"'The English of this wildernesse': aspects of early New England's literary inheritance, as illustrated by the works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor." Since the late 1920's, the literature of early New England has been increasingly studied in the context of the development of American history, literature, and mythology. Without denying the usefulness of such a context, I want to redress the balance by setting selected aspects of two writers in particular, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, in the context of their English origins, and to study them specifically as English provincial writers who exemplify the important phenomenon of cultural lag in a community distant from but crucially attached to a changing metropolitan culture. Part of the originality of my approach is the new look I give to the implications of colonial and provincial literature. Chapter one outlines a detailed historical and critical context for my study. As well, I discuss some of the roots and presuppositions of modern literary scholarship of Early New England, and using T. S. Eliot's distinction between "aesthetic" and "merely historical" criticism, I stress the need for an evaluative context for the early New England poets to complement any discussion of historical perspective. In my second chapter, I tackle crucial and inadequately examined aspects of the influence of Puritanism on New England poetry, concentrating especially on the theological distrust of the imagination and (especially important for Taylor) the literary implications of eucharistic theology. Having developed the major strands of my approach, I then turn to Bradstreet (chapters three to six) and Taylor (chapters seven to nine). Chapter three discusses Anne Bradstreet in the context of Renaissance attitudes to women, in order to show what expectations and possibilities existed for a woman in her position to write poetry. Chapters four and five gradually move from an historical to an evaluative perspective - chapter four to deal with her public poetry, chapter five with her domestic verse and chapter six, her religious poetry. Chapters seven to nine are devoted to selected aspects of Taylor's work. Chapter seven attempts to make a new evaluation of his contribution to the Metaphysical literary tradition; chapter eight explores the implications of his religious beliefs for his poetic practices and especially his constant sense of literary inadequacy. In chapter nine, the crucial question of the relative importance of "historical" and "critical" contexts is again faced as I look at Taylor's poems on the Canticles, not in order to examine his sources, but rather to show the ways in which his poetical imagination responded to and transformed his sources. There is a brief concluding chapter. Throughout the study, I have responded to the great amount of critical and scholarly work done in recent years, and I have therefore concentrated on particular aspects of the topic which, if in no case providing me with totally untouched territory to map, at least have offered the chance of meaningful and original exploration. I also hope that I am offering my explorations within an original and provoking cultural and critical context.

Hardy’s visual imagery reveals both the eye of the draughtsman and the eye of the artist. His style ranges from awkward pedantries to flowing poetic beauty. This PhD thesis first examines the eccentric scientific imagery, and then the more sustained poetic visual themes such as the ‘near’ and ‘far’ view, or the use of light and shade. Hardy’s reference to paintings, etchings and sculptures is examined in detail, with illustrations provided throughout the text. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy. / The French farce of the period 1450-1550 contains a cornucopia of verbal expressions that we may term 'exclamatory’; swearing, oaths, curses, insults, supplications, interjections, exhortations, scatology, invocations of saints, and so on. Yet this literary form, considered by researchers be a repository of spoken French of the later Middle Ages, remains largely unexplored from this standpoint. Indeed, there are few studies of 'expressive' modern language in existence, due largely to the inferior status given to this linguistic register by the majority of researchers. This thesis seeks to examine and quantify the formulaic nature of exclamatory discourse in the farces. By adopting a broader definition of the word 'exclamation' than that currently accepted, we seek to unite the disparate and fragmentary attitudes of the few researchers who have expressed the view that this aspect of discourse merits further analysis. It is asserted that examination of formulae (i.e. leitmotivic usages) allows an objective assessment of affective language; the formulaic constructions are shown to be themselves subject to formulaic modification. A database of 7668 quotations (68,500 words) from 99 farces is used to establish a taxonomy which shows usage in context. The taxonomy is organised around headwords, which form the nuclei of the various expressive domains. From this taxonomy, 858 formulae are extracted and described. The relative frequency of occurrence of the phrases in the taxonomy is portrayed in graphical form. The field of research from 1900 to the present is examined. The attitudes of researchers are shown to have undergone evolutionary rather than revolutionary development in the course of the century; the abovementioned divergence of methodologies (and definitions of the field of research), is asserted to have hindered an advance of research in this area. Possibilities for further research are suggested, for example in the field of comparative inter-lingual studies.

Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy. / This thesis establishes a critical edition of the diaries of Geneviève Bréton (1849-l9l8) written between 1874 and 1914. As 'diary' and 'journal' are synonyms, the words are used interchangeably throughout the thesis. Geneviève Bréton was an educated, privileged and literary woman, the third child in a prestigious Parisian family. In this thesis, I argue that her diaries or private writing play the role of an alternative to, for a woman, socially stigmatized public writing. Although she wrote compulsively throughout her life, experimenting with the novel, she devotes most attention to the diary genre, exploring it beyond its conventional parameters as a feminine outlet. Diaries provide a compromise for Bréton as she finds a way around the limitations imposed by sexual difference and cultural mores in nineteenth-century France. As a woman, and as a wife, she accepts the social and cultural imperatives of her environment but, where possible, on her own terms. I argue that for Bréton, the daughter of publishers and friend of writers, the diary genre is a surreptitious entry into their world, her private form of literary expression and creation. I suggest that she recognises this fact at the end of her life when she herself undertakes the preparation of her 1867-1871 journals for publication. The 1874-l9l4 diaries are held in manuscript form in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The first five years of the diaries, based on the material prepared by Bréton, were published in 1985. The present work will facilitate further publications. The corpus of the later diaries, transcribed over a four-year period in the National Library archives in Paris, is preceded by a three-part introduction: a presentation and discussion of the methodology chosen to transcribe the diaries; an analysis of the nineteenth-century family, social, and literary contexts that influence the writing; and the development of a thesis on the rationale behind the existence of the diaries, their character, content, and volume. Bréton began the task of editing and retyping her journals. This edition of the subsequent journals carries on the undertaking of 'publishing and republishing Silenced texts' Julia Swindells, 'Liberating the Subject? Autobiography and "Women's History": A Reading of the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick' in The Personal Narratives Group eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, 1989, p.24.: that of drawing out the untold stories of creativity and rebellion against confinement which are part of history and literary history.

The thesis is divided into five parts. The first consists of a revue of the opinions of the critics on the work of Georges Bernanos, and then proceeds to define the aims of the thesis: (i) to combat the pernicious idea that we are dealing with a "Catholic Opus", one where the term "Catholic" would imply "idealistic" or "out of touch with reality", and to arrive at a different way of approaching the work; (ii) to lay bare the hidden unity of the work since the new interpretation we are seeking will derive from the relation of the parts to the whole; (iii) to show the radical nature of Bernanos's thought which lays bare the roots of the Discontents of our Civilisation and, by so doing, imparts a prophetic tone to his writings. In the second part Bernanos is placed within the context of his times and compared to other intellectuals, both Catholic and non-Catholic, in order to separate the "Catholic" from the "non-Catholic" elements in his work. Next, using the methods of Charles Mauron, we study the Youthful Works. In the third part, following the methods of Lucien Goldmann, we place the Novels in the context of Ecclesiastical Politics. In the fourth part we trace the transformation of the Novelist into the political pundit, then we go back to La Grande peur des bien-pensants to retrace the origins of his political thinking. Chapter twelve, "Birth of the Modem World", traces the development of capitalism in France and concomitant evolution of the value-system and ways of thinking. The fifth part contains the second half of the "Ecrits de Combat" entitled "The Modem World" which gives us Bernanos's view - a prophetic view - of the world we inhabit at present, Then the Conclusion. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Victoria, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [176]-186).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 19, 2009) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.