Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ludwig-Maximilians Universität zu München, 1916. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [vii]-ix).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

This thesis examines the representations of friendship in letters, collaborations, and paratexts from the Renaissance and the Romantic era to uncover the affection behind the performances taught in classical manuals of friendship. The pairs of Shakespeare-Fletcher and Middleton-Rowley from the Renaissance are compared with Wordsworth-Coleridge and Keats-Brown from the Romantic era to show that the representations did not change even when the myth of the solitary genius began to develop. The representations of friendship based on the ideal of the one true friend allow men to express their affection for other men without being homoerotic or even homosocial. The textual evidence of friendship does not always prove that two people were each other’s “one true friend,” but the signs of friendship signify affectionate friendship for readers who desire such a true friendship for themselves.

Note: / The following pages represent an attempt at what I might call, with some hesitation, 'applied theology'. In them I endeavour to describe the development during a specific period of European history, of a phenomenon which has been, especially in the last fifteen years or so, a topic of intense theological discussion. That phenomenon is secularism. Now, the concept 'secularism', as it is understood nowadays, played no part in the theological discussions of the years we shall consider. The closest term was 'atheism', which we, from our perspective, in consideration of the secular theism of the French Revolution, for example, can see to have a rather different meaning. What I attempt to do here, then, is to write, not quite an essay in historical theology, since there is no theology of secularism in the period at issue; nor quite an essay in Church history, since, in a secularized society, the Church appears merely as one social institution amongst others; but an historical essay on the development of certain social attitudes which to-day pose a genuine theological problem.[...]

This study, which is founded on an assumption of the unity of aesthetics and ethics, illustrates the reformative power of the moral imagination and sympathetic engagement in Mary Wollstonecraft’s first novella, Mary, A Fiction. Sympathy—wakened by the literary imagination and invoking the reader’s moral potentiality—is what links the literary and the ethical; the emotional exchange, the sympathetic fusion, that occurs between reader and text may extend beyond the pages of the novella into the real world. The affective experience of reading literature, which allows for imaginative perspective-taking, moves us to act in ways that make us more social, more resistant to injustice, and better equipped to enact necessary change. This study delineates the three-fold operation of imagination, sympathy, and affect in Wollstonecraft’s Mary, which extols a heroine who exemplifies the radicalizing power of affect and which itself has the power to effect a revolution in its readers.

In the ideology of sentimentalism, physical sensation integrates the parts of the body into a whole, and the fragmented members of the body politic into a social community. However, intense pain is always an individual experience. It not only isolates us from other people, but is also isolates us from our own bodies: pain renders our bodies out of control. Moreover, pain attacks our very notion of self by threatening to render us unconscious, and unable to perceive that self. This complex of problems became especially acute for late eighteenth-century writers, as they tried to reconcile their sympathy for the French Revolution with the intense pain that the Revolution signified. What they articulated was a process by which the self initially identifies with the pained body of the other, but then appropriates that pain to make it one's own, thereby isolating the self from infectious Revolutionary sympathies.

This thesis seeks to analyse the often contradictory viewpoints concerning the role of the poet and the nature of poetic creation expressed in the writings of the Chilean vanguardista Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). In particular, it looks to focus on the tension between Huidobro’s doctrine of creacionismo (with its emphasis on the idea of poetry as the product of conscious willpower bringing forth new worlds ex-nihilo from the mind of the poet) and the Neo-Platonist concept, implicit in many of Huidobro’s more lyrical compositions, that the images and metaphors deployed by the poet are no mere arbitrary inventions but instead analogical representations of an inexpressible Infinite (existing a priori to language) which cannot be apprehended through rational modes of thought and expression. This tension is studied in the context of the hybrid discipline known as the “History of Ideas” with attention being paid as much to the philosophical as to the purely literary sources of these clashing aesthetic principles (ranging from Schelling and the German Romantics to Nietzsche and the French Decadents), which the present author contends spring ultimately from a common motivation: namely the desire to rediscover in art that which the discoveries of the Enlightenment had rendered impossible through either religion or systematic philosophy – a road to the Absolute.

This study, which is founded on an assumption of the unity of aesthetics and ethics, illustrates the reformative power of the moral imagination and sympathetic engagement in Mary Wollstonecraft’s first novella, Mary, A Fiction. Sympathy—wakened by the literary imagination and invoking the reader’s moral potentiality—is what links the literary and the ethical; the emotional exchange, the sympathetic fusion, that occurs between reader and text may extend beyond the pages of the novella into the real world. The affective experience of reading literature, which allows for imaginative perspective-taking, moves us to act in ways that make us more social, more resistant to injustice, and better equipped to enact necessary change. This study delineates the three-fold operation of imagination, sympathy, and affect in Wollstonecraft’s Mary, which extols a heroine who exemplifies the radicalizing power of affect and which itself has the power to effect a revolution in its readers.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: David L. Clark. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 278-296) Also available online.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1975. / Bibliography: leaves 137-140.