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This study uses Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech, delivered to the House of Commons following the evacuation of Dunkirk, France in June 1940, as a source text by which to examine Churchill's use of British cultural narratives in political communication. Narrative and heuristic theories are proposed as means by which listeners process such messages. A number of rhetorical devices are defined, in order to inform a discussion of the narratives identified, particularly the means by which those narratives were rhetorically embedded in the text. After a careful examination of the source text, the narratives of knighthood and chivalric values, as well as King Arthur and the Arthurian legend, specifically as presented in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, were identified as primary cultural narratives from which Churchill draws much meaning. A thorough critical history of each of these narratives is undertaken, revealing sentiments of oath-bound civic duty tracing back to Britain's historical founding as a culture and a nation, following the fall of Rome in the fifth century, and persisting up until Churchill's use of those sentiments in his historic 1940 speech.

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John Steinbeck, known for his descriptions of the American West, maintained a fascination with the Arthurian legend throughout his life and literary career. Through comparative analysis of Cup of Gold, Tortilla Flat, and The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, we can see Steinbeck's recurring interest in the Arthurian legend which is often overlooked by scholars. Steinbeck's initial interest in strict translation which evolved into adaptation over the course of his work on The Acts shows his developing interest in Arthurian themes which he enhanced with his own creative abilities as a world-renowned author. By highlighting the gap between Steinbeck's view of America and his known Arthurian interest, we can challenge current interpretations of Steinbeck's literary corpus, and create new meaning which has been overlooked. Despite limited scholarship on The Acts, this thesis explores Steinbeck's connection to King Arthur and underscores the significance of his contribution to the Arthurian tradition.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Mists of Avalon is different from the usual episodic versions of the Arthurian legend in that it has the structural unity that the label "novel" implies. The narrative is set in fifth-century Britain, a time of religious conflict between Christianity and the native religions of Britain, especially the Mother Goddess cult. Bradley pulls elements from the Arthurian legend and fits them into this context of religious struggle for influence. She draws interesting family relationships which are closely tied to Avalon, the center of Goddess worship. The author also places the major events during Arthur's reign into the religious setting. The Grail's appearance at Camelot and the subsequent events led to the end of the religious struggle, for Christianity emerged victorious.

In Poets of Reality, Joseph Hillis Miller seeks to establish T.S. Eliot as a precursor of the modern movement towards romantic. subjectivism. By applying his phenomenological critique, Miller claims that several major modern writers, including Eliot, adopt aesthetics based on various forms of philosophical monism. The point underlying this thesis is that Eliot stands opposed to any such position and, until 1930, breaks with philosophy, monistic or otherwise. His art from this period is instead characterized by a search for solution in poetic artifice, a pure art. However, with "Ash Wednesday," the poet once again enters fully into the realm of ideas, and by Four Quartets has achieved a synthesis of art and idea that is clearly dualistic in nature and affirms the importance of a progressive, and not destructive tradition. All of this he finally undergirds with a logocentric belief in language as a vehicle to be purified, far from the linguistic nihilism of Miller's "Yale School" colleague, Jacques Derrida.

À travers cette analyse textuelle et iconographique, nous avons suivi les déclinaisons de l’idée de hiérarchie à l’intérieur du Tristan en prose et dans l’iconographie d’une partie de ses manuscrits. Introduite dans la fiction, la hiérarchie devient principe ordonnateur et conduit les personnages à la recherche d’une place privilégiée dans le monde et à la recherche du sens de ce monde en expansion. Oblique, verticale ou horizontale, la hiérarchie traverse le roman et le dépasse, tout en ouvrant un dialogue problématique avec d’autres grands textes de l’époque. Nous avons cherché à comprendre le fonctionnement de l’image par rapport aux axes thématiques du roman, mais aussi par rapport à d’autres cycles iconographiques. / Throughout our analysis, we have investigated the multiple aspects of the idea of hierarchy within the Prose Tristan and a part of its iconography. Introduced in fiction, the hierarchy becomes an ordering principle that makes the characters search for both a privileged place and a meaning in a continuously expanding world. The hierarchy can be oblique, vertical or horizontal. It goes through the novel and beyond it, chiefly to open a problematic dialogue with other major texts of that time. We tried to understand the way the image functions in connection not only with the main themes of the novel but also with other iconographic cycles.

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Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:30:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Andrea Rossini T Favaro.pdf: 799656 bytes, checksum: 0952ed8df4eaff987d0790e036ed9eda (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-11-03 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This M.A. dissertation analyzes the work Idylls of the King (1889), from the English poet Alfred Tennyson, as a historical source. Our first aim is to identify the context of the idylls production, associating the work to political, economical and social matters such as the ones that were formed at the Victorian England. The second one is to identify the singularities from the Tennyson´s authorship through the characters selection, episodes and approached themes from the achievement which we call temporal transition, associating the Arthurian myth to the English history. In that manner, we identify what the author believed to be the mission of the poet, linked to social function of culture. The third aim is to identify the royalty built by Tennyson, based on what he considered to be the tradition which passes through all the nation history, the political and personal virtues / Esta dissertação analisa a obra Idylls of the King (1889), do poeta inglês Alfred Tennyson, como documento ou registro histórico. Nosso primeiro objetivo é identificarmos o contexto de produção dos idílios, associando a obra as questões políticas, econômicas e sociais tal como se configuravam na Inglaterra vitoriana. O segundo é identificarmos as marcas da autoria de Tennyson por meio da seleção de personagens, episódios e temas abordados a partir da realização do que denominamos trânsito temporal, que associa o mito arthuriano à história inglesa. Dessa forma, identificamos aquilo que o autor acreditava ser a missão do poeta, vinculada à função social da cultura. O terceiro objetivo é identificarmos a realeza construída por Tennyson, fundamentada no que considerava ser a tradição que perpassara toda a história da nação, a virtude pessoal e política