Inaug. Diss.--Bonn, 1970. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: p. 4-10.

The dissertation argues that libertine first-person lyrics of seventeenth-century England reveal a coherent literary strategy in formal, thematic, and ideological terms. My focus is the libertine poems of Donne, Suckling, Carew, Lovelace, and Rochester. I situate the lyrics in a period of historical change, an age of epistemological and ontological questioning. Libertine lyrics concern inconstancy on various levels, from the sexual to the ontological, and they explore the problems of freedom, human nature, identity, and individualism. I argue that the libertine's inconstant selfhood is a creative "solution" to a historical dilemma. This conception of inconstant selfhood is also a response to courtly prescriptions of the behavior of poets and courtiers, a way of claiming an authoritative voice and individualistic freedom. My examination of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics shows that, as part of a transitional age, the poems manifest a contradictory character and they reveal an ideological inconsistency. However, in the final analysis, the imaginative answer to the period's problem of mutability and displacement that libertine lyrics offer turns out to be unsatisfactory. In tracing the development of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics, I suggest that the poems constitute an experimental and transitional development in the lyric tradition of male confessional desire.

No description available.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2009. Dept. of English. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 157-164).

This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Barry Faulk, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 18, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

Mémoire de maîtrise : Lettres : Lille III : 1992. / Bibliogr. p. 173-178.

Libertines Real and Fictional in Rochester, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Boswell examines the Restoration and eighteenth-century libertine figure as it appears in John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester's Satyr against Mankind, "The Maim'd Debauchee," and "Upon His Drinking a Bowl," Thomas Shadwell's The Libertine, William Wycherley's The Country Wife, and James Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763. I argue that the limitations and self-contradictions of standard definitions of libertinism and the ways in which libertine protagonists and libertinism in general function as critiques of libertinism. Moreover, libertine protagonists and poetic personae reinterpret libertinism to accommodate their personal agendas and in doing so, satirize the idea of libertinism itself and identify the problematization of "libertinism" as a category of gender and social identity. That is, these libertines misinterpret-often deliberately-Hobbes to justify their opposition and refusal to obey social institutions-e.g., eventually marrying and engaging in a monogamous relationship with one's wife-as well as their endorsement of obedience to nature or sense, which can include embracing a libertine lifestyle in which one engages in sexual encounters with multiple partners, refuses marriage, and questions the existence of God or at least distrusts any sort of organized religion. Since any attempts to define the word "libertinism"-or at least any attempts to provide a standard definition of the word-are tenuous at best, it is equally tenuous to suggest that any libertines conform to conventional or standard libertinism. In fact, the literary and "real life" libertines in this study not only fail to conform to such definitions of libertinism, but also reinterpret libertinism. While all these libertines do possess similar characteristics-namely affluence, insatiable sexual appetites, and a rebellion against institutional authorities (the Church, reason, government, family, and marriage)-they often misinterpret libertinism, reason, and Hobbesian philosophy. Furthermore, they all choose different, unique ways to oppose patriarchal, social authorities. These aberrant ways of rebelling against social institutions and their redefinitions of libertinism, I argue, make them self-satirists and self-conscious critics of libertinism as a concept.