Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "English"
Now showing items 1-20 of 29
-
"All May Na Man Have in Talle": The Parabiblical Imaginary in Medieval English Literature
(2016-09-16)This is a study of four fourteenth-century narrative poems written in a parabiblical mode. The poems—Cursor Mundi (c. 1300), Cleanness, Patience and Pearl (all c. 1380s)—are substantially and thematically concerned with ... -
Cognitive Boundaries: Perception and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(2015-05-16)Cognitive Boundaries: Perception and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Britain considers the relationship between form and ethics in nineteenth-century literature through investigating representations of cognitive restraint. ... -
Colony Writing: Creative Community in the Age of Revolt
(2016-05-18)This dissertation studies the impact of a form of literary patronage, domestic writers’ colonies, on U.S. literary production in first half of the twentieth century. I discuss Provincetown, Massachusetts; Taos and Santa ... -
Cosmopolitan Romance: The Adventure of Archaeology, the Politics of Genre, and the Origins of the Future in Walter Scott's Crusader Novels
(2015-08-28)Romanticism is the only literary-historical period defined by its privileged relation to a single genre: romance. This dissertation reorients our understanding of Romanticism’s posture toward the problem of origins, which ... -
The Entangled Cities: Earthly Communities and the Heavenly Jerusalem in Late Medieval England
(2016-05-17)This project examines medieval adaptations of the image of the New Jerusalem, an image of heaven drawn from the biblical book of Revelation. The book of Revelation was composed at a period of social and spiritual crisis ... -
The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American Poetry
(2015-11-09)This dissertation explores the afterlife of the Western epic tradition in the poetry of the United States of America after World War Two and in the wake of high modernism. The ancient, Classical conception of epic, as ... -
Getting Lost: Forms of Animation in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel
(2018-05-11)In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels, moments of getting socially, morally, or geographically lost often overlap with those at which characters are overtaken (or animated) by emotions, movements, and thoughts ... -
Hap: Uncertainty and the English Novel
(2015-05-16)This dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists envisioned thinking, judging, and acting in conditions of imperfect knowledge. I place novels against historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, psychology, ... -
The Imaginary Encyclopedia: The Novel and the Reference Work in the Age of Reason
(2016-05-17)The Imaginary Encyclopedia explores the relationship between aesthetics and epistemology in the eighteenth century by positing a formal analogy between the early novel and the reference work (e.g., Johnson’s Dictionary, ... -
Lyric as Comedy
(2016-05-18)Although the twentieth-century lyric poem might seem to intensify a genre of sentiment into a genre of meditative or tumultuous solipsism, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Terrance Hayes ... -
Milton and Music
(2015-05-04)The young John Milton grew up in a musical household, and there is biographical evidence that his youthful passion for music only deepened over the years. My dissertation is not, however, concerned with biography. Instead, ... -
The Miniature and Victorian Literature
(2015-09-24)The Victorian period is famously characterized by its massiveness, with the vast extent of the British Empire, the enormous size of the nineteenth-century city and the massive scale of the three-volume novel. Yet the ... -
“My Life Is Only One Life”: Turning to Other People in American Lyric Poetry After New Criticism
(2017-05-09)Lyric poetry has the reputation of being solitary, hermetic, and focused exclusively on the experiences of the poet or first-person speaker. This reputation can make lyric poems seem self-involved and even solipsistic – ... -
Narrative and Its Non-Events: Counterfactual Plotting in the Victorian Novel
(2016-04-22)This dissertation examines the role of several types of counterfactual plots in both defining and challenging the borders of nineteenth-century realist fiction. Using texts by Dickens, James, Gaskell and Hardy, I argue for ... -
Poetry, Desire, and Devotional Performance From Shakespeare to Milton, 1609-1667
(2015-09-22)Poetry, Desire, and Devotional Performance from Shakespeare to Milton, 1609-1667 documents and analyzes the ways post-Reformation devotional and worship practices inflected early modern English poetic conceptions of erotic ... -
Practical Georgics: Managing the Land in Medieval Britain
(2015-09-08)This dissertation shows how the management of the land is both a material precondition for and an obsession of medieval British reading and writing. In medieval Britain, the people who read and wrote were the people with ... -
The Practice of Form: Arts of Life in Victorian Literature
(2016-09-13)The Practice of Form: Arts of Life in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian poets, prose stylists, and fin-de-siècle aesthetes used literary form as a means of self-making. Connecting the resurgent interest in formal ... -
The Premodern Literary: Matter and Form in English Poetry 1400-1547
(2016-05-17)In poetry—so the story often goes—form is more important than content. After all, poets and critics since the early modern period have said so. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that content and form should be “organic” ... -
Protestant Institutionalism: Religion, Literature, and Society After the State Church
(2016-02-29)Even as the Church of England lost ground to political dissent and New England gradually disestablished its state churches early in the nineteenth century, writers on both sides of the debates about church establishments ... -
Representations of Counsel in Selected Works of Sir Philip Sidney
(2015-05-16)This dissertation addresses the historical, political, and literary-rhetorical framing of counsel in selected works of Sir Philip Sidney: his Letter to Queen Elizabeth (1579), The Old Arcadia (1580), the first two books ...