This thesis brings to light evidence for the circulation and first-hand reception of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century England. Though the Poetics upended literary thinking on the Continent in the period, it has long been considered either unavailable in England, linguistically inaccessible to the Greekless English, or thoroughly mediated for English readers by Italian criticism. This thesis revisits the evidentiary basis for each of these claims in turn. A survey of surviving English booklists and library catalogues, set against the work's comprehensive sixteenth-century print-history, demonstrates that the Poetics was owned by and readily accessible to interested readers; two appendices list verifiable and probable owners of the Poetics respectively. Detailed philological analysis of passages from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie proves that he translated directly from the Greek; his and his contemporaries' reading methods indicate the text circulated bilingually as standard. Nor was Sidney’s polyglot access unusual in literary circles: re-examination of the history of Greek education in sixteenth-century England indicates that Greek literacy was higher and more widespread than traditional histories of scholarship have allowed. On the question of mediation, a critical historiography makes clear that the inherited assumption of English reliance on Italian intermediaries for classical criticism has drifted far from the primary evidence. Under these reconstituted historical conditions, some of the outstanding episodes in the sixteenth-century English reception of the Poetics from John Cheke and Roger Ascham in the 1540s to Sidney and John Harington in the 1580s and 1590s are reconsidered as articulate evidence of reading, thinking about, and responding to Aristotle's defining contribution to Renaissance literary thought.

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

The thesis traces the evolving attitudes towards rhetoric in the highly-rhetorised English-language prose of the late sixteenth century by focusing on a term that was itself subject to significant change: 'wit'. To wit's pre-existing denotations of intellectual acumen, capacity for reason and good judgement was added a novel meaning, related to the capacity for producing lively speech. As a term encompassing widely divergent meanings, many Elizabethan and early Stuart works explored 'wit' as a central theme or treated the term as significant to explorations of the human mind, its capacity for rhetoric, and the social and moral dimensions of this relationship. The research centres on how 'wit' is seen and how it corresponds to rhetorical wittiness as produced in practice, and questions the implications of this for understanding the social and moral dimensions of the authorial wit. By focusing on the early vernacular manuals of rhetoric by author such as Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham, on Lyly's and Greene's euphuist prose, and on Thomas Lodge's and Sir Philip Sidney's prose defences of poetry, the first half of the thesis explores the term's conceptual ambiguity. Potentially both reformative and deceptive, this ambiguity becomes a useful tool for the author looking to construct a profitable persona as a Wit, or a brilliant-yet-unruly master of rhetoric. The second half of the research notes how 'wit' tends to outlive its usefulness as a multivalent term in later writings when these seek to move away from the social commodification of an author's rhetoric. Examining Sidney's theological and political aims in The New Arcadia, Thomas Nashe's carnivalesque questioning of the idea of profit, and Francis Bacon's systematic interpretation of Nature, the research suggests that rhetoric and 'wit' maintain both their significance and their ambiguity into the seventeenth century. A meta-rhetorical signpost, 'wit' comes to reflect through its use and disuse both the issues at hand and the inherent self-reflexivity of any attempt to deal directly with rhetoric.

This study investigates the relationship between the individual and their monthly donation to the INGO Amnesty International Sweden as a process of identity stimulation. Problematizing how consuming a brand whichdoes not give anything concrete back to the individual communicates through core values in order to strengthen identity. The study uses theories from Zygmunt Bauman, Sidney Levy, Lilie Chouliaraki and Ronald E. Anderson. According to research for the relationship between the individual and brand there has been a shift where the individual choses brands from other parameters than function, rather this is made from its representation. Therefore consuming brands is an expression for identity. Furthermore research about charity organizations states that there has been a shift in how they communicate and affect individuals’ need to reduce suffering - identity stimulation - as a consequence of neoliberalism. The study is constructed through a qualitative methodology that collects empirical data from responsive- and flexible deep interviews, with respondents who donates monthly to Amnesty International Sweden and are in the age gap between 18-30 years old. The study does not aim for a generalization of the result, rather it investigates how identity can be stimulated through Amnesty International Sweden using concepts as self-oriented, others-oriented and reduce suffering. The result proves what have been stated by former theories, were the relationship between the individual and brand functions as an identity stimulation through different aspects such as identification and distance, the individual as a product and ways to materialize this. However, there has been a clear shift in the individuals awareness of online and offline behaviour which affects how they present themselves as a product. As pointed out earlier by theories from Bauman and Levy, the resultemphasizesthat the individual consumes a brand that represents themselves and strengthens their identity individually and to their social environment. Lastly,the study discuss its result of new individual behavior online and offline as a consequence of neoliberalism and how research within media- and communication studies can further help us understand how communication technology and political forces can affect each other in regards of individual behaviour. The study and its result is situated in the junction between the digital communicative sphere and constant political changes.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à l’émergence de l’art séquentiel aux États-Unis à partir du milieu du XIXe siècle. Né de l’illustration de magazine satirique avant d’aboutir dans les cahiers dominicaux des journaux, ce qu’on nomme d’abord comic (ou comic strip) évolue et s’adapte au gré de l’industrie médiatique à travers des contraintes de production qui répondent bientôt d’habitudes de lecture. S’articulant sur ces procédés à travers une perspective en partie deleuzo-guattarienne, cette thèse propose une interprétation écosophique, axée par des critères sociaux, psychiques et matériels, afin d’étudier les passages transmédiatiques de la bande dessinée jusqu’à la première apogée du strip journalier. Cette approche technocritique, informée par le champ des comics studies, se construit autour de l’analyse de la périodicité et des contraintes de diffusion ainsi que leur compression d’une planche, cherchant à présenter à terme une théorie du rythme de la production et de la lecture de la bande dessinée. Cette conceptualisation passe en partie par une réévaluation de l’œuvre de Sidney Smith, créateur de The Gumps, et de son recours à des stratégies de sérialisation épisodique. Ancien chalk talker (une profession d’animateur-dessinateur de foule), Smith sert de fil conducteur à cette réflexion sur le rythme et la répétition de la BD dont le corpus inclus aussi de nombreux cartoonists importants du début du XXe siècle (Lyonel Feininger, Bud Fisher, George Herriman, Frank King et Winsor McCay). / This dissertation focuses on the emergence of sequential art in the United States from the middle of the 19th century. Born from the illustration of satirical magazines before ending up in the Sunday pages of newspapers, what was first called a comic (or comic strip) changes and adapts to the liking of the media industry through production constraints that will soon meet reading habits. Articulating these processes through a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, this thesis proposes an ecosophical interpretation, framed by social, psychic, and material factors, in order to study the transmedia growth of American sequential art up to the first apogee of the daily strip. This technocritical approach, informed by the field of comics studies, is built around the analysis of periodicity and distribution constraints and how they compress a page, seeking to present a theory of rhythm for the reading and production of comics. Part of this conceptualization involves a reassessment of the work of Sidney Smith, creator of The Gumps, and his use of episodic serialization strategies. A former chalk talker, Smith serves as a guide for this reflection on the rhythm and repetition of comics, the corpus of which also includes many important cartoonists from the beginning of the 20th century (Lyonel Feininger, Bud Fisher, George Herriman, Frank King, and Winsor McCay).

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze John Keats’s “Lamia” and his style of Anti-Romance as informed by William Shakespeare’s own experimentation with Romance and Anti-Romance in “King Lear.” In order to fulfill the purpose of my thesis, I explore both the Romance and the Anti-Romance genres and develop a definition of the latter that is more particular to “King Lear” and “Lamia.” I also look at the source material for both “King Lear” and “Lamia” to see how Shakespeare and Keats were handling the originally Romantic material. Both Shakespeare and Keats altered the original material by subverting the traditional elements of Romance. In conclusion, the thesis suggests that Shakespeare’s Anti-Romance, “King Lear,” and his general reworking of the Romance genre within that play informed Keats’s own experimentation with and deviation from the traditional Romance genre, particularly in “Lamia.”

My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.

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This dissertation argues that in Renaissance discourses of the body the body is progressively evacuated of the spirit, as we move from texts of the late Medieval period to texts of the Jacobean period. Where New Historicists have suggested that the practice of “self-fashioning,” which dictates behaviour, speech and dress, takes place in the Renaissance, I argue that there was a material self-fashioning of the body occurring simultaneously. Such corporeal fashioning, motivated by desire for physical improvement, frustrates the extent to which the soul shapes the body. My Introduction lays theoretical and historical groundwork, situating the body/soul relationship in relation to Christian theology, Senecan-Stoicism, Epicureanism and philosophical materialism. Discourses of artistic creation, informed by neo-Platonism, also influence corporeal fashioning in that the most radical bodily modifications are imagined through literature, where artificers are often privileged as creators. Chapter One examines “The Miracle of the Black Leg,” a transplant, by the doctor-Saints Cosmas and Damian, of a Moor’s black leg to a white Sacristan, whose gangrenous leg is amputated. In written and pictorial representations Cosmas and Damian, initially figured as Saints, are later presented as doctors who perform a medical procedure. Alongside the doctors’ increasing agency, the black leg itself, inflected by Renaissance notions of Moors and Moorishness, troubles the soul’s immanence in the body. Chapter Two examines Elizabeth I’s practices of bodily fashioning through her wigs, dentures and cosmetics. I argue that Elizabeth’s symbolic value, which includes components of monarchical rule, as well as attitudes toward female beauty, is always already pre-empted by her body. In Book III of The Faerie Queene, moreover, Edmund Spenser writes an alternative history of England through Britomart’s body to provide an heir to Elizabeth’s otherwise heirless throne. Chapters Three and Four perform close readings of Book II of The Faerie Queene, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. I argue that both the allegorical and theatrical modes demand a level of materialism that paradoxically makes the body the centre of attention, and anticipates Cartesian mechanistic dualism. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-25 22:59:31.67

The main goal of this thesis was to evaluate the use of high spatial remote imagery to map the location and biophysical parameters of eelgrass in marine areas around Sidney Spit, a part of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve of Canada (GINPRC). To meet this goal, three objectives were addressed: (1) Define key spectral variables that provide optimum separation between eelgrass and its associated benthic substrates, using in situ hyperspectral measurements, and simulated IKONOS and Landsat 7ETM+ spectral response; (2) evaluate the efficacy of these key variables in classification of the high spatial resolution imagery, AISA and IKONOS, at various levels of processing, to determine the processing methodology that offers the highest eelgrass mapping accuracy; and (3) evaluate the potential of ―value-added‖ classification of two eelgrass biophysical indicators, LAI and epiphyte type. In situ hyperspectral measurements acquired at Sidney Spit in August 2008 provided four different data sets: above water spectra, below water spectral profiles, water-corrected spectra, and pure endmember spectra. In Chapter 3, these data sets were examined with first derivative analysis to determine the unique spectral variables of eelgrass and associated benthic substrates. The most effective variables in discriminating eelgrass from all other substrates were selected using data reduction statistics: M-statistic analysis and multiple discriminant analyses (MDA). These selected spectral variables enabled eelgrass classification accuracy of 98% when separating six classes on above water data: shallow (< 3 m deep) eelgrass, deep (> 3 m) eelgrass, shallow sand, deep sand, shallow green algae, and spectrally deep water. The variables were located mainly in the green wavelengths, where light penetrates to the greatest depth: the slope from 500 – 530 nm, and the first derivatives at 566 nm, 580 nm, and 602 nm. The same data were classified with 96% accuracy after correcting for the water column, using the ratios 566:600 and 566:710. The only source of confusion for all data sets was between green algae and eelgrass, presumably due to their similar pigment composition. IKONOS and Landsat 7ETM+ simulated datasets performed similarly well, with 92% and 94% eelgrass classification accuracy respectively. In Chapter 4, the efficacy of the selected features was tested in the classification of airborne hyperspectral AISA imagery and satellite platform multispectral IKONOS imagery, and compared with various other classifiers, both supervised and unsupervised: K-means, minimum distance (MD), linear spectral unmixing (LSU), and spectral angle mapper (SAM). The selected features achieved the highest eelgrass classification accuracies in the study, when combined with atmospheric correction, glint correction, and optically deep water masking. AISA achieved eelgrass producer and user accuracies of 85% in water shallower than 3 m, and 93% in deeper areas. IKONOS achieved 79% for shallow waters and 82% for deep waters. Endmember classification also showed accuracies over 84% and 71% in AISA and IKONOS imagery respectively. Again, the largest source of confusion was between eelgrass and green algae, as well as between exposed vegetation (sea asparagus and green algae) and exposed eelgrass. Incompatibilities of the automatable processing steps (Tafkaa, LSU and SAM) made automated mapping less accurate than supervised mapping, but suggestions are made toward improvement. The value-added classification of eelgrass LAI and epiphyte type produced poor results in all cases except one; epiphyte presence / absence could be delineated with 87% accuracy. Before applying the findings of this study, one must consider the spatial scale of the intended management goal and select imagery with suitable spatial resolution. Tidal variations, as well as seasonal variability in water conditions and eelgrass phenology must also be considered as they may affect classification accuracies.