John Donne was indisputably the foremost English preacher of his day. Many studies have focussed on his instructional methods; fewer have concentrated on how he tries to move his hearers. Donne especially liked preaching on the psalms. Since Christian antiquity, the seven psalms known as the penitential psalms have enjoyed a privileged place in church worship. They are central to the sacrament of penance. By Donne's time, changes in the Church of England's sacramental theology had all but eliminated the practice of penance. Nevertheless, Donne considers penance or, as it had become known, repentance, to be a crucial part of believers' lives. With his sermons on the penitential psalms Donne contributes to the vast body of literature surrounding the sacrament of penance, but his contribution is unique. He thinks that since the second person of the Trinity is identified with the Word of God, the institution of preaching God's Word is incarnational. In the sacraments, the priest ushers in the Body of Christ; in the sermon, Donne believes, the preacher's role is similar. For Donne, sermonizing is sacramental in effect. In his sermons he attempts to bring the real presence of God to his listeners. Moreover, his sermons display a "sacramental mimesis": they enact their subject matter by their very words and try to effect change in the listeners as the words are uttered. Further, Donne thinks that since God established all the ordinances of the church, none of them should be ignored. Therefore, Donne's twenty-one sermons on the penitential psalms reveal a preacher who is on the one hand a conservative churchman and on the other a startlingly innovative preacher. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

In using the doctrine of the Incarnation as a lens to approach the devotional poetry of seventeenth-century Britain, ‘“And the Word was made flesh”: The Problem of the Incarnation in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Poetry' finds this central doctrine of Christianity to be a destabilising force in the religious controversies of the day. The fact that Roman Catholics, the Church of England, and Puritans all hold to the same belief in the Incarnation means that there is a central point of orthodoxy which allows poets from differing sects of Christianity to write devotional verse that is equally relevant for all churches. This creates a situation in which the more the writer focuses on the incarnate Jesus, the less ecclesiastically distinct their writings become and the more aware the reader is of how difficult it is to categorise poets by the sects of the day. The introduction historicises the doctrine of the Incarnation in Early Modern Europe through presenting statements of belief for the doctrine from reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldryk Zwingli in addition to the Roman Catholic decrees of the Council of Trent and the Church of England's ‘39 Articles'. Additionally, there is a further focus on the Church of England provided through considering the writings of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes amongst others. In the ensuing chapters, the devotional poetry of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, and Richard Crashaw is discussed in regards to its use of the Incarnation and incarnational imagery in orthodox though diverse manners. Their use of words to appropriate the Word, and their embrace of the flesh as they approach the divine shows the elastic and problematic nature of a religion founded upon God becoming human and the mystery that the Church allows it to remain.

Thesis supervisor: Alvin Snider. Includes bibliographic references (p. 214-227).

By reading mournful poems rhetorically, I expand the concept of the elegy in order to reveal continuities between private and communal modes of mourning. My emphasis on readers of elegies challenges writer-centered definitions of the elegy, like that given by Peter Sacks, who describes how the elegy's formal conventions express the elegist's own motives for writing. Although Sacks's Freudian approach helpfully delineates some of the consoling effects that writing poetry has on the elegist herself, this dissertation revises such writer-centered concepts of the elegy by asking how elegies rhetorically invoke ethical relationships between writers and readers. By reading elegiac poems through Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theories and Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, I argue that these poems characterize, as Levinas suggests, subjectivity as fundamentally structured by ethical relationships with others. In keeping with this ethical focus, I analyze anthology poems, meaning short lyric poems written by acclaimed authors, easily accessible, and easily remembered - including several well-known poems by such authors as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Frost. Anthology pieces invite ethical evaluation in part because they represent what counts as valuable poetry - and also, by implication, what does not. Because anthology poems are read by broad, diverse audiences, I suggest that a rhetorical methodology focusing on writer-reader relationships is essential to evaluating these poems' ethical implications. This rhetorical approach to poetry, however, questions rhetoricians and aesthetic theorists from Aristotle and Longinus to Lloyd F. Bitzer and Derek Attridge who emphasize distinctions between rhetoric and poetics. I address the ongoing debate about the relationship between rhetoric and poetics by arguing, along the lines of Wayne C. Booth's affirmation that fiction and rhetoric are interconnected, that poetry and rhetoric are likewise integrally tied. To this debate, I add an emphasis on philosophy - from which Plato, Ramus, and others exclude rhetoric and poetry - as likewise essential to understanding both poetry and rhetoric. By recognizing the interrelatedness of these disciplines, we may better clarify poetry's broad, ethical appeals that seem so valuable to readers in situations of loss.

This dissertation considers the development of an ethics stemming from the Augustinian revival of early modern England, and the subsequent effect of this ethics on the literary culture of the period. The Preface claims that religious and textual communities operate according to a “cultural mobility” that eludes conventional neo-historicist approaches to literary culture, and Paul Ricoeur’s aphorism, “the symbol gives rise to thought,” serves as a model for thinking through this mobility. Augustinian ethics is a cultural phenomenon in the period, because people are thinking about Augustine, giving new life to his works through their own expressions of thought. After exploring the ways in which the Augustinian revival was brought about during the early modern period in the Introduction, one such expression of thought, John Donne’s relationship with early modern print culture, is examined in Chapter One. Following the theoretical outline of Augustine’s Christianization of Ciceronian rhetoric in his De Doctrina Christiana, it is suggested that though Donne’s aversion to the print publication of his poetry may have begun as a result of his “gentlemanly disdain” of the press, it ultimately found its sustenance in the form of an Augustinian ethic. Chapter Two examines the possibility of a metaphorical acquisition of Augustinian hermeneutics in the metadrama of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This hermeneutics ultimately calls into question the epistemological framework of Theseus’s skeptical aesthetics, suggesting that a more inclusive aesthetics based on charity can elevate the stage to its proper dignity. The last chapter turns from the communal implications of Augustinian ethics to its subjective implications by examining Augustine’s inner light theology and the role it plays in John Milton’s late poetry. Instead of falling in line with criticism that sees the simultaneous publication of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes as a dialectical meditation on the virtues of pacifism and the evils of religious violence, this reading suggests that the late poetry asserts the ethical rights of those who attend to the inner light, whether they be peaceful or violent. / text

Title page, table of contents and abstract; v.2: table of contents; v.3: table of contents only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library. / This doctoral submission comprises three volumes and is entitled Twistonality: A Personal Exploration. Volume One consists of a portfolio of eleven original compositions, Volume Two is an exegesis and Volume Three contains live and/or computer-generated recordings of the music. The works are scored for a variety of instrumental and vocal combinations. The compositions explore the use of tonality as a basis for the creation of a uniquely personal style which incorporates musical gestures encountered in both traditional and contemporary performance practice. The term 'twistonality', devised for this submission, refers to a musical language in which a composer may express original ideas by twisting forms and tonal structures already resident in the conscious or subconscious memory in order to reflect his or her emotional reality as experienced through music. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1283916 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Elder Conservatorium of Music, 2007

Title page, table of contents and abstract; v.2: table of contents; v.3: table of contents only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library. / This doctoral submission comprises three volumes and is entitled Twistonality: A Personal Exploration. Volume One consists of a portfolio of eleven original compositions, Volume Two is an exegesis and Volume Three contains live and/or computer-generated recordings of the music. The works are scored for a variety of instrumental and vocal combinations. The compositions explore the use of tonality as a basis for the creation of a uniquely personal style which incorporates musical gestures encountered in both traditional and contemporary performance practice. The term 'twistonality', devised for this submission, refers to a musical language in which a composer may express original ideas by twisting forms and tonal structures already resident in the conscious or subconscious memory in order to reflect his or her emotional reality as experienced through music. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1283916 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Elder Conservatorium of Music, 2007

Title page, table of contents and abstract; v.2: table of contents; v.3: table of contents only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library. / This doctoral submission comprises three volumes and is entitled Twistonality: A Personal Exploration. Volume One consists of a portfolio of eleven original compositions, Volume Two is an exegesis and Volume Three contains live and/or computer-generated recordings of the music. The works are scored for a variety of instrumental and vocal combinations. The compositions explore the use of tonality as a basis for the creation of a uniquely personal style which incorporates musical gestures encountered in both traditional and contemporary performance practice. The term 'twistonality', devised for this submission, refers to a musical language in which a composer may express original ideas by twisting forms and tonal structures already resident in the conscious or subconscious memory in order to reflect his or her emotional reality as experienced through music. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1283916 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Elder Conservatorium of Music, 2007