Thesis (doctorat d'Etat)--Université d'Aix Marseille I, 1979. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (v. 3, p. 1399-1454).

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 1998. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 90 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-88).

Thesis (doctorat d'Etat)--Université d'Aix Marseille I, 1979. / Includes indexes. Bibliography: v. 3, p. 1399-1454.

No description available.

Much recent scholarship celebrates the early modern period for its development of broader public political engagement through printed media and coffeehouse culture. It is the argument of this study that the formation in England under Charles II of a public sphere may be shown to have followed a reassessment of political discourse that began at Westminster during the troubled reign of that king’s father, Charles I. The narrative of parliament’s growth in this era from an “event to an institution,” as one historian describes it, tells of more than opposition to the King on the battlefields of the English Civil War. Parliament-work in the early years of England’s revolutionary decade also set new expectations for rhetorical deliberation as a means of directing policy in the House of Commons. The ideals of discursive politics that were voiced in the Short Parliament (May 1640), and more fully put into practice in the opening session of the Long Parliament (November 1640), were soon also accepted by politically-minded authors and readers outside Westminster. Prose controversy published in print and political poetry that circulated in manuscript both demonstrate that the burgeoning culture of debate outside parliament could still issue “in a parliamentary way.” Such promotion of productive textual engagements eventually constituted a wider, notional assembly, whose participants – citizen readers – were as much a product of deliberate education and fashioning as they were of the “conjuring,” “interpellation,” or “summoning” that recent scholarly vocabulary suggests. Following the spirit of reform in the English parliament, and subsequently developing through the years of partisan political writing that followed, public opinion, like the Commons, established itself in this era as an institution in its own right. These public and private assemblies disseminated the unprecedented amount of parliamentary writing and record-keeping that distinguishes the period under review, and this rich archive provides the literary and historical context for this study.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - James Cook University, 2004. / Typescript (photocopy). Bibliography : leaves 250-283. Also available in an electronic version via the Internet.

Tübingen, Univ., Diplomarb., 2004.

This thesis examines the genre of epic, and particularly Milton’s Paradise Lost. It argues that it is only in attending to the contextual interactions within Paradise Lost that its full meaning can be comprehended. It demonstrates that the poem not only narrates the Fall, but actively performs its consequences in its thematic and linguistic structures, which continually stress the impossibility of approaching perfect (divine) totality. Chapter one outlines the theoretical response to epic, read as a petrified genre in contrast to the newness, openness and linguistic flexibility of the novel. It then challenges these assumptions through a reading of the invocation to book III of Paradise Lost. The chapter closes by examining seventeenth-century writings on epic, demonstrating that Milton’s contemporaries saw the epic as defined by the possibility of didactic intervention into its context. Chapter two examines the forms of the epic metaphor, which serve as a temporal link between the ‘mythic’ past of epic and contemporary events. It then shows that the nationalistic impulse of epic was a method by which the mythic past of a country was deployed as an exemplary narrative for the present. The chapter closes by considering the ways in which shifts in national conception were mapped onto the epic. Chapter three outlines Paradise Lost’s thematic engagement with the concept of representation. It focuses on the twin images of the music of the spheres and the Tower of Babel, used in Paradise Lost to represent man’s relationship with God. It argues that the poem uses these tropes to explore the linguistic effects of the Fall. Both these images are deployed to suggest that postlapsarian expression is too open and ambiguous to properly portray divinity. Chapter four moves that discussion to a linguistic level, arguing that the poem is characterised by indeterminacy. It argues that Paradise Lost calls into question the possibility of expressing perfect truth in fractured, postlapsarian language. It shows that punning is the mark of fallen creatures in the poem, and suggests that the poem’s own puns exploit this category to linguistically question its own status as representation through performances of ambiguity. The conclusion synthesises these local readings of Paradise Lost into a reading of the poem as a whole. It argues that these individual instances demonstrate the poem’s continual reflexive concern over its theodicean project. By continually expressing ambiguity, at the level of imagery and language, Paradise Lost draws attention to its status as postlapsarian art, and the consequent impossibility of approaching the divine perfection exemplified by the celestial music or prelapsarian language.

Much recent scholarship celebrates the early modern period for its development of broader public political engagement through printed media and coffeehouse culture. It is the argument of this study that the formation in England under Charles II of a public sphere may be shown to have followed a reassessment of political discourse that began at Westminster during the troubled reign of that king’s father, Charles I. The narrative of parliament’s growth in this era from an “event to an institution,” as one historian describes it, tells of more than opposition to the King on the battlefields of the English Civil War. Parliament-work in the early years of England’s revolutionary decade also set new expectations for rhetorical deliberation as a means of directing policy in the House of Commons. The ideals of discursive politics that were voiced in the Short Parliament (May 1640), and more fully put into practice in the opening session of the Long Parliament (November 1640), were soon also accepted by politically-minded authors and readers outside Westminster. Prose controversy published in print and political poetry that circulated in manuscript both demonstrate that the burgeoning culture of debate outside parliament could still issue “in a parliamentary way.” Such promotion of productive textual engagements eventually constituted a wider, notional assembly, whose participants – citizen readers – were as much a product of deliberate education and fashioning as they were of the “conjuring,” “interpellation,” or “summoning” that recent scholarly vocabulary suggests. Following the spirit of reform in the English parliament, and subsequently developing through the years of partisan political writing that followed, public opinion, like the Commons, established itself in this era as an institution in its own right. These public and private assemblies disseminated the unprecedented amount of parliamentary writing and record-keeping that distinguishes the period under review, and this rich archive provides the literary and historical context for this study.

No description available.