Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight" includes an emotional apostrophe to his two-year old son, Hartley, about the complex spiritual and artistic moments of transcendence that a truly visionary poet can find through the medium of Nature, away from the barriers of City walls: / (UNFORMATTED TABLE OR EQUATION FOLLOWS) / Coleridge's poem is itself a symbol of the focus of my study. I will explore the possibilities for, and the barriers against, the interrelated experiences of spiritual and artistic transcendence in the urban and natural landscapes of three writers: the English Romantics William Blake and Coleridge, examined in Chapters II and III, and the latter-day American Romantic, Frank Norris, treated in Chapters IV and V. In Chapter VI, I will extend my study to provide a brief look at urbanism in selected writers of the twentieth century. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-12, Section: A, page: 3711. / Major Professor: R. Bruce Bickley, Jr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

Thesis advisor: Susan Michalczyk / In nineteenth-century England, women were struggling to find an outlet for the intelligence, emotions, and creativity that the patriarchal society around them continuously stifled. For women such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, writing served as an opportunity to defy restrictive social structures and offered a needed public voice. By expressing their own thoughts and frustrations, Austen and Brontë helped to overcome the anonymity imposed upon women of their time, as they illuminated the female experience. The following paper takes a look at the ways in which Austen and Brontë imparted autobiographical elements to their female characters, as both authors underwent important catharses and inspired the women around them. To this day, their literature provides critical insight into the troubled existence of the nineteenth-century woman, while revealing their own struggles with their constricted identities. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / This project explores Dracula's many shifting guises and identities, chiefly examining them through an Irish/Mytho-Celtic lens. Among these are Dracula's role as conqueror, mythical Celtic figure, sexual liberator, imperialist, aristocrat, landlord, victim and agent of imperialism. Although Dracula's nature and his portrayal in the novel is often contradictory, this project seeks to acknowledge the contradictions while at the same time pushing beyond them to get at the, for lack of a better phrase, soul of Dracula's character. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This study argues for the centrality of dance to the style and structure of three modern epics: H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, William Carlos Williams' Paterson and James Joyce's Ulysses. My critical approach is twofold: I examine how the modern epic is conceptualized through dance aesthetics, and I analyze how the performative motifs in the texts signify, through dance, issues of gender, race and sexuality. Stuart Gilbert asserts that The Dance of the Hours is an important structural device in Ulysses; however, the influence of dance on the epic been critically overlooked. Although Williams, a dance aficionado, cites Martha Graham as an inspiration for Paterson, the form in the epic, has not received much critical attention. The satyr is central to Williams' early poem Danse Russe as well as the much later Paterson. I argue that the structure of Paterson is a satyr drama and that the epic is, in fact, a performance. The figure of the dancer was one of H.D.'s poetic personas; in this regard, there is an inherent dancerly aesthetic in her body of work. In the epic, Helen identifies herself as a dancer and claims that she herself is the writing; thus, I assert that her movement is a privileged site I argue that the dance aesthetics and the recurrent dance motifs justify a performative reading of the epics; the field of performance studies provides the lens for the theoretical framework of my dissertation. I argue that the syncretic interaction between memory and physical movement in the odysseys comprises a performative space in which identities are reconstituted. In the epics, personal memory converges with the cultural memory of the genealogy of particular dance forms, and this convergence is the catalyst for kinesis/physical movement in the narratives. Through kinesis, the physical movement, the dances in the odysseys are enacted, for example, the Dance of the Hours in Ulysses. The performances are the impetus for metamorphoses in the narratives and these metamorphoses involve transformations of gender, race and sexuality. The transformations provide new insight into the gender dynamics in these modern epics / acase@tulane.edu

James Joyce's interest in theater and cinema have led many to assume that both have heavily influenced his work. While such an assumption is somewhat valid, it ignores those characteristics of Joyce's fiction that are distinctly theatrical rather than cinematic--his reliance on dialogue over description, and thus the word over the image, and his panoramic rather than closeup vision--as well as the major differences between the theater and the cinema. Furthermore, by asserting that cinema influenced Joyce, critics ignore the fact that when cinema was beginning to implement the techniques they find in Joyce's work, Joyce had already written Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and most of Ulysses This study explores the cinematographic versus theatrical characteristics of Joyce's novels by examining his techniques in light of the distinguishing characeristics of the two genres. I use dramatic adaptations of his prose works to demonstrate that these techniques are indeed ones that operate in the genres themselves, recognizing that while adaptations are somewhat influenced by the skill of the adaptor, the portions of an adaptation which work well or badly do so partly because of the original. This is especially true of the adaptations I have chosen because most of them lift whole sections of the novels virtually unchanged, making the adaptations even more useful as gauges of the theatrical or cinematic characteristics of their originals I consider three adaptations of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Joseph Strick's film (same title), Hugh Leonard's Stephen D, and Phoebe Brand, John Randolph, and Frederick Ewen's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (All three also draw some of their material from Stephen Hero.) For Ulysses, I consider six adaptations: Joseph Strick's film Ulysses, Eamon Morrissey's Joycemen, Joseph Carroll's Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops, Donna Wilshire's Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, Marjorie Barkentin's Ulysses in Nighttown, and Louis Zukofsky's unpublished filmscript. For Finnegans Wake, I consider five adaptations: Mary Ellen Bute's film adaptation by the same title, Davie Heefner's play by the same title, Mary Manning's The Voice of Shem, Jean Erdman's Coach with the Six Insides, and Stuart Gilbert's unproduced scenario for Anna Livia Plurabelle / acase@tulane.edu

A study of late medieval apocalyptic literature and culture, this project examines the interdependence of economic and religious discourse in the Middle Ages and investigates the shift in social consciousness occasioned by demographic changes and the growth of England's profit economy in the fourteenth century. After exploring the growing dissonance between religious tradition and economic language, the study examines expressions of social dissatisfaction, including the actions and communications of the 1381 rebels, William Langland's moral objections in Piers Plowman, and the complaints central to the other 'plowman poems' of Langland's imitators. Contrasting regenerative agrarian metaphors and apocalyptic visions with eschatological, urban visions of paradise, this study argues that Langland and the 1381 rebels exhibit 'radical nostalgia'--a longing for agrarian Christian roots in the midst of social tension which projects the traditional social structure of the past onto a renewed, if not millennial, society / acase@tulane.edu

In the Chester cycle of medieval mystery plays, a character called the Expositor appears periodically to comment on events which have been depicted onstage. Because this character does not appear in other extant cycles, one should ask how his presence affects the Chester plays. My dissertation investigates this character's dramatic and interpretive function, arguing that he serves as chorus, preacher, and narrator and thus sheds light on the ways in which medieval audiences interpreted dramatic performances My introduction shows that, while critics have traditionally focused on either the religious or the dramatic aspects of the cycle, the Expositor shows us how the two intersect. Chapter Two analyzes this character's dramatic function through a close reading of his speeches and an examination of evidence for the staging of the plays. As a character who serves a structural function and provides additional information not depicted on stage, the Expositor resembles similar figures in other cycle and non-cycle plays. Chapter Three compares the Expositor to these other choric figures Few other characters have the interpretive duties that the Expositor has, however, and he thus speaks not only as a dramatic character, but also as a preacher. Chapter Four considers him in the context of homiletic theory c. 1350-1550. Like a preacher, the Expositor serves as objective point of view, moral voice, and spiritual guide. However, while the figure of the preacher would have been generally familiar to the reviser who added the Expositor to the cycle, it is also possible to identify a more specific model for him: the narrator in the Stanzaic Life of Christ. Chapter Five demonstrates correspondences between the Chester cycle and this text Chapter Six draws out the theoretical implications of the previous chapters. Though scholars have claimed that there was no dramatic theory in the Middle Ages, one can be extrapolated from characters such as the Expositor. Because the Expositor is modeled on both dramatic and non-dramatic figures, he has functions in common with both, and thus he illuminates the complexities of theatrical performance in the Middle Ages / acase@tulane.edu

The leaves of the Kells manuscript retain an important place in the Wake, performing a vital role in the key given to the reader to unlock not only Joyce's work, but any text requiring the reader to consider the innumerable layers of significance present in the most accomplished forms of communication. The text by nature of its definition, being ineffable, cannot be expressed in any more reductive fashion than the complex design-motif which merely directs the reader toward the sacred, inclusive of its delineation here. What lies beneath the text, once the reader has traveled through the language and its form, resists the chosen medium with which Finnegans Wake and the Book of Kells require to communicate: yet, the sacred text, in either a spiritual or literary state of reverence, may only express the margins of meaning where the real significance remains profound and ineffable / acase@tulane.edu

From the late nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth, the question of the relationship between unity and plurality, known as the problem of the One and the Many, occupied the minds, lectures and writings of the most eminent philosophers of both Europe and America. Poems written in dialogue forms, that is, poetry in which lines are attributed to more than one voice, inevitably recapitulate the problem of the One and the Many, because such poems must be understood both as the products of the one voice of the poet and of the multiple voices of the poem's designated speakers. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, poets used dialogue forms extensively to explore links between aspects of the One-Many problem, including those between the individual and the world, between body and soul, and between faith and reason This dissertation examines the ways in which W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Louis MacNeice adapt traditional forms of dialogue poetry (the eclogue, dialogue of self and soul, ballad, and drama) to their discussions of aspects of the question of the One and the Many. These poets manipulate the three distances inherent in dialogue poetry---the distance between the speakers, the distance between the poet and the speakers, and the distance between the speakers and the reader---to reconcile form and content to the extent that the forms of the resulting works reflect each poet's understanding of the nature of unity and of the relationship between the One and the Many as expressed within each poem / acase@tulane.edu

By analyzing the autobiographies and a selection of fictional works by Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1902) and Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897), this study seeks to examine the ways in which writing women and their work were influenced by and responded to the prevailing Victorian middle-class ideal of womanhood I begin this study with an outline of the historical development of the ideal of middle-class womanhood and its relation to the emerging economic and political power of the middle classes, in order to place the ideal of domesticity in relation to historical change. The analysis of Yonge's and Oliphant's lives that follows looks at their relationship to the material and financial conditions of their writing careers as a way of exposing their means of legitimizing their roles as women writers. But since I am especially concerned with writing as self-expression, I follow the study of their experiences with a review of women's autobiographical theory in order to show how self-writing, or autobiography, is more likely than biography to posit those moments in which the self appears to be different from the culturally constructed ideal because writing is a means of negotiating the culturally determined expectations of the outside world. I then look at their individual autobiographies to illuminate how the Victorian ideal of woman's sphere, as an issue of class and gender, bears on the emergent self of the autobiography The final section is an analysis of the fictional work of these two authors. I consider Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe, The Daisy Chain, and The Clever Woman of the Family and Oliphant's Salem Chapel, The Perpetual Curate, and Miss Marjoribanks as sites of the complex interplay of old and new social, political, economic, and moral forces in the forging of middle-class Victorian life. My interest is in the author's negotiation of traditional Victorian conceptions of public and private spheres, whether politically, economically, culturally, or ideologically defined, especially as it is revealed by those narrative strategies that encourage a fuller understanding of the potential in Victorian culture for women to have a place in the public sphere / acase@tulane.edu