This study argues that early writings for children reflect by their very nature a radical social redirection, since the valuation of children and the state of childhood was the result of cultural upheavals in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which led to the development of a powerful, literate and progressive working class: industrialization, educational reform, Puritanism, evangelicalism, a growing feminist movement and the socioeconomic struggle against poverty and repression. Children's literature was a means for ambitious and reform-minded outsiders--those excluded by class, economics, gender, and religious, political or sexual preferences--to communicate both subversive and optimistic values to succeeding generations who embody society's hopes for the future. / Chapter One reviews social background leading to the formal development of a body of reformative literature written expressly for children in the late eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the influence of subversive Puritan writings, such as those by Nathaniel Crouch and John Bunyan, and the political and economic empowerment of the working classes. Chapter Two examines the subversive nature of early imaginative writing for children, including works by John Newbery and Samuel Johnson's "The Fountains." Chapter Three discusses early writings for children by professional women writers. Works by Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Trimmer are discussed as early examples of a radical reassessment of the significance of three groups of "little people": children, women and the working poor. Chapter Four examines the subversive effects of nineteenth-century works of fairy tale and fantasy such as Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House and John Ruskin's "The King of the Golden River." Chapter Five addresses the usurpation of children's literature as political and social satire by writers like Christina Rossetti and Oscar Wilde, concluding that cultural pessimism and skepticism led to a reactionary conservatism in children's literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Works such as J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy address a static and nostalgic childhood of adult memory rather than the dynamic spiritual and intellectual growth of real childhood. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0822. / Major Professor: Bertram Davis. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Since its initial appearance in 1852, Empedocles on Etna has continued to spark controversy. Now frequently celebrated as Matthew Arnold's most significant poem, Empedocles and its author are recognized as central to the development of the modern literary tradition. This study presents a socio-historical analysis of Empedocles and interpretations of it as an illustration of the process of literary-critical transformation. The primary methodological model is provided by Jerome McGann's The Beauty of Inflections: Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985). As Coleridge did for his Ancient Mariner, Arnold has also "underwritten" the entire interpretive tradition of Empedocles largely through the 1853 "Preface." The study begins with an examination of the original context of Empedocles. The Chapter 1 overview includes information that has been gathered by various critics from the poem's initial publication to the present regarding Arnold, his poem, and his critics during the period immediately preceding the first publication of Empedocles through the response to its 1867 republication. In addition to providing background information pertinent to the poem, Chapter 1 distinguishes between information available to Arnold's contemporaries and later information as it began to circulate in the reading communities. Chapters 2 through 4 categorize twentieth-century studies of Arnold and Empedocles. Chapter 2 examines the critical perception of Arnold's brand of Classicism as well as his ancient sources. Chapter 3 focuses on studies which stress Arnold's and his poem's complex relationship to Romanticism. Post Romanticism, Arnold, and Empedocles are addressed in chapter 4. The final chapter offers a reinterpretation of Empedocles. The study thus reveals the transformations inherent in not only the critical understanding of a particular work and its author, but also in the conception and practice of criticism as well. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-04, Section: A, page: 1369. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Marginal annotation in medieval romance manuscripts| Understanding the contemporary reception of the genre

<p>This dissertation proposes a reading of postcolonial African literature in light of the continent's continued status as a "remnant" of globalization--a waste product, trash heap, disposable raw material, and degraded offcut of the processes that have so greatly enriched, dignified and beautified their beneficiaries. The "excremental" vision of African authors, poets and filmmakers reflects their critical consciousness of the imbalances and injustices that characterize African societies and polities under pressure from monetized capitalism and domestic corruption. The figure of superfluity, excess, destruction or extravagance--concepts gathered together under the sign of "waste"--is a central thematic, symbolic, and formal feature of many postcolonial African works, and I suggest that literature functions in this context to document, critique, and offer alternatives to the culture of waste that predominates in political and social life on the continent. </p><p>The argument covers a range of geographical and historical ground, from the "excremental" preoccupations and stylistics of early postcolonial African fiction, to contemporary South Africa, where political anxieties about the relative superfluity of entire populations to the project of neoliberal development are articulated through the aesthetic challenges of representing the past while remaining open to productive futurity. Through chapters on excremental literature and the politics of allegory; corruption, debt and economy in Senegalese film; magical realism and inflation in Nigeria; and recycling and aesthetics in transitional South Africa, I argue for a reading of postcolonial African fiction as a mode of political ecology, an aesthetics that draws its energies directly from the problem of waste management figured in the works. </p><p>Drawing on theoretical perspectives from Walter Benjamin and postcolonial marxism to poststructuralist literary philosophy, the "new economic criticism," and psychoanalysis, I investigate how African artists themselves make sense of the continent's increasing superfluity to the global economy, its role only as "la poubelle"--the world's trash heap--where toxic waste and excess capital alike are sent to die.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007. / Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 25, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0608. Adviser: Lawrence Clopper.

Thesis (D. Lit.)--University of London. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris, 1926.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 8, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-05, Section: A, page: 1649. Adviser: Barbara Klinger.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1916. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-84).

Originally presented as author's thesis, Würzburg, 1933. / "Literatur (und Abkürzungen)": p. 6.