Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4326. Adviser: Siobhan Somerville. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 289-320) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Western Ontario (Canada), 2007. / (UMI)AAINR30853. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3848.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010. / Directed by Christian Moraru; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 19, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-272).

This thesis is concerned with how we read, edit, and understand the socio-textual relationships between seventeenth-century literary manuscripts. It takes as its subject William Strode (1601?-1645), poet, preacher, and Public Orator of the University of Oxford. In particular, this study examines the transmission and reception of Strode's English verse, predominantly by examining verse miscellanies of the 1620s, 1630s and 1640s. Chapter 1 provides the most extensive account of Strode's life to date, situating his career as a manuscript-publishing poet alongside his academic and clerical careers and social and literary contexts. Chapter 2 studies Strode's autograph manuscripts in detail, focusing on an autograph notebook, in which Strode transcribed and revised his poems; a booklet of eight poems which provide insight into how Strode circulated his verse; and a no longer extant, authorial manuscript of Strode's verse, which raises the question of whether or not Strode intended to print his poems in a single-author collection. Chapter 3 follows Strode's poems from these autograph manuscripts into four verse miscellanies compiled by his most prolific collectors, and makes original arguments about how Strode's poems circulated in seventeenth-century Oxford. This chapter ends with a discussion of two poems by Strode, once thought lost to scholarship. Chapter 4 moves from Christ Church to consider the social and textual coordinates of Strode's Oxford, and non-Oxford readers, offering reconsiderations and revisions of arguments about the provenance of a range of verse miscellanies. Chapter 5 considers the reception of Strode's poetry in the verse miscellany, and uses this evidence to refine theorizations of 'social editing' and 'textual malleability', before offering guidelines towards an edition of Strode's English verse.

abstract: Kiran Nagarkar, who won the Sahitya Akedemi Award in India for his English language writing, is a man who attracts controversy. Despite the consistent strength of his literary works, his English novels have become a lightning rod - not because they are written in English, but because Nagarkar was a well-respected Marathi writer before he began writing in English. Although there are other writers who have become embroiled in the debate over the politics of discourse, the response to Nagarkar's move from Marathi and his subsequent reactions perfectly illustrate the repercussions that accompany such dialectical decisions. Nagarkar has been accused of myriad crimes against his heritage, from abandoning a dedicated readership to targeting more profitable Western markets. Careful analysis of his writing, however, reveals that his novels are clearly written for a diverse Indian audience and offer few points of accessibility for Western readers. Beyond his English language usage, which is actually intended to provide readability to the most possible Indian nationals, Nagarkar also courts a variegated Indian audience by developing upon traditional Indian literary conceits and allusions. By composing works for a broad Indian audience, which reference cultural elements from an array of Indian ethnic groups, Nagarkar's writing seems to push toward the development of the seemingly impossible: a novel that might unify India, and present such a cohesive cultural face to the world at large. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2011

The thesis focuses on the description of the Scottish landscape, especially the Hebrides archipelago (The Lewis Trilogy - The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man, The Ches Man), in a contrast to the description of nature and landscape in the epic series of novels from the European continent (The Enzo Files) by Scottish regional author Peter May. In comparison with the description of nature and landscape and of the French countryside in The Critic, the work includes the author's narration of the city environment in the novel Extraordinary People. The work characterizes the genre of May's novels (Criminal Thriller) and examines the relationship between the descriptions of the landscape and the location of the plot with the elements of the genre mentioned (motives of tension and mystery, violence, crime and emotionally escalated life situations). The work also tries to watch the author's relationship with the region and the tradition of Scottish regional literature.

Early Modern Players of Folly Thesis Abstract This thesis examines the ways in which folly is used in early modern literature. It asks: how is it that such an ephemeral concept proliferated and endured in the culture of early modern Europe? My understanding of early modern folly as a discursive phenomenon that was used as a way of questioning the knowledge of the ostensibly reasonable world is illustrated by case studies of four characters-four players of folly. Dedicated a chapter each, they are Till Eulenspiegel, the great German jester; Pomet Trpeza, a typically Ragusan wit of Marin Držić's Dundo Maroje; Brother Jan Paleček, a Bohemian representative of holy folly; and Sir John Falstaff, the embodiment of folly in Shakespeare's 1 and 2 Henry IV. Although they emerge from different cultural, linguistic and generic traditions, they nonetheless share a propensity for employing folly in ways that uncover possibilities for new understandings and challenge rigid certainties of the world around them. Early modernity, the era that produced the works I explore, has become associated with shifts and instabilities. In this Age of Discovery, man was compelled to understand afresh a suddenly unfamiliar world. However, where man and his reason reign, folly gladly follows. I read each of my four players of folly as...

ix, 106 p. / This thesis focuses on the metafictional elements in selected works of the contemporary Chinese authors Gao Xingjian, Huang Jinshu, and Wang Xiaobo. I define metafiction as both a formal feature inherent in the text and the result of an approach towards that text. I argue that metafiction confronts us with the (postmodern) issues of 1) the ontological status of the text, 2) the figure of the author and reader, and 3) the (ambiguous) relationship between fiction and reality. Simultaneously, it accepts and celebrates this self-conscious and ambiguous character, encouraging readers to do the same. By combining elements from the indigenous literary tradition and international literary movements, contemporary Chinese metafiction is a valuable contribution to the study of metafiction. Ultimately, it shows what it means to write and read in a Chinese as well as in a global context. / Committee in charge: Prof. Alison Groppe, Chairperson; Prof. Maram Epstein, Member; Prof. Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang, Member

My thesis explores the way in which the Italian language and literary culture contributed to John Milton’s early development as a poet (over the period up to 1639 and the composition of Epitaphium Damonis). I begin by investigating the nature of the cultural relationship between England and Italy in the late medieval and early modern periods. I then examine how Milton’s own engagement with the Italian language and its literature evolved in the context of his family background, his personal contacts with the London Italian community and modern language teaching in the early seventeenth century as he grew to become a ‘multilingual’ poet. My study then turns to his first published collection of verse, Poems 1645. Here, I reconsider the Italian elements in Milton’s early poetry, beginning with the six poems he wrote in Italian, identifying their place and significance in the overall structure of the volume, and their status and place within the Italian Petrarchan verse tradition. After considering the significance of the Italian titles of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, I assess the impact of Italian verse forms (and particularly the canzone) upon Milton’s early poetry in English and the question of the nature of the relationship between Milton’s Mask presented at Ludlow Castle and Tasso’s ‘favola boschereccia’, Aminta. Finally, I consider the place in Milton’s career of his journey to Italy in 1938-9 and its importance to him as a personal ‘conquest’ of Italy. I suggest that, far from setting him upon the path toward poetic glory, as is often claimed, his return England marked the beginning of a lengthy hiatus in his poetic career. My argument is that Milton was much more Italianate, by background, accident of birth and personal bent, than has usually been recognised and that an appreciation of how this Italian aspect of his cultural identity contributed to his poetic development is central to an understanding of his poetry.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:35:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2004-11-29Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T21:07:53Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 chicoski_r_dr_assis.pdf: 879246 bytes, checksum: 1a1d01028bb5a71acc72be1a539f8e80 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O objeto de estudo da pesquisa é a obra O mez da grippe e outros livros (1998) de Valêncio Xavier, escritor contemporâneo influenciado pelas artes visuais, fascinado pela imagem e por textos híbridos. A produção literária labiríntica, eclética está alicerçada nos princípios da montagem cinematográfica, na colagem e na intertextualidade. A vocação multitextual do autor leva-o a construir textos descontínuos, polifônicos, multidiscursivos. De modo não linear, incorpora vários códigos que se entrelaçam formando um mosaico, um caleidoscópio literário. A obra é analisada à luz de referências sobre o pós-modernismo, a fim de discutir a relação entre erotismo e morte na ficção de Xavier. / The research is focused on Valêncio Xavier's O mez da grippe e outros livros (1998, The influenza month and other books). Xavier is a contemporary writer who is influenced by the visual arts and is fascinated by the image and by hybrid texts. His eclectic literary production resembles a labyrinth and is supported by the principles of cinematic assemblage, collage and intertextuality. The author's vocation leads him to produce texts that are marked by discontinuity, polyphonic and multi-discursiveness. The result of the juxtaposition of the various codes that he appropriates in a non-linear fashion is a mosaic, a literary caleidoscope. The works are read in light of references about post-modernism, so as to discuss the relation between eroticism and death in Xavier's fiction.