acase@tulane.edu

The question of antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice has often been written about as if antisemitism is a unitary phenomenon, one not requiring definition. Nevertheless, any discussion of antisemitism implies a definition, one which in turn implies a standard for representing Jews and Judaism When the various critical articles that exonerate the play of the antisemitism charge are analyzed, it emerges that the charge has often been evaded by employing definitions which now must be regarded as over-narrow and which, for instance, rule out religion and folklore as a source of antisemitism. There is a current tendency to regard the play as being 'about' antisemitism, rather than antisemitic, so that the tradition of seeing the play as enlightened on the Jewish question remains Ultimately, a work of art should be regarded as antisemitic if it employs pejorative stereotypes about Jews without clearly repudiating them, and the deficiencies of such stereotypes are best appreciated against the backdrop of a certain amount of knowledge of the Jewish cultural heritage. Held up to these standards, readings that do see the play as antisemitic have also been deficient. One of the earliest and most influential readings of this type, E. E. Stoll's, displays stereotyped notions of Jewish characteristics even as it asserts that the play is antisemitic. More recent up-datings of Stoll's argument avoid the crudest manifestations of this problem, but may exhibit subtle versions of it. Attempts to reduce antisemitism to the manifestation of a single impulse also result in confusion that might be dispelled by focusing on representational standards The criticism of Chaucer's 'The Prioress's Tale' and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta often resembles that of Merchant with respect to some of the above-mentioned issues / acase@tulane.edu

The dissertation examines the narrative erasure enacted upon mothers by English courtship novels of the eighteenth century, an erasure that seems historically incongruous given that century's cultural fascination with maternity. While the popular fiction of the time minutely traces the tales of beautiful and morally deserving young women negotiating their ways through the marriage market, most of these novels terminate before the heroine's motherhood. The generic erasure of women after marriage reflects the political, legal, social and economic erasures enacted upon eighteenth-century women within the institution of marriage. The novel's pleasure, proffered for popular consumption, performed the ideological function of making the erasure of women's subjectivity palatable, even sweet. Further, the inevitably tragic fate of almost any novel's heroine who narratively survived into maternity promoted an ideology of gender that denied women independent and autonomous identity, and packaged the culture's violence toward women within an ideology of maternal sacrifice that bound women in contracts of affection and self-sacrifice Moreover, while they construct female characters on the basis of individual identity and agency, the courtship novels deny any but the most illusory of subjectivity to women. Susan Staves' Married Women's Separate Property elucidates eighteenth-century Britain's legal machinations which sought to prevent women's political and economic claims to equality in the face of the liberal ideology of the individual. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace's Consuming Subjects examines the cultural construction of the female consumer which bore the weight of much social anxiety over commercialization. The economic power of capital could potentially, and sometimes did, extend to women through property. Furthermore, the liberal ideology of the long eighteenth century's last third threatened to disturb gendered distinctions of power, explaining in part why Mary Wollstonecraft was so reviled after her death. In each of the four novels upon which the dissertation focuses the heroine must evaporate after her marriage or suffer abjection and death. The dissertation argues that women were defined in the eighteenth century as a profitless surplus, what Georges Bataille calls the 'Accursed Share,' upon which was enacted what Joseph Roach terms a performance of waste / acase@tulane.edu

While seventeenth-century pirates earned admiration, the eighteenth-century pirate appeared as the worst of all possible criminals. The government fought against pirates through laws and on sea, but a war was waged against them at home also in print. These works bring to the fore questions of discipline and nationalism as writers attempted to explain or to explain away the pirate's rejection of country The first two chapters deal with works that attempt to discipline the pirate. The theme of home present in stories about John Avery, a pirate who established a colony on Madagascar, serves two purposes: it allows England the power to exclude since Avery never successfully returns home, and it presents the definition of a good colonist, one who wishes to be ruled by England and to remain disciplined in spite of the distance that prohibits the disciplining gaze. The second chapter juxtaposes privateer Woodes Rogers' account of his voyage, a primer on disciplining his men without the support from land-based institutions, with Defoe's story of Mary Reed, a female cross-dressing pirate. Because of Reed's gender, she carries a priori for Defoe the qualities necessary to the disciplined privateer The concluding chapters complicate the categories of disciplined and undisciplined subject and the power of print to discipline. Chapter Three explicates John Gay's Polly, in which all European characters demonstrate corruption, while their Indian counterparts retain discipline and honor. Through a parody of Dryden's All For Love, Gay demonstrates that the values of heroic drama embodied in the Indians leave them vulnerable in a time marked not by stable, intrinsic aristocratic honor, but by a new way to assess individuals in a market economy, the values of credit. The last chapter studies a land-based 'pirate,' Jonathan Wild, who styled himself as Thief-Taker General of Great Britain. Wild uses the tools of discipline--the gaze provided by his network of spies and the print culture that allowed him to place ads and engage in public relations--to dupe the public. In turn, works about Wild, including Henry Fielding's comic novel, castigate the public for their role in Wild's success / acase@tulane.edu

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-10, Section: A, page: 3322. / Traditionally, the offspring of illustrious, respected citizens are not studied unless they become famous in their own right. Traditionally, too, the daughters of prominent eighteenth-century men have been largely ignored or referenced casually in a footnote. From the age of four, however, Charlotte Cibber Charke, the youngest daughter of the Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber, made certain that she would not be ignored. In her childhood began adventures and escapades that would lead her through a riotous, tragic life that deserves to be remembered. Charlotte Cibber Charke's notoriety is well-deserved, but not so much for her passing as a man as for her unflinching struggle to survive as an unattached woman against all the dictates of propriety of the eighteenth century. Her attempts at the careers of actress, entrepreneur, and author have been examined and the judgment is that she is well worth remembering. Dressing as a man onstage soon carried over into her personal life, especially after her irascible temperament and the Licensing Act of 1737 thwarted her London theatrical career. Versatile acting abilities and a ferocious desire to preserve her autonomy enabled her to pose as a young man while attempting diverse male occupations to support herself and her daughter. Waiting tables in a tavern, selling sausages on the street, trading teas in her shop, running a boarding house, and managing an elaborate puppet show were some of her survival schemes. On more than one occasion she was pursued and proposed to by young women. Labeled a transvestite by modern critics, Charlotte Cibber Charke was, rather, a survivor. In a time when women alone were either protected as mistresses or exploited as prostitutes, she faced these two choices and determined she could accept neither. Deserted by her husband of less than a year and left alone with an infant, she attempted the logical route to survival and independence--she went on the stage in her father's theatre at Drury Lane and became as famous for her breeches roles in her time as Nell Gwynn had been in hers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1988. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [401]-411.

"Irish Modernism and The Problem of Metaphor: Interactions Between the Imagination and the Materiality of Language in the Literature of Beckett, Joyce and Yeats" examines the unconventional role that metaphor plays as an essential figure in the literature of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and W.B. Yeats. It maintains that the unusually strong interest of each author in the non- conceptual, musical or physical possibilities of the linguistic sign can be read as a form of resistance to the means-to-ends constitution of instrumental language, which each saw as a defining characteristic of hegemonic discourse. What emerges, I argue, out of this attention to the dynamic processes of literary creation over the transmission of a fixed idea is an original kind of tropology that elevates sensory impressions over ideal meaning, the predicate over substance, the image over the sign. Drawing initially from Beckett's analysis of "primitive" or "direct metaphors" in Joyce's Finnegans Wake--where content and form appear as indistinguishable--I demonstrate how we can trace in Beckett's work the development of an immanent model of figuration that shatters the sign's referential relation to the outside world. In Beckett's work, the primary function of metaphor will emerge as a movement in which the imagination manages to break free from the given in order to respond "directly" to the dynamic possibilities that are internal to language. Beckett's post-war literature is exemplary in this respect: here the movement of metaphor functions primarily to isolate the poetic image from its parasitical attachment to the symbol in order to put thought into contact with a fluid visualization, with the continuity and mobility of the real.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 236-251). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 227-247). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99241

<bold><p>Seasons and Sovereigns:<br></p><p>Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621<br></p></bold><p><p></p><p> Current scholarship on months, seasons, and climates in Renaissance aesthetics has developed along the two-dimensional axis of pastoral and georgic, leaving critics unable to develop an overarching theory of how or why early modern subjects charted environmental stability over time. <bold>Seasons and Sovereigns</bold> addresses this occlusion by studying the course of nature as it pertains to sudden dissolution, long periods of stability, or constant change in volatile Elizabethan and early Stuart greenworlds.</p><p><p> </p><p>While environmental stability occupies a central role in two theories of sovereignty - the classical Golden Age, which experienced eternal Spring, and the two-bodied King, where a King's body politic transcends the vicissitude signified by seasonal change - succession crises required rapid changes. By focusing on exceptions to temperate climates, <bold>Seasons and Sovereigns </bold> argues that many writers of the English Renaissance challenged the prescriptive accounts of innocuous socio-political climates or constant natural spaces by exploring the reasons behind floods, wonders, seasonal usurpation, and other perversions of nature's course found along the fringes of literary greenworlds. </p><p><p> </p><p>The project begins by examining Queen Elizabeth's cult of <i>ver perpetuum</i> to justify a more capacious interpretation of the theory of the King's Two Bodies as it pertains to the body politic's exemption from the passage of time, including seasonal change. It contextualizes these issues by delineating how genre studies have responded to the presence of calendars and months in literary texts. Chapter 2 argues that a remarkable number of late sixteenth-century texts flood (or threaten to flood) a greenworld to reflect anxiety over succession. The epic-scale dissolution evoked by sea grottos, Parnassus, and the lost city of Atlantis level social distinctions as unequivocal signs of nature's lethal heterogeneity in Lyly's <italic>Gallathea,</italic> Boboli garden, and <italic>Cymbeline.</italic> </p><p> <p>Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare replaces an Arcadian landscape with a theater of green wonders and Macduff's knowledge of seasonal decorum in <italic>Macbeth.</italic> The chapter begins in the "wake" of the Golden Age with Thomas Dekker's decision to revive pastoral in his account of the Queen's funeral in <italic>The Wonder-full Yeare,</italic> 1603. Chapter 4 shifts the Arcadian impulse inward by exploring resistance to constancy (a pastoral value) in <italic>The Changeling</italic>, where I juxtapose three normative views of human nature that were active in 1621. Rather than advocate one perspective on constancy, Chapter 5 suggests that Mary Wroth's heroines in the <i>Urania</i> dissolve contracts and engage in post-Golden Age political jurisprudence by promoting duplicity and metamorphosis.</p> / Dissertation