Inaug.-diss.--Leipzig. / Cover title. "Lebenslauf": p. 95. "Literaturverzeichnis: p. 90-93.

This thesis project examines the theology of despair through two texts of the English Restoration, John Bunyan’s 1666 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and John Milton’s 1671 Samson Agonistes. It interrogates the spiritually regenerative properties of autobiographical introspection and the role that scriptural analogies play to that end. Where Bunyan’s exercise yields an educative model for readers to follow, Milton’s cautions against the imitability of autobiographical despair.

Proefschrift--Letteren--Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam, 2000. / Résumé en anglais. Bibliogr. p. 519-545. Index.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2004. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-75).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2004. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-75).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 2000. / Includes abstract. Includes vita. Appendix contains the full text of the four works analyzed, with added cross-references. Hypertext published on web site of Quaker Heritage Press. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-389).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 2000. / Typescript. Includes abstract. Includes vita. Appendix contains the full text of the four works analyzed, with added cross-references. Hypertext to be published on web site of Quaker Heritage Press. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-389).

Habilitationsschrift--Basel, 1977. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 346-361).

This dissertation explores the development of prose fiction continuations from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia to the novels of Samuel Richardson. Examining instances in which a text was continued by someone other than its original author, I ask precisely what this distinction means historically: what factors create a system of literary value in which certain continuations are defined as ‘spurious,’ and how does the discourse surrounding these texts participate in changing attitudes toward authorship, originality, and narrative closure? My work thus contributes to recent critical efforts to historicise authorship and literary property, using prose fiction examples that have not previously been discussed in this context. Analysing the rhetorical strategies found within paratextual materials such as prefaces, dedications, and advertisements, I establish how writers of continuations discuss the motivations for their works, how these are marketed and received, and how the authors of the source texts (or their representatives) respond to them. Through close reading, the dissertation traces the development of persistent metaphors for literary property across these texts, focusing on images of land, paternity, and the author’s ‘spirit.’ The introductory chapter addresses these metaphors’ significance, defines the main elements of continuations, and situates them within the historical context of a growing print marketplace and developments in copyright law. The dissertation then presents a series of case studies of the most documentarily-rich instances of continuation across the period. Starting with The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, published posthumously in an incompletely-revised form, Chapter 2 shows how its gaps allowed other writers to continue the story, while Chapter 3 studies the metaphorical approaches to authorship taken in the continuations’ paratexts. Chapter 4 examines two Restoration texts, The English Rogue and The Pilgrim’s Progress, which combine the Arcadia continuations’ concern about the author’s honour with issues of commercial competition. The intersection of profit, reputation and copyright protection brought out in this chapter is reflected in the subsequent discussion of the career of Samuel Richardson. Chapter 5 shows him responding to public challenges to his authorial control following the success of Pamela, whereas Chapter 6 explores the more private assertions of authority taking place within Richardson’s correspondence during the publication of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. Finally, my conclusion summarises the subsequent legal and critical privileging of original over continuation, emphasising the historical contingency of this process. The broad chronological scope of the dissertation allows the frames of all these texts to inform each other for the first time, crossing the established critical boundary between the ‘romance’ and the ‘novel.’ This approach reveals continuities as well as differences, enabling me to construct a more nuanced picture of Early Modern approaches to prose continuations and authorial ownership. In establishing links between law and literature, the project also provides an important historical context for contemporary debates about copyright, fanfiction, and literary property.

<p>This study examines the representation of "conscience" in English literature, theology, and political theory from the late fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. In doing so it links up some prominent conceptual history of the term, from Aquinas to Hobbes, with its imaginative life in English narrative. In particular, beginning with William Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> and moving through texts in the "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" and on to John Bunyan's allegories and polemics, I explore what I call the "satiric" dimensions of conscience in an allegorical tradition that spans a long and varied period of reform in England, medieval and early modern. As I argue, conscience in this tradition is linked up with the jolts of irony as with the solidarities of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ironies of conscience depend precisely on settled dispositions, shared practices, common moral sources and intellectual traditions, and relationships across time. As such, far from simply being a form of individualist self-assurance, conscience presupposes and advocates a social body, a vision of communal life. Accordingly, this study tracks continuities and transformations in the imagined communities in which the judgment that is conscience is articulated, and so too in the capacities of prominent medieval literary forms to go on speaking for others in the face of dramatic cultural upheaval.</p><p>After an introductory essay that examines the relationship between conscience, irony, and literary form, I set out in chapter one with a study of Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> (ca. 1388 in its final version), an ambitious, highly dialectical poem that gives a figure called Conscience a central role in its account of church and society in late medieval England. While Langland draws deeply on scholastic accounts of <italic>conscientia</italic>--an act of practical reason, as Aquinas says, that is binding as your best judgment and yet vexing in its capacity for error and need for formation in the virtues--he dramatizes error in terms of imagined practice, pressing the limits of theory. A long, recursive meditation on how one's socially embodied life constitutes distinctive forms of both blindness and vision, Langland's poem searches out the forms of recognition and mutuality that he takes a truth-seeking irony of conscience to require in his contemporary moment. My reading sets the figure of Conscience in <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> alongside the figure of Holy Church to explore some of these themes, and so also to address why the beginning of Langland's poem matters for its ending. In chapter two I turn to an anonymous early fifteenth-century poem of political complaint called <italic>Mum and the Sothsegger</italic> (ca. 1409) that was written in response to new legislation introducing capital punishment for heresy in England. In Mum I show how an early "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" gets taken up into a rhetoric of royal counsel and so subtly, but decisively, revises aspects of Langland's political and ecclesial vision. In a final chapter moving across several of John Bunyan's works from the 1670s and 1680s, I show how Bunyan conceptualizes coercion in terms of the state and the market, and so defends a "liberty" of conscience that resists both Hobbesian assimilations of moral judgment to the legal structures of territorial sovereignty and an emergent market nominalism, in which exchange value trumps all moral reflection. In part two of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan draws surprisingly on medieval sources to display the forms of mutuality that he thinks are required to resist "consent" to such unjust forms of coercion.</p> / Dissertation