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<p> This dissertation explores the possibility of an early modern cultural materialism in selected dramatic works of Thomas Middleton in which fasting plays a prominent thematic role. The once venerable Christian practice of fasting was compartmentalized into secular and religious components in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in England even as its overall practical contour was preserved largely intact. It was subjected to conflicting representations and programs for reform, and appropriated by differing political and ecclesiastical factions. The vicissitudes that beset fasting offered a fertile ground for cultivating an understanding about the nature of the material basis of cultural formations and the historical dynamic governing their fates. It is this indigenous cultural materialist understanding, I argue, that Middleton's treatment of fasting in his dramatic works exemplifies. </p><p> The first chapter offers a history of fasting from the early church to its secularization under Queen Elizabeth as Protestant <i>status quo ante</i> in reference to which later departures and appropriations took place. One such departure by King James is the subject of the next chapter on <i>A Chaste Maid in Cheapside</i> in which the king's attempt to re-sacralize fasting is subjected to a materialist satire and made into a springboard for imagining a utopia of a specifically materialist kind. The next chapter on <i>The Puritan</i> contextualizes the play in terms of the puritan attempts to incorporate fasting as part of the Protestant prayer regime in the place of cunning folk's witchcraft and Catholic ecclesiastical magic. <i>Masque of Heroes</i> and Christmas keeping at the Jacobean Inner Temple are the subjects of the last chapter. I discuss the prominence in the masque of the anthropomorphized Fasting Day in connection with inter-generational and inter-constituency struggle for the custodianship of the valued custom of Christmas keeping. </p><p> These studies represent a series of historicist contributions to Middleton scholarship on the individual works. More broadly, they constitute an attempt to exploit insights from cultural history and material culture studies to broaden the scope of the study of religion in early modern English drama. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4687. Advisers: Janet Sorensen; Richard Nash.

My examination of Malory's work in the light of his times falls into a number of sections which examine his portrayal of government, society, love, religion and chivalry. I have at tempted to identify in each both Malory's own perceptions and those of his society and to show the links between them. I have also considered the proportions of realism and idealism in his work, where appropriate, as well as the accuracy of the physical picture which Malory's work gives of his times. To some extent my choice of topic has been prompted by a desire to justify, though certainly not to apologise for, the study of medieval European literature in the Southern hemisphere, particularly in Africa. I feel that both the internationalism and, if I may coin a term, the 'intertemporalism' promoted by such disciplines have their part to play in the modern world where they are seen as facets of universal human experience. They allow us to approach the stage where the experience of one man in any time may become the experience of any man in any time, and thus intellectually to transcend the bonds of race, or place, or time. The Morte d'Arthur is in this respect a pathway in human experience and the aim of my essay has been to test its reliability. Conclusions are expressed at intervals in the body of the essay, often at the end of a section or subsection, and, more generally, in a separate conclusion at the end. While most references are acknowledged in footnotes I have acknowledged quotations from Malory's work only by page number in the body of the essay. My text for these is Vinaver, E; Malory; Works (London:Oxford University Press, 1981). Since I am to some extent precariously straddling disciplines in this essay I hope that my heavy reliance on historians, particularly social historians, will be viewed with tolerance.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-226). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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This thesis presents a critical analysis of Deleuze’s philosophy of language, using and examining Russian and Italian futurist manifestos to draw out the ‘futurist’ aspects of Deleuze’s language and thought. These aspects constitute a poetics of Deleuze as well as a poetics of the avant-garde, presenting in both areas the celebrated, utopian state of language as dynamic, performative matter. The way in which futurist manifestos often attempt to perform and demand their aims simultaneously, and the temporal problems which arise due to this, is an operation which can be perceived in Deleuze’s writing. The difference between writing which describes a linguistic practice and writing which performs this linguistic practice is a temporal gap requiring a double operation of description and enactment, which the performative manifesto purports to fulfil. In both Deleuzian and futurist poetics, however, the fulfilment of this double operation can lead to problematic territory. Deleuze presents several linguistic practices in The Logic of Sense which can also be located in the writings of both Russian and Italian futurists, despite the differing political and aesthetic programmes of these variants of the movement. The common element identified and examined in this thesis is an accelerative drive to eliminate the temporal gap between items in an analogical equation so that synonymy is no longer an inexact science; the conjunction and the copula are truncated and cleave together, resulting in radical linguistic becoming. My argument is that minute technical linguistic modifications such as these operate synecdochically within futurist and Deleuze’s poetics, standing for their creators’ entire conceptual systems. Ultimately, the paradoxes inherent in the relationship between the radical fluidity of futurist nonsense and the radical fixity of its ensuing formalism provide a new way of thinking about Deleuze’s approach to language.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3862. Advisers: Deidre Lynch; Nicholas Williams.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 366-375) and indexes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 366-375) and indexes.