Virtually all nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' find in the Curfew bell of the opening lines primarily a figure of death evoked by the growing darkness, the fading sounds, the emptying landscape and ultimate solitude of the speaker, and most of all the funerary associations of tolling bells and the 'passing bell' tradition. And yet, culturally, despite some symbolic overlap, the Curfew bell and the passing bell are quite distinct, each with its own characteristic history, practices, traditions, and connotations, distinctions recognized widely in eighteenth century literary and antiquarian circles. In this thesis, I explore the literary historical question of why so many readers, popular and scholarly, of the 'Elegy' have avoided the overt political implications of these Curfew traditions in favor of the more allusive funerary associations. I develop an argument grounded in both literary tradition and cultural history for taking Gray's famous Curfew seriously as a literal Curfew bell, rather than as merely a symbolic passing bell or funeral bell. The result is a view of the 'Elegy' as engaging with class on a more fundamental level than usually assumed, both anticipating and informing the language of political economic discourse in the latter half of the eighteenth century, suggesting that whether we take the poem most fundamentally as a moral meditation on the ultimate universality of death or as a more socio-political reflection on the disparities of class depends greatly on how we hear this tolling bell.

This project is about what I am calling an “erotic epistemology” in nineteenth-century English elegiac poetry, a condition or event in a poetic text in which the discourses of love and knowledge are, to use a term Shelley liked to describe the experience of love, “intermixed.” The persistence of this inter-discourse suggests some fundamental connection between the desire for love and the desire for knowledge. Curiously, these performances of erotic longing insist urgently in the rhetorical, formal, and somatic registers of elegiac poetry in the nineteenth century. The confrontation with death that elegy stages is ideal for thinking about the relationship between erotic desire and poetic knowledge. As the limit case of a mind confronting an ultimately unknowable condition, the furthest expression of an impossible desire—the desire for the dead—elegies are love poems as well as death poems. This dissertation argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais for John Keats (1821), Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam for Arthur Hallam (1850), Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave Atque Vale for Charles Baudelaire (1867), and Thomas Tod Stoddart’s The Death-Wake (1831), perform the poetics of mourning as an erotic discourse, and allow an intimate understanding of a dead other that is an experience of pleasure. Much scholarship on the concept of eros considers it nearly synonymous with sexual desire and bodily pleasure. This project establishes a mode of reading elegy through its figures and forms that conceptualizes eros in these poems beyond sexuality, and without the burdens of biography and history. By stepping outside the critical confines of generic convention, literary influence, and eros-as-sexual want, this dissertation reevaluates the interpretive possibilities of erotic desire and language in a genre that is not commonly read as an amorous mode of speech. For these elegists, knowledge itself is an object of amorous desire, and epistemological want is a motive force of poetic mourning. These poems arrive at the pleasure of this knowledge through verse forms and figures of speech that perform an intimate textual relationship between the living and the dead, and when these linguistic events occur, the elegies reveal themselves as love poems.

My dissertation explores several topics recurring throughout Ovid’s single Heroides. When, how, and why does Ovid restructure tragic, epic, or pastoral stories into elegy? How do his heroines deal with their lovers starting relationships with new women, and what method of coping with abandonment is the most effective? What is the role of magic in the Heroides, what rules does it follow, and who uses it successfully? How does Ovid capitalize on the connection between elegy and lament, and which heroines does he use to do so? Finally, what is the role of writing in the Heroides, how does Ovid use the character of Sappho in the collection, and how does the Sappho epistle help readers interpret the rest of the Heroides? The letters of Briseis (3), Phaedra (4), Hermione (8), and Oenone (5) transform previously epic, tragic, and pastoral worlds and inhabitants into elegiac contexts to show how they wish their men to accept the role of the elegiac lover. Ovid uses these reclassifications to explore the boundaries of elegy and show how thorough knowledge of audience and the genre are necessary for success. Oenone (5), Hypsipyle (6), Deianira (9), and Medea (12) each see their lovers replace them with another woman; Ovid uses their different methods—emulating the new woman’s qualities, attempting to regain the lover’s affection, and seeking revenge—to discover which approach will achieve its desired purpose. Ovid’s construction of magic as a practical tool is established in the letter of Medea (12), and can be applied to the epistles of Deianira (9), Hypsipyle (6), and Laodamia (13) to interpret the magical practices in those epistles. Ovid explores a different facet of the elegiac genre by using the traditional link between elegy and epitaph in the letters of Phyllis (2), Dido (7), and Hypermnestra (14), but alludes to it in the epistles of Canace (11), Ariadne (10), and Deianira (9) to bridge the gap between literary characters and his readers’ reality. Finally, the Sappho epistle (15) provides a tool for interpreting both the individual letters of the Heroides and Ovid’s own concerns. By using the famous poetess as one of his heroines, Ovid connects himself and his reputation to hers. His character Sappho provides a lens through which we can examine all of the heroines who are at a crisis point, a metaphorical cliff’s edge, as they write.

This dissertation deliberates manifestations of religious individualism Kharijite poetry during the Umayyad era, AD. 661 to 750. The opening chapters discuss various inadequacies in the study of Umayyad poetry in general and Kharijite poetry in particular that often concentrate upon the perceived static nature of form and neglect significant changes that occur in the content and function of poetry. Chapters four and five examine aspects of Kharijite ideology that paved the way for the development of religious individual. Chapter six through ten discuss the various manifestations of this nascent religious individualism in Kharijite poetry. The dissertation argues that specific perspectival shifts that occur predominantly in elegy mark an important departure from Classical and Medieval Arabic poetry in general. In a significant number of Kharijite elegies, the poets' focus on the self replaced or superseded the ritualistic mourning for the martyr, the traditional subject of the elegy during this historical period. Elegy became increasingly a platform and vehicle for self examination, self-reflection and religious self-scrutiny. These characteristics signify the emergence of a nascent religious individualism in Kharijite poetry. / text

This thesis is an examination of realism in the love elegies of Propertius: of how it is created, how it is limited, and how its limitations increase its effectiveness rather than diminishing it. The first half analyzes the variety and subtlety of the creation of realism in elegies 1.3, 2.29b, and 4.7, three poems that, because of shared features that link them to each other and set them apart from the rest of Propertius's elegies, represent a case study of realism. The second half begins by describing how the realism in these poems is limited, and how these limitations intensify the effect of their realism by drawing attention to the poet's agency in creating it. This effect is then related to larger trends in the creation and limitation of realism in Propertius's remaining love elegies, in which the same pattern is observed, by means of the analysis of recurring techniques. This examination of aspects of realism in Propertius's poetry provides insight not only into his poetic method, but into his attitude to his genre and its potential. / Thesis (Master, Classics) -- Queen's University, 2008-06-09 15:40:16.227

This thesis examines the eroticization of historical and political narratives from Ovid’s Fasti, particularly the capture of Gabii (2.687-710), the rape of Lucretia (2.721-852) and the Aristaeus narrative (1.363-390). I argue that Ovid’s eroticization of these narratives is a response to the political pressure to write poetry in support of Augustan ideology. These narratives about military conquests and moments of great political change are imbued with epic themes and Augustan ideology. Yet, Ovid transports these narratives into elegy, which is a genre that defines itself as distinct from imperial and public domain. Ovid’s asserts poetic autonomy by re-envisioning historical narratives and political ideology in a manner suitable to his elegiac concerns. His version of history does not reflect Augustan ideology and, at times, is starkly opposed to it. I argue that Ovid’s re-imagining of these narratives asserts the freedom of the poet as an autonomous storyteller. / Graduate

The Naturalist is a collection of poems with a critical preface. In this preface, titled "'Death is the mother of beauty': The Contemporary Elegy and the Search for the Dead," I examine contemporary alterations and manifestations of the traditional genre of elegy. I explore the idea that the contemporary mourner is aware of the need to search for meaning despite living in a world without a centrally believed mythology. This search exposes the mourner's need to remain connected to the dead and, by proxy, to grace. I conclude that the contemporary elegy, through metaphorical figuration, personal memory, and traditional symbolism, simultaneously employs and denies the traditional elegiac conventions of apotheosis and resurrection by reconceiving them as methods not of achieving transcendence but of embracing desire with an acceptance of the inability to transcend. The poems of The Naturalist are a collection of elegies that reflect many of the ideas brought forth in the preface.

No description available.

A collection of poetry.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Focusing on elegiac dimensions of the museum, Reinventing the Museum: Textured Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Women’s Elegies contends that Eavan Boland, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks help us conceive a new spatial imaginary, which addresses traditionally underrepresented subject matters and historiographies with ethical alertness. Reading their works and their affective-experiential modes through an interdisciplinary feminist lens, this dissertation explores the ways in which the four women poets revise and update Julia Kristeva’s foundational concept of women’s time. Their decision to draw from museums—both physical and metaphorical—foregrounds woman’s embodied self and its relational ontology, ultimately to challenge the dominant dynamics of historiographical, literary canon formation. Functioning as bookends are my chapters on Boland and Brooks whose writings about Irish and Black experiences respectively explore tactics of space-making at the face of postcolonial, post-slavery displacements and diasporas. Taking Boland’s museum elegies as a point of departure, I move on to Plath’s plastic self-elegies where an inquiry into the plasticity of the self and theatrics of self-exhibit happens. Next, I examine Bishop’s shift from Enlightenment taxonomization to love as a possible antidote to enlightenment culture. Straddling between love poetry and elegy, Bishop’s prismatic love elegies often cast a discursive journey to proto-museums with the beloved as a figure for love. Her occasional superimposition of the lover on the racial other gestures towards Brooks’s necropolitical elegies and elegies of necropolitics, the latter of which resonate with the mission of Black neighborhood museums. Each assigned with a textured materiality—textile, plastic, light, and firmness, respectively—the chapters are divided into three sections that proceed from the poets’ problem posing to their attempt to think through the identified problem. On a broader scale, the chapters progress from the most concrete, fungible, and tangible materiality to the least, which points to a way of being, an attitude towards life. Assigning textured materialities to each chapter additionally draws attention to the interstices between the formal materiality of poetic language and nonlinguistic gestures and speech sounds. In this manner, my project actively builds on the momentum of and expand current debates in and around genre theory, phenomenology, affect studies, a version of historical materialism, postcolonial/Black studies, and museum studies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.