Sin duda todos los lectores y críticos de Ted Hughes estarían de acuerdo en considerarlo como uno de los poetas más importantes en la literatura inglesa del siglo XX. A pesar de ello, Hughes también fue un autor prolífico de literatura infantil, publicando a lo largo de su vida más de 25 libros para niños en forma de poesía, prosa, teatro y ensayos críticos. De hecho, escribió su primer libro de cuentos, How the Whale Became, en 1956 en lo que entonces era un pequeño pueblo de pescadores llamado Benidorm, durante su luna de miel con Sylvia Plath. Sin embargo, sorprende que la crítica no se haya centrado en el estudio de la literatura infantil de Hughes. En respuesta a la sensibilización en torno a la crisis ambiental que comenzó en el siglo pasado, la obra de Hughes indaga sobre las fracturas que han alejado al ser humano del mundo natural y tiene como objetivo restablecer el nexo de unión entre la humanidad y la naturaleza. Tal y como se explica en este estudio, la concienciación ecológica de Hughes se forjó en su infancia, en sus andanzas por el mundo natural que lo rodeaba. Al igual que en la obra infantil más madura del poeta, los primeros poemas sobre animales ya mostraban una preocupación por la conservación de las especies locales donde el apego hacia el mundo natural y el deseo de volver a conectar con la naturaleza a menudo se expresan a través de una preocupación constante por la educación ambiental. El universo creativo de la obra de Hughes se puede leer como un contexto para cicatrizar la fractura de la sociedad occidental con la naturaleza y un intento de volver a acercar la cultura humana a sus raíces. Es precisamente en ese contexto que Hughes desarrolla su búsqueda chamánica donde el chamán/poeta actúa como narrador, sanador y mediador, articulándose en un lenguaje sagrado en sintonía con el mundo natural. La función terapéutica y sanadora de la naturaleza está estrechamente relacionada con otros conceptos claves que Hughes explora a lo largo de su obra infantil tales como el mito, la imaginación, y la educación. De hecho, son temas integrados en su actitud como escritor y que forman parte de su universo literario. Para Hughes, los niños constituyen un público ideal puesto que todavía no han sido condicionados por la sociedad. Su literatura infantil representó una parte oculta de su ser autobiográfico, estrechamente relacionado con su búsqueda terapéutica de curación. En este sentido la misión sanadora de Hughes es doble. A nivel personal su obra se puede leer como una historia de redención, una alegoría de curar su ser fracturado. Por otra parte, su obra se puede leer también como una búsqueda para recuperar el equilibrio con el fin de curar las heridas que nos han distanciado de la naturaleza, para que la reconciliación entre cultura y naturaleza pueda llevarse a cabo. Teniendo en cuenta todo lo expuesto, surge la pregunta de hipótesis de esta tesis: ¿existe una búsqueda de curación en la literatura infantil de Ted Hughes? Para contestarlo se ha contextualizado la obra de Hughes en relación con los textos principales de la ecocrítica y he llevado a cabo un escrupuloso análisis de su literatura infantil a través de su poesía, prosa y teatro además de sus ensayos críticos y cartas. A través de una lectura ecocrítica de la obra de Hughes se ha planteado preguntas claves cómo las siguientes: ¿Cómo se relaciona su literatura infantil con nuestra crisis ecológica y qué es lo que pone de manifiesto una lectura ecocrítica de su obra? ¿Es su escritura sensible a temas relacionados con el medio ambiente? ¿Qué preguntas relativas a cuestiones medioambientales suscita su obra? ¿Qué sentido de curación y recuperación ecológica aparece en su literatura tanto en el ámbito personal como social? ¿En qué obras se consigue este aspecto redentor y equilibrio y armonía entre la naturaleza y la humanidad y en cuáles no? Tal y como se defiende en esta tesis, a través de la literatura infantil, Hughes esconde un ser autobiográfico oculto estrechamente ligado con su búsqueda catártica de curación. La mayor parte de la obra de Hughes responde o bien a una crisis personal y humana, o a una fractura del ser humano con la naturaleza. A través de la figura de la diosa y el poder del mito fue capaz de explorar las energías primigenias del mundo natural, así como las fuerzas creativas y destructivas del universo. La poesía de Hughes critica estas dualidades señalando el sentido de la absoluta alteridad de la naturaleza y las relaciones entre estas energías y la sociedad occidental quien se ha distanciado de la naturaleza. En su poesía adulta, dada la energía masculina predominante y la carga sexual y violencia que subyace en gran parte de su trabajo, rara vez se logra el equilibrio entre esas energías y fuerzas. Por otro lado, tal y como esta tesis argumenta, es en su literatura infantil – en su prosa, poesía y teatro – donde tiene lugar ese equilibrio de forma más exitosa, siendo terapéuticamente más redentor gracias a su efecto sanador. Con el fin de enmarcar el concepto de curación en su literatura infantil esta tesis doctoral se ha estructurado en dos partes: la Primera Parte, ‘Speaking Through the Voice of Nature’ (Hablando a través de la voz de la naturaleza), consta de tres capítulos y está dedicada a situar al lector dentro del marco teórico y de los aspectos biográficos más importantes de la vida de Hughes, así como su temprana relación con el mundo natural y su desarrollo como escritor y ecologista. La segunda Parte, ‘The Quest for Healing in Ted Hughes’s Children’s Writing’ (La búsqueda de curación en la literatura infantil de Ted Hughes), se centra en el análisis de sus obras literarias a través de los distintos géneros. Finalmente, tras el análisis de sus obras, la conclusión identifica los puntos principales de la investigación y los resultados del análisis.

This study responds to the need for an understanding of the relation of form and political critique within the sonnet form, and hopes to demonstrate that the sonnet can be used to effectively articulate the experience of racism, especially the Du Boisian concept of "double- consciousness," a sense of two-ness born of being both black and American. The fundamental structure of the sonnet (octave, volta, sestet) is dialectical; it "contests the idea it just introduced" (Caplan, Poetic Form: An Introduction 75). The sonnet's self-reflexive structure has been adopted and adapted by poets such as McKay, Cullen, Hughes, and Brooks. The formal and social characteristics of sonnets by African-Americans function synergistically: the way that the octave and the sestet respond to each other in a single poem is also similar to the "call-and- response" movement of African American oral culture. Its tendency to mix two unlike things is like Harlem itself: a compressed space where the street sweeper rubs shoulders with the business tycoon. Perhaps most importantly, the sonnet can be a Trojan horse, a genteel container that conceals a potentially subversive message. This study is constructed around related lines of questioning: First, why did African American poets, in an era usually associated with free verse, choose to adopt a traditional form? Second, how do African American poets adapt a European form as a lens into African American experience? Sonnets by African Americans reflect the complexity of a seemingly simple triangulation between the traditional requirements of form, the promise of equality, and the reality of racism. African American poets infuse "Harlem in Shakespeare," pouring black consciousness into the European form, and they raise "Shakespeare in Harlem," elevating the status of African American forms to the highest levels of literary art. At the same time, this study demonstrates the value of a prosody-based approach for examining how small formal details contribute substantially to the reader's impression of the sonnet. These poets deploy the "rules" of the sonnet ingeniously and unexpectedly. Additionally, the sonnet is a way to separate from and simultaneously be a part of the dominant culture by writing a critical message in a recognizable form. Black culture can criticize white culture, while at the same time acknowledging the mutual, inescapable relationship that binds blacks and white Americans together. Additionally, the sonnet is a way to separate from and simultaneously be a part of the dominant culture by writing a critical message in a recognizable form. Black culture can criticize white culture, while at the same time acknowledging the mutual, inescapable relationship that binds blacks and white Americans together.

This work explores how the 20th century English poet Ted Hughes translates one episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses (the "Pyramus and Thisbe" myth included in Hughes's Tales from Ovid) to make it an emblem for his notions about translation. In translating "Pyramus and Thisbe," Hughes removed many of the formal Ovidian elements and amplified the themes of violence and mingling latent in the myth. In doing so, he highlights the concept that communication sometimes necessitates breaking, symbolized primarily by the chink in the wall through which Pyramus and Thisbe whisper to one another. This metaphor for translation corroborates Hughes's discursive assertions that he favors literalness when translating, and yet contradicts the markedly Hughesian poems his translation work produces.

Séparé du Sud pastoral, de la capitale londonienne et d’Oxbridge par une frontière moins géographique que culturelle, le Nord de l'Angleterre a une géographie variable en fonction des besoins du discours. Une constante discursive parcourt cependant la littérature sur la région : marqué par ses rudes conditions climatiques, jadis peuplé de barbares, en butte aux invasions et ravagé par la Révolution Industrielle, le Nord serait en marge de la sphère poétique. Or, à partir des années 1960, dans le cadre d'une redécouverte des marges de l'ex-empire et d’une dissolution des frontières nationales due à la mondialisation, le Nord revendique son droit à figurer à part entière au cœur de la carte poétique. Les poésies de Basil Bunting, de Ted Hughes, de Tony Harrison, et de Simon Armitage nous invitent à parcourir ces Nords géographiques, historiques, culturels, mais avant tout poétiques. Ces quatre poètes, nés dans le Nord, ont en commun d’avoir pris une distance, sinon physique, du moins intellectuelle, avec la région, ce qui leur a permis de poser un regard critique. Le mouvement nostalgique de retour à la terre natale amorce une réappropriation sur le plan de l’imaginaire de cet espace colonisé par des discours dépréciatifs. Les poètes y découvrent une source intarissable de créativité et partent en quête d’une langue qui résorbe l’écart entre nordicité et poéticité : l'impur accent barbare devient axiome poétique. Comment cette poésie du Nord met-elle en question l'anglicité et la tradition poétique anglaise en même temps qu'elle la structure ? Si « poésie du Nord » il y a, quelles en sont les réalisations dans la voix, le rythme et la forme poétiques ? / Divided from the pastoral South, London and Oxbridge by a frontier that is less geographical than cultural, Northern England has been constructed through shifting discourses. One discursive feature though has been constantly present in the literature on the region : since the place is forbidding (not the least because of its grim weather), since it used to be populated with barbaric tribes and provided a buffer against even more barbarian invasions, since it was devastated by the Industrial Revolution, the North is excluded from the poetic sphere. Yet since the 1960s, in a context of peripheries emerging from the former empire and of national frontiers disappearing due to globalisation, the North has claimed its right to hold a central place on the poetic map. Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage have participated in reconfiguring geographical, historical, cultural, but, most importantly, poetic Norths. The nostalgic return to the region where they were born and bred reads as a creative and critical reappropriation of a space that has been colonised by derogatory discourses. The poets discover an inexhaustible source of inspiration and set on a quest for a language that would bridge the gap between northerness and poetry : their impure barbarian accent becomes a poetic axiom. How does this Northern English poetry question Englishness and the English poetic tradition while constructing them ? If « Northern English poetry » does exist, how does it show in terms of poetic voice, rhythms and forms ?

Development of concepts for victory through exercises, simulations and force comparison is a continuously ongoing process in military organizations. A complementing method of contributing to concepts for victory can be made through systematic testing of existing theories which prescribes such concepts. This can provide knowledge regarding the validity of a theory and provide fundamental insights concerning which basic factors contributes to victory in naval combat. In this essay Wayne P. Hughes Six Cornerstones are tested through a qualitative case study of the battle of the Nile in 1798 and the Falklands campaign in 1982 to test its explanatory value for victory. The results show findings of the theory in both cases and larger deviations only occurred between two cornerstones. The largest deviations occurred between the cornerstones which contained specific descriptions for successful actions. The cornerstones which described success in a general manner and as desired effects were more applicable in the cases. This strengthens the fact that a recipe for specific actions in combat hardly can prescribe general success. The results also show that general descriptions can be viewed valuable for what it excludes, not for what it specifically prescribes. More research has to be done to say something further regarding the validity of the theory.

As Paul Gilroy has argued, the Black Atlantic is a cultural and literary network that has emerged in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade. The concerns of the Black Atlantic are made visible in the poetry of African American Langston Hughes and Cuban Nicolás Guillén. Gilroy’s theorization of the Black Atlantic draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of ‘double consciousness’ which describes the “doubleness” that blacks can experience when belonging to two groups at the same time which have been constructed as oppositional and exclusive in a society. One of Du Bois’s main concerns is to highlight the troublesome situation of the African Americans in the time after the emancipation, and to advocate for the inclusion of black people’s culture and identity into the U.S. national identity. Gilroy develops the idea of double consciousness to question national identities, notions of ethnicity, and the assumption that cultures always flow into congruent patterns with national borders; he further suggests that the Atlantic should be taken as a single, complex formation of black cultural expression. The analysis in this essay of the poems by Hughes and Guillén show that even though the poetry of these writers emerges in different contexts their poetry share essential similarities in their expressions of the Black Atlantic: the expression of a collective subject’s experience of slavery and displacement, the experience of double consciousness, and the aspiration for a whole identity, which can either, or simultaneously, be a desire of belonging to a national identity or to a cosmopolitan identity. Furthermore the analysis displays that the poems express a belonging to a certain kind of ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in which the subject’s experience of not belonging and the unification in the dispersion is fundamental; this rootless world identity is in itself a manifestation of the Black Atlantic culture which Gilroy describes.

The purpose of this study was to examine the causes and historical impact of the Armstrong investigation into the practices of the life insurance industry. As a long-time admirer of Charles Evans Hughes, and a serious student of the history of insurance, I found the opportunity of looking into an important part of Hughes's early career and the most significant event in the annals of insurance history to be especially compelling, particularly as my research came to show the need to re-assess much of what previously has been written about the episode.In addition to basic resource materials available at Bracken Library, I found that extensive use of contemporary newspaper accounts, principally those in the Chicago Tribune andNew York Times, revealed the vivid images that caught so well the attention and imagination of the American public in 1905. I also have made valuable use of James Hazen Hyde's personal papers in the archival section of Baker Library at Harvard University. This important collection of private correspondence and records has been largely overlooked by insurance historians writing about the period. Those who have written about the New York Times also have ignored the Hyde material, most significantly the items linking the financial condition of the New York Times with the Equitable Life Assurance Society, the principal firm in the great financial scandal. That embarrassing link explains the newspaper's restrained and even bland reporting and editorials concerning the unfolding events.Little mention is given the Armstrong investigation in the insurance textbooks used in American colleges and universities. The occasional references to the most important public investigative body of its time are limited to phrases beginning with "because of" or "prior to" and rarely provide more than a minimal amount of background explanation. Certainly more of the history of insurance needs to be taught.While institutions of higher learning offer students the opportunity to study the history of many subjects, such as art, music, medicine, law, and economics, none of the more than two hundred universities in the country offering insurance courses includes study of the history of insurance. Of the many rich and intriguing events in the realm of insurance, the story of the Armstrong investigation, with its startling findings and resulting widespread reform legislation, should serve well as the nucleus of an insurance history text. Completion of such a textbook indeed will finish the work started by this thesis. / Department of History

That marginalized discourse communities practice differing modes of communication is a claim recently argued; critics have focused on the trope of metonymy as a means of signifying a discriminated-against group's silenced status within the mainstream society. What seems to be ignored in this discussion is how differing media--literature, music, painting--constitute texts that cut across discursive space (the site of these media) in a similar fashion. By positing the intertextuality (i.e., the similarity) of psycholinguistic metonymy and jazz phraseology, this thesis demonstrates how literary texts issuing from marginalized discourse communities can speak their subjectivities' full names. In Langston Hughes' "The Blues I'm Playing," metonymy and jazz serve as methods of analysis which show the subject-object relationship in artistic production. Jack Kerouac's On The Road constitutes a narrative subjectivity that, like jazz music, metonymically disrupts itself as silences speak from the realm of an Other. By accounting for the similarities between metonymy and jazz, this thesis asserts that more accurate readings can be derived from literature issuing from discourse communities which use jazz to signify. / Department of English

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2006. / Thesis advisor: Antonio García-Lozada. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Spanish." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-104). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M. A.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: W.T. Lhamon, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 9, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 67 pages. Includes bibliographical references.