The origin of the story of Narcissus is unknown, and the circumstances of his death are uncertain, but the most popular version of the tale as told by Ovid has been read, translated, explained, moralized and disputed by innumerable writers and alluded to by many more. Renaissance writers in England, such as Golding, Edwards and Sandys, were interested in first introducing the myth into their own language and then, in explaining its meanings, lessons and moralizations. Later poets paraphrased their translations, often adding their own point of view or else using only the skeleton structure of the myth for their own poetic purposes. The simple story of a youth who died by a pool after falling hopelessly in love with his own reflection acquired a significance and immortality worthy of a Greek god. The Eighteenth Century writers, who were less interested in the gods than their predecessors had been, almost completely ignored Narcissus in their poetry, but later poets such as Blake, Shelley and Keats revived him once again and transformed the faded youth into a Romantic. In The Book of Thel Blake explores the consequences of self-love, and anticipates the fuller development of this theme in The Four Zoas. He uses the archetypal pattern of the Narcissus myth for portraying the fading Thel, who refuses to enter the state of Generation because she is afraid of the voice of experience that she meets in her own grave when she descends into the underworld. Her sterile separation from her Spectre is similar to the unconsummated relationship between Narcissus and Echo. Thel fleeing from her grave escapes back to non-existence, fading by the river like Narcissus and Echo. An understanding of the function of the Narcissus story in Shelley's poem, Alastor, is indispensable to an interpretation of this controversial poem. Shelley's allusions to the myth are faithful to the Ovidian version of Narcissus as a youth who sighs away his life after seeing his own shadow in a well. Shelley associates the Poet's quest with the Narcissus myth by generally paralleling the narrative structure of Ovid's story, and by employing much of its imagery. Chapter II argues that Shelley's poem is both unified and consistent when it is interpreted in terms of the Narcissus theme. Keats primarily uses the popular myth of Endymion and Cynthia in his poem, Endymion, but also includes other myths in the manner of the Renaissance epyllion. The most significant addition to the main myth is the story of Narcissus as a comment on the nature of Endymion's quest. Keats pictures the hero at the well, viewing the reflection of the vision, in order to establish the specific parallel to Ovid's story. Endymion, however, unlike Narcissus or the Poet in Alastor, recognizes his illusion and proceeds towards accepting his responsibility to his kingdom and to the Echo figures in the poem. The analysis concludes with a comparison of the specific handling of the Narcissus myth in the three poems in terms of the various versions of the myth, the treatment of the metamorphosis of Narcissus Into a flower, and the development of the theme of self-love. The thesis establishes the significance of the Narcissus myth in The Book of Thel, Alastor and Endymion, and evaluates Blake's, Shelley's and Keats's contribution to the attempts of the Renaissance writers to introduce the Ovidian story into English literature. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis explores the significance of John Keats's medical Notebook, and his time at Guy's Hospital (October 1815 – March 1817), for the poet's career. As a primary contribution, it offers a new transcription of Keats's medical Notebook (Appendix 1). The transcription reproduces Keats's text and indicates the layout of his notes, but is neither a facsimile, nor a new edition: the visual form of Keats's notes is not reproduced, nor do I offer critical annotations; commentary follows in subsequent chapters. The achievements, limitations and influence of the only edition of Keats's medical Notebook — Maurice Buxton Forman's from 1934 — are the subject of the first chapter, which also considers accounts of Keats's medical career in Keats biography and criticism. Chapter two focuses on the poems Keats wrote while at Guy's to show that the two aspects of his life — medicine and poetry — were mutually influential. Chapter three considers Keats's medical notes in comparison to a fellow-student's, indicating how some characteristics of Keats's note-taking prefigure aspects of his mature poetry. Chapter four finds Endymion suffused with medical knowledge and imagery, and argues that this was a vital aspect of the poem's depiction of passion. Chapter five suggests that the publication of Keats's 1820 volume was greatly influenced by questions of health, medicine, and disease; concerns reflected by the poems in it, which also reveal the extent of Keats's continued awareness of, and interest in, contemporary medical thought. In sum, the thesis argues that the origins of Keats's poetic achievement can be traced in his medical Notebook and ‘hospital' poems, and that the ability to infuse his poetry with medical knowledge was a vital component of Keats's poetic power and achievement.

This critical assessment is a study of B.K.M. Mtombeni's literary achievements in the Tsonga literature. The literary trend which persists throughout his novels Mibya ya nyekanyeka and Ndzi tshikeni, his volumes of short stories Ndzhaka ya vusiwana and Mavala ya yingwe and his plays Malangavi ya mbilu, Vuhlangi bya vuhlangi and Mihizo ya kayivela, was identified. Mtombeni has been a successful writer, who through his thematic patterns, plot, characterization, language and style, was able to bring out his ideas and thoughts to his readers effectively. Each chapter of this study dealt with special literary issues which contributed to the accomplishment of the research. The first chapter is a general introduction setting out the aim of the research: a biographical sketch; definitions of key terms of the topic and the literary approaches; the motivation behind the selection of the topic; the method of research; and the scope and composition of subsequent chapters. The thematic patterns of Mtombeni's works and his attitude to life are handled in chapter two, whilst the focus of the third chapter is on conflict, which is a major element of plot. Reference is also made to the other elements of plot such as climax and denouement. Chapter four addresses characterization with the aim of determining the lifelikeness, plausibility and. credibility of characters in Mtombeni's works. Chapter five analyses Mtombeni's language and style, the focus being on diction, whilst syntactic patterns, preambles or introductory paragraphs, imagery, proverbs and idioms, tone and dialogue form chapter six. Mtombeni's use of patterned language in his plays is treated in the seventh chapter, whilst the last chapter is the general conclusion of the study, with recommendations for future research. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Tesis para optar al grado de Doctor en Literatura Hispanoamericana y Chilena / Como es sabido y Borges (1899-1986) mismo lo señala, pasó su niñez “detrás de una verja con lanzas, y en una biblioteca de ilimitados libros ingleses. Palermo del cuchillo y de la guitarra andaba (me aseguran) por las esquinas” Esta pequeña cita instala una problemática no menor en su obra y que contiene la relación siempre en tensión entre Latinoamérica (periferia) y Europa (centro). La investigación examina especialmente el diálogo interdiscursivo e intercultural entre Borges y dos románticos ingleses: William Blake (1757-1827) y John Keats (1795-1821) a través de la desterritorialización de Tyger y Nightingale del contexto romántico inglés decimonónico y su reterritorialización en la Argentina borgeana moderna / postmoderna del siglo XX. Metodológicamente, se ha realizado un análisis del poema “The Tyger” de Blake y del poema “Ode to a Nightingale” de Keats para dilucidar su significación o significaciones románticas. Posteriormente se ha examinado la obra ensayística, cuentística, lírica de Borges en búsqueda de los significados que él atribuye a tyger y nightingale descubriéndose una polisemia compleja otorgada por sus acercamientos serios o jocosos. En otras palabras, Borges desestabiliza la relación significante /significado de tyger y nightingale y su contexto romántico. Tanto tyger como nightingale diseminan rizomáticamente por la obra de Borges a través de los principios de conexión y heterogeneidad que permiten unirlos a nuevos significados diversos sin que se llegue jamás a un significado definitivo. Borges instalaría una postergación infinita del significado que asemeja un deslizamiento, un rodar, un nomadismo con múltiples entradas y salidas entre los discursos involucrados. (Kristeva, 1980; Derrida, 1975; Deleuze/Guattari, 1997; Barthes, 1974). Aunque la investigación se encuentra aún en progreso, la recodificación que hace Borges de los significantes románticos ingleses tyger y nightingale parece tener importantes implicancias desde la perspectiva del postcolonialismo, ya que el juego literario conducido por Borges establece una relación de paridad con el centro que cuestiona la sujeción periférica de América Latina al centro Europeo.

Jin, Lu. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

While John Keats never traveled to America and only wrote a handful of admittedly hostile lines about it in his poetry, American writers and readers have consistently regarded Keats as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the past two centuries. His critical reputation in America has been stable since the 1840s, enduring throughout changing tastes and movements, and his biography and work have been utilized in manifold appropriations by American poets and writers. I examine Keats’s attitude toward the United States—which was in conflict with the general feeling regarding the country by his fellow Romantic poets—and briefly review the American reception of Keats’s poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries before considering quintessential appropriations of Keats and the Keats biography in works by three American poets: Amy Clampitt, Stanley Plumly, and B.H. Fairchild.

By reading mournful poems rhetorically, I expand the concept of the elegy in order to reveal continuities between private and communal modes of mourning. My emphasis on readers of elegies challenges writer-centered definitions of the elegy, like that given by Peter Sacks, who describes how the elegy's formal conventions express the elegist's own motives for writing. Although Sacks's Freudian approach helpfully delineates some of the consoling effects that writing poetry has on the elegist herself, this dissertation revises such writer-centered concepts of the elegy by asking how elegies rhetorically invoke ethical relationships between writers and readers. By reading elegiac poems through Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theories and Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, I argue that these poems characterize, as Levinas suggests, subjectivity as fundamentally structured by ethical relationships with others. In keeping with this ethical focus, I analyze anthology poems, meaning short lyric poems written by acclaimed authors, easily accessible, and easily remembered - including several well-known poems by such authors as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Frost. Anthology pieces invite ethical evaluation in part because they represent what counts as valuable poetry - and also, by implication, what does not. Because anthology poems are read by broad, diverse audiences, I suggest that a rhetorical methodology focusing on writer-reader relationships is essential to evaluating these poems' ethical implications. This rhetorical approach to poetry, however, questions rhetoricians and aesthetic theorists from Aristotle and Longinus to Lloyd F. Bitzer and Derek Attridge who emphasize distinctions between rhetoric and poetics. I address the ongoing debate about the relationship between rhetoric and poetics by arguing, along the lines of Wayne C. Booth's affirmation that fiction and rhetoric are interconnected, that poetry and rhetoric are likewise integrally tied. To this debate, I add an emphasis on philosophy - from which Plato, Ramus, and others exclude rhetoric and poetry - as likewise essential to understanding both poetry and rhetoric. By recognizing the interrelatedness of these disciplines, we may better clarify poetry's broad, ethical appeals that seem so valuable to readers in situations of loss.

This critical assessment is a study of B.K.M. Mtombeni's literary achievements in the Tsonga literature. The literary trend which persists throughout his novels Mibya ya nyekanyeka and Ndzi tshikeni, his volumes of short stories Ndzhaka ya vusiwana and Mavala ya yingwe and his plays Malangavi ya mbilu, Vuhlangi bya vuhlangi and Mihizo ya kayivela, was identified. Mtombeni has been a successful writer, who through his thematic patterns, plot, characterization, language and style, was able to bring out his ideas and thoughts to his readers effectively. Each chapter of this study dealt with special literary issues which contributed to the accomplishment of the research. The first chapter is a general introduction setting out the aim of the research: a biographical sketch; definitions of key terms of the topic and the literary approaches; the motivation behind the selection of the topic; the method of research; and the scope and composition of subsequent chapters. The thematic patterns of Mtombeni's works and his attitude to life are handled in chapter two, whilst the focus of the third chapter is on conflict, which is a major element of plot. Reference is also made to the other elements of plot such as climax and denouement. Chapter four addresses characterization with the aim of determining the lifelikeness, plausibility and. credibility of characters in Mtombeni's works. Chapter five analyses Mtombeni's language and style, the focus being on diction, whilst syntactic patterns, preambles or introductory paragraphs, imagery, proverbs and idioms, tone and dialogue form chapter six. Mtombeni's use of patterned language in his plays is treated in the seventh chapter, whilst the last chapter is the general conclusion of the study, with recommendations for future research. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

The purpose of this thesis was to explore selected works from William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats, in order to expose textual instances of feminist thought. This analysis was aided with feminist theorists falling under the main strains of queer theory, materialism, and gender performance. Specifically, this thesis focused on the ways in which women, particularly virgin daughters, were viewed as property by their male kin. It also looked at how these women engaged in various symbolic masquerades and/or actual cross-dressing as a response to the aforementioned phenomenon. Finally, the thesis exposed how these masquerades can be construed as a queering of identity—manifested through reversals of power and rejection of patriarchal institutions like marriage.

nción Lingüística Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa