Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-274).

Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2006.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2000. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis presents a critical edition in modern spelling of The London Prodigal, a comedy played by the King's Men and printed in 1605 by Thomas Creede for the publisher Nathaniel Butter. The title-page (photographically reproduced) attributes the play to William Shakespeare. This claim is assessed and judged to be mistaken. Both external and internal evidence have been examined in relation to eight possible authorship candidates; Thomas Dekker emerges as the strongest. The present text of the play is based on the 1605 Quarto. Collation of twelve copies revealed several press variants. The introduction treats the play's publication and stage-history and takes a critical look at its background and sources, plot and structure, setting, characters, style, themes, and role in the development of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama. An attempt is made to determine the date of composition, as well as the author. A short section is devoted to conjecture about the manuscript copy used for the Quarto and to bibliographical deductions about its treatment in the printing-house. A full commentary glosses obscurities and enlarges on the play's literary, social, and historical allusions. There are textual notes on variants, emendations, and lineation. An appendix reproduces the parable of the Prodigal Son from the 1568 Bishops' Bible. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

Prophet, pamphleteer, and hermit, Roger Crab (c.1616-1680) stands out from the sectarian tumult of mid-seventeenth century London as a zealous religious independent and a noteworthy oppositional figure. This study describes Crab's brief publication career as shaping a "rhetoric of reclusion," identifying in his work the distinct patterns of self-representation intended to free a purportedly divine message from the damaging influences of printers and booksellers, hireling ministers, and even the authorial self. Crab writes against the untoward mediation of his own text, but also against such interference with other sacred text. Beyond reclusion, the hermit's task proves one of reclamation. He seeks through publication and public attestation to reclaim the word of God from wayward church interpretation and from sectarian misappropriation.

Postcolonial theorists tend to read metaphor generally as a trope of power that synthesizes its inherently binary structure of tenor and vehicle to produce totalizing meanings. Although some critics have emphasized the importance of metaphor in postcolonial and Canadian studies, theorists like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak tend to approach metaphor either in exclusively structuralist or in predominantly deconstructivist terms. In contrast to these approaches, this study examines how texts from different postcolonial traditions of writing reconfigure metaphor for political and cultural reasons. It reads metaphor as a trope of cultural crisis that produces contiguous histories and crosscultural identities that contest clearly defined national boundaries. While it is impossible to resist metaphor's self-deconstructive tendencies, this project shows that we can resist and rearticulate its oppressive effects by conceptualizing metaphor's operative modes in performative and postcolonial terms. Performative metaphors generate, while keeping in suspense, the social and psychological constraints that impact on the construction of identity. The cultural significance of performative metaphors lies in their potential to replace the metaphoric binary structure of vehicle and tenor with metaphor's ability to reiterate and destabilize dominant discourses of race, gender, and nationalism. In the context of ethnic Canadian and Caribbean writing, performative metaphors foreground questions of naming, memory, and cultural translation; they also challenge those rhetorical and literary forms through which cultural and national identities are imagined and represented in “authentic” and “original” terms. A performative understanding of metaphor, as developed in this dissertation, articulates an ethical imperative that, first, accounts for the physical and representational violence enacted on the subaltern body and, second, acknowledges the ways in which subaltern subjects produce cultural knowledge with a difference. Methodologically, this study combines feminist theories of performativity with postcolonial theory, Caribbean and Canadian literary criticism. It discusses Judith Butter's theory of performativity in the context of ethnic Canadian historiographical writing, Caribbean performance and epic poetry. A critical examination of texts by Derek Walcott, David Dabydeen, Austin Clarke, M. G. Vassanji, and Sky Lee demonstrates that metaphor is one of the most important tools for a postcolonial critique of identity and nation formation. / Graduate

Poetry, Desire, and Devotional Performance from Shakespeare to Milton, 1609-1667 documents and analyzes the ways post-Reformation devotional and worship practices inflected early modern English poetic conceptions of erotic desire and intimacy. My study focuses on two specific Reformation religious developments—the official Anglican ceremonialism of the state church and the popular Reformed predestinarianism—each of which enjoyed a widespread following during the roughly sixty years bracketed by the lives of Shakespeare and Milton. While religious historians often treat state-sanctioned worship and popular divinity as contradictory or antagonistic, I demonstrate that both cultural arenas reveal one important commonality: each sought to prioritize the body as the most important means for externally verifying inner devotional affect. Whether sanctioned by the state church or only informally practiced, post-Reformation English devotional practices embodied the seventeenth-century’s deep suspicion of outward signs of inner affect—one that that coexisted with an equally powerful impulse to venerate those very outward markers of grace. In a religious culture that regarded outward performance as devotionally suspect, the body and the senses nevertheless remained vital to the way individuals could outwardly demonstrate and interpret their inward affect. I maintain that outward devotional performance did more than provide the material and external scaffolding by which individuals could conceptualize their relationship with God. Moreover, it provided early modern thinkers and poets with a lexicon and a conceptual apparatus for describing and interpreting devotional intention and access within the context of a wide range of earthly entanglements and fleshly negotiations. Most significantly, the religious developments of the English Reformation informed the way poets conceptualized access within decidedly secular, earthly, and erotic relationships—shaping the way English men and women read and interpreted the impulses and desires of both others and themselves. My project examines the role of the body—desired and desiring—at the crossroads of both erotic and devotional life in the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton. In these poems, God, dead wives, standoffish mistresses, exes, whores, homoerotic boy lovers, and even Satan play distinct parts as both antagonists and objects of longing. Within the space of a few decades of the early seventeenth-century century, the absolutism that characterized nearly every aspect of English religious life opened possibilities for thinking about the role of the body in matters both spiritual and secular that emerged not in opposition to, but as a direct result of, the limitations placed on the ways individuals could conceive of and express their most powerful desires. These articulations of devotional longing—whether for earthly lovers or for God—were enabled precisely by the spiritual and psychological constraints posed by the ever tightening restrictions on public worship and prayer. / English

Approaching the poem from the perspective of reception history, the present dissertation seeks to show that the Bible’s role in The Faerie Queene is far more pervasive than has usually been recognized. Rather than see the biblical material as the domain of only certain sections—notably, Book I and perhaps Books II and V—I propose that it is to be seen as a meaningful presence throughout the poem. Indeed, I will argue that it provides a previously unnoticed, unifying structure to the whole. I begin by giving a brief sketch of the Bible in Spenser’s early life. From here, I draw upon the resources of modern biblical scholarship—specifically, Childs’ “canonical approach”—to describe the way Spenser read the Bible and, consequently, the ways in which he alluded to it. I go on to discuss the notions of “typology” and “allegory,” providing the foundation for a discussion of Spenser’s reading not only of the Bible, but of the ongoing narrative of history. Then follows an exploration of the ways Spenser seeks to relate the various legacies of the Classical and biblical past to his Christian, humanist present, which culminates in a description of the Christian canon’s structuring role within the poem. This leads to a reflection on this structure’s significance through consideration of the various instances of books and of reading that occur in Book I. I then take up this theme again in Book III, in the transformation of Malbecco and in the idolatrous Tabernacle-Temple of Busirane. Drawing upon the early modern discourse concerning images and idols, I conclude with a discussion of The Faerie Queene as a unified, poetic sign pointing to the Divine Presence—a function typified in the discarded ending of Book III.

This thesis is made up of two parts: a critical essay (I) and (II) an original epic length screenplay – 210 pages script plus fifteen pages appendix. The critical essay contains a short essay on The Yin-Yang Creative Writing Art pieces which are part of the screenplay. I term creative writing art, art pieces which use only written characters and codified symbols to visually render new artistic impressions. The screenplay brings to a contemporary audience the life of Louis Bachelier (1870-1946), the first mathematician (French) to use modern mathematics to describe the behavior of financial markets. It lets unfold the prejudices and struggles he had to overcome, as viewed in our time by a young black mathematician of African origin named K., starting in grad school in Paris in the mid-90s, and then on to Wall Street, as a proponent of a new theory of decision making based on a proto-probabilistic concept called BICs (Basis Instruments Contracts) that he has invented. We span Bachelier’s life from the death of his parents to his famous thesis in 1900, to the dramas of the Dreyfus affair in France, WW I, up to the death of his ephemeral spouse, and the climactic denial of tenure to him in 1926. The narrative unfolds as K. himself experience similar struggles and prejudices in modern times which lead him from Wall Street to inner city life in Newark, NJ, and then to Beijing China, and back to New York. The intertwined narratives unfold in at least four languages – English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Ghomala – serving as a clinical and scientific examination of the various dimensions of prejudice, language, deriving analytical insights that bind persuasion, risk, prejudice, rewards and punishments in the decision making process. It also features two heart wrenching love stories that grip hearts and reveal characters of great humanity. This is a universal story of the travails of the misunderstood and unappreciated underdog, who nonetheless keeps on soldiering to usher in a better world.

Abstract not available.