This thesis examines traditional Irish dance as a locus of cultural memory, inscribed on the body. The native people of Ireland experienced invasion and oppression for nearly a millennium, beginning with Viking invasions at the end of the 8th century and ending in the 1940s, when the British finally departed Ireland, now an independent country. During the years of English rule, the British imposed harsh laws and sought to eradicate all vestiges of Irish culture in an attempt to diminish Irish identity. Through the ages, the definition of what it means to be Irish has changed widely, frequently resulting in revolt against invaders and internal armed conflicts. Physical alterations of the Irish body also occurred, though in a more representational context than a literal one. Traditional Irish dance grappled with how to present the Irish body, endeavoring to use it in way that overcame the cultural traumas of invasion and suppression. When Ireland began reclaiming its identity in the twentieth century, it soon became clear that dance had been profoundly affected by the traumatic oppression. Interestingly, the emerging dance form that became codified as distinctively Irish dance both reflects the history of suppression and seems to repeat the oppression, as if the living body were caught up in traumatic repetition. Traumatic experiences have shaped the collective and individual Irish bodies, and dance performance highlights a culture that is continually repeating its oppressive past in an attempt to find a cure from that traumatic heritage. By examining the solo dance tradition, Irish dance becomes a fertile field for studying the qualities of an embodied dance form that, in this case, performs a cultural history marked by oppression and traumatic repetition. As developed under the Gaelic League and the Irish Dancing Commission, traditional Irish dance reflected a rather proscribed art form, meant to specifically embody certain qualities of "Irishness." Looking back to pre-invasion Ireland, they intended to display the distinct, pure Irish identity of the past; instead, they continued the pattern of control and suppression. However, Ireland and Irish dance have grown beyond those early structures of traumatic repetition. In 1994, Riverdance grabbed worldwide attention as it presented Irish dance in a new context, with movements that broke from proscribed forms and expressed a non-traumatic Irish identity. Riverdance and the ensuing global craze for Ireland demonstrate a cultural artifact that has successfully stepped from the past into the dynamic present. While still acknowledging and preserving its original roots, the traumas of the past have been healed through embodied representation.

This study of the "prosaics" of allegory in Perez Galdos's novels examines the relationship between allegory at its most formally elemental and prose realism at its most complex. The first chapter introduces the major lines of philosophical, rhetorical, hermeneutic, and deconstructionist thinking in modern approaches to allegory, from the Romantics to Paul de Man, and illustrates various ways in which allegory's formal structures serve as the figural and morphological underwriters of Galdos's narrative fictions. Chapter II uses a single tropological occasion in Galdos's Miau to develop a realist's revisionistic equation, in which the authoritative and morphologically deterministic structures of typology are compounded by modern intertextuality and the figural structures of metonymy and metaphor. Dante's Inferno supplies the allegorical subtext for the tropological occasion in question, and in that fashion is introduced the master allegorist whose authoritative traces will serve as allegorical tracking points in each of the study's subsequent chapters. Nicolai Gogol and Charles Dickens provide control texts by which to gauge the innovative subtlety with which Galdos articulates his stylistic equation. Chapter III explores the role of personification allegory in construing a metaphysics of fictional character. Galdos's dialogue novel Realidad, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, Prudentius's Psychomachia, and Dante's Inferno provide opportunities for speculation about about reductivity and complexity in realistic characterization. The fourth chapter takes Galdos's Torquemada tetralogy as the basis for comment upon realistic fictions as allegories of epochal thinking. Michel Foucault's concept of the "episteme" opens the way for a discussion of the epochal disjunction in that novel series between Comtian positivism and Dantean allegory--a disjunction between system and synthesis. The fifth and final chapter draws upon allegory to propose a theory of the management of narrative time in realism. The theory suggests allegory as the underwriter of several narrative time codes that work against the impulse of chronology in prose narrative. Galdos's short novel Tristana is considered as an allegory of time--historical time, time detained, and time passing. Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, offers examples of Galdos's deployment of the time codes under consideration.

Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Tiutchev were steeped in the ideals of the German Romantic movement, towards which both writers display a particular affinity. This movement had a significant impact on contemporary Russian culture, which was pulling a variety of heterogeneous elements into its vortex. Taking this affinity into account, this dissertation offers a new reading of Gogol's last book, Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends. In order to clarify the structure of Selected Passages and to demonstrate that language is central to Gogol's Weltanschauung, his early works are first examined. Right from the start, the importance of language and the search for an individual idiom is announced in Gogol's writings. Selected Passages is considered in its entirety. A structural analysis of the book's composition reveals an implicit theory of language underlying the sequence of its parts. Gogol views the contemporary state of language as corrupt and leading to spiritual death. The redemption of humanity is possible only if the original purity of language is restored. Thus, Gogol advocates a regressive movement towards the pure, God-given Word. Gogol insists that the Russian language is undergoing an acute crisis. He foresees a way out of this crisis through the emergence of a new poetic language that will partake not only of the Russian literary language, but of other sources of inspiration as well. Tiutchev's poetry represents just such a language, and is thus one manifestation of Gogol's linguistic advocacy. Introducing a new aesthetic into Russian prosody, Tiutchev opened new vistas for poetry and the Russian language. A comparison between Tiutchev and the German Romantic poet Eichendorff reveals striking similarities between the two poets. This similarity is not to be seen as an instance of one poet influencing the other, but rather that both are responding, to an astonishing degree, to the same aesthetic values.

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The medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight evidences much of its Celtic heritage in the plot and subplot, as well as in the characters themselves. The Ulster Cycle, an ancient Irish story group, and the Mabinogion, a medieval collection of traditional Welsh tales, both contain parallels to the English romance. In addition to these numerous analogues, other Celtic features appear in the poem. Knowingly or not, the Gawain-poet used the conventions of the Irish and Welsh traditions in the Other World journey, the battle-belt/lace, the pentangle/ sun symbol, and the color green. A study of these elements as Celtic features of the poem ensures a proper reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

by Pauline Po Chun Tam. / Text in Chinese and English / Bibliography: leaves 93-101 / Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1985

by Gara Pin Han. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-103). / Chapter Chapter One: --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter A. --- Focus of study --- p.1 / Chapter B. --- Background of Research --- p.4 / Chapter C. --- Main Objectives --- p.7 / Chapter D. --- Structural Clarification --- p.8 / Notes to Chapter One --- p.10 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- Background of Wallace Stevens' View of Nature --- p.11 / Chapter A. --- The View of Nature of Stevens' Predecessors --- p.11 / Chapter B. --- The View of Nature of Stevens' Contemporaries --- p.23 / Notes to Chapter Two --- p.32 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Wallace Stevens' View of Nature --- p.33 / Chapter A. --- "Wallace Stevens' ""Double Vision"" Towards Nature" --- p.33 / Chapter 1. --- Human Perception Versus Nature --- p.36 / Chapter 2. --- Human Construct Versus Nature --- p.46 / Chapter B. --- Wallace Stevens' View on Reality and Imagination --- p.57 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- Criticism of Wang Wei's Poetry --- p.62 / Chapter A. --- Major Opinions on Wang Wei's Landscape Poetry --- p.62 / Chapter B. --- Limitation of Human Perception --- p.70 / Chapter C. --- Limitation of Human Construct --- p.80 / Notes to Chapter Four --- p.91 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- Conclusion --- p.94 / Notes to Chapter Five --- p.98 / Works Cited --- p.99