Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-175). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 224-250.

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University, 1984. / Added t.p. (1 leaf) inserted. Added t.p. with thesis statement, inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-185).

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University, 1984. / Added t.p. (1 leaf) inserted. Added t.p. with thesis statement, inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-185).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Oregon, 2005. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-220). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Often praised for its sophistication in the narrator- and character-text, the Odyssey is regarded as the ultimate epic of a warrior’s much-troubled nostos. As a corollary of both its theme and the polytropia of the main hero, the poem explores extensively the motifs of secrecy and disguise. Apart from the lying tales of Odysseus, one important, albeit less obvious, example of the tendency to secrecy and disguise is the exchanges between the gods, which constitute a distinct group of speeches that have significant implications for the action of the poem. The aim of this dissertation is to study the divine dialogues of the Odyssey from the angle of communication and persuasion. Employing findings from narratology, discourse analysis, and oral poetics, and through close readings of the Homeric text, I argue that the overwhelming majority of these related passages have certain characteristics, whose common denominator is obliqueness. Apart from Helius’ appeal to Zeus (Chapter 2), distinctive in its own narratorial rendition, the rest of the dialogues, namely Hermes’ message-delivery to Calypso (Prologue), the two divine assemblies (Chapter 1), plus the exchanges of Zeus with Poseidon (Chapter 2) and Athena (Epilogue) conform to set patterns of communication. Within this framework, interlocutors strongly tend towards concealment and partiality. They make extensive use of conversational implicatures, shed light only on certain sides of the story while suppressing others, and present feigned or even exaggerated arguments in order to persuade their addressee. Direct confrontation is in principle avoided, and even when it does occur, it takes a rather oblique form. In this communicative scheme, the procedure of decision-making is not clear-cut, and the concept of persuasion is fluid and hidden behind the indirect and subtle dialogic process.

Thesis (Revise). / Includes bibliographical references (p. [339]-349) and index.

Thesis (Revise). / Includes bibliographical references (p. [339]-349) and index.

This diploma thesis deals with fantasy literature in both, national and international contexts, as well as with its didactical possessions. Its aim is to prove that this genre has, apart from its history and a recognized place in the domain of literature, a cognitive value to enhance the readers in terms of aesthetics, knowledge, experience and emotions. A second aim of the thesis is to describe the position of fantasy in so-called ``speculative fiction{\crq}q. The first part of the work allows its readers to understand the term ``Fantasy``. It also provides them with history of the genre and its nowadays´ subdivision. In the subsequent chapters the fantasy is presented as a genre able to adapt to fields not necessarily linked to contemporary literature, such as source of knowledge and understanding in lives of young people. A more detailed approach to the Czech form of the genre is also provided with emphasis to common and opposite aspects of it in comparison with the world fantasy (mostly Anglo-American). The didactical potential is underlined in appropriate paragraphs. The 4th and 6thchapters are then fully dedicated to the didactical potential. The last chapter presents results of research work focused on fantasy.

This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.