This project begins by examining current trends in the study of medieval literature, particularly in the area of medieval literature dealing with religious conflict. Literary review demonstrates that since the late 20th century, critical examination of medieval literature has been dominated by postcolonial analyses. A dedication to postcolonial analyses, in effect, has stagnated the field of medieval literary analysis, particularly in regard to those texts representing religious differences. By focusing examination on two seminal medieval texts, "The Prioress's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Song of Roland, this dissertation argues that traditional, postcolonially-inspired analyses are ineffective and inconsequential for modern, post-9/11 audiences, particularly high school students. More substantial and authentic readings are revealed through an application of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's monster theory, a hypothesis articulated in his essay "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" (1996) which, when coupled with conventionally psychoanalytic concepts of psychical reality and jouissance, reveals that the cultural creation of monsters is unchanging across time and culture. By illustrating this phenomenon through the Christian creation of Jewish and Muslim monsters, through literary examinations of "The Prioress's Tale" and Song of Roland respectively, this project hints that the same cultural forces feeding monster creation in the Middle Ages are alive in our modern age in the creation of terrorist monsters. The project culminates by arguing that the most effective way to teach literature of the Middle Ages to post-9/11 students is to focus on literature ripe with religious conflict in order to tap into affective connections to be found between modern students and the people of the Middle Ages. This is a bond best forged through a discussion-driven approach to literary instruction. / A future for medieval studies -- Monster Jews in the creation of the Christian psychical reality -- The necessity of Saracen monsters in the formation of the Christian self -- The future of medieval studies : teaching The prioress's tale and Song of Roland in contemporary high school classrooms. / Department of English

The focus of this thesis is to trace the dialogue between the Greek cinéma d' auteur and Greek literature focusing on film adaptations of Greek literature from 1964 to 2001. It is argued that film adaptations are a sensitive prism through which to examine the auteurs’ cultural politics regarding their work and, through that, understand the economy of the auteurist cultural production itself. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One presents the history of the creation of the Greek cinéma d' auteur and traces its developments in relation to the concepts of national and high art. The principle argument is that Greek literature, endowed with notions of high art and national identity, played a key role in the gradual emergence, formation and consolidation of auteurism as a cinema that enunciates national identity and articulates high art values. The next four chapters examine four film adaptations each made by an acclaimed auteur. The chapters endeavour to investigate the identity politics of each director in relation to the categories of high and national art that defined the Greek cinéma d' auteur. Moreover, the chapters aim to study the politics involved in the validation or renegotiation of auteurism itself. The major contribution of the thesis is the exploration of film adaptations of Greek literature in the Greek cinéma d' auteur which has not been systematically discussed so far. Furthermore, the investigation of the two separate components that make up the subject of the thesis, namely cinema and literature, both from a theoretical perspective and within the framework of film studies, aligns the thesis with recent discussions in Modern Greek Studies and theoretical debates about authorship in films, film adaptations as well as peripheral cinemas.

This thesis names the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature as arising from the educational milieu of the University of Oxford’s English School during the mid-twentieth century. It argues that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis lay the foundations for the children’s fantasy genre by introducing an English curriculum at Oxford in 1931 (first examined 1933) that required extensive study in medieval literature, and by modelling the use of medieval source material in their own popular children’s fantasy works. The Oxford School’s creative use of its sources produces medieval ‘afterlives,’ lending the Middle Ages new relevance in popular culture. This research directly compares medieval literature to children’s fantasy works by Tolkien, Lewis, and four other Oxford-educated children’s fantasy authors in order to reveal the genre’s debt to actual medieval texts and to the Oxford English syllabus in particular. The four authors are Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman. This thesis situates the tendencies of medievalised children’s fantasy in relation to Lewis and Tolkien’s personal and scholarly convictions about the patriotic, moral, and aesthetic qualities of medieval literature and folklore. Building on the theories of Michel de Certeau, this thesis demonstrates how Oxford School fantasy produces new mythologies for England and argues that, as children’s literature, these works have an implicit didactic function that echoes that of the English School curriculum. This thesis traces the attempts of some Oxford School authors to navigate or explode generic conventions by drawing upon new source material, and contends that the structures and hierarchies that underpin the genre reassert themselves even in texts that set out to refute them. It suggests that such returns to the norm can produce pleasure and invite diverse reading, growing out of the intertextual associations of each new rewriting.

The present thesis examines the way E.M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Joseph Brodsky, and James Merrill appropriated C.P. Cavafy in writings that were disseminated and consumed amongst culturally dominant literary circles, and which eventually determined the Greek-Alexandrian poet’s international reputation. I aim to contribute a new perspective on Cavafy, by evading the text-based tradition of reception studies, and proposing an alternative method of discussing the production of Cavafy's canonical status. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory, I view literary canonization as involving a variety of factors at play beyond creative achievement: in particular, relationships of 'authorial consecration' whereby writers create and circulate cultural capital through their power to legitimize other artists. The critical and fictional texts I analyse perform readings of Cavafy's poetry alongside imaginative portrayals of the poet's life and personality. I take this complementary relationship - between the image of the poet each author projects and their reading of his work - as a starting point to explore the broader ideas of aesthetics and authorial subjectivity that inform the renderings of Cavafy generated by prominent literary figures. Rather than passive recipients of influence, these figures are considered as active agents in the production of 'Cavafy narratives', appropriating the poet according to their own agendas, while also projecting onto him their own position within the cultural field. Eventually, Cavafy becomes a point of insight into the multiplicity of networks and practices involved in the production of cultural currency; in turn, the study of the construction of Cavafy's authorial identity sheds light on the cumulative processes that have defined the way the poet is read and perceived to the present day. This duality of perspective is essential to a study concerned with the cultural contexts framing the poet's steady rise to international fame throughout the 20th century.

This thesis investigates the narrative models in Dante's Commedia with the aim of opening up the poem to alternatives to the dominant narrative embedded in the text, which it terms Dante's masterplot. This is the teleological trajectory which allows the poet to subjugate earlier works or earlier parts of the poem to the revisionist gaze of its endpoint. The thesis analyses the masterplot's workings in the text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia. It then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly, which are enacted by (i) paradoxes, (ii) alternative endings and parallel lives; and (iii) the future. Paradoxes are used to neutralise the teleological hierarchy and thus allow Dante to represent contradictory ideas and experiences in the temporal medium of language. Through counterfactuals and twin episodes, Dante establishes in his poem a number of storylines that detour from and run parallel to the main narrative; this allows him to make room for an affective space within the text, which suspends narrative necessity and moral normativity. The future tense poses a problem case for the masterplot in that it indefinitely postpones the endpoint on which teleology relies, and thus exposes the poem, and its author's, vulnerability to time and circumstance. By focusing on non-linear modes of storytelling, the thesis questions interpretations of the Commedia that favour one normative master-truth, and highlights instead the manifold poetic, theological and ethical tensions which, due to the masterplot's influence, are often overlooked. The thesis concludes with a proposal that, alongside the traditional notions of Dante's characteristic plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can and should come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

The Political Aesthetic of the Medieval Persian Prison Poem, 1100-1200 traces the dissemination of the medieval Persian prison poem (habsiyyat) from South Asia to the Caucasus in the context of the contemporaneous developments in literary and political theory that shaped this genre. Varying attitudes towards figuration in Persian literary criticism are examined in terms of an aesthetics of incarceration that, I argue, extended the political boundaries of medieval Persian literary culture. Drawing on the pioneering works of Zafari (1985) and Akimushkina (2006), I elucidate the prison poem's strategies for making the medieval experience of incarceration available to literary representation. In documenting the dialectic between the sultan's material power and the poet's discursive sovereignty, I show how medieval Persian prison poetry critically engaged with medieval punitive practices. Ultimately, this dissertation traces the relation between the increased use of incarceration as a mode of punishment by regional sultanates and the discursive elevation of poetry that is Persian literature's greatest contribution to world literature. Concomitantly with investigating the twelfth-century aesthetics of incarceration, this dissertation documents how twelfth-century Persian poetry was transformed by idioms of literary knowledge articulated through a Persianized Arabo-Islamic rhetoric. Exegeses of specific prison poems by Mas'ud Sa'd Salman of Lahore (d. 1121), Khaqani Shirwani (d. 1199), and of other prison poets from these regions, are offered alongside documentary explorations into the status of non-Muslim minorities in Saljuq domains, the transformation of a predominantly panegyric genre into an instrument of political critique, and demonstrate the political importance of the habsiyyat to the historiography of incarceration as well as of Persian literature. By examining the literary archive of incarceration from Lahore in South Asia to Shirwan in the Caucasus, this study aims to expand the scope of investigations into the aesthetics of power as registered by literary form, to extend the temporal dimensions of the historiography of incarceration, and to contribute to classical Persian literary theory's conceptualization of genre. Chapter one offers a synoptic and global history of incarceration in the medieval world. Chapter two considers what the prison poem as a genre has to offer global literary theory. Chapter three studies the complex modulation of the qasida form through the prison poem's emphasis on the poet's lyric subjectivity. Chapter four traces the appropriation of the motifs of prophecy by Persian prison poets who aspired for a sovereignty that exceeding the boundaries of material power. Chapter five offers detailed exegeses of the two most significant texts in the medieval Persian archive of incarceration: Khaqani's Christian qasida and his qasida on the ruins of Mada'in. Chapter six documents the devolution of authority onto prison poetry and the reconstitution of material power through discursive sovereignty. Collectively, these chapters show that, just as medieval Persian prison poets protested the terms of their social contracts and thus suffered imprisonment, so did the prison poem genre contest the distribution of sovereignty in the medieval world by transferring prophecy, and prophecy's concomitant authority, to the poet.

Cecco d'Ascoli (1269?-1327), was burned at the stake in Florence as a heretic on 16 September, 1327. The Inquisitor also set aflame his texts: a Latin textbook on astronomy and Acerba, a 4867 verse "scientific epic" written in his particular Italian vernacular. The Inquisitor also banned the possession of either text on pain of excommunication. Despite the ban, the texts survived and even flourished. However, Acerba never engaged the public to the extent that the tragedy suffered by the text's author has. For almost seven hundred years, this "anti-Comedy" has gone largely uninterrupted due to the difficulty of the language, an enigmatic hybrid of several vernaculars, and due to the difficulty of the content, technical medieval science written in verse by an author habituated to syncopating his arguments for a university audience familiar with the material. In this dissertation, I provide a reading of the two most difficult chapters, Acerba I.i and I.ii, where Cecco sets forth his system of "applied astrology" that serves as a General Unifying Theorem to explain all phenomena in the cosmos. In Acerba, Cecco presents a cosmos bound tightly together by principles of interactions that I term "applied astrology", his Grand Unifying Theorem that unites God, angels and humanity. Just as twentieth and now twenty-first century physics tries to find a "Theory of Everything" that can account for both quantum mechanics and general relativity, theories that seem mutually exclusive, Cecco's intellectual goal was to unite a theory of causative astral influences and independent human intellects. The crux of the problem is this: if we believe that astral influences alter earthly life, how can we claim that we, as humans, are independent agents? Cecco wants to account for astral influences, which he sees as a link between man and God, and save free will, and this forms the base of his ethical theories expounded throughout Acerba but especially in Acerba I.i and I.ii. These chapters are thus key to understanding the entire work. To arrive at an understanding Acerba requires a summation of Cecco's life, an understanding of the intellectual and cultural stakes in his work and a thorough knowledge of his scholastic commentaries in Latin. These, written specifically to make medieval astronomy comprehensible to fourteenth-century undergraduates, are a clear prose exposition of the same "system of everything" that he sets out in Acerba. Before I approach the poem, I will review the content of his Latin prose. Once the basic features of his applied-astrological system are understood, we will then be in a position to understand this notoriously difficult text and examine the merits of Cecco's solution to the problem of free will and material determinism.

This dissertation aims to show that the Commedia develops an original and coherent philosophy of human nature. Deploying the methodologies of two separate disciplines, the history of philosophy and literary criticism, it places the poem’s ideas in the intellectual context in which they developed, and analyzes the learnedness, freshness and validity of its conclusions. The topic is divided in three themes, discussed in the same number of chapters: 1) Love and desire. After following Arendt in tracing a tension in Augustine’s works between the theological primordiality of dilectio Dei and the biblically endorsed importance of love for one’s neighbor, I argue that the Commedia develops a concept of social charity that seeks to reconcile that seminal Christian paradox. 2) Free will. Based on a study of the theory of free will advanced by Purgatorio and Paradiso, I advance the idea that Dante’s metaphysics and psychology of human freedom, particularly in regards to his description of the workings of absolute and relative will, contrast in a fundamental way with Aquinas’ in the Appendix of the Summa theologica; and based on that conclusion, and on an analysis of the example of Piccarda Donati, it is possible to conclude that the Commedia not only postulates a hierarchy of volitions as a necessary condition for human freedom, but also defines free will as the ability to formulate a self-forming action. 3) Body and soul. Based on the account of the creation of the universe found in Paradiso XXIX, I argue that the Commedia’s cosmos is strictly hylomorphic, and postulate that this theory also applies to the relationship between body and soul. Thus the transumanar depicted by the last canticle, far from a rejection of worldly existence, rather implies a reencounter with those inalienably human characteristics, but on a higher plane.

On Violence and Tyranny examines historiography as a vehicle for the production of a theory of tyrannicide in the aftermath of the murder of Pedro I de Castilla (1369). The thesis of this work is that by considering the royal chronicle as a vehicle and locus for political theorization, we can appreciate the formulation of a theory of tyrannicide as a medium for dynastic legitimation that is not reducible to political propaganda. Rather, it becomes a meditation about monarchy itself, the limits of power, and the underlying causes and consequences of political violence. The chronicle of the king Pedro's rule conceives an economy of violence coded in terms of saber (political wisdom), justice and the law, as a means to face the ideological, political, and social challenges that civil war and regicide pose to a community. I will focus on two fragments of the chronicle, a pair of letters attributed to a wise Moor that the chronicler chose to include in a second stage of his composition and that establish extra textual connections to other political genres such as the specula principum and political prophecy. Through them, I will explore how a theory of tyrannicide allows the chronicler to confront three major problems that regicide poses. First, how to explicate the dynastic break that king Pedro’s murder brought about, and minimize the discontinuity that the advent of a new, and illegitimate, dynasty (the Trastámaras) represented for a historical tradition that deeply valued the continuity of history. Second, how a theory of tyrannicide served to repair the broken ties provoked by the civil war. And third, how to represent that founding violence, the violence against a sovereign, to render it legitimate, but not available for anyone else to exploit.

This dissertation analyzes the function of animal speakers in political poetry by William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower, and it claims that late fourteenth-century poets describe the marginalized voices of emerging politicians by using animal expressions and noises. These writers invent a playful yet earnest poetics of acknowledgment in comparing politicians’ calls to animal cries. In unveiling novel interpretations of Langland’s mouse, Chaucer’s goose, and Gower’s jay, I argue that the speeches of animals contribute to significant argumentative strains within several late fourteenth-century poems, which remain obscure if the reader ignores the signal contribution of the animal. Finally, I study the use of animal speech in the Lancastrian poem, Richard the Redeless, to understand the ways in which the anti-Ricardian regime appropriated this malleable animal imagery to pursue its own political agenda.