Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis--Cologne. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [175]-185) and index.

Originally published as the author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1935. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Nancy Armstrong. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210- 228).

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Rosemary J. Mundhenk.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Beth Dolan.

Bourgeois Heroics analyzes the increasing influence of an emergent middle class upon literary production, demonstrating a growing cultural trend away from an heroism associated with moral fortitude and noble birth (embodied in contemporary notions of the "courtier") towards one characterized by responsible economic policy and household management. This cultural shift, I contend, reflects the demands of a bourgeois identity deeply invested in commercial success. My research delves into Tudor economic, religious, and political documents to uncover the ways in which bourgeois insecurities and anxieties about financial and moral failure are displaced onto a series of imaginary threats, such as commodities, women, and institutions that resist the control of the market place. Fusing materialist and psychoanalytic approaches, I argue that these specifically mercantile fears have left their literary traces and given shape to a unique form of heroism, one that in its literary representations reflects back upon the values of the middle class, assuages commercial anxieties, and ultimately validates a bourgeois identity.

Deviant Bodies explores how post-Reformation anxieties about institutional politics, civic morality, and national boundaries inform--and are informed by--early modern discourses on sexual deviance. Focusing on works by John Bale, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, James I, Thomas Carew, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, my study argues that the disruptive presence of queer desire plays an integral role in shaping the emerging, interrelated discourses of heterosexuality and nationalism in early modern culture. Looking at heterosexuality as a complex structure organizing political and sexual relations, my project analyzes the production, circulation, and eradication of deviant sexuality in polemical and literary works that imagine the nation within the context of Protestant political reform. Through its analysis of the textual roots of early English nationalism, Deviant Bodies reveals the extent to which cultural representations of the nation are constituted through sexual deviance. Rather than focusing on the recovery of an essentialist or constructed notion of a "queer" early modern self, however, my study examines the mechanisms of the early modern state--the monarchy, the church, the judiciary, and the parliament--that imagine the existence of sexually deviant individuals or groups. To that end, my study focuses not simply on the historical and literary representation of same-gender sexual desires, acts, or relationships, but rather on the complex relationship of such representations to the institutions that first produce and later obliterate them. Deviant Bodies examines the relationship of sexual aberrance to other categories of cultural deviance with which it is frequently conflated: gender insubordination, religious transgression, and the abuses of political authority most frequently associated with kingship. Through its exploration of the cultural deviance associated with women, papists, and kings in early modern England, this study considers the ways that the nation depends on a complex ideology of deviance in order to constructs its own seemingly immutable borders.

The purpose of this dissertation is to create a word list of male and female speech in those Old English narrative poems which contain dialogue, to use as a reference in determining what, if any, differences existed between the way male Anglo-Saxon poets constructed speech for their male and female characters. Using a specifically designed computer program and an on-line text of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, I electronically tagged those lines assigned to male characters, and then those assigned to female speakers, to generate two separate word lists. I eliminated all immortal speech (God, angels, demons), and all proper nouns as not germane to a study of male and female speech patterns. After I created the raw word lists, I parsed each individual word, and placed it under the appropriate headword. I further classified nouns, adjectives and pronouns according to case and number, and verbs according to person, number, tense and mood. In addition to the word lists, the dissertation includes a critical introduction, and a brief analysis of differences between male and female speech patterns in selected poems.

John Milton's Italian sonnets are more significant than they are generally thought to be. In spite of attempts to revive interest in them, they are among the poet's least valued works. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that the practices of publishing the sonnets out of their original order and including English translations along side of the original Italian alter readings of the sonnets by altering their context. These practices are largely responsible for the sonnets' poor reception. In addition to being altered by editorial practices and translations, the context in which the sonnets are received has been altered by changing views about Milton's biography. The present study, therefore, also involves an examination of the way biographical studies can affect interpretation. Reading the poems in their original order and considering their arrangement as purposeful and artistic expands the possibilities for interpretation. My particular reading of the sonnet sequence reveals Milton's self-conscious, retrospective portrayal of a rite of passage in which he prepares to assume a mature and public role. The sonnets show that new understandings of religious and secular love motivate the poet to represent his views in a public form. In his presentation and arrangement of Sonnets 1-7, the poet translates personal conflict into social and political action, and he uses the interplay of tbe English and Italian languages and traditions to dramatize his relationship and responsibility to his native land and the world at large.