This thesis examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and literary influences have changed the way that Chaucer portrayed Aeneas in both The Legend of Good Women and The House of Fame. The primary texts looked at in comparison are Ovid's Heroides, Virgil's Aeneid, and the historical works of Dares and Dictys. This study concludes that this complex network of forces caused Chaucer to present Aeneas as an overall negative figure in his poetry.

This thesis examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and literary influences have changed the way that Chaucer portrayed Aeneas in the both The Legend of Good Women and The House of Fame. The primary texts looked at in comparison are Ovid's Heroides, Virgil's Aeneid, and the historical works of Dares and Dictys. This study concludes that this complex network of forces caused Chaucer to present Aeneas as an overall negative figure in his poetry.

ABSTRACT Although Cotton Mather, as the official chronicler of the 1692 Salem witch trials, is infamously associated with those events, and excerpts from his apologia on Salem, Wonders of the Invisible World, are widely anthologized today, no annotated critical edition of the entire work has appeared in print since the nineteenth century. This present edition of Wonders seeks to remedy this lacuna in modern scholarship. In Wonders, Mather applies both his views on witchcraft and on millennialism to events at Salem. This edition to Mather's Wonders presents this seventeenth-century text beside an integrated theory of the initial causes of the Salem witch panic. The juxtaposition of the probable natural causes of Salem's bewitchment with Mather's implausible explanations exposes the disingenuousness of his writing about Salem. My theory of what happened at Salem includes the probability that a group of conspirators led by the Rev. Samuel Parris deliberately orchestrated the "witchcraft" and that a plant, the thorn apple, used in Algonquian initiation rites, caused the initial symptoms of bewitchment (39-189). Furthermore, key spectral evidence used at the Salem witch trials and recorded by Mather in Wonders appears to have been generated by intense nightmares, commonly thought at the time to be witch visitations, resulting from what is today termed sleep paralysis (215-310). This dissertation provides a detailed look at some of the testimony given in the Salem court records and in Wonders of the Invisible World as it relates to the interpretation in folklore of the phenomenology of nightmares associated with sleep paralysis. The third chapter of this dissertation focuses extensively on Mather's text as a disingenuous response to the Salem witch trials (320-456). The final section of chapter three posits a "Scythian" or Eurasian connection between Swedish and Salem witchcraft. Similarities in shamanic practices among respective indigenous populations of Lapland, Eurasia, Asia, and New England, caused the devil's involvement in both the visible and invisible worlds to appear more than theoretical to writers like Jose Acosta, Johannes Scheffer, Nicholas Fuller, Joseph Mede, Anthony Horneck, and Cotton Mather, inducing Mather to include a lengthy abstract of the Swedish account in Wonders (404-449).

This thesis examines the competing frameworks in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—the fictional Foreword written by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and the manuscript written by Humbert Humbert—in order to understand to what extent the construction manipulates the rhetorical appeal. While previous scholarship isolates the two narrators or focuses on their unreliability, my examination concentrates on the interplay of the frameworks and how their conflicting objectives can be problematic for readers. By drawing upon various theories by Michel Foucault from Power/Knowledge and Louis Althusser’s “On Ideology,” I look into how John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. and Humbert Humbert use authoritative voices to directly address readers with a specific duty, as “parents, social workers, educators” and “ladies of the gentleman,” and I question to what extent this can force readers to unwillingly forfeit their authority in order to adopt an alternative disciplinary gaze in pursuit of a premeditated idea of truth and justice. Using the concept of truth and justice, I explore how psychological discourse and the court are made up of ideologies that operate like the Panopticon, and I question where readers fit despite the strong influence exerted on to them by this structure.

Alison, the protagonist, is a 21-year-old cello student from Northwest Ohio who studies at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Although she comes from a conservative Methodist upbringing, Alison has turned away from her beliefs and entered into a polyamorous relationship with Luke, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, and his wife Cheryl. Through this relationship, Alison has been able to explore her nascent bisexuality and enjoy the affection she has been denied by her reticent mother and absent father. While the members of the triad hold lofty principles about openness and trust, the practice of that relationship—and its ever-shifting unwritten rules—fail to live up to their ideals.

This dissertation explores the influence of Reformation representational anxiety on early seventeenth-century poetic depictions of Christ. I study the poetic shift from physical to metaphorical portrayals of Christ that occurred after the English Reformation infused religious symbols and visual images with transgressive power. Contextualizing the juncture between visual and verbal representation, I examine the poetry alongside historical artifacts including paternosters, a painted glass window, an emblem, sermons, and the account of a state trial in order to trace signs of sensory “loss” in the verse of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. The introduction provides a historical and poetic overview of sixteenth-century influences on religious verse. The first chapter contrasts Donne’s sermons—which vividly describe Christ—with his poems, in which Christ’s face is often obscured or avoided. In the chapter on George Herbert's The Temple, I show how Herbert’s initial, physical portraits of Christ increasingly give way to metaphorical images as the book progresses, paralleling the Reformation’s internalization of images. The third chapter shows that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum makes use of pastoral conventions to fashion Christ as a shepherd-spouse, the divine object of desire. In the final chapter I argue that three poems from John Milton’s 1645 volume can be read as containing signs of Milton’s emerging Arianism. Depictions of Christ in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Lanyer, and Milton reveal the period’s contestation over images; the sensory strain of these metaphorical representations results in memorable, vivid verse.

This dissertation will explore the way Philip treats puppets and masks as pseudo-sacred objects in order to maintain control in Angela Carter’s work The Magic Toyshop. To show the implications of the pseudo-sacred, I will use Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard that examines the way primitive cultures are able to maintain order through particular religious beliefs and collective violence against a scapegoat. My critical reading of the text will look closely at how Philip uses the pseudo-sacred to build up the community. When the pseudo-sacred is finally called into question the community is threatened. Although Philip attempts to deflect blame onto the scapegoat Melanie, he fails as there is no social buy-in, leading to the destruction of the community. While the house is burned down destroying the puppets and masks, presumably along with Philip, the pseudo-sacred still has the chance of being perpetuated through Finn’s own obsession with power and control.

Closure is one of the most important putative goals for highly structured Renaissance verse. Elements of structure—for example, sophisticated prosody or the embedding of a poem within a web of intertextual relationships—determine how poets work toward closure. This project explores how verse forms and genre manifest poets’ attempts to create resolution, and, significantly, how often the challenges of the process instead become the object of focus. Developing a New Formalist approach that focuses on how literary forms are inherently responsive (both to the social conventions that inform various genres and to the expressive goals of individual authors), I examine texts in four important Renaissance poetic genres: epyllion (William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis [1593]), satire (Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiae [1598, 1599]), religious lyric (George Herbert’s The Temple [1633]), and pastoral elegy (John Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis [1639] and Lycidas [1637, 1645]). These works illuminate some of the most significant strategies of authors who often meditate on the appeal of definitive, resolved conclusions and also on the complex ways their works become conditioned by the hope and struggle for resolution.

Current scholarship on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor mostly focuses on topics surrounding Sir John Falstaff’s presence, mythical allusions, and the questionable date of publication. Although their actions are the driving force of the play, the woman frontrunners, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, receive little scholarship attention. Anne Page, daughter of Mistress Page and wife of Fenton, also dictates the course of the play by taking control of her betrothal. Yet she remains underappreciated in scholarship. This thesis highlights important characteristics of all three wives of Windsor in addition to justifying Anne Page’s role as a wife of Windsor. Through close readings of the text and analyses of scholarship immediately relevant to these wives and common attributes of women in Renaissance England and Shakespeare plays, I argue these strong, multifaceted women refute stereotypical female roles and undermine patriarchal authority aligning themselves with other idolized outspoken woman characters in Shakespeare plays.

Existing scholarship on Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse primarily focuses on the title character and her unconventional gender presentation. This highlighting of Moll deemphasizes the other intriguing aspects of the play, including its thematic concerns involving issues of prejudice, reputation, gender, class, marriage, and sexuality. This thesis takes the spotlight off of Moll and shines it instead on a selection of other significant characters—including Sir Alexander Wengrave, Sebastian Wengrave, Mary Fitzallard, and a grouping of minor characters who have earned this play its designation as a city comedy: Laxton, Goshawk, the Openworks, and the Gallipots.