What I shall do in this paper is apply Frye’s concept of romance to Hard Times, i.e., Frye's defining romance as a device for using archetypes. The novel, as Frye sees it, is a vehicle whereby “realism” or life-like representation is applied. Hard Times contains “stylized figures” which thematically and formalistically support the dehumanization concept Dickens is portraying. Thus Dickens turned, as it were, toward a potentially revolutionary form within which to accomodate what is in many ways his most original piece of writing.

The following psychological interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest is unique to articles on the same subject which have appeared in literary journals because it applies a purely Jungian reading to the characters in the play. Here each character is shown to represent one of the archetypes which Jung described in his book Archetypes ~ the Collective Unconscious. In giving the play a psychological interpretation, the action must be seen to occur inside Prospera's own unconscious mind. He is experiencing a psychic transformation or what Jung called the individuation process, where a person becomes "a separate, indivisible unity or whole" and where the conscious and unconscious are united.

(anglicky) The main question of this thesis is whether the Christian church used stories containing monster beings with the aim of converting the Anglo-Saxon society to the new faith. This question is looked at through interpretative and content analysis of several Old English texts from the Nowell Codex. These are: the heroic-elegiac poem Béowulf, the travelogue The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the hagiographic text The Passion of St Christopher and the bestiary Liber Monstrorum, which is the only afore mentioned text not included in the Nowell Codex. The first chapter of this thesis provides a basic summary of the perception of monster beings from the prehistoric times to the Middle Ages. The next chapter analyses the role of the hero, nature and the distance of the British Isles from the centre of the World as perceived at the time. This chapter ends with the analysis of the pagan elements in the poem Béowulf. The last chapter focuses on the interpretations of monster beings in Christian settings and analyses the chosen Old English texts on a Christian interpretative level. The thesis arrives at the conclusion that the Church of the 6th to 10th century didn't use the motifs of various monsters on purpose. On the contrary, it seems that Germanic and Christian elements freely converged, and...

My goal for this thesis is to investigate the concept of (mis)labeling female protagonists in contemporary British fiction as mentally ill—historically labeled as madness—when subjected to traumatic events. The female protagonists in two novels by Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2018) and Blue Ticket (2020), and Jenni Fagan’s 2012 novel The Panopticon, are raised in environments steeped in trauma and strict, hegemonic structures that actively work to control and mold their identities. In The Panopticon, this system is called “the experiment”; in The Water Cure, it is personified by the character King and those who follow him; and in Blue Ticket, it is the social structure as a whole reflected in the character of Doctor A. To simply label these novels’ woman protagonists as ill would be to ignore that their behavior is not mental illness but in fact rational behavior produced by the traumatic dystopian environments.

Analyzing Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and linking trends of the Byronic hero that have merged into a variety of genres reveal that the hero is a mode of subversive gender expression, which has evolved within the Gothic through feminine desire. Delving into Bram Stoker’s Dracula will provide unique insight into the audience’s desires/expressions of gender. Finding the transition point from the monster vampire of Dracula to Stephanie Meyer’s desirous, sparkling boy-next-door in Twilight will track the trajectory of gender and sexual norms through time. From the foundational adaptation of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights to the repressed vampiric desire of Dracula, to queer desire/domestication within Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, ending with sparkling vampires of Twilight, we can invite the Byronic hero, which already supports rejection of societal expectations, into a genderless space, becoming a champion of desire absent from the constraints of gender and sexuality conformity.

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are corrupted by capitalism to diminish the human body into a interchangeable, unhuman cog; fully understood as Bataille’s “thing.” The anti-elegy, distorted by capitalism, creates the possibilities necessary for Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” which protests humanity’s objectification under capitalism while creating the ultimate anti-elegy for the anti-elegy.

For thousands of years, people have been hearing, reading, and interpreting stories and myths in light of their own experience. To read a work by a different author living in a different era and setting, people tend to imagine works of literature to be something they are not. To avoid this fateful tendency, I hope to elucidate what it means to read a work of literature and interpret it: love it to the point of wanting to foremost discuss its excellence of being a piece of art. Rather than this being a defense, I would rather call it a musing, an examination on two texts that I adore: Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Exodus

Somewhere is most general histories and outlines of English literature, the greatness of the King James Bible and its influence on all of English literature since 1611 have been pointed out. Unquestionably, all men of letters in the English language since that time have known of the King James Bible; and many of them may have been decidedly influenced by its tradition of cadenced prose and its prose figures. The great deal of research would have to be done in order to establish conclusively the influence of the Prayer Book upon all writers from 1549 to the present time. If this thesis stimulates any other worker to make a study in the general problem, it will have far exceeded its present purposes. For this approaches only one small aspect of the problem. Samuel Johnson is an obvious subject for such a study, because he attended the Church of England;1 he knew the Prayer Book well;2 in fact, he was such a good Church of England man that Boswell records in the Life at least two occasions when Johnson was offered a position in the Church.33 Furthermore, Johnson was preeminently a prose writer and used an ornate style. This combination of devoutness and literary ability makes of him ripe material for an investigation of the influence of the Prayer Book on an English writer. There is another reason why Johnson should make a good subject for study. He lived in an age that was a part of the same Renaissance tradition that produced the Bible and the Prayer Book. In fact, it has been pointed out that Johnson was the last of the great Renaissance humanists.4. The problem that this study attempts to solve, then, is "Did the Book of Common Prayer have any influence on Samuel Johnson's prose style?" Although many other problems have arisen in the course of this work, no attempt will be made to solve any of them; showing that the Prayer Book did influence at least part of Johnson's writing will be the single purpose of this paper

I do not purport to give a definitive argument for or against the influences of the unconscious, for the necessary realm of expertise lies within other fields: psychiatry and psychology. However, the application of psychoanalytic literary theory of the unconscious to the lives, words, and characters of selected female authors in order to explore a richer, more meaningful purpose of their art will be the subject of this literary journey. Specifically, the intent will be an analysis of the relation between the manifest content of three classic works of literature to the unconscious intent relative to the author’s biographical perspective, or the psychology of literature.

The Role of a Noblewoman in England during the Wars of the Roses Bc. Karolína Snellgrove Abstract This work will focus on the emancipation of noble women in England in the second half of the 15th century and their role as patrons, warriors, but also alleged witches. For our purposes we'll concentrate on Margaret Beaufort and Queens Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville. We will also try to evaluate the influence of Joan of Arc on the medieval emancipation of women in England and find out under what circumstances and to what extent high-ranking women could have been independent at this time.