The purpose of this project is to shed light on three female laboring-class poets who have gone largely overlooked by scholars of eighteenth-century studies, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Janet Little. This paper argues that when discussed together these poets exemplify the shift from Augustan models of intellectualism to proto-Romantic thought. Issues of literary patronage and trend are highlighted in this thesis as the laboring-class poetic tradition enjoyed a long vogue in the eighteenth-century. Chapter One offers a look in the literary marketplace of the period and what scholars have said about the subject of laboring-class writing so far. Chapters Two, Three, and Four focus on the poetry of Leapor, Yearsley, and Little, with particular attention to tribute poems with the goal of highlighting the role of laboring-class writers from Augustan poetry to proto-Romantic poetry.

vii, 280 p. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: SCA Archiv Theses H855 / Adviser: Earl Pomeroy

This thesis examines the patronage and collecting of Alexander, l0th Duke of Hamilton, premier peer of Scotland, son-in-law of the maniacal collector William Beckford, and arguably the greatest collector in the history of Scotland. Using archival evidence from many sources, it begins with investigations of the Duke's early collecting of Italian Renaissance paintings and manuscripts, acquisitions associated with Russia between 1807 and 1814, involvement with Princess Pauline Borghese and the Bonaparte family, and purchases of porphyry and marble in Rome between 1817 and 1827. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the extension and refurbishment of Hamilton Palace between 1822 and 1832 and parallel purchases of furniture, furnishings and applied art. Special attention is paid to motivation and the acquisition of items from the Fonthill sale, tapestries made for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, furniture owned by Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon's 1810 tea service, bronze statues (wrongly) associated with Francis I of France - which served to underline the Duke's status and "support" his claim to the French dukedom of Chatellerault - and porphyry busts of Roman emperors that were "superior" to the bronze copies in the British royal collection. Chapter 7 reviews the last grand projects: the extremely expensive great black marble staircase, planned equestrian monument of the Duke as Marcus Aurelius, and Hamilton Mausoleum. The final chapter concentrates on the later purchases of Classical items and plaster copies, second marble bust of Princess Pauline, Thorvaldsen 's Napoleon Apotheosized, and Old Master paintings, and discusses how the Duke displayed his collection, in colourways, running sequences, clusters, and "end statements". A ''post mortem " conclusion sketches out the continuity of collecting Napoleonic material, as a consequence of the Duke's son and heir's marriage to the daughter of the adopted daughter of Napoleon and cousin of Napoleon Ill and the dispersal of the collection and demolition of Hamilton Palace between 1880 and 1930.

No description available.

No description available.

It is commonly felt among literary and theatre-going people today that the Theatre of the Absurd is making a comment on the meaninglessness and formlessness of contemporary life. The way the Theatre makes its comment is new and exciting: it simply places before our eyes meaninglessness and formlessness. And the Absurd is left at that. Directors can concentrate on the bizarre, making the plays, even The Caretaker, into three-hour runs of pointless juxtapositions that leave sophisticated audiences complacent. Too often the plays of Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco are treated as slices of life, without beginning or end. This paper was undertaken in an effort to discover whether there was not more to the Absurd play than imitation of life's daily chaos. Strong ritualistic elements had been noticed during a first random reading of some Absurd plays. A later discovery of Genet and his open experimentation with rituals, led me to suspect that the ritual so obvious in his plays also played a part, though a more furtive one, in the works of Pinter and Beckett. The following close examination of texture and structure has convinced me that the formal element, which distinguishes ritual, makes up the fabric of the Absurd play; and that this studied use of ritual makes the plays of the Absurd the most precise dramatic statements to have been seen on western stages since medieval days. Rather than exemplifying formlessness, the Absurd play often stands witness to the stark purity of formality. . / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

As delineated in the Introduction, the central direction of this thesis is that of determining the nature and purpose of Harold Pinter's-drama, of tracing his relationship to contemporary drama and dramatists in general, and the theatre of the Absurd in particular. Contrary to the popular belief that the concept of the Absurd suddenly burst upon the literary scene within the last decade, the emphasis of the first chapter lies on the evolutionary process of its development. The idea of the Absurd, or better, an intuition of the concept of the Absurd can be discovered in the philosophic, literary, and theatrical expression of the western world since the end of the last century. These manifestations of the Absurd did not reach the mind of the multitude until it began to express itself through the medium of the theatre. Even then, however, it remained somewhat esoteric in its appeal and reception. Harold Pinter enters the scene of the Absurd, not as an innovator but as a playwright with an exceptional sense of theatre. He does not attempt to redefine its basic ideas, the concept itself is already somewhat diffuse in meaning; his, is an expression of an intense and concentrated image of the absurd. He forged a new weapon with which to impress the Absurd on the consciousness of the popular mind. Pinter's variation of the Absurd thus differs from the continental expression of Beckett and Ionesco in emphasis and manner of expression, not in idea. Its area of concentration is not on the human condition, but on the abject apparition of the individual imprisoned in existence and society. Unlike Beckett's his queries are not of a metaphysical nature. Pinter probes into the masked reality of everyday life. What he exposes is the presence of a menace which threatens, intimidates and destroys the individual, yet remains unidentified. Toward the expression of this conception of man's predicament, Pinter has conceived of a dramatic metaphor which is best described as 'latent grotesque' in effect. Thus the grotesque dominates the idea of his drama and is the very essence of his threatrical form. The theatre which can now be identified with Pinter's name is a drama of anxiety which progresses from the comic grotesque to the terrifying grotesque. Laughter which resolves itself in fear is the new instrument with which an awareness of the Absurd is impressed upon the audience. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation examines the work of Felipe Alfau, a Spanish-American writer who wrote two novels and a collection of children’s stories in the first half of the twentieth century which were the focus of a short-lived critical enthusiasm in the early 1990s. It recognizes the important contribution made by those early critics, but also tries to make a case for a reading of Alfau at variance with the kinds of readings his work has previously received. Specifically, it points at structural and thematic complexities in Alfau’s narratives that have been attributed to his experimentation with self-reflexivity and metafiction, experimentation which many have claimed anticipates the work of writers of the second half of the century. My dissertation shows how other unrelated concerns may have led him to boldly reconsider the parameters of narrative form. I contend that for Alfau confabulation, collaboration, and art are generators of narratives that present the self as an insoluble mystery. What I intend to demonstrate is that Alfau views these sources as problematic repositories that fail to capture and preserve human experience, yet simultaneously believes that they are the only means at our disposal for doing so. His narratives communicate the frustrations such a paradox entails, but also celebrate human faith in those means in spite of such frustrations.

This study has attempted to show that, in her récit Le Soleil et la terre (Paris: Société Nouvelle des Editions J.-J. Pauvert, 1977), the contemporary French woman writer Chantal Chawaf has, through her use of language, created female-defined symbolic imagery. The sources of such imagery draw upon the depths of female experience expressed in a female collective unconscious silenced within both the female mind itself and the interpretive cultural body. At the very core of such imagery - and that upon which focuses the author is the primary presence of the sexual body as the very key defining mode of existence and weltanschauung. The introduction briefly discusses Chantal Chawaf's sensuous and sensual use of language to convey the bodily source of her imagery and words. The focus, however, remains - throughout the study - on how the author is bringing to the foreground the bodily presence and experiences of woman left essentially unacknowledged, in woman's own terms, in the general social fabric. The first chapter examines imagery arising in the female imagination when the self confronts the self as female revealing to woman the sisterhood of all females through ties of body and a primordial affinity with Mother Earth as giver and sustainer of life. The second chapter discusses the cathartic process of freeing woman from the shackles of self-denial arising from an implicit and blind acceptance of male-dominated visions and experiences. The search for female identity in a male-dominated world necessitates fleeing from established and universally accepted symbolic forms by distorting them through imaginative powers. The third chapter examines the gradual attempt to ground woman's identity through a (re)conquest of the female self. The process of (re)birth entails the recognition and acceptance of the self's primary motivating force: the female body and how it relates to its biological truth of giving life. Thus, bodily-defined, life ultimately derives meaning through the human interconnection of man, woman and child as expressed in the time-worn word - Love - to which Chantal Chawaf gives a new, life-pulsating and all-encompassing cosmic meaning. An integral, if not perhaps paramount, part of considerations of content in this study has also been that of form. The very form of this study attempts to duplicate, as a mimetic echo, Chantal Chawaf's image of the woman writer as a lacemaker (la dentelliére) searching to find and make meaning apparent through the transparent or barely visible medium of words. An attempt was made to show (by means of layout, blanks, spacing, oblique quotations...) how explanatory analysis need not follow the path of logical discursive thought, but can also arise from the interplay or associative capacity of abstract intelligence, memory and imagination; i.e., to arrive at intellectual meaning through the concept known in the visual arts as «negative space». / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This study explores the moral characteristics of late eighteenth-century Scottish culture in order to ascertain both its specific nature and its contribution to modern consciousness. It argues that, while the language of moral discourse in that socio-economic environment remained in large part traditional, containing aspects from both neo-Stoicism and classical humanism, it also incorporated and helped to develop an explicitly modern conceptual network. The language of sensibility as discussed by Adam Smith and adapted by practical Scottish moralists, played a key role in the Scottish assessment of appropriate ethical behaviour In a complex society. The contribution of enlightened Scottish moralists to the language and literature of sensibility has been virtually overlooked, with a corresponding impoverishment of our understanding of some of the most important eighteenth-century social and cultural developments. Both literary scholars and social historians have made the mistake of equating eighteenth century sensibility with the growth of individualism and romanticism. The Scottish contribution to sensibility cannot be appreciated in such terms, but needs to be examined in relation to the stress that its practitioners placed upon man's social nature and the integrity of the moral community. Scottish moralists believed that their traditional ethical community was threatened by the increased selfishness, disparateness, and mobility of an imperial and commercial British society. They turned to the cultivation of the moral sentiments as a primary mechanism for moral preservation and regeneration in a cold and indifferent modern world. What is more their discussion of this cultivation related in significant ways to the development of new perspectives on adolescence, private and domestic life, the concept of the feminine and the literary form of the novel. Scottish moralists made a contribution to sentimental discourse which has been almost completely overlooked. Henry Mackenzie, Hugh Blair and James Fordyce were among the most popular authors of the century and their discussion of the family, the community, education, the young and the conjugal relationship was not only influential per se but also reflected a particularly Scottish moral discourse which stressed the concept of sociability and evidenced concern about the survival of the moral community in a modern society. To the extent that literary scholars and historians have ignored or misread their works, they have obscured rather than enlightened eighteenth-century culture and its relationship with the social base. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate