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This thesis sets in their literary context polemical books and tracts arising from tho, debate on church order within the Church as established by law in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The first two chapters set out the terms of the discussion and describe the historical context of the works considered. Chapter one looks at models of discourse appropriate for a study of polemic, concluding that the perspective of traditional rhetoric enables one to pose the right stylistic and ethical questions of works whose goal was effective persuasion. Chapter Two looks at the conditions under which these works were produced, analysing the extent and effectiveness of censorship. The principal argument begins in Chapter Three, with an analysis of the main linguistic model for this literature - the formal disputation as practised in the universities demonstrating its inability to cope with the fundamental nature of the disagreements between opponents and its tendency under pressure to become a trial in print. Chapter Four complements this analysis with a chronological survey of events from the Admonition controversy of 1572-3 bo the mid-1580s. John Whitgift's appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury and his subsequent campaign against non-subscribers are identified as pivotal events which focused attention on the political and legal mechanisms for the enforcement of order in the church, and the literary responses of reformers to this shift of focus from the theological to the historic are analysed. The first part of Chapter Five looks in more technical detail at the increasingly arbitrary use of literary language by reformers, examining the crucial influence of the dialectician Ramus on the tendency to treat as formal proof a rhetorically effective arrangement of propositions; the latter part of the chapter looks at the witty reductio ad absurdum of this tendency in the Marprelate tracts. Chapter Six considers the last ten to fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign, concentrating in particular on the polanic arising from or influenced by the Star Chamber cases against reformers in 1590-1.The Conclusion summarises briefly the linguistic shortcuts used by the majority of polemicists to strengthen their case, and contrasts these with Hooker's arphasls on the need to respect the processes of language in the journey of theological discovery. Finally, I examine the implications of the obviovis-bankruptcy of traditional forms of exchange in a new situation, and the-consequent decline of dialogue, for the English Church after 1603.

Prose style criticism of literary nonfiction has faded from scholarly popularity since a boom in the 1980s. Recent literary criticism of nonfiction has focused on context while neglecting aesthetics, or left the work of style analysis to composition or rhetoric scholars. I examine the work of Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and two writers associated with the literary journal n+1, Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman, to demonstrate the way that prose style analysis is a meaningful critical approach that helps define changing nonfiction genres, including online genres. I read Didion's work across her oeuvre to demonstrate the way her prose style shifts subtly over time and between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and literary journalism. I trace the influence of David Foster Wallace's American postmodern forebears on his fictional and nonfictional prose styles, and follow that line of influence to the nonfiction writing of online genres. I conclude by discussing the way that young writers associated with the journal n+1 regard Wallace's influence on their work and the writing of their generation, and examine Gessen and Batuman's prose style on and offline to find the literary in some unlikely locations. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-11-30 22:27:36.61

Lingering in the topic of literary engagement, this article follows a reader enthralled by words and the significant non-space where fiction and reality intersect. Using Terry Fallis’ political satire “The Best Laid Plans,” a physical map of the reading is followed as I amble through the Ottawa sites depicted in the novel. In this literary pilgrimage, reading is considered as a corporeal (re)action with a series of educative affects. Contrasting this experience with common in-school reading practices, this narrative encourages the honouring of the individualized relationship between reader and text as well as highlighting the pedagogical value of dallying in a work of fiction. Drawing on concepts of spatiality, I contemplate the notion of the home city as a familiar and yet capricious place, made more significant by a fantastic connection. Reading in significant spaces has a lasting, sprawling outcome whereby text, place and reader are all affected.

This thesis investigates the textual culture of early modern Scotland, as evident from three literary miscellany manuscripts produced and circulated in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. Each of the main three chapters will consider one miscellany manuscript in its complex totality, dealing with questions of provenance, ownership, editorial history, literary analysis, and an assessment of the manuscript in its wider cultural context. Manuscript transcriptions are appended, particularly since the contents of two out of three of the miscellanies discussed here have never been printed. Chapter One, by way of introduction, considers the current state of manuscript research in Scotland, and the implications for Scottish studies of book-historical methodologies. ‘Histories of the Book’ are currently being written across Europe (and further afield), and Scotland forms no exception. Against this backdrop, Chapter One evaluates recent critical work on early modern Scottish textual culture, and the extent to which book-historical narratives, developed in relation to medieval and renaissance English literature, can be applied to Scottish writing. More specifically, this chapter locates the miscellany manuscript as a prime site of investigation for scribal culture. The first miscellany under investigation, in Chapter Two, is Edinburgh University Library MS Laing III.447. For the largest part, the content of this manuscript has been printed, as a supplementary volume to the works of Alexander Montgomerie. This print is problematic in many respects, however, since it reorganised the entire content, and removed from its immediate context the longest poem of the manuscript, Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae. The appended transcription restores the original order. Chapter Two will investigate the contributions of the many scribes that were responsible for the manuscript, and examine whether any thematic coherence may be detected. Chapter Three deals with Cambridge University Library MS Kk.5.30, a hybrid manuscript that contains two sections. Section one (dating to the late-fifteenth, early-sixteenth century) features a transcription of John Lydgate’s Middle English Troy Book; section two consists of a later supply (c. 1612) by James Murray of Tibbermuir, containing additions to the Troy Book and twenty-seven miscellaneous poems. Though this latter section will be the main focus of the chapter, the manuscript’s other section, and thus its hybridity, will not be ignored. The third and final miscellany to be discussed is National Library of Scotland MS 15937. Containing approximately 175 items (many of which from English sources), this is the most expansive of the three manuscripts considered here. MS 15937 is textually a problematic source, since it is a nineteenth-century transcript of a lost original, the latter compiled by Margaret Robertson of Lude around 1630. This miscellany is an important witness also in musical terms, since it collects the words to a significant amount of Scottish and English songs, many of them unique to the manuscript. All chapters will stress the highly idiosyncratic nature of the miscellanies, but also, where possible, establish common ground between them, and connect them to other Scottish and English manuscripts and printed books. In all their complexity, the miscellanies reveal a literary culture whose nature undermines the monolithic and court-centred history that has been so prevalent in literary criticism (though the court, and courtly writing, are important backgrounds to a great deal of the poetry contained in the manuscripts). Finally, as underlined in the concluding Chapter Five, EUL Laing III.447, CUL MS Kk.5.30, and NLS MS 15937 are important collections both for the preservation, and for evidence about the dissemination, of Scottish and English verse.

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