This thesis analyses answers to prayer in Chaucer’s works. It contextualises this analysis through attention to late-medieval devotion, arguing that Chaucer uses petitionary prayer both to explore important themes, such as the injustice of suffering innocence, and to challenge elements of contemporary religious practice. Chapter One explores petitionary prayer in theory, teaching, and lay practice, proving that late-medieval understandings of prayer’s effectiveness are varied, contradictory, and at times problematic. Two of Chaucer’s dream visions, 'The Book of the Duchess' and 'The House of Fame', feature in the second chapter, which demonstrates that answers to prayer in these texts fulfil a dual function, operating both as literary device and as the means through which Chaucer examines themes of profound importance which recur throughout his works. Chapter Three addresses conflicting prayers in two romances, arguing that Chaucer uses answered prayer in 'The Knight’s Tale' to obliquely critique the weaponisation of prayer in contemporary Christian society, inviting a focus on human responsibility for conflict, and that this emphasis on agency is continued through relegating the role of prayer in 'The Franklin’s Tale'. Chapter Four analyses the divergent discourses surrounding prayer in the hagiographic tales, concluding that the extent to which the narratorial voice faithfully represents the answers to the hagiographic subject’s prayers depends on the didactic purpose expressed. The final chapter examines the unanswered and unanswerable prayers of 'Troilus and Criseyde', arguing that Chaucer offers the poem’s Trinitarian conclusion and a poetic recreation of the Boethian conception of time in response to the problems posed by these prayers. This thesis demonstrates that, rather than operating as a mere device for advancing plots, petitionary prayer provides Chaucer with a powerful tool with which to pursue several philosophical and theological issues at the heart of his writing.

This thesis considers literary and critical reverberations of environment and place in order to reframe conceptions of what nature might mean for contemporary poetry. It attends to the timeframe of 1990 – present, assessing how developments in socio-political context and critical thought correspond or conflict with poetic responses. The interdisciplinary reach of the thesis brings together literary geography and ecocriticism, both of which established their roots during this period, putting conventional understandings of place and environment under pressure. The approach encourages a geographical attention to socio-cultural concerns whilst maintaining critical awareness of recent ecocritical focus on materiality, emphasising the potentially productive friction between cultural representation and physical reality. The thesis responds to earlier Romantic paradigms, granting marginalised contemporary poetry a stronger critical agency whilst still accepting the transformations and metamorphoses of literary convention. Taking a thematic approach, each chapter engages with key binaries found in environmental and geographical thinking to reveal how contemporary poetics unsettle and challenge such dualisms. The study looks at the work of twelve writers: Thomas A. Clark, John Burnside, Alec Finlay, Roy Fisher, Philip Gross, Barry MacSweeney, Robert Minhinnick, Alice Oswald, Frances Presley, Jo Shapcott and Zoë Skoulding. As a result, it compares and contrasts the poets’ engagements with the key threads in the thesis, suggesting that contemporary poetry of place and environment is united through its recognition of the paradox or gap between the material world and linguistic representation. Ultimately, the thesis concludes that contemporary poetry of environment and place is deliberately unstable, as it metamorphoses forms, modes and legacies, encouraging an understanding of such work as simultaneously responsive to and yet distinct from conventional paradigms of nature poetry.

This thesis argues that Cassius Dio used his speeches of his Late Republican and Augustan narratives as a means of historical explanation. I suggest that the interpretative framework which the historian applied to the causes and success of constitutional change can be most clearly identified in the speeches. The discussion is divided into eight chapters over two sections. Chapter 1 (Introduction) sets out the historical, paideutic, and compositional issues which have traditionally served as a basis for rejecting the explanatory and interpretative value of the speeches in Dio’s work and for criticising his Roman History more generally. Section 1 consists of three methodological chapters which respond to these issues. In Chapter 2 (Speeches and Sources) I argue that Dio’s prosopopoeiai approximate more closely with the political oratory of that period than has traditionally been recognised. Chapter 3 (Dio and the Sophistic) argues that Cassius Dio viewed the artifice of rhetoric as a particular danger in his own time. I demonstrate that this preoccupation informed, credibly, his presentation of political oratory in the Late Republic and of its destructive consequences. Chapter 4 (Dio and the Progymnasmata) argues that although the texts of the progymnasmata in which Dio will have been educated clearly encouraged invention with a strongly moralising focus, it is precisely his reliance on these aspects of rhetorical education which would have rendered his interpretations persuasive to a contemporary audience. Section 2 is formed of three case-studies. In Chapter 5 (The Defence of the Republic) I explore how Dio placed speeches-in-character at three Republican constitutional crises to set out an imagined case for the preservation of that system. This case, I argue, is deliberately unconvincing: the historian uses these to elaborate the problems of the distribution of power and the noxious influence of φθόνος and φιλοτιμία. Chapter 6 (The Enemies of the Republic) examines the explanatory role of Dio’s speeches from the opposite perspective. It investigates Dio’s placement of dishonest speech into the mouths of military figures to make his own distinctive argument about the role of imperialism in the fragmentation of the res publica. Chapter 7 (Speech after the Settlement) argues that Cassius Dio used his three speeches of the Augustan age to demonstrate how a distinctive combination of Augustan virtues directly counteracted the negative aspects of Republican political and rhetorical culture which the previous two case-studies had explored. Indeed, in Dio’s account of Augustus the failures of the res publica are reinvented as positive forces which work in concert with Augustan ἀρετή to secure beneficial constitutional change.

This dissertation studies certain Hindi and Persian narratives of the War of Succession (1658) to succeed Shah Jahan (r.1627-1658). All the narratives under study were written during the reign of Aurangzeb (r.1658-1707), the successor of Shah Jahan. The study evaluates the significance of the War as a landmark moment in the social history of India, especially in the formation and inter-relationships between religious communities. The dissertation demarcates the larger epistemological and ontological canvas on which these communities took shape and interacted with each other. The research outlines the ways and the contexts in which terms such as Hindu, momin, musalman, Islam, din and Rajput were deployed in literary texts. It asks whether Hinduism and Islam were two disparate traditions, as previous histories of the War and Mughal India had contended. The dissertation argues that social communities of Hindus and Muslims were mutually and similarly circumscribed within an Islamic worldview and concept of din. Hindu traditions could portray Muslims in concepts and terms borrowed from Indian epics but within an over-arching Islamic cultural dispensation. The War was not a moment of evolution between two independent Hindu and Muslim traditions. Rather, the War was a moment that saw the evolution, even if it be of an antagonistic kind, of Hindu and Muslim traditions within a larger Islamic framework. Besides the above primary focus, the dissertation provides the reader with important insights and overviews regarding allied subjects such as the literary histories of Persian and of Hindi/Urdu, especially in the Dingal and Khari Boli dialects, the political culture of Hindu India, Rajput political culture, Mughal political culture, patronage networks in Mughal India, notions of soldierly duty in seventeenth century India, language and status, preaching in the Hindu and Islamic traditions, the sociological ideas of acculturation and Islamisation, and twentieth century history-writing.

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.

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This dissertation reconsiders the creative and strategic crisscrossings among the African diaspora’s literary and cultural productions, paying special attention to the status and influence of Black America(ns), as a point of reference, on African and Afro-descendant writers working in French. Building upon the works of Paul Gilroy on the one hand, and Frida Ekotto on the other, I trace a major literary lineage in Afro-diasporic literature that revolves around the question of legibility. The texts studied in this dissertation are linked by their focus on a hermeneutic that is deployed along two main lines of thought. At the diegetic level, how are the characters being (mis)read by other members of the African diaspora, and reciprocally, how do the characters see these other members of the African diaspora and situate themselves in relation to them? At the meta-level, how does this reading system, or system of knowledge acquisition, invite or highlight a critique of genre (and gender) conventions and classifications? More specifically, I look at how writers such as Maryse Condé, Alain Mabanckou, and Léonora Miano establish affiliative ties with their Anglophone peers— Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Teju Cole, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—across the Black Atlantic and across generations, in order to challenge the French system of racial and literary classification. In so doing, I argue that they also participate in shaping the figure of the contemporary black intellectual on a global scale, from a non-American black perspective. The two main objectives of my research are to situate African, Caribbean, and Afro-descendant writers working in French within a transnational literary tradition that transcends the long-lasting polemical—and today outdated—category of “Francophone Literature,” and to account for their contributions to it. / 2024-03-04T00:00:00Z

Beginning in 1911 with Jennie Gerhardt and continuing through the publication of The "Genius" in 1915, all of Dreiser's major fiction is curiously marked by the same recurring narrative pattern. The pattern is always triangluar in construction and always contains the same three figures-- a vindictive and vengeful parent, outraged by an outisder's violation of personal and societal values; an enchanted offspring; and a disrupted outsider who threatens established order. In spite of each work's different characterization, setting, and episode, the narrative conflict invariably arises from the discovery of an illicit relationship between offspring and outsider, and the narrative climax involves a violent clash of wills, with victory sometimes going to the parent and sometimes to the outsider. The denouement is consistently sorrowful and pensive in tone, with a philosophical epilogue which speculates on man's melancholy and puzzling fate. As both a guide to personal therapy and a key to the work with which Dreiser established his artistic identity, the recurring narrative pattern is important. Its examination (1) illuminates an obscure period in Dreiser's life, (2) reveals his personality priorities as he turns the kaleidoscope of introspection to observe the Cudlipp crisis from various angles, and (3) offers to the discerning reader a reliable clue to the developing system of aesthetics of one of America's greatest artists.

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<p>U tezi se analizira mesto i uloga Bogoboja Atanackovića (1826&ndash;1858) u istoriji srpske književnosti. Na osnovu književne recepcije njegovog rada ustanovljeno je da spada u pisce koji su prvo bili preterano hvaljeni, a potom potpuno omalovažavani. Atanacković je imao za cilj da obrazuje i zabavi svoje čitaoce, a stavovi koje je zastupao u svojoj poetici pokazuju da je poznavao savremena mu pedago&scaron;ka stremljenja. Spada u pisce koji su pisali za ženski deo publike i za omladinu. Na Atanackovića su uticali srpski pisci prethodnih epoha i njegovi savremenici, prvenstveno Branko Radičević, potom savremeni mu mađarski, nemački, ruski i francuski pisci, kao i usmena narodna i građanska lirika. U svoja dela unosio je opise događaja iz revolucije 1848&ndash;1849. godine. Njegov doprinos razvoju srpske književnosti ogleda se u napu&scaron;tanju vojvođanskog dijalekta u skladu sa reformom srpskog jezika Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, kombinovanju sentimentalno-romantičarskih stilskih postupaka sa prvim elementima realizma u srpskoj prozi, kao i okretanju temama iz savremenog života i uno&scaron;enju socijalnih pitanja u književnost, dok je u putopisima koristio meditativno-reporterski stil i epistolarnu formu.</p> / <p> The position and the role of Bogoboj Atanacković (1826&ndash;<br /> 1858) in the Serbian literary history is analysed in the<br /> thesis. On the ground of the literary reception of his work<br /> it has been found out that he belongs to the group of<br /> writers who were at the beginning praised too much, and<br /> later on completely disdained. Atanacković aimed to<br /> educate and entertain his readers, and the attitudes he<br /> supports in his poetics shows that he was familiar with the<br /> contemporary pedagogical teachings. He was writing for<br /> the female part of the audience and for the youth.<br /> Atanacković was influenced by the Serbian writers of the<br /> previous epochs along with his contemporaries, first of all<br /> Branko Radicević, also the contemporary Hungarian,<br /> German, Russian and French writers, as well as the oral<br /> folk and urban lyrics. In his works he described the events<br /> from the 1848&ndash;1849 revolution. His contribution to the<br /> development of the Serbian literature is seen in<br /> abandoning the Vojvodina dialect in accordance with the<br /> Vuk Stefanović Karadžić&rsquo;s reform of the Serbian<br /> language, combining of the sentimental and romantic<br /> style with the first elements of realism in the Serbian<br /> prose, also in turning to the themes from the<br /> contemporary life and including the social aspects into the<br /> literature, while in the prose accounts of his travels he<br /> used meditative-reporter style and the epistle form.</p>