This thesis assesses the role of the interview form within literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The project contends that the interview, although styling itself as a revealing, authentic, private confession, is a genre of life writing that deeply troubles the model of singular Romantic authorship that it simultaneously promotes. The thesis argues that the interview has been a key site for negotiating conceptions of authorship since its inauguration. Exploring issues of publicity, life writing and gossip, through nineteenth-century newspaper depictions of scandals (chapter one), I argue that the act of interview publication is a staging of the speaking self in the public sphere. In chapter two I triangulate discussions of journalism, celebrity and material modernism to argue that the characteristic modernist authorial persona, far from being revolutionary, avant-garde or iconoclastic, was in fact deeply retrograde. Chapter three examines how the interview operated as a negotiation of the study, the marketplace and the middlebrow in the 1930s, with reference to the popular Everyman magazine series “How Writers Work.” The development of an interrogative interview model in the postwar era forms the subject of chapter four, as I demonstrate how the backdrop of the Cold War transformed the ways in which writers as diverse as Ezra Pound and the Beat poets responded to the interview in their work. The penultimate chapter argues that the Paris Review interview offers a hitherto unrecognised link between New Criticism and New Journalism and can revitalise discussions around the historical institutionalisation of literary studies. Chapter six considers the interview’s prominent contemporary position within world literature as a purveyor of literary value and archive of global cultural memory. Overall, the project illustrates how central the interview has been in the cultural construction of authorship in the last 150 years.

Dorothea Herbert was an Irish provincial writer who did not publish during her lifetime. Only three of her manuscripts are now extant: a collection of poetry, Poetical Eccentricities Written by an Oddity (1793), an illustrated memoir, Retrospections of an Outcast (1806) and a Journal which covers the years 1806-7. All three manuscripts were missing for long periods and some doubts as to their existence and authenticity made many scholars reluctant to study her work. There is almost no documented historical evidence of her life and our only access to her is through her writing. The internal evidence of her writing suggests that by 1806 she was suffering from a serious mental illness. Nevertheless, her works reveal a relatively hidden world of literary practice in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Studied alongside the manuscripts and printed works of a range of contemporary writers, Herbert’s extant manuscripts uncover a complex and informal literary culture. This textual world is dependent on print culture but operates independently of it in a closed system of gift-giving and manuscript circulation. In this thesis I explore the influence of print culture on the writing and reading practices of Herbert and her contemporaries. The thesis is divided into five chapters which examine: the history of Herbert’s manuscripts and those of her contemporaries, their writing as material practice, the cultures in which they read the writing and circulation of manuscripts and the history of the print trade in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This thesis is a cultural history of the textual afterlives and poetic appropriations of John Donne's verse. I use print and manuscript miscellanies, hitherto unstudied commonplace books, letters, diaries and seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism to ask, who was reading Donne and in what physical forms? By looking at allusive strategies and reading practices of the time, I demonstrate how many different Donnes can be identified when we strip away modern notions of what 'Donne' is and seek multiple afterlives. I nuance the idea of Donne as a determinedly coterie poet, suggesting his print presence might have looked to his early audience like a strategic writer who had not, despite Izaak Walton's narrative, closed off the possibility of public authorship. I find there was a period of radical re-appropriation and re-reading of Donne in the seventeenth and eighteenth century: Donne was as a guiding influence to canonical poets. Rochester is perhaps the poet whose voice most vividly recalls Donne's swaggering persona and intricately-constructed rendering of apparent spontaneity. Katherine Philips's verse makes sophisticated use of Donne's voice in her intimate quasi-erotic verse; I contrast this with the voice of her poems written for state occasions to show how Donne becomes a resource for self-revelation. Dryden offers a sustained critical vision of Donne: although, as the primary mercenary proponent of mass popular literature, he may seem initially wholly unDonnean, I show how his verse both explicitly and obliquely negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the dual critique and celebration in Pope's versification of Donne's Satyres, and at the Dunciad, to see where the limits of allusion come up against Pope's cacophonous multiplicity of voices. These four poets take different threads from Donne's canon to different ends and, in so doing, create different Donnes.

Subject to this study is the Neunfelsenbuch ('Book of the Nine Cliffs'), an account of a vision, which is assumed to have originated in Strasbourg after 1352. Initially written in the German vernacular, it was widely circulated in various German dialects and in Dutch and Latin translation. The text exists in two versions: a long version, which is thought to be the work of Rulman Merswin (1382), a citizen of Strasbourg and founder of the convent at the 'Gruner Worth' (1367); and a short version of unknown authorship. Previous scholars have considered the long version to be Merswin's reformulation of the shorter text, which was presumed - though not proven - to have been the original. By investigating the transmission and the textual history, this study aims to solve the questions of authorship and original form. It provides an overview of the entire transmission of both versions in prints and manuscripts, particularly focusing on the southern German short version. For the first time the short version is made available in a critical edition, as a basis for a systematic comparison with the long version. The comparison reveals that, in fact, the long version is the original and thus confirms Rulman Merswin as the true author. Written in 1352, the text not only belongs to the oldest works of the Tauler reception, but also stands at the beginning of the literary production at the 'Gruner Worth'. As a result, this text provides new insights into the spiritual development and the literary heritage of one of the most important centres of spiritual literature in the German vernacular of its time.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:48:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Eliezer Lirio dos Santos.pdf: 841357 bytes, checksum: de0ee8d576c3701563db82000beb9820 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-09-26 / The research proposes to assess the impact and consequences that changing the handwriting to printed was in the sixteenth century, especially in the Protestant Reformation, and how this contributed to the spread of the printed book. Printing with movable type, Gutenberg spread, greatly influenced the printing of books. One of the factors that contributed to the success of this new technology was new support for printing, paper. This new book is now on paper, is printed in unimaginable quantities and in a short time, from the book manuscript on parchment. Against this backdrop, the Protestant Reformation effectively has its beginning. The reformers, as anyone used to this new service and support to spread their ideas. This research proposes to study this issue related to the impact it had on the cultural and religious life of the sixteenth century. / A imprensa de tipos móveis, difundida por Gutenberg, contribuiu decisivamente para produção de livros em grande escala, influenciada principalmente pelo novo suporte de impressão, o papel. Desta união, surge o livro impresso, que a partir deste momento é produzido em grandes quantidades em um curto espaço de tempo, em relação ao livro manuscrito. É neste cenário que a Reforma Protestante tem efetivamente seu início. A pesquisa aborda como os dois maiores expoentes da Reforma Protestante, Lutero e Calvino, se beneficiaram desta nova tecnologia e suporte, e ao mesmo tempo demonstra que, ao se utilizarem esta tecnologia, acabaram contribuindo para a disseminação e aceitação da imprensa e seu produto principal, o livro impresso.

This dissertation examines the cultural, intellectual and artistic contributions religious women made in the production of secular and religious books in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy. It presents the first comparative study of nuns' book production across Italy and introduces new manuscripts to the canon of nuns' bookwork. Though the scholarship of the last fifty years has increased our understanding of the institutional and individual lives of nuns, little research has been done on their production and exchange of texts. Nun-scribes and manuscript painters produced liturgical, devotional and administrative books for use in-house, as well as for secular and religious communities and individuals outside the walls of the convents. Evidence of their bookwork repositions them as active participants in a rich spiritual, intellectual and artistic life and broadens their sphere of activity and influence to include a wide community of secular and religious patrons, artistic collaborators, scholars, family members, and book-buying clientele. Through a close examination of the material evidence in their manuscripts, this study illustrates how nuns used the production and exchange of texts to further their individual and institutional goals. This dissertation makes an important contribution to the current understanding nuns' spiritual, artistic and intellectual life and practice and significantly reshapes the current understanding of women's education and learning in Renaissance and early modern Italy (1400-1650).

"God's Spies": Reading, Revelation, and the Poetics of Surveillance in Early Modern England The recent material turn in humanities scholarship has yielded fascinating and insightful research in roughly the past decade, especially in the fields of book history and the history of reading. Scholars of material culture have researched the concrete particulars of book production, the places books were sold, and the conditions in which they were read. This dissertation focuses on the clandestine aspects of early modern English material culture, with particular emphasis on the secret spaces in which reading occurred. Early modern English monarchs cultivated a culture of surveillance in an effort to eliminate illicit religious texts, which combined with changes to the conditions in which texts were read to encourage more private and secretive reading habits. Ultimately, technological, religious, and political change became epistemological as readers increasingly applied a hermeneutics of surveillance to the texts they approached, reading for hidden meaning and for total interpretive control of a text. Writers of imaginative fiction staged scenes of what I call textual surveillance in their works, transforming the hermeneutics of surveillance into a poetics of surveillance that scrutinized the validity of this interpretive strategy and explored how these material, religious, and political changes warped the way readers interpreted, thought, and perceived reality.

<p>This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political term within Whitman's later editions, it was nearly devoid from the original one, in which republican political concepts were still regnant. The argument put forth is that in the space of twelve years, Whitman's relationship to democracy went through a strikingly classic dialectic trajectory: emergence, consolidation and fissure. The immediate engine driving this progression was the Civil War, but behind this immediate cause was the slower, broader motor of modernization, particularly modernization's expansion of markets, for in the market's circulation and interconnection of people and commodities Whitman saw a model for an expansive and integrative democratic collectivity. The first chapter explores the importance to Whitman of the physical print room as a uniquely hybrid site in the course of modernization, for while it was one of the first to exploit the expanding industrial market, it also maintained pre-industrial forms of artisanal labor late into that progression. The print room thus became a site where the industrial market's reach and pre-industrial labor's affective relationship to the product and its consumers could be combined, and the print room therefore plays a central role, in ways both subtle and profound, in Whitman's poetry, in his understanding of the emerging democratic nation, and in his own literary productive practice. The second chapter turns from an investigation of democratic social space to an investigation of democratic time, noting how a nearly forgotten event, a loan between Whitman and James Parton, ended the "afflatus" under which the early editions were produced and prompted Whitman to revamp Leaves' relationship to history. Whitman's experience of personal debt failure led him to reconsider the ways in which his political project was susceptible to similar collapse, for the circuits of affective connection upon which his democratic project was based depended not only on their reach through space but on their forward projection through time, particularly the continual recycling of death into life, what Whitman called the "perpetual payment of the perpetual loan." Whitman sought to reduce this contingency by abstracting the political project of the work from his immediate social world (America) to a political philosophy (democracy) which stood above and outside of time. The 1860 edition thus marked the emergence of democracy as the book's central political philosophy. Yet this strategy proved insufficient when Whitman confronted the one barrier to affective exchange that his verse could not bridge: the dead bodies of the Union soldiers. This unbridgeable difference reverberated outward through the circuits of Whitman's poetry, dismantling the political and affective structures he had been building up to 1860. A text which previously declared the absence of both the past and death - "the greatest poet ... places himself where the future becomes present," "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death" - now becomes doubly haunted by ghosts, once by the dead bodies of Union soldiers which, as much as Whitman declares he "will henceforth forget," he cannot, and again by the strange emergence of new "Phantoms, gigantic, superb." These phantoms represent for Whitman the inversion of democracy's promise, democracy become nightmarish and zombie-like, and his fundamental triangle is haunted by its inverse: a melancholic Whitman; the overmastering re-emergence of the "bards of the past" and explicitly antiquated poetic forms; and a threatening, sovereign federal power autonomous from the people. The revisions Whitman introduced to the post-war edition of 1867 tell the story of a crisis in democratic confidence on behalf of democracy's former champion. Taken all together, the first four editions of Leaves form a chronicle of the archetypal democratic poet's struggle with democracy during U.S. democracy's most critical decade.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation explores the emergence of a golden age of Arabic encyclopaedic literature in the scholarly centers of Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). At the heart of the project is a study of Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (‘The Ultimate Ambition in the Branches of Erudition’), a 31-volume encyclopaedic work composed at the beginning of the 14th century and divided into five parts: (i) heaven and earth; (ii) the human being; (iii) animals; (iv) plants; and (v) the history of the world. My study examines the formal arrangement, thematic contents, and codicological features of this seminal work, arguing that the rise of encyclopaedism in this period was emblematic of a certain intellectual ethos, a systematic approach to the classification of knowledge which emerged in the discursive context of a rapidly centralizing imperial state. I argue that the Nihāya grew out of an amalgam of several genres (including the adab anthology, the cosmographical compendium, the chancery scribe manual, the dynastic chronicle, and the commonplace book), developing into a new form and serving a different purpose from its literary predecessors. Such texts, long considered tokens of intellectual and cultural decadence, demonstrate the strategies used by Mamluk religious scholars, chancery scribes, and littérateurs to navigate an ever-growing corpus of accumulated knowledge / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This thesis is a study of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript and print contexts of Older Scots romance. Building on recent developments in Middle English romance scholarship and Older Scots book history, it seeks to contextualise the surviving corpus of Older Scots romances in light of their unique material witnesses and contemporary cultural milieu. Chapters 1 to 8 focus respectively on the following Older Scots romances: the Octosyllabic Alexander, the Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, Florimond, Lancelot of the Laik, King Orphius and Sir Colling, Golagros and Gawane and Rauf Coilyear, the Scottish Troy Book, and Clariodus. The conclusion assesses and evaluates the most significant and recurring features of these chapters and reveals how they cumulatively deepen our understanding of the book-producing and book-owning culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland. The conclusion also looks forward to new witness- conscious editions of Older Scots romance that endeavour to represent as far as possible a text’s unique and idiosyncratic manuscript and print contexts. In each chapter I examine the set romance’s primary contexts of composition, including authorship, date, and first audience, as well as its secondary publication contexts. A full palaeographical, codicological and bibliographical description of each manuscript and print is provided, with details of when, where and by whom each witness was produced. Information about when and where that witness was read is also given, with details of the owners and readers where known. Significant attention is paid to the use of titles, rubrication and mise-en-page to reveal the trends and bibliographical codes in copying and presentation. Where appropriate, the compilation choices made by scribes and readers are also analysed. Careful assessments of these are shown to aid modern thematic and comparative literary interpretation. Most notably, each chapter of this thesis also provides much-needed new information about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish literary communities. Several significant and often-overlapping circles of scribes, readers and owners are revealed. The familial, professional and geographical associations between these groups of producers and consumers are traced and consequently new book- publishing and book-owning networks are documented. In further original work, a number of hitherto unknown texts, scribes and readers are also successfully identified.