloom to Andrea Henderson has bypassed dramatic and quasi-dramatic explorations of subjectivity. These explorations, however, add to the conversation about subjectivity in powerful ways by addressing the paradoxes of mimetically representing subjectivity. These difficulties spring from a question that surrounds mimetically represented subjectivity: how can a supposedly objective medium portray experience that is by definition non-objective, purely interior, and therefore incommunicable? This paradox …

Something Rotten In The State Of New Jersey: The Tragedy Of The Sopranos, Georgia Grace Frances Graham

Senior Projects Fall 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

"A Great Man's Madness": An Inquiry Into Sanity And Gender In Jacobean Tragedy, Vittoria Mollo

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis delves deep into an analysis of madness in two seventeenth century tragic plays: William Shakespeare's Macbeth and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The first portion of the dissertation will provide historical background and context. The rest will be a critical literary analysis centered around the argument that both plays present an inextricable connection between loss of mental clarity and gender.

Burbage's Father's Ghost, James J. Marino

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613-1713, By Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, R. Mark Jackson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Intended For The Stage?: Samson Agonistes In Performance, Timothy Burbery

Timothy J. Burbery

The year 2000 marked the centenary of an important but overlooked milestone in Milton studies, namely the first staging of Samson Agonistes, by William Poel, in 1900. While many scholars may be aware of isolated productions of the tragedy, the extent and variety of its stage history is perhaps less well-known. The work was successful as a dramatic reading throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it had never been attempted on the boards until Poel’s landmark production. That event ushered in a range of performances throughout the twentieth century, and nearly every decade saw several dramatizations. At least fifteen …

Tragedy And Transcendence: Tracing Tragedy From Early Modernity To Present, William J. Giancola '12

College Honors Program

This thesis will examine six “tragedies” spanning the Renaissance and Modern epochs and attempt to trace the narrative of tragic consciousness as this consciousness expands to include new forms, symbols, and modes of expression. Additionally, this thesis will attempt to parse the kind of relationship tragedy has with transcendence and seek to understand – and ultimately judge – whether each of the texts examined herein is properly “tragic” as opposed to ironic, pessimistic, nihilistic, merely cynical, or merely existential.

Aeschylus’ Tragedy Of Law: Kinship, The Oresteia, And The Violence Of Democracy, Grace Hobbs

English

No abstract provided.

Gesamtkunstwerk And Other Trifles: Poems, Derk A. Olthof

Theses and Dissertations

In all their various categories, the arts serve as the dominant subject matter of Gesamtkunstwerk and Other Trifles. The title itself begins with a German word-meld—gesamt (total) + kunstwerk (work of art). Thus a primary aim of these poems is to bring as many elements of art together as possible and to use their various forms (self-portraits, nocturnes, odes, etc.) as metaphorical frameworks that inform abstractions such as regret ("How to Draw Regret"), psychological disorders ("Insomnia Nocturnes") and confusion in how one should feel about living realities as opposed to inanimate objects ("Dead Starling"). Most of the poems …

“Tragical History” And “Tragedy” As Inquisitive Vehicles: Examining The Implications Of Marlowe’S Two Faustus Texts, Joseph Sturcken

English

No abstract provided.

Uncommon Sense In Renaissance English Literature, Eric Byville

Dissertations

My project explores the distinctive union of Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan satire in Renaissance English drama, particularly the works of John Marston and William Shakespeare. Unlike Ben Jonson, who incorporated both Senecan tragedy and Elizabethan satire in his drama but did so in different plays (Catiline, Every Man Out), Marston and Shakespeare combined the two traditions in one and the same play, such as the former's Antonio's Revenge (1600) and The Malcontent (c. 1603) and the latter's Troilus and Cressida (1601) and Timon of Athens (c. 1606). They recognized and exploited a deep compatibility between the two traditions, a compatibility …

It’S Not A Matter Of Message But Of Messenger: Miltonic Principles In Thomas Hardy’S Jude The Obscure, Karley Adney

Scholarship and Professional Work of the Provost's Staff

Thomas Hardy once referred to his masterpiece Jude the Obscure as 'tragedy, told for its own sake as a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that was universal. Although the novel was roundly criticized upon its publication for dealing explicitly with issues like divorce and adultery, it was through these issues that the novel dealt with the universal, as Hardy would have put it.

Macbeth And The Meaning Of Tragedy, Joseph A. Bryant Jr.

The Kentucky Review

No abstract provided.

The Dialectic Of Tragedy In "Hamlet," "Macbeth," And "Othello", Andrew Kaufman

Honors Papers

The purpose of this essay will be to suggest a reading of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello which I don't believe has received sufficient attention. The interpretation I will present is not meant to be suggested as the only valid reading of the plays, but as a reading which should be considered along with many other valid readings, in attempts to gain insight into these three major tragedies, and to understand their points of similarity.

Arthur Miller's Concept Of Tragedy, Howard James Stark

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, Arthur Miller has been the subject of much critical debate. Numerous critics have stated that his plays are not true tragedies because they do not meet the requirements for tragic drama. Several other critics, however, attempting to some to Miller’s defense, have stated just the opposite. So far, the situation has not been resolved; and there appears to be little chance that it will, considering the manner in which both Miller’s defenders and sensors have been approaching the problem. First, they have been brandishing a term which does not carry the same meaning for each of them. …