Within Odes 1-3 Horace consistently locates an idealized version of Rome in Sabinum and Italia. The former had long been a moral foil for Rome. The latter consisted of the regions of Italy that rebelled against Rome during the Social War and fought on the side of Marius in the civil wars that followed. Horace joins these two groups with the term Sabellians and places them together in moral opposition to the corruption and decadence of the late first century BC. Thus Horace elevates the formerly rebellious and still foreign Italici into Roman politics in the lofty position of virtuous outsider, a post formerly exclusive to the Sabines. This dialogue of Italian morality can be seen in Horace's geography. Almost without exception, whenever Horace locates a poem within Sabinum or Italia he does so within the context of ideal Roman values. In contrast, his geographical references to the city of Rome and the areas of Italy that sided with Rome in the Social War and Sulla thereafter are almost all in the context of luxury, excess, and general moral bankruptcy. Horace's use of Roman individuals and families divides Rome along the same lines. Odes 1.12 features a list of excellent Romans. Of the many possible and usual individuals, Horace chooses only the Sabellians. Throughout the Odes, Horace contrasts the proverbial luxury of the Etruscans with Sabellian simplicity and implicit moral superiority. His patron Maecenas is frequently the representative Etruscan for these sermons. It has long been assumed that Horace wrote about Sabinum in such laudatory language because his famous Sabine farm was a gift from Maecenas. But, Horace's praise extends beyond the Sabine hills into Italia as well. He sees himself and his fellow Italici—Horace's hometown of Venusia sided with the rebels—as virtual Sabines. Thus his true motivations are the elevation of the formerly rebellious parts of Italy to the status of ideal Romans and the subsequently easier integration of the recently enfranchised Italici into Roman politics as virtuous examples for Rome to follow.

Efficiency in the presentation of a Latin text and its study-aids is the key to assisting intermediate students, who frequently become overwhelmed with the amount of vocabulary and grammar that needs to be simultaneously understood in order to read with any accuracy. This text breaks down the first book of Caesar's Bellum Gallicum in both a visual and a conceptual manner to aid students in learning intermediate Latin efficiently. The text is comprised of five parts. The first section contains the text as found in DuPontet's edition of Caesar's Bellum Gallicum. The second section has grammar notes that explain tense and case uses that are necessary for grasping the text, as well as citations for further reading. The third section displayes the text segmented into clauses and is positioned in such a way that the student can, at a glance, visualize what is part of the main clause, and what is subordinate to it. This segmentation assists the reader in learning to follow the order of Caesarian clauses when translating. The fourth section provides a list of vocabulary, not previously memorized by students, that happens to appear in that specific section. The final component is a list of all words that first appear in Book 1 of Caesar's Bellum Gallicum and that appear throughout Caesar's text five or more times.

In order to reconcile the deus ex machina at the end of Sophocles' Philoctetes with the actions of the rest of the play, this project analyzes the role of Odysseus within the play with special attention to rhetoric. By considering the character of Odysseus as a complex construct referencing both literary and historical contexts, this study suggests that Neoptolemus in fact errs in siding with Philoctetes to the degree that he does by the tragedy's end. The themes of the play involving Philoctetes and Neoptolemus then become warnings against inappropriate emotional responses, again consistent with Heracles' advice in the deus ex machina at the play's end.

The question of fidelity, which has long been at the center of adaptation studies, pertains to the problem of authorship. Who can be an author and adapt a text and who cannot? In order to understand the problem of fidelity, this thesis asks larger questions about the problems of authorship, examining how authorship is changing in new media. Audiences are taking an ever-increasing role in the creation and interpretation of the texts they receive: a phenomenon this thesis refers to as participatory authorship, or the active participation of audience members in the creation, expansion, and adaptation of another's creative work. In order to understand how audiences are creating texts, first the place of the player within video games is addressed. Due to the nature of the medium, players must become active co-creators of a video game. Drawing a parallel between video game players and performance, it is argued that players must simultaneously perform and author a text, illustrating the complex and multilayered nature of authorship in video games. In the second chapter the role of the fan is examined within the context of the My Little Pony fandom, Bronies. Like players, fans take an active role in the creation of the text and destabilize the traditional notion of authorship by partially controlling of a text from the original author. By examining the place of the player and the fan the traditional notion of authorship is destabilized, and the more open and collaborative model of participatory authorship is proposed.

In A Son of the Forest (1829) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), the narrators describe their most formative experiences in relation to addiction and their respective religions. Though these narratives emerged at different periods (almost a century apart) in North American history, there are considerable similarities between them. As William Apess describes his struggle with alcoholism, he also appropriates both the language of popular literature and print culture in the Methodist movement, and in turn criticizes the white supremacist ideals ingrained in early American culture. Similarly, Malcolm X details his experience with substance abuse while criticizing white supremacist ideals, specifically, those that are ingrained in patriotic symbols, such as the Bible and the Constitution. Additionally, X's participation in the Nation of Islam illustrates his complex, and sometimes constrained, relationship with the leader of the religion, Elijah Muhammed. This thesis explores both subject-formation and the narrators' development of their self-knowledge. I interpret these concepts using Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation and Michel Foucault's theory of technologies of self; these frameworks are complementary due to their emphases on an individual's relationship to the state. I conclude that subject-formation and addiction are two sides of the same coin in these narratives. Apess and X struggle with addiction in their narratives but ultimately recover and are transformed both physically and mentally. By demonstrating the dynamics of agency between the narrated and narrating "I," this thesis describes the ways that these narrators develop their self-knowledge in light of their experiences, making life narrative a transformative literary platform.

This study approaches the representation of Guinevere of the Arthurian legend from a Jungian-feminist perspective. Employing a revised quaternity of feminine archetypes, I indicate how the figure of Guinevere generally attracted to itself the negative aspects of the archetypes of the Mother, Maiden, Wise Woman, and Warrior. Viewed within the cultural context of the last quarter century, even the favorable depiction of the queen in several medieval romances and in nineteenth and twentieth century texts, has been perceived by modern fantasy authors as a negative portrayal. These modern fantasy writers, working within a genre favorable to revisionist characterization and drawing upon highly speculative theories of primitive goddess worship, have created a Guinevere that reflects ongoing feminist concerns.

Earlier scholars have made some unsubstantiated comments about similarities between Chinese Yuan and English Renaissance theaters. The present comparative study explores the significant similarities and differences between these two theaters. The two theaters are shown to be strikingly similar in the theatrical conventions they employ. We see similarities between these two theaters in crucial aspects. Both were open theaters with a bare stage surrounded by the audience on at least three sides. Both stages lacked scenery and used portable properties transported by stage hands. Audience were equally noisy. The players, clad in magnificent costumes, were flexible and skillful in acting, singing, dancing, and tumbling. They spoke, chanted, or sang in both prose and verse forms. They also followed similar procedures in their presentation. These areas of similarity required players of both theaters to act with a theatricality or stylization. In this study, I have applied the approaches taken by the scholars of English Renaissance theater to the study of Chinese Yuan theater. This has enabled me to explore some areas that scholars on Yuan theater have not touched. This synchronic comparison of two theatrical conventions bearing no traces of mutual influence also shows that, given similar historic, economic and social soils, people in different civilizations will bring similar flowers to bloom.

This dissertation positions South African "colored" author Bessie Head as a political novelist. The dissertation also explores the nature of Head's art-form and content situating her achievements in the context of African traditions. The dissertation further highlights elements which distinguish Head as a political writer who both participates in and resists male-defined political discourse. Head's work appears to be an exploration of the possibility of defining "a new code of honour which all nations can abide by." This venture, which she seems to approach from an original angle in every text, leads her to embrace a redemptive kind of politics which is not readily recognizable as "political" writing because of its reliance on African spirituality. A Question of Power in particular, as this dissertation proposes, reveals what I have named the concept of consciousness-invasion, a notion which seems to be informed by African spirituality. Additionally, the thesis analyzes the critical reception accorded Head in the last two decades. It explains two discoveries: that, in general the attempts of Headian scholars to articulate the author's novelistic vision has yielded limited results because they have not seen her work as primarily political; that the view of Head's texts as political exposes the complexity of her canon as represented by her ability to simultaneously depict, with a fine balance, colonialism, racism, sexism, tribalism, and the self-interest which lies in every character who champions these oppression devices. In its redefinition of "political" writing the dissertation further argues that Head's novels exhibit the power dynamics of "macropolitics" in relation to those apparent in "micropolitics" and in "metapolitics". ("Macropolitics" and "micropolitics" are terms adopted from the work of linguist Robin Tolmach Lakoff while "metapolitics" is my own coinage.)

The paradoxical principle I explore in the fiction of Dickens and O'Connor is perhaps best expressed this way: the archetype of the child reveals that isolation, smallness, and apparent insignificance can create connectedness, expansiveness, and meaning. The archetype surfaces in any character that suffers these first three fates, be it the solitary child or the seemingly insignificant, outcast adult (or "little man," in O'Connor's words). Central to the study is my suggestion that the small, often childlike narrative consciousness O'Connor describes as fundamental--even exclusive--to the short story can exist in the novel, as well. The "little man" of the short story, O'Connor writes, "impose(s) his image over that of the crucified Jesus" (The Lonely Voice 16). I believe that by looking at the way in which O'Connor characterizes the paradoxical rhythm of smallness and expansiveness, as well as the way that rhythm manifests itself mythologically, we can open up new avenues (through the small portal of the childlike figure) to larger works of fiction, as well. The fiction of Charles Dickens, which includes some of the most sprawling novels in all of literature, becomes illuminated in the context of the myth and the short story. Dickens's short installments (a feature of the literary tradition of nineteenth-century England); his oral, fireside narrative voice; and his extensive depiction of small and childlike characters all reveal the explosion of events in tiny but potent milieus.

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