This thesis presents a reading of Chaucer's dream visions in their philosophical, religious and secular contexts. It traces the poet's discussion of individual subjectivity, vis-a-vis the conventions of courtliness, in the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Legend of Good Women. Unlike the 'playful', and elliptical poet of many recent studies, this thesis presents a Chaucer who was fully engaged with the important moral and philosophical issues of his age. By drawing upon Aristotelian psychology, derived from his reading of Boethius, Dante and the poets of the French court, Chaucer was able to articulate precisely which aspects of the courtly identity are determined by language and empirical experience, and which parts are transcendent of this determinism. Engagement with the dream visions thus enabled the reader to recognise those aspects of courtliness which assist his or her ethically informed autonomy, and those which compromise it. A detailed engagement with the literature, language, and behaviour of the court then takes place in the dream visions, which are a genuine exploration of individual subjectivity yet still remain socially aware. The motivation for this exploration is shown to be a product of both the author's Christian beliefs and his identity as a courtly poet. Religious sensibility and the demands of courtly society are shown not to be mutually exclusive but rather the source of urgent and productive dialogue.

Through a detailed analysis of two outstanding discourses on love: Plato's eros and Lacan's desire, this thesis studies the narratives of desire in Shakespeare's poetry. My reading of Shakespeare's poetry is an interpretation of three major themes of procreation, sublimation, and idealisation that not only reflect the discourse of desire but also establish its formulation. In each chapter a tradition of the theme has been respectively incorporated to demonstrate its context. Part I (Chapters One to Three) reveals Plato's concept of eros in terms of logocentricism and its egocentric nature. Part II (Chapters Four to Seven) concentrates on the cause, nature and object of desire from Lacan's perspective. In Part III, Chapter Eight focuses on the metaphor of procreation as an egocentric desire that creates the irrevocable mark of loss. Through the act of regeneration, the lower not only establishes the beloved as an other but also denies any sense of unity. In Chapter Nine, the paradoxical nature of sublimation demonstrates a mode of auto-eroticism that constitutes desire as a metonymy of want-to-be. By elevating the beloved, the lover maintains his transcendence. Finally, Chapter Ten explores the unrepresentability of beauty and the inexpressibility of desire in the movement of idealisation. The dematerialisation of the beloved presents an iconic image of her and the language of desire, like the language of hieroglyphics, becomes indecipherable. Accordingly, the image of death in Shakespeare's poetry characterises the impossibility of desire. In a concluding chapter, I demonstrate how Shakespeare's lover in articulation of his desire, faces a dilemma.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis explores the alternative mode of early medieval history-writing manifested in Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian vernacular poetic texts like Beowulf and the Waltharius. While such sources have long been recognized to contain historical elements, they are usually considered the preserve of literary or linguistic study, since they are primarily labelled as ‘legendary’ or ‘fictional’ due to their many mythical or fantastic elements. This thesis approaches them as historical narratives from the perspective of the textual communities involved in their making and reception, not in order to unpick the pieces of ‘true history’ from ‘fiction’, but rather seeking to reconstruct the vernacular theory of history that informs these texts. In doing this, the present investigation critiques the theoretical underpinnings of previous scholarly approaches to these texts that are based on modern categories (such as the dichotomy history/fiction or on the tandem Germanic-heroic)which misrepresent the attitudes of the creators and audiences of vernacular ‘heroic’ narratives. This thesis employs a series of new approaches drawing on cognitive linguistics, rhizomatic and diffraction theory, leading to a recategorization of these texts as ‘poetic history’, an alternative mode of constructing narratives about the past that is based on different source materials, works according to a different poetics, and fulfils different sociocultural functions from those of early medieval historiography written by ‘proper’ historians such as Bede or chroniclers. Hence, the individual chapters will focus on these issues by exploring the poetics, narrative content, historical evolution, and socio-cultural functions of poetic history.

Relying on a constructivist framework of analysis drawn from the disciplines of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and History, this thesis examines the contribution of Victorian poetry and poetic theory to the modern construction of ‘mysticism’ as an aesthetic and ineffable category. My analysis is guided by the Foucaultian notion that any definition of a given concept reflects issues of authority, which I use to propose that, in the increasingly secularized milieu of nineteenth-century culture, many Victorian intellectuals sought to assert the ineffability and aesthetic character of mysticism as part of a larger nineteenth-century search for an authoritative place for poetry. With a special focus on the writings of Thomas Carlyle and James Thomson (B. V.), the problematization of mysticism I offer here spans the period between the mid-1820s and 1880s, a relatively broad context that allows me to draw connections among various poets, critics and their works, and weave these into a readable narrative where mysticism figures as a key player in the collective aesthetic consciousness of an age. Chapter I of this thesis establishes the conceptual and theoretical parameters of the debate informing the constructivist method I employ, with the aim of offering a critique of previous literary scholarship on Victorian poetry that adopts mysticism as a primary analytic category. I argue that such scholarship largely bases its analysis on essentialist definitions, and often ends up being ideologically exclusionary. Chapter II provides a detailed look at the conceptual overlap between mysticism and poetry in both Modernist and Victorian discourse for the purpose of establishing that modern mysticism is fundamentally a poetic and aesthetic construct, one that was shaped by the nineteenth-century discourse on poetry and art. Situating Carlyle’s discourse on mysticism within that of other contemporary figures, Chapter III examines his leading role in the nineteenth-century conceptual transformation of ‘mysticism’ from a term that was pejoratively used to signify ‘unintelligibility’ to one that was used to denote the transcendental legitimacy of poetry. Chapter IV traces Thomson’s career-long engagement with mysticism along his religious and intellectual development from a theist to a self-proclaimed atheist, arguing that it reflects on a larger scale the history of mysticism’s development in the second half of the Victorian age: how its Romantic appropriation in the mid-nineteenth century was especially freighted with religious meanings, and how this would gradually change at the turn of the century, where it would become more open to secular and naturalistic interpretations.