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Seeking Holiness: The Contribution Of Nine Vernacular Narrative Texts From The Twelfth To The Fourteenth Centuries, Stephanie Grace Petinos
Seeking Holiness: The Contribution Of Nine Vernacular Narrative Texts From The Twelfth To The Fourteenth Centuries, Stephanie Grace Petinos
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Spirituality has been increasingly studied to determine the laity’s role within Church history in the Middle Ages. However, secular literature is often overlooked as a source of understanding lay spirituality, even though it is a crucial aspect of cultural and social history. I fill this gap by analyzing nine important vernacular texts to uncover several distinctive definitions of holiness, all of which blend the religious and the secular. Close reading of these texts reveals various paths to holiness, which undermine the Church’s attempts at sole control over spirituality. This study demonstrates that secular authors were concerned with exploring spiritual matters; …
Jules Verne Constructs America: From Utopia To Dystopia, Dana L. Radu
Jules Verne Constructs America: From Utopia To Dystopia, Dana L. Radu
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In my dissertation, I examine visions of the United States in Jules Verne’s (1828-1905) Voyages extraordinaires (1863-1905). Of the sixty-four novels that make up that series, twenty-three, over one-third, feature American characters or take place on American soil. I demonstrate that in his early novels (1863-1886), he presents the United States in an optimistic and utopian light, while in his later novels (1887-1905), his depictions of the United States take on a pessimistic and dystopian aspect. In also showing that Verne had been influenced by utopian socialists Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), I provide …
How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul
How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …
The French Revolution In The French-Algerian War (1954-1962): Historical Analogy And The Limits Of French Historical Reason, Timothy Scott Johnson
The French Revolution In The French-Algerian War (1954-1962): Historical Analogy And The Limits Of French Historical Reason, Timothy Scott Johnson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the use of the French Revolution as an explanatory device for discussing the French-Algerian War (1954-1962). Anticolonial intellectuals in France invoked the French Revolution to explain their reasons for supporting colonial reform as well as their solidarity with Algerian nationalist aims. Through an examination of intellectuals’ public interventions alongside French and Algerian historical narratives, I examine the ways in which historical alignment signaled political and cultural distance between France and Algeria. Making an independent Algeria analogous to eighteenth-century revolutionary France lent political and conceptual legitimacy to Algerian claims to an independent national identity while also reinforcing the …