This study proposes two aesthetics, Franciscan and Dominican, to account for two types of lyrics. The Franciscan aesthetic accounts for lyrics which present a simple Christian truth for emotional reaction. But this aesthetic is too generally defined, and does not account for lyrics which present Christian paradox for intellectual appreciation. This study is an effort to provide a more exact definition of the Franciscan emotive aesthetic, and to begin to define a Dominican intellectual aesthetic. The arrival of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century indicated the human creature to be an intrinsically capable intellect; Thomism incorporated this intellectualist view into a Christian philosophy which was at odds with Bonaventureanism. The binary philosophical milieu--Thomist-Dominican and Bonaventurean-Franciscan--contemporary with the Middle English lyric makes the possibility of co-existing aesthetics not unreasonable. Dominicanism and Franciscanism came to disagree especially on the Thomist doctrine of unicity. "The Debate Between the Body and the Soul" affirms pluralism, and therefore may be associated with Franciscanism. Examination of "The Debate" and many emotive lyrics finds them similar in purpose and structure, providing a more exact definition of the Franciscan aesthetic as "open" and "linear." An "open" aesthetic structures facile poetry which avoids intellectual complexity, and involves the will in "linear" movement towards is ultimate, simple good. An aesthetic so defined reflects the Bonaventurean tradition, which affirms primacy of the will in the human soul. Those lyrics which express paradox address the reader's intellect, the primary faculty of the soul according to Thomism. A Dominican aesthetic accounts for these lyrics. This aesthetic structures a "closed" lyric which the reader analyzes for meaning. The rhetoric of closed expression, a barrier to universal communication in the Augustinian view, is appropriate to all readers and the subject matter. The ultimate Christian truths represented in the "closed" lyric defy science; only poetry has a point of contact with such truth. "Closed" lyrics are also "cyclic." Since the subject matter is beyond reason, the intellect returns to the poetic representation after failure to move to full understanding.

Shakespeare's dramatic, poetic narratives combine language functions overlooked when readers think of his texts as "plays" and become absorbed in the "story" as only a sequence of events. This study explores reader response to poetry and narrative, points out the different thought processes followed when encountering the two, and reveals new perspectives on the texts by integrating associative, paradigmatic thought with logical, syntagmatic thought. By treating myth as psychosocial process, this analysis shows how Shakespeare both presents and deconstructs his culture's assumptions in the "play" of words, the "play" of one character's "truths" against another's, and the revealing "play" between language and action. Three categories of myth function become visible: moribund, living, and fictive. Shakespeare often demonstrates the thrust of the living myth by drawing upon aspects of moribund myth in literary conventions, informing allusions, folklore, and source materials; he then provides a counterthrust at cultural assumptions through the language of defamiliarization--often spoken by his fool figures. He explodes the fictive myth--our "willing suspension of disbelief"--by self-reflexive language which upsets our illusionary sense of control over language and human destiny. Reading Cycle Process analysis is part of this study: the dramatist's sources, his written texts, and the reader's response to those texts reveal "hot spots" of language--resonating psychosexual-psychosocial keys to shared human experience seldom directly articulated. Chapter one introduces myth and language acquisition theory involving Lacan's important differentiation between the imaging and symbolic stages of human development, including pertinent concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss, and the Russian Formalists. The remaining five chapters focus upon living myths still viable today: Twelfth Night and the myth of corporeal immortality, Romeo and Juliet and the myth of law and order, Titus Andronicus and the myth of the "white goddess-destructive mother," and King Lear and the myth of the parent-child relationship. Language as a determiner of human realities may appear a modern apprehension, but this study reveals Shakespeare's acute awareness of this phenomenon as he structures his texts to illuminate both destructive and sustaining illusions in Western culture.

Based on the primary assumption that Spenser's poetic imagery is indissolubly united to his conceptual meaning and that neither imagery nor meaning can be properly understood apart from each other nor apart from the poet's stated didactic intention, this study examines the resonances of the lion imagery (i.e., its visual rhyme) and the resonances of the meanings implicit in that imagery (its conceptual rhyme) in order to demonstrate that the unity of those resonances consistently reflects, in little, the architectonic unity of The Faerie Queene. The function of the lion imagery in the minor poems lays the conceptual groundwork for Spenser's use of the lion as an icon for justice and love in his epic, where the image's concentrated significance can be exfoliated by ordered reference to the four traditional levels of allegory (literal, allegorical or mytho-historical, moral, and anagogical) and to the three literary traditions of Classical Antiquity, Christianity, and Romance. By virtue of its commonplace identity as the king of beasts and as the heraldic device of British monarchy, the lion image is a succinct embodiment of the royal metaphor which informs so much of The Faerie Queene's mytho-historical allusiveness and which furnishes secular analogues to the sacred meaning associated with the Lion of Judah, the metaphoric image of Christ which arcs over scripture from Genesis to Revelation and epitomizes the entire purport of biblical narrative. An accurate interpretation of Una's literal lion, of Redcrosse as Spenser's recasting of medieval literature's Knight of the Lion, and of Britomart, Redcrosse's feminine counterpart, depends upon these secular and sacred allusions, as do the significances emblematized in Cambina and Mercilla. During the epic's progress the many allegorical resonances sounded by the lion image are gradually consolidated by repetition and suggestion and eventually apotheosized in the leonine Dame Nature of Arlo Hill. By focusing on the simple and clear surface of the lion imagery, this study demonstrates that the allegorical similitudes connoted by that simple and clear surface display a complex but ultimately unambiguous correspondence with The Faerie Queene's chief intellectual and thematic concerns.

The Romantic emphasis on individual feelings posited the heroic figure as a person who attempts to make the world adapt itself to his sense of interior identity. An examination of Charles Dickens' life and art suggests that he distrusted the Romantic hero. Dickens gives his villains strong wills and rigid identities. He creates other characters who, while not truly villains, are in error because they want to limit relationships to shared identity with one other who is viewed as an extension of the self. His virtuous characters see all identity as relational; passive and affectless, they have little sense of self as inner being. Dickens' three basic character types are splits of their creator's own personality. The author was at his best when he could achieve loss of self identity in work, in the theater, or in relationships with groups of people. When most of his identity was shared with one other who became an alter-ego, Dickens was manipulative and autocratic. In his roles as husband, father, and businessman where maintaining a rigid self image was of paramount importance, his behavior was tyrannical, insensitive, even unethical. Four Dickens novels contain normative figures who have little sense of self as interior. Tom Pinch of Martin Chuzzlewit is a prime example of a virtuous, other-directed character. Both Young and Old Martin go through a series of misadventures until they learn, partially from Tom's example, that relationships are more important than self image. In David Copperfield, David is influenced to shift identity to meet the needs of others by the examples of Agnes and Traddles, both passive characters. He also loses some sense of consistent identity in the process of narrating his life story. Outerdirected, affectless characters in the world of Little Dorrit must engage in productive work in order to be happy and escape the clutches of a Society which demands an unyielding image of identity and position from everyone. Pip of Great Expectations, more than any other character, comes to conscious rejection of the Romantic idea that identity emanates from an inner self rather than being acquired through relationships with others.

As imaginatively inviting as The Tempest is, it retains significance in a parable-like manner. The import of Prospero's project is not as manifest as might first be thought. What Shakespeare Romantically dramatizes is man's ongoing attempt to conceive himself as a relational existence. Formally, Shakespeare stages the parabolic mystery of medial man. Historically, he supplies basic imaginative terms for subsequent approaches to the mystery. In examining Shakespeare's precedent along with Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" and W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror, we come to appreciate the vitality and importance of the Tempest legacy. Shakespearean Romance develops the dialectic potential of pastoral tragicomedy. In The Tempest that potential is realized in concentrated form, as antithetical concepts enter into active exchange across the middle earth of human placement. Poised between the exegetical dialectic of St. Augustine's confessional manner, and the existential dialectic of Soren Kierkegaard's philosophy, the Tempest's vision balances faith and skepticism, concern for authority and acceptance of nescience. "Caliban upon Setebos" is also carefully poised; in the arrested dialectic of its natural speaker we may glimpse the satirically deflected hesitancies of a poet uncomfortable with contemporary positivist enthusiasms. While Browning throughout the 1860's seems to tend toward an equivocation of his Christian faith in human mediacy, Auden in the early 1940's draws on The Tempest to express his emerging conviction of the necessary in the possible, and the self's relational fullness. Among the three works is intimated a middle way between idolatrous superstition and despairing agnosticism, a ground between angry sky and insensate sea. A distinguishing feature of Tempest-related works is the cultivation of a contemporary sense of human proportion. The variety of imaginative experience subsumed within this group might be traced between Milton and Eliot, Pope and Pynchon, Coleridge and Beckett. In a broad perspective, the East-West axis traversing the Tempest complex balances the interchanges between Europe and the American New World against those between Europe and the Levantine/classical Old World. A dialectically indrawn coda to Shakespeare's career, The Tempest is an influential precedent for the wedding of formalist and historicist impulses.

The Revolt of Islam, Shelley's longest and most neglected major work, contains some of his most rigorous thinking on the subject of revolution, as well as showing a substantial growth in poetic skill. This poem shows Shelley's empiricism, relentlessly examines the consequences of "reform" as well as tyranny, and is the transition between his earlier works and the great poems which would follow. Shelley wished The Revolt to appeal "to the common sympathies of every human breast," emphasizing both that his readers share important concerns and that he directs his poem primarily to their hearts. Both his desire to write for society, to converse with a readership rather than dictate to a coterie, and his belief--in accord with Hume--that the will is motivated by emotions, show Shelley's inheritance from the eighteenth century. Those few critics who have studied The Revolt have usually seen it as a simple chronicle of the war between Good, as represented by the revolutionaries, Laon and Cythna, and Evil, as appearing in the Tyrant and the Iberian Priest. While such a paradigm is indeed established in the allegorical opening Canto, I argue that as the poem progresses this facile dualism disintegrates. Even the protagonists are potential tyrants; Laon's contradictory language and Cythna's elevation as High Priestess of Equality demonstrate that revolution cannot be achieved instantly, finally, or easily, for evil derives not from external circumstance alone, but also from each man's potential "dark idolatry of self." Another important aspect of The Revolt is the personal immortality achieved by Laon and Cythna after their martyrdom. A seeming anomaly in a skeptical poem which consistently attacks Christianity, and indeed all organized religion, the Paradise of the concluding Canto is actually not an unreal or mystical state but the culmination of the poem's empiricism. Finally, this poem occupies a crucial place in Shelley's poetic development. Written after Queen Mab and before Prometheus Unbound, The Revolt is the link between them, in technique as well as content, for the dogmatic, declamatory style of earlier works gives way to narrative and conversation, and Necessity as the instrument of social change is replaced the individual will. In The Revolt Shelley found his mature voice, and his subject and conclusions here, the philosophy of reform, persist throughout his career.

The works of the Gawain-poet have been examined for traces of French influence, of Celtic influence, and of Latin influence; they have not been systematically examined for that influence which was closer to home for the poet, Anglo-Saxon influence. Yet the poet's word choice and diction indicate a pervasive Anglo-Saxon influence, possibly reflecting the poet's knowledge of the language of the past, or possibly reflecting an extensive vocabulary in the vernacular which was heavily rooted in the Anglo-Saxon but which has not been preserved in manuscript. In Cleanness, the poet uses concepts which indicate his familiarity with an Anglo-Saxon biblical tradition. In Patience, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet's word choice indicates a closer lexical indebtedness to the Anglo-Saxon parent language than has been heretofore examined. The poet does use words which are a traditional part of the "word-hoard" available to the alliterative poet. He also uses, however, words which are unique to him or words which appear for the first time in Middle English in this manuscript. Several of these words have homophones in Anglo-Saxon which point to possible double meanings not previously recognized. The poet's Anglo-Saxon word choice lends a coloring of the comitatus to his works. Noah, Abraham, and Lot can be viewed as ideal thegns, whereas Jonah can be viewed as a failed thegn. The Pearl-maiden can be viewed as a peace-weaver, mediating between her former earthly lord and her new heavenly Lord. The poet's word choice lends to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight faint epic tones reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf. An Anglo-Saxon dimension is just one more of the many dimensions to be examined in this extremely complex poetry. The poet's Northwest Midland dialect, relatively unadulterated by contact with the court of William the Conqueror, is closer to the Northumbrian ancestor dialect than other regions which had been heavily influenced by the French, so this Anglo-Saxon dimension should not be ignored.

Woolf's Victorian background made her ambivalent towards the external world of time, place, history, society, physical phenomena, and language. The Victorian Age stressed factualism, time, and place, embracing society and rejecting individuality, emotion, and aestheticism. Woolf's father enforced these values; her mother added traditional feminity, physical beauty, and social role-playing. Woolf's Modernist novels rebel against this heritage but also demonstrate her attraction to it. Her English novel criticism concentrates upon empirical facts, society and communication. Her novels are shaped by a dynamic of rebellion against, and return to, the external world. Time and place, especially setting, enforce this opposition. Characters rebel against society and language, discovering consciousness, self-definition, and "moments" of communication. But such ephemeral moments demand a disjunction from society allied with self-diffusion and death. Thus the characters return to civilization: the limited communication of society is all that exists in the external world. Woolf's novels structurally rebel and return to externality: her experimentation departs from traditional genres; characters are defined through social relations; her novels end with gestures of completion. Language and characters metafictionally expresses her ambivalence towards language; she distrusts its conventional limitations, but she uses it to communicate. Woolf's first five novels demonstrate her development towards a form expressing her ambivalence. The Voyage Out and Night and Day pose the themes of rebellion and return and the discovery of the inner world, but they employ traditional structures. Jacob's Room demonstrates the failure of traditional novels and heroes; nevertheless the narrator demonstrates the importance of society, language, and communication. Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse are mirror-images of Woolf's attitude towards externality. Mrs. Dalloway depicts an external culture; Clarissa vacillates between her isolated present and the communication of memory. She unifies her worlds at her party, and Woolf reiterates this unity in her own language. To The Lighthouse evokes an internalized, timeless milieu. Nevertheless, island and sea settings objectify opposite worlds, and Mrs. Ramsay creates her moment of communication through social conventions and language. Lily transforms that moment into art by communicating with Mr. Ramsay. Woolf's language expresses her own uncertainties about communication and the creative power of externality.

The purpose of this dissertation is to discuss the theme of Synagogue, Ecclesia, and the Whore of Babylon in order to provide iconographic background for Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. The first chapter traces the iconographical development of this theme from its beginning through ivory carvings and manuscript illuminations. Special attention is also given to the scriptural and patristic basis of this theme. The second chapter discusses Dante's use of this theme in the final cantos of the Purgatorio in which Dante the pilgrim sees a Pageant of the Church which is transformed into a vision of the Whore of Babylon. In this chapter, Dante's poetry is compared to the iconography of the north porch of Chartres Cathedral which also deals with the themes of the Old and New Covenants and the Active and Contemplative Lives. Chapter three discusses the figure of Chaucer's Wife of Bath in relation to this iconography, and a special comparison is made to the imagery of the typological windows which once decorated Canterbury Cathedral. The Wife of Bath, who is described in imagery which recalls Synagogue and the Whore of Babylon, tells the story of a loathly hag who is transformed into a beautiful queen. Thus, a Synagogue-Whore of Babylon figure tells the tale of a Synagogue figure who is revealed as Ecclesia. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion of Spenser since, by the time of the Reformation, artists and poets were no longer interested in the contrast between Synagogue and Ecclesia, but between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

While Milton's ambivalence towards myth has been attributed to pagan-Christian tension or to pressure from a utilitarian culture, I argue that his poetical struggle with Orpheus the enchanting bard is equally political. His attraction to the divinely gifted singer, evident in his juvenilia, was tempered by the need to take account of the myth's royalist currency as a figure for the ordering power of monarchy. The court masque epitomized an art of Orphic enchantment designed to spellbind the audience - an art antithetical to Milton's quest for a collaborative readership empowered to choose citizenship over subjection. Growing dissident under Charles I, he rejected this royalist art of mastery along with the traditional union of bard and king. Milton used Ovidian irony to reposition Orpheus within a dialogical poetics of engagement that might inspire readers to realize their god-given freedom. / I trace the development of Milton's poetics to show that, in search of a mutually beneficial relation between artists and audiences, governors and peoples, his poetry weighs Orphic enchantment against more dialogical models. I demonstrate how the more secular poems link the pursuit of Orphic art to escapism and question the passivity of the enchanted audience, implying that we open ourselves all too readily to political subjection. Milton takes on royalist art by gesturing towards a poetics that awakens others to social action. I further argue that the sacred poems harness the Christian concept of trial to such an anti-authoritarian poetics, delving more deeply into the temptations of Orphic power and the problem at their heart: why do we so often prefer enchantment to engagement, too often deserve subjection for failing to earn citizenship? While the poems affirm that art can serve engagement, they warn that Orphic temptations such as nostalgia and melancholy may arrest development and encourage disengagement. Milton builds his epic and his God alike on the levelling model of dialogue. The freedom fostered by that model is fragile, but engaging in debate gives us a taste for the choosing that it requires, stimulating the desire to exercise our free will further. The dialogue through which we flourish as reasoners and choosers demands both chutzpah and humility. The "skilfull and laborious gatherer[s]" expected in Milton's prose become the engaged and collaborative readers for whom his poetry calls by refusing merely to enchant us. / Tandis que l'ambivalence de Milton envers le mythe a été attribuée ou à la tension entre les traditions païenne et chrétienne ou à la pression d'une culture utilitaire, je soutiens que sa lutte poétique contre Orphée le barde enchanteur est également politique. Son admiration pour le chanteur divinement doué, évidente dans ses oeuvres de jeunesse, était tempérée par le besoin de tenir compte du crédit dans le milieu royaliste du mythe comme symbole du pouvoir ordinateur de la monarchie. Le masque de la cour a exemplifié un art d'enchantement orphique destiné à envoûter le public - un art antithétique à la quête de Milton d'un lectorat participant prêt à choisir la citoyenneté plutôt que la subjugation. En devenant dissident sous Charles Ier, il a rejeté cet art royaliste de la domination ainsi que l'union traditionnelle du poète et du roi. Milton a employé l'ironie ovidienne pour replacer Orphée dans une poétique dialogique d'engagement qui pourrait inspirer ses lecteurs à réaliser leur liberté, donnée par Dieu. / Je suis le développement de la poétique de Milton pour montrer comment, à la recherche d'une relation mutuellement bénéfique entre les artistes et les publics, les gouverneurs et les peuples, sa poésie évalue l'enchantement orphique par rapport à des modèles plus dialogiques. Je démontre que les poèmes plus séculiers lient la poursuite de l'art orphique à l'évasion et mettent en question la passivité des enchantés, en suggérant que nous nous exposons bien trop volontiers à la subjugation politique. Milton affronte l'art royaliste en signalant une poétique qui incite les autres à l'action sociale. Je soutiens en plus que les poèmes sacrés exploitent le concept chrétien de l'épreuve pour cette poétique antiautoritaire, en fouillant plus profondément les tentations du pouvoir orphique et le problème à leur base: pourquoi préférons-nous si souvent l'enchantement à l'engagement, pourquoi méritons-nous trop souvent la subjugation en ne réussissant pas à gagner la citoyenneté? Alors que les poèmes affirment que l'art peut servir l'engagement, ils avertissent que les tentations orphiques telles que la nostalgie et la mélancolie risquent d'arrêter le développement et de favoriser le désengagement. Milton construit son épopée et son Dieu d'après le modèle égalisateur du dialogue. La liberté favorisée par ce modèle est fragile, mais nous lancer dans le débat nous donne le goût de faire les choix que le débat nécessite, en stimulant notre désir d'exercer encore notre libre arbitre. Le dialogue qui nourrit nos capacités de raisonner et de choisir exige du culot ainsi que de l'humilité. Les « skilfull and laborious gatherer[s] » attendus dans la prose de Milton deviennent les lecteurs engagés et participants que sa poésie réclame en refusant simplement de nous enchanter.