While eschewing a strict definition on the didacticism of Blake's imaginative vision, the following four analyses could be said to revolve around three general themes. These are: (1) that Songs of Innocence engage in a dialectic, much of their appeal deriving from the tension created between the co-existence of so-called qualities of "innocence" and "experience"; (2) that each one is an individual attempt to reconcile these, as well as other, oppositions; and (3) that such a reconciliation is hierarchical, usually concluding on a transcendent or visionary plane. The first three center on the text and metrical phenomena. In "The Ecchoing Green" they are explicated synonymously, whereas in "The Shepherd," "The Little Black Boy," and "Laughing Song," the textual approach precedes an appropriate metrical amplification. The final discussion of "The Blossom" marks a technical shift into sound color, though the structure of the approach continues the same alternating pattern demonstrated on the three analyses before it.

No description available.

No description available.

Note:

No description available.

This thesis treats Daniel Read's music analytically to establish style characteristics. Read's fuging tunes are examined for metric placement and structural occurrence of dissonance, and dissonance as text painting. Read's comments on dissonance are extracted from his tunebook introductions. A historical chapter includes the English origins of the fuging tune and its American heyday. The creative life of Daniel Read is discussed. This thesis contributes to knowledge of Read's role in the development of the New England Psalmody idiom. Specifically, this work illustrates the importance of understanding and analyzing Read's use of dissonance as a style determinant, showing that Read's dissonance treatment is an immediate and central characteristic of his compositional practice.

The purpose of this study is to examine the parallels between the tenets of Carl Jung's psychology and the mythopoeic structure of Blake's poem, The Four Zoas. The investigation is divided into three chapters. The first deals with the major conceptual parallels between the intellectual systems of the two men. The second is a detailed analysis of the poem, and the third concludes the study by discussing the originality of Blake's thought. Blake anticipated much of Jung's psychology. The parallels between the two are so strong that each man seems to corroborate and validate the opinions and insights of the other. The extent to which he foreshadows Jung reveals Blake to be one of the most original thinkers of any period of time.

This dissertation examines the history of the relationship between light/color as an artistic medium and music. Looking at four artist-inventors from the eighteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries, I consider how new arts of light and color arose from music, relied on music, and also distanced themselves from it. Drawing chiefly on published and unpublished primary sources, this dissertation compares artists’ and inventors’ conceptions of what this new art should be as it was continuously reimagined and reconstituted in their works, discourses, and technologies. I suggest a running tension throughout this history between the aspiration for a new and even autonomous art and its reliance on the music. In Chapter 1, I investigate the work of the eighteenth-century French Jesuit monk Louis Bertrand Castel, who in 1725 proposed the first ever instrument for color music, his clavecin oculaire or ocular harpsichord. I note conflicting tendencies in his thought as he suggested two different avenues for color music: as a form of multimedia, and as a separate, silent medium capable of giving pleasure on its own. The next chapter turns to the color organ and color music of the late nineteenth-century inventor and artist Alexander Wallace Rimington. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of color, reception of Rimington’s performances, and the inventor’s own writings, I locate Rimington’s organ at the intersection of a continuing tradition of analogizing music and color and late nineteenth-century attempts to theorize color independently and systematically. I then demonstrate how Rimington’s desire to use color music as means of improving color perception can be understood as part of a larger debates about sensing color and color education around the turn of the twentieth century. Chapters 3 considers Mary Hallock Greenewalt’s instrument, the sarabet, and her art form, nourathar¸ while the final chapter looks at Thomas Wilfred’s (usually silent) light art, lumia. I suggest that Greenewalt and Wilfred’s relationship to music is a source of tension in their work, as they attempted to extricate and purify light art into an autonomous art form but display various forms of musical influence.

No description available.

The origin of the story of Narcissus is unknown, and the circumstances of his death are uncertain, but the most popular version of the tale as told by Ovid has been read, translated, explained, moralized and disputed by innumerable writers and alluded to by many more. Renaissance writers in England, such as Golding, Edwards and Sandys, were interested in first introducing the myth into their own language and then, in explaining its meanings, lessons and moralizations. Later poets paraphrased their translations, often adding their own point of view or else using only the skeleton structure of the myth for their own poetic purposes. The simple story of a youth who died by a pool after falling hopelessly in love with his own reflection acquired a significance and immortality worthy of a Greek god. The Eighteenth Century writers, who were less interested in the gods than their predecessors had been, almost completely ignored Narcissus in their poetry, but later poets such as Blake, Shelley and Keats revived him once again and transformed the faded youth into a Romantic. In The Book of Thel Blake explores the consequences of self-love, and anticipates the fuller development of this theme in The Four Zoas. He uses the archetypal pattern of the Narcissus myth for portraying the fading Thel, who refuses to enter the state of Generation because she is afraid of the voice of experience that she meets in her own grave when she descends into the underworld. Her sterile separation from her Spectre is similar to the unconsummated relationship between Narcissus and Echo. Thel fleeing from her grave escapes back to non-existence, fading by the river like Narcissus and Echo. An understanding of the function of the Narcissus story in Shelley's poem, Alastor, is indispensable to an interpretation of this controversial poem. Shelley's allusions to the myth are faithful to the Ovidian version of Narcissus as a youth who sighs away his life after seeing his own shadow in a well. Shelley associates the Poet's quest with the Narcissus myth by generally paralleling the narrative structure of Ovid's story, and by employing much of its imagery. Chapter II argues that Shelley's poem is both unified and consistent when it is interpreted in terms of the Narcissus theme. Keats primarily uses the popular myth of Endymion and Cynthia in his poem, Endymion, but also includes other myths in the manner of the Renaissance epyllion. The most significant addition to the main myth is the story of Narcissus as a comment on the nature of Endymion's quest. Keats pictures the hero at the well, viewing the reflection of the vision, in order to establish the specific parallel to Ovid's story. Endymion, however, unlike Narcissus or the Poet in Alastor, recognizes his illusion and proceeds towards accepting his responsibility to his kingdom and to the Echo figures in the poem. The analysis concludes with a comparison of the specific handling of the Narcissus myth in the three poems in terms of the various versions of the myth, the treatment of the metamorphosis of Narcissus Into a flower, and the development of the theme of self-love. The thesis establishes the significance of the Narcissus myth in The Book of Thel, Alastor and Endymion, and evaluates Blake's, Shelley's and Keats's contribution to the attempts of the Renaissance writers to introduce the Ovidian story into English literature. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate