<p>The longstanding relationship between honour and violence has obvious martial and chivalric overtones. The prevalence of the duel in early modern England points to the developing performativity and growing symbolic meaning of violence during the period, a codified violence that relied heavily on hierarchical guidelines. The duel helped to stabilize social notions of rank and masculinity, and became a means of culturally validating masculinity and reifying honour codes. This thesis frames a study of violence and its relationship to honour and masculine identity through analysis of dramatized scenes involving masculine honour in three of Shakespeare’s plays – <em>Twelfth Night</em>, <em>Henry V</em>, and <em>Hamlet</em> – with a concurrent investigation of contemporary policies and essays on civility and honour. I examine instances of public violence that directly relate to private or personal concepts of honour, as well as the ways in which honour is conceived of and transmitted both linearly, through generations, and horizontally through discourses of national or social honour to one’s duty. This study contributes to a sense of honour as a dynamic and omnipresent discourse in the early modern era, one that structured and dictated the lives of the Elizabethan aristocracy.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis analyzes the impact of the Dark Age of comics on Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles, specifically arguing that the traditional superhero figure enacts a certain narrative violence on the characters and text itself, both through direct violence and in the limiting of potential narratives. The first chapter establishes The Invisibles’ contemporary comic tropes, establishing Dark Age superheroes as an exceptionalist figures who use extreme violence to separate themselves from a perceived corrupt society. As such, this thesis moves from a psychoanalytic approach to heroism towards a schizoanalytic approach found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how similar cycles of pathologization found in their critique of psychoanalysis also apply to The Invisibles’ attempt to innoculate itself against its own sensationalized violence. In doing so, the series eventually purges itself of the hero’s underlying ideological violences and attempts to actualize a Morrison’s own notions of utopia through the medium of comics, valuing multiplicities and the production of narratives to inform the experience of reality over a limitation of narratives based on violent conflict.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>Following from such theorists as Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman and Heather Love, this thesis seeks to address current scholarship on queerness and temporality that conceptualizes queer subjects as complicating traditional notions of linear time, reproduction, and progress. Mobilizing theories of temporal disruption and disorientation, including backwardness and the queer moment, this thesis explores the association between such disruptions and a persistent impulse to reckon with and reconstruct what I refer to as “the fugitive dead,” understood here both as past events and as the ghostly figures of the dead and effaced. Such disruptions can, this project posits, foster queerly generative affinities between seemingly separate categories (e.g. between the present and the past or between the living and the dead), thereby providing alternatives and challenges to normative temporal trajectories.</p> <p>My analysis considers literary representations of such temporal disruptions, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>, Michael Cunningham’s <em>The Hours</em>, and Alison Bechdel’s <em>Fun Home</em> to explore their treatments of temporal linearity, queer moments, affinity and connection, as well as haunting and spectrality. Furthermore, this thesis also addresses the capacity of literary texts to <em>enact </em>temporal disruption in the form of the revisioning project, which can be figured as the literary attempt to encounter the fugitive dead. Ultimately, this thesis explores the literary and intertextual dimensions of this complex approach to queer temporality, advocating for the generative possibilities of an attentiveness to the continued presence of the past and an engagement with the figures of the lost and disappeared.</p> / Master of English

In this paper, I will explore the rise and fall of the scholar magician or sorcerer, both as a popular dramatic subject and as an arc for individual characters, and the ways in which these figures tied into contemporary fears about the intersection of religion and developing scientific knowledge.

In my thesis, I explore William Blake's technique of combining word and image in his practice of engraving. The unity of text and image is deeply related to his unique mythology and concept of infinity. Blake's artistic theories and practices, such as his emphasis on the line as the most essential artistic element, are reflective of his understanding of art in relation to human perception and imagination. The interaction of his words and images provides a space of imaginative engagement for the reader, which opens the doors of perception and creates the possibility of revealing infinity.

This dissertation will explore the way Philip treats puppets and masks as pseudo-sacred objects in order to maintain control in Angela Carter’s work The Magic Toyshop. To show the implications of the pseudo-sacred, I will use Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard that examines the way primitive cultures are able to maintain order through particular religious beliefs and collective violence against a scapegoat. My critical reading of the text will look closely at how Philip uses the pseudo-sacred to build up the community. When the pseudo-sacred is finally called into question the community is threatened. Although Philip attempts to deflect blame onto the scapegoat Melanie, he fails as there is no social buy-in, leading to the destruction of the community. While the house is burned down destroying the puppets and masks, presumably along with Philip, the pseudo-sacred still has the chance of being perpetuated through Finn’s own obsession with power and control.

Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered deeply. His “Terrible Sonnets” are confessional poetry that demonstrate his struggle with his God and with himself. This work analyses the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, starting Noah and ending with Jesus’s promise of a Paraclete, to analyze how both God and Man approach earthly and heavenly comfort. The work will then turn to Hopkins’s poetry to show that Hopkins’s unshakable faith and deep understanding of the Bible is both the cause and the cure of his suffering. This essay concludes that it is only through suffering that Hopkins, like Job, Jesus, and King Lear, is able to achieve both comfort and wisdom.

This thesis aims to explore the relationships between dramatic texts and the Elizabethan topic of the humours. It covers Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Jonson's plays Every Man Out of His Humour and Every Man in His Humour, and Shakespeare's plays Hamlet and As You Like It. Each of these works provides a glimpse into society and its opinions specifically on melancholy, from its most basic and complex definitions to how it is perceived and addressed.

An introduction to Alice scholarship, including a brief biography of the author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, as well as the subject matter. An examination of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland's genre, as well as an in-depth analysis of the text as a children's story.

This thesis explores the complexities to be found in the characters of Lear's Fool from King Lear and Feste from Twelfth Night. It begins with an investigation of the history behind the taxonomy of fools that William Shakespeare created in his works. The rest of the thesis is devoted to examining the many facets of the two aforementioned fools, with the goal of discovering just how important and influential they are to their respective plots and to the world of literature. Finally, there is a brief coda that explores the other striking similarities that the two plays have in common.