Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This study explores Thomas Gray’s concepts of literary history, tradition, and the past. It proffers critical examinations of Gray’s literary and historical thoughts, illustrating the extent of the complexity of the mid‐century cultural and intellectual climate in which Gray and his contemporaries were writing. It shows the aesthetic, cultural, and political dimensions of canonicity in the course of examining the ideological motivation behind Gray’s literary history. Though much of Gray’s poetry is private and written for a narrow literary circle, his literary history seems engaged with issues of public concerns. Gray’s literary history must not be understood as a mere objective scholarly study, but as an ideological narrative invented to promote specific national and cultural agendas. Though Gray’s plan for his History of English Poetry was inspired directly by Pope’s scheme of writing a history of English poetry, Gray’s historiography represents a challenge to Pope’s most fundamental “neo‐classical” premises of canonicity in that it aligns English literary poetry back to the literary tradition of ancient Britain and resituates the English literary canon in an entirely different theoretical framework. Gray reworked Pope’s historical scheme to suits the need of the political and intellectual agendas of his own time: the national need for a distinctive cultural identity, which was promoted by and led to the emergence of a more national and less partisan atmosphere. Gray’s comprehensive project of literary history charts the birth and development of what he views as an English “high‐cultural” tradition, whose origins he attributes to the classical and Celtic antiquity. In Gray’s view, this tradition reaches its peak with the rise of Elizabethan literary culture; a culture which was later challenged by the “French” model which dominated British literary culture from the Restoration to Gray’s time. Gray’s literary history is to be examined in this study in relation to the concept of canonformation. Gray’s historiographical study of literary culture of ancient Britain, his historicization of Chaucerian and medieval texts, his celebration of Elizabethan literary culture, and his polemical attack on “neo‐classical” literary ideals intend to relocate the process of canon‐formation within a “pure” source of national literary heritage, something which provides cultural momentum for the emergence of a historiography and an aesthetics promoting Gray’s idea of the continuity of tradition. As is the case in his poetry, the concept of cultural continuity is also central to Gray’s literary history, and permeates through his periodization, historicism, criticism, and his concept of the transformation of tradition.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-66).

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 180-194). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Laura Edmondson, Florida State University, School of Theatre. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 13, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains v, 67 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

La présente thèse propose une recherche sur la tradition textuelle et l’édition critique du discours Εἰς Ῥώμην (En l’honneur de Rome) d’Aelius Aristide (IIe siècle apr. J.-C.). Le discours, prononcé à Rome en 144 apr. J.-C., est un éloge de l’Empire romain. La première édition critique du discours fut publiée par B. Keil en 1898 ; au cours du XXe siècle deux philologues ont préparé des éditions comportant un texte critique, en s’appuyant sur l’apparat de Keil. La thèse est organisée en une introduction générale et deux parties, suivies par la bibliographie et quatre annexes. La première partie est consacrée à la recherche sur la tradition textuelle du discours, et est structurée en six chapitres. La deuxième partie consiste dans l’édition critique du discours En l’honneur de Rome, avec apparat critique et des témoignages de la tradition indirecte. Le texte grec est suivi par un apparat complémentaire donnant les leçons des manuscrits mineurs et des notes critiques. / The purpose of the present thesis is to perform a research on the textual tradition and the critical edition of Aelius Aristides’ speech Εἰς Ῥώμην (To Rome) (2nd century CE). Delivered in Rome in 144 CE, this speech is a praise of the Roman Empire. The first critical edition of the speech was published by B. Keil in 1898; in the 20th century, two philologists prepared editions with critical text, based on the apparatus of Keil. The thesis consists of a general introduction and two parts, followed by the bibliography, and four appendices. The first part explains the research on the textual tradition of the speech, and is structured in six chapters. The second part consists of the critical edition of the speech To Rome, with critical apparatus and the testimonies of the indirect tradition. The Greek text is followed by a complementary apparatus offering the variant readings of the minor manuscripts and some critical notes.

The search for origins of the republican aedileship presents a difficult task. At first sight the story about foundation and evolution of this magistracy lies in ancient sources. On the closer look it may be discerned, that the same sources have their own present intentions. They search for a tradition in oral based history to legitimise the current status of the aedileship and present it in historical context. Yet another question raises ambiguity. The twin character of the magistracy blurs our perceptions and makes it challenging to distinguish whether plebeian and curule aedileships are evolving intertwined or apart of each other. Nevertheless, delving upon the wide variety of ancient sources it is still possible to reconstruct the basic functions and duties of the aediles. Furthermore, the aedileship has to be looked upon in broader picture, in order to figure out, how it is situated in the system of republican magistracies and why the roman aristocrats strived to serve as aediles. The main purpose of this paper is to bring the aedileship out of the shadows and present it as full pledged research topic. Starting with aedileship it may embark us on questioning our knowledge of the republican magistracies. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This thesis considers the relationship between practices, communities and continuity in intermittent organisational arrangements. Cultural festivals are argued to offer one such particularly rich and nuanced research context; within this study their potential to transcend intermittent enactment emerged as a significant avenue of enquiry. The engagement of organisation studies with theories of practice has produced a rich practice-based corpus, diverse in both theoretical concerns and empirical approaches to the study of practice. Nevertheless, continuity presents an, as yet, under-theorised aspect of this field. Thus, the central questions of this thesis concern: the practices that underpin the enactment of festivals; the themes emerging from these practices for further consideration; and relationships between festivals and the wider context within which they are enacted. These issues were explored empirically through a qualitative study of the enactment of a community-centred film festival. Following from the adoption of a ‘practice-lens approach', this study yielded forty-eight practices, through which to explore five themes emerging from analysis: Safeguarding, Legitimising, Gatekeeping, Connecting and Negotiating Boundaries. This study revealed an aspect of the wider field of practice that has not yet been fully examined by practice-based studies: the cementing or anchoring mechanisms that contribute to temporal continuity in intermittent, temporary or project-based organisations. The findings of this thesis suggest a processual model, which collectively reinforces an organisational memory that survives periods of latency and facilitates the re-emergence of practice, thus potentially enabling organisations to endure across intermittent enactment and, ultimately, transcend temporality and ephemerality. The themes examined and insights offered in this thesis seek to contribute to: practice-based studies and film-festival studies; forging a new path linking these two disciplines; and generating both theoretical and practical insights of interest to festival organisers and stakeholders of project-based, temporary or intermittent organisational arrangements.

La tesi si propone di indagare l’intertestualità dantesca nell’opera volgare di Matteo Maria Boiardo. Il fenomeno è già stato oggetto di studi – indirizzati soprattutto al poema cavalleresco, e in misura minore (specie negli ultimi anni) al canzoniere lirico – che si sono mossi però nell’alveo dell’impostazione strutturalista, con una considerazione della memoria poetica da un punto di vista formalista e tipologico. Questa corrente ha consentito sviluppi importanti negli studi filologici, ma porta a vedere il fatto letterario staccato dal suo contesto di riferimento. Se questo esito in Italia è stato arginato da una forte base storicista, va detto che gli studi sulle riprese poetiche hanno però vissuto una situazione particolare. Da una parte, infatti, lo strutturalismo fra anni ’60 e ’70 ha imposto anche in Italia, attraverso una serie di importanti lavori, il suo modo di trattare la questione, senza poi che il successivo approdo semiotico incidesse in maniera significativa. Dall’altra, la reazione di chi voleva agganciare il fenomeno al dato storico ha riportato il problema all’impostazione erudita della critica delle fonti, privilegiando la raccolta dati da mettere in relazione con le informazioni sulla storia della tradizione e della circolazione. L’obbiettivo di questa tesi è fare un passo avanti, nella convinzione che per lo studio di questi fenomeni di riuso sia la circolazione manoscritta che i dati testuali e formali vadano letti in una piena prospettiva semiotica: guardare ai fenomeni di tradizione e trasmissione testuale nell’ottica dei processi ricettivi, e considerare le scelte di memoria poetica come atti comunicativi, con un valore pragmatico. La ricerca ha l’intento di giungere ad una maggior comprensione del rapporto del dotto poeta umanistico con il modello dantesco, un’interpretazione più chiara delle strategie di riuso, determinate dal particolare modo di leggere la Commedia nel contesto specifico, e perciò attraverso un preciso filtro fra quelli disponibili al tempo. Accanto all’insieme di informazioni filologiche sulle attestazioni manoscritte nelle biblioteche del tempo, l’indagine qui condotta consente – anche da un punto di vista che potremmo definire attributivo – di indicare in Benvenuto da Imola l’esegeta di riferimento per Boiardo e il suo pubblico, proprio perché l’osservazione ravvicinata dei testi e dei loro legami fa emergere questa tradizione interpretativa come la più attiva nell’elaborazione boiardesca rivolta ai lettori. Il lavoro non ha preso le mosse da un afflato teorico, teso a riconcettualizzare l’intertestualità, ma da un intento di chiarificazione sui testi e alcuni loro aspetti che non sembravano però trovare una spiegazione soddisfacente all’interno del quadro metodologico diffuso. Il lavoro, allora, ha assunto poco alla volta anche una vena metodologica sorta dall’osservazione dei fenomeni in modo nuovo. E così, accanto all’indagine storico-letteraria, e in stretta relazione con essa, è stato possibile avanzare alcune proposte ermeneutiche sui meccanismi intertestuali in base alle dinamiche della comunicazione letteraria. E nelle pagine che seguono il percorso si articola attorno a nuclei diversi ma interconnessi: da una parte la riflessione generale a carattere semiotico sui fenomeni di memoria poetica, che vengono concettualizzati grazie agli apporti di discipline come la pragmatica; segue una ricognizione storica sulle modalità di lettura e ricezione del modello dantesco – e non solo – in base alla circolazione dei testi e dei loro apparati esegetici; si arriva poi al nucleo del lavoro con l’affondo diretto su opere e paratesti esegetici con le loro relazioni, che si instaurano all’interno del laboratorio d’autore e poi da lì arrivano al pubblico.