Thesis--Giessen. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [v]).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 278-301). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1987.

This thesis is a study of the life and works of Thomas D'Urfey (1653- 1721), a prolific writer of -plays, poetry and operas during the Restoration period. It places him in the context of the theatre of his time and the difficult conditions in which he worked, showing how obscurity of birth and lack of education affected him in his burning desire for success and financial reward. His relationships with great men illustrate the role of the patron in Augustan society, and his long career in the theatre illuminates the principal developments in English drama between 1676 and 1710. The Introduction provides a brief critical survey of the current state of Restoration comedy criticism and of D'Urfey's place in that criticism. Chapters One and Three are primarily biographical; Chapters Two, Four and Five study his plays; Chapter Six takes a broader view of his non-dramatic writing, and Chapter Seven examines his last three comedies and discusses them as precursors of the novel. The final section of Chapter Seven makes some comparisons between Thomas D'Urfey and other dramatists of the period, especially John Dryden, and argues that there is a special interest in the struggle for recognition of an author generally regarded as a failure. The Conclusion summarises the arguments in the thesis for this re-assessment of D'Urfey's interest and importance. Throughout the thesis D'Urfey's work is shown to have many rewards for the modern reader.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation addresses the profound influence that the shared experience of humans and animals had on the poetics of early modern drama. With reference to a selection of early modern comedies and a range of non-literary texts that includes natural history encyclopedias and animal husbandry manuals, I argue that the vernacular knowledge of animals shaped the early modern imagination generally and the early modern playwright's imagination particularly. I propose an original approach to early modern literature, one which urges integrating a consideration of the real-world referent for animal representation, the collective life lived by humans and animals, and the poetics of early modern drama. / In my introduction, I take up the dissertation's general claims about the ethical and historiographical dimension of interpreting early modern animal representation. I continue to work at this theoretical level in Chapter One, where I consider how the animal-focused disciplines of sociobiology and ecology can help and hinder readers interpret early modern drama. In the following chapters, I work closely with a selection of early modern plays, contexts, and literary and theatrical devices. Chapter Two focuses on a web of comic plays that feature instantiations of animals in stage properties and actor's gestures. The web of plays in Chapter Two includes the anonymous Mucedorus; Lording Barry's Ram Alley; John Fletcher's Women Pleased; Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament ; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton; Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost; and Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter Three is devoted to the anthropomorphism of the allegorical representations of animals in Ben Jonson's plays Volpone and The Alchemist. In my reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Chapter Four, I move on to consider animals whose representation is removed from reality not merely by anthropomorphism, but also by magic. All of these instances of representation draw animals into a sphere of existence that is commonly understood as the exclusive domain of humans at the same time that they draw humans in the other direction, which is to say into the muck and mire that is the origin of all life.

This study explores the problem of female defense in relation to the constitution of women as disempowered speaking subjects within the dominant rhetorical structures of early Stuart literature. The discourse of male rhetoricians defines a subordinate place for women in the order of language. The English formal controversy arguments over the nature of women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries similarly deploy tropes of male precedence and female subordination to restrain women in the symbolic order and to inhibit any form of female discourse. In order to construct an effective defense a female apologist must reconstitute herself by working within and subverting these constraints. Early Stuart drama provides numerous instances in which women confront and contest the pre-established limits for female speech in their efforts to defend themselves and/or their sex. However, in the dramas selected for this scrutiny, despite the forceful defense strategies that female characters use in their attempts to negotiate their negative positions in language, they are ultimately marginalized. My final chapter therefore examines the rhetorical strategies whereby in her life and writing one woman author, Elizabeth Cary, successfully appropriated and transformed the gendered tropes into compelling female defenses.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2001. / Title from title screen (viewed Apr. 23, 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts. Includes bibliography. Also available in print form.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Montpellier III, 1977. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 1095-1114) and index.