The character of the Fool in William Shakespeare's King Lear uses hitherto unexamined gustatory imagery as a linguistic device to achieve the literary fool's function of imparting wisdom that masquerades as nonsense. While previous critics have analyzed the linguistic devices of puns, riddles, and rhymes used by medieval and Renaissance literary fools, this thesis argues not only that the Fool's gustatory imagery constitutes the dominant motif in the play, but also employs food theory to demonstrate how these image patterns provide political commentary on the dramatic action. The Fool's pattern of gustatory imagery is employed as well by characters who can be seen as variations on the wise fool. Through these characters, Shakespeare establishes a food chain motif that classifies some characters as all-consumptive, even cannibalistic, and others as their starving prey. The pattern of food imagery offers a range of perspectives, from highly critical to idealistic, on the play's meaning and political relationships. / by Sara Rafferty Sparer. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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Winner of the 2003 Outstanding Thesis prize. / Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; / Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: The Challenge: Today a daunting quantity of scholarship relating to Hamlet exists. While databases and electronic catalogues aid research, these directories present a virtual wall of minimal bibliographic data. Sorting through lists still takes eons. Meanwhile, new publications are constantly added to the academic stacks that ever threaten to tumble over. The Solution: A web site that groups together scholarly publications using similar approaches and treating similar subjects will translate the overwhelming into the maneuverable. The online medium will provide accessibility to everyone--student, research assistant, instructor, scholar--and will guarantee the opportunity to update this resource on a regular basis. Scope: Listings will span materials published between 1991and 2001. The bibliography will exclude notes, reviews, abstracts, and treatments of theatre and film performances as well as certain forums (e.g., newsletters, bulletins, electronic journals). / ABSTRACT: Scholarship focusing on the Folio/Quartos debate seems relevant but requires specific and technical specialization and will thus be omitted. Pedagogical studies and comparisons of Hamlet to other literary works will also be excluded. Research: IAC Expanded Academic Index, 1982-1995, IAC Expanded Academic Index, 1996-, and MLA Bibliography databases, as well as Dr. Sara Deats?private bibliography on Hamlet, will be combed for applicable scholarship. Organization: The bibliography will categorize publications by theoretical approach (e.g., feminism, new historicism) and subject focus (e.g., characters, themes). It will arrange individual works alphabetically by author within each subsection, using the MLA format. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. Desmet and Williams, 2009), both of which base their analyses of the Shakespeare-Gothic intersection on the premise that Shakespearean quotations, characters and events are valuable objects in their own right which mediate on behalf of the 'present' concerns of the agents of textual appropriation. In light of this scholarship, this thesis argues the case for the presence of 'Gothic Shakespeare' in Gothic writing during the latter half of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, it acknowledges the conceptual gap whereby literary borrowings were often denounced as acts of plagiarism. Despite this conceptual problem, it is possible to trace distinct 'Gothic' Shakespeares that dismantle the concept of Shakespeare as a singular ineffable genius by virtue of a textual practice that challenges the concept of the 'genius' Shakespeare as the figurehead of genuine emotion and textual authenticity. This thesis begins by acknowledging the eighteenth-century provenance of Shakespeare's 'Genius', thereby distinguishing between the malevolent barbarian Gothic of Shakespeare's own time and the eighteenth-century Gothic Shakespeares discussed under the term 'appropriation'. It proceeds to examine the Shakespeares of canonical Gothic writers (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) as well as their lesser-known contemporaries (T.J. Horsley Curties and W.H. Ireland). For instance, Walpole conscripts Hamlet in order to mediate his experience of living in England after the death of his father, the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The thesis then argues for the centrality of Shakespeare in the Gothic romance's undercutting of the emergent discourses of emotion (or 'passion'), as represented by the fictions of Radcliffe and Lewis, before moving on to consider Curties's attempted recuperation - in Ethelwina; or, the House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) - of authentic passion, which is mediated through the authenticity apparatus of Edmond Malone's 1790 editions of Shakespeare's plays. It concludes with W.H. Ireland's dismantling of Malone's ceoncept of the 'authentic' Shakespeare through the contemporary transgressions of literary forgery and the evocation of an illicit Shakespeare in his first Gothic romance, The Abbess, also published in 1799.

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At first glance, the long tradition of Quebecois adaptations of Shakespeare might seem paradoxical, since Quebec is a francophone nation seeking political independence and has little direct connection to the British literary canon. However, it is precisely this cultural distance that allows Quebecois playwrights to play irreverently with Shakespeare and use his texts to explore issues of nation and gender which are closely connected to each other. Soon after the Quiet Revolution, adaptations such as Robert Gurik's Hamlet, prince du Quebec and Jean-Claude Germain's Rodeo et Juliette raised the question "To be or not to be free" in order to interrogate how Quebec could take action to achieve independence. In Macbeth and La tempete, Michel Garneau "tradapts" Shakespeare and situates his texts in the context of the Conquest. Jean-Pierre Ronfard's Lear and Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux carnivalize the nation and permit women to rise to power. Adaptations since 1990 reveal awareness of the need for cultural and gender diversity so that women, queers, and immigrants may contribute more to the nation's development. Since Quebec is simultaneously colonial, neo-colonial, and postcolonial, Quebecois playwrights negotiate differently than English Canadians the fine line between the enrichment of their local culture and its possible contamination, assimilation, or effacement by Shakespeare's overwhelming influence, which thus allows them to appropriate his texts in service of gender issues and the decolonization of the Quebec nation.

To date, the Latin American essay remains little studied, certainly compared to other literary genres such as the novel, poetry and theater. This thesis examines prevailing theorists' conceptions of the essay and its historical development in Latin America. Employing the notions of cultural identity and difference, which have long been central to Latin American critical thought, this study distances the development of the essay in Latin America from Spanish colonial writings of the sixteenth century. In its place, this study proposes an innovative classification scheme that incorporates cultural codes as its main criteria in order to provide a more equitable treatment of essays from areas that have traditionally been marginalized in standard chronologically based classification schemes. Some of the paradigms used in this study to defend the integrity and specificity of the Latin American essay and culture are Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's affirmation of the values of the continent's indigenous pre-columbian heritage, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's discursive reinvention of South America, and Jose Marti's notion of hibridez—a cultural and racial complex mixture rooted in the region's history—as an affirmation of a continental Latin American cultural identity. This thesis demonstrates that since Latin American essays diverge thematically from colonialist discourse, studies of the origins of the Latin American essay do not have to perpetuate the colonialist legacy.