Zugl.: Jena, Univ., Diss., 2006

Zugl.: Frankfurt am Main, Univ., Diss., 2007.

Byron’s women characters have typically been seen as, in Hazlitt’s early observation, ‘yielding slaves’. My study re-examines that assumption, finding instead, across Byron’s career, an abiding concern with the active individuality of women, and, more especially, with the creation of a specifically female form of heroism. Recent critical attention has discussed women in Byron’s poetry in general, notably Nigel Leask (British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire, 2004) and Susan Wolfson (Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism, 2006), but Byronic female heroism has gone unstudied. Caroline Franklin’s sociologically couched work (Byron’s Heroines, 1992) is one of the few to tackle the heroine, but she understands the term merely as ‘female protagonist’: my interest, by contrast, is in the development of a specific, new kind of gendered heroism. Byron’s representation of women takes shape within a number of discrete but inter-related discourses. The thesis examines the manner in which Byron engaged with previous literary and historical representations of proscribed gender roles. I remain alert to the literary heritage of Byron’s representation of female heroism, which extends beyond his own socio-historical context. The thesis is organised within the three major influences: (i) contemporary writings on gender and women, and a consideration of how Byron has ‘resisted’ availability for feminist critique, this being a result of an insufficiently nuanced approach to his poetry; (ii) eighteenth-century writings on the Orient and Oceania, which examines the concepts of Orient and Other as central to the destabilization of fixed perimeters of gender spheres in Byron’s Turkish Tales; (iii) epic, which establishes Byron’s relationship with his literary predecessors as one of reformation and resistance before demonstrating how Byron’s particular form of heroism and epic was one way that he made room for the heroic female. The thesis concludes with a brief coda, which extends the parameters of the governing concerns of the thesis, gender and heroism, arguing that Don Juan becomes a formal realization of the gendered heroics of Byron’s poetic consciousness.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation examines Byron's Don Juan and his attitude towards profits from the copyright money for publishing his poems. Recent studies on Don Juan and Byron have paid great attention to the poem especially in terms of the author's status as an unprecedented noble literary celebrity. Thus the hermeneutics of the poem has very often had a tendency to bind itself within the biographical understanding of the poet's socio-political practices. It is true that these studies are meaningful in that they highlighted and reconsidered the significance of the author's unique life so as to illustrate biographical and historical contexts of this Romantic text. Admitting the significance of the biographical approach, however, the current dissertation also argues that an interpretation of a literary work should consider a number of outside influences that affect the meaning of a text, which is in and of itself a creation of historical, political, economic, and material aspects of a specific time and place, not merely of an individual author. After the theoretical background suggested in Chapter I, Chapter II emphasizes the history of the publication of the first two cantos and investigates John Murray's publishing practices. Chapter III addresses some of the external influences on the reading of Don Juan to show that non-political content of the early five cantos came to be treated as politically radical by the voluntary and involuntary association of Byron and his work with radical publishers such as Leigh Hunt and William Hone. Chapter IV is a study of the new cantos of Don Juan (from the sixth canto). Focusing on Byron's political stance which gradually developed from his early liberalism into a more radical activism, this chapter explores Percy Shelley's influence on Byron's political ideas, the new cantos of Don Juan, and Byron's use of radical satire to instigate the fight against tyranny. Chapter V investigates Byron's attitude towards the profits he earned from the copyright of his poems to argue that Byron?s attitude towards his brain-money gradually changed from an ambiguous position to a strong insistence on obtaining what he perceived to be fair payments for his poems.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Denne mastergraden er en intertekstuell og fortelleteknisk analyse av J. M. Coetzees Disgrace. Romanen forholder seg nært til et Sør-Afrika kort tid etter oppløsningen av apartheid. Den har blitt lest realistisk, og har blitt kraftig kritisert for å fremstille en pågående rasisme i Sør-Afrika. Denne avhandlingen leser romanen som en postmoderne tekst og bruker Gerrard Genette sine teorier om transtekstualitet for å vise hvor omfattende leken med litteratur er i Disgrace.

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1994. / Title from title page screen, viewed April 4, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Lawrence W. McBride (chair), M. Paul Holsinger, Mark A. Plummer, Jo Ann Rayfield, Joseph A. Braun, Jr. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 155-166) and abstract. Also available in print.