Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1938. / Vita. "This article was presented in part at the joint session of the agricultural history society with the American historical association at Philadelphia on Dec. 29, 1937. It is a summary of the author's doctoral dissertation with the same title at the University of Minnesota in 1938"--P. 224. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Aug. 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-210). Also available on the Internet.

This thesis is prompted by a curiosity about the popularity of the image of Peter Pan. Realising that the familiar and ubiquitous image is as much a product of consumer culture as it is the result of multimodal adaptations and reinterpretations of J. M. Barrie?s Peter Pan, this study attempts to shovel aside present-day conceptions of Peter Pan stories, so as to unearth the bedrock, to see Peter Pan as it was when it was new, back in its own time. To do so, this study goes back to the original Peter Pan texts. Picking out elements that signal the presence of certain literary modes, this thesis explores how the Peter Pan narratives engage with these modes, genres and traditions. One of the motives of the thesis is to rescue Peter Pan from ghettoization in the cosy category of “children?s literature”, and through critical attention to take it seriously as an important work in the literature of the early twentieth century. Chapter I situates Peter Pan in the pastoral tradition. Adducing William Empson?s concept of the pastoral as the process of “putting the complex into the simple”, this thesis argues that Peter Pan portrays two competing pastoral spaces and lays claim to the tradition by challenging its parameters of innocence. The chapter also invokes Bakhtin?s idea of carnival, asserting that the Peter Pan texts are “carnivalesque” in both their self-referential play with narrative and generic conventions, and with various more or less satirical and transgressive themes. Chapter II traces elements of Pan myths in the texts, and argues that the texts engage with the late-Victorian and Edwardian interest in myth by re-envisioning an avatar of Pan that would take its place amongst other literary Pans of the era, such as those of E. M. Forster, Kenneth Grahame, Elizabeth Browning, and Arthur Machen. The final chapter sets Peter Pan in the midst of a battle of modes of representation and vision, with R. L. Stevenson championing romance and Henry James politely standing for realism. The chapter argues that while the Peter Pan texts belong more to romance, they play with the boundaries of each by critiquing both modes, all the time showing up and relishing the artificiality of narration. The chapter then picks up on the sense of play, pervading Peter Pan’s engagement with every literary mode that has been discussed, and examines the social meanings and aesthetic instances of play against the backdrop of Edwardian England. Throughout the chapters, by dint of its spirit of play, Peter Pan problematizes the modern family and deconstructs the hierarchy of generations, along with the fundamental anthropological categories of childhood and adulthood, categories which were coming under scrutiny and pressure from the modernizing forces at work at the beginning of the twentieth century. With its sustained exploration of the structure of generations, Peter Pan addresses a problem of modernity in spite of its fantasy setting, and there is a case therefore for considering it under the rubric, elaborated by Nicholas Daly, of “popular modernism”. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 418-438). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2002. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 418-438).

In this thesis I have made a study of certain aspects of pastoralism and the pastoral genre in late Elizabethan literature. I have done this because I felt that Elizabethan pastoral writing was, at its best, far more than just a literary exercise undertaken, as was much Continental pastoral writing, to furnish the vernacular with a genre approved by Classical precedent. The strength of Elizabethan pastoral derived from the combination of certain indigenous factors present during Elizabeth's reign, with the current interest in imitating the Classics and introducing a famous genre into the vernacular. There had always been in English literature a strong response to the natural world and this response revealed itself in pastoral writing in which the traditional naturalistic details derived from Classical sources were infused with the grace and strength of direct observation. More importantly, Elizabethan England had a monarch who was not only ideally suited through her sex and celibacy to play the leading role in a pastoral world, but who also actively encouraged and enjoyed the eulogistic sentiments native to the Renaissance pastoral. In the English attempt to imitate a favourite Renaissance version of the pastoral - the use of a pastoral framework to comment on ecclesiastical or political affairs - there was, in Tudor Protestantism, with all its internal conflicts and its vital struggle against the political and spiritual forces of the Roman church, an ideal source of material for eclogues in the style of Mantuan. Such factors ensured that Elizabethan pastoral had a significance and relevance largely lacking in the more academic products of Continental pastoralists. Preface, p. i

“The Pastoral Field: Local Ecologies in Early Modern Literature” excavates the ways in which pastoral literature registers the role nature-human interaction played in shaping protracted struggles over land use and ownership, and in the degradation and improvement of natural landscapes. Revising a longstanding critical tradition that understands early modern pastoral as primarily allegorical, the project instead insists that the form can also accommodate topical thinking about regional ecologies. Shifting the emphasis away from the Elizabethan court towards local agricultural politics, it unearths the ways in which natural crises such as flooding, famine, sheep rot, and soil degradation hastened processes of agricultural improvement and enclosure—and how those processes were in turn mediated, counter-factually imagined, and actively promoted within the literary devices of pastoral. Each of my four chapters locates pastoral plays, poems, romances, and country-house entertainments in the particular landscapes that shaped their development— landscapes that were, in turn, reconfigured by the literary and political concerns of Elizabethan authors.