<p>This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.</p> / Dissertation

In the sixteenth century, the cartographic revolution was rapidly changing the experience of everyday life in England. Modes of thinking and inhabiting space (such as astronomy, trigonometry, surveying, and cartography) were advanced and refined, and in England, the map went from rarity to ubiquity in less than seventy years. Navigating Time explores how literary strategies changed in response to this rapid shift in the technology of spatial representation. I consider four epics, the epic being the early modern genre most overtly invested in matters of empire (and thus, in matters of space and history). Building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities, I argue that the epic offers a radical critique of the technological innovations of the cartographic revolution and the menace those innovations posed. Alongside this critique, the early modern epic outlined a new poetics centered on navigation. Epics by Holinshed, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton sought to encompass the representational possibilities of the map, but also to highlight and exceed the map's narrative insufficiency. Holinshed's Chronicles reforms the topography of the city, converting its streets and alleys into historical texts and presenting historiography and mapping as competing interpretive frameworks for urban space. The Faerie Queene redefines genre as the conduct of bodies in space, making it thus impossible to fix Faeryland as a mappable terrain, and asserting the continuous interpretation required by allegory against the compression imposed by the map. Drayton's Poly-Olbion seems at first to be a verbal map of Britain, but the poem quietly insists on the power of literature not to mimic but rather to supplant the world it describes, becoming the terrain a map can only represent. Finally, Milton's Paradise Lost creates a form of navigating without a destination, by transforming history into a geographic expanse that cannot be mapped, only wandered.

In 1871, R. H. Hutton criticized George Eliot for "unfairly running down one of her own characters": Middlemarch's Rosamond Vincy. Hutton blamed Eliot for being cruel to her own creation and used his role as a reader and a critic to lodge a public complaint on Rosamond's behalf. Indignant Reading identifies this response--dissatisfaction and even anger with an author for his/her perceived mistreatment of a fictional character--as a common occasion for literary criticism in the nineteenth century. The indignant readings found in Victorian reviews, letters, and prefaces advance conceptions of plot, characterization, and fictionality distinct from those offered in modern narratological criticism or historicist accounts of Victorian novel practice or literary criticism. Rather than abstracting the aesthetic and ethical concerns from the emotional terms common to Victorian criticism, I see these concerns emerging in conjunction with serious emotional demands and significant, if sometimes inchoate, beliefs about the "rights" of fictional characters. In my discussion of indignation resulting from crimes of plot, I argue that insufficiently motivated events were interpreted by Victorian critics and readers as arising from the author rather than from the text. Discussions of crimes of characterization reveal an implicit tri-partite model of fictional character, in which authors might be incorrect about their own characters as well as cruel toward them. This manner of thinking about authorial accuracy and justice implies, I argue, a conception of fictionality that de-emphasizes the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, modeling the author’s relationship to his fiction on that of the historian to his text. This approach to fiction changes, however, in the twentieth century, alongside restrictive attitudes about the role of affect in performing literary criticism. While indignant reading re-enters the academy as one type of feminist criticism, which emphasizes the ethical at the expense of the affective, indignation in its most emotional form has become a primary mode of expression for fan communities.

Renaissance Error proposes that the formal key to early modern literature is digression. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers compose works that persistently imitate moral and cognitive wandering, often in an attempt to remedy such wandering. Their powerful sense of human error springs from the humanist and reformist view of the Middle Ages as a gigantic detour from classical civilisation and from the apostolic Church. This sense deepens as the intellectual disciplines and religious paths of the Renaissance divide. And it culminates in a radical picture of all human desire, thought, and history as continually digressive from beginning to end.

Victorian novels were, generally speaking, big. But what forms did their bigness take? Why did a "macro" aesthetic prevail in the mid-nineteenth century? And why, after losing influence in the following century, has it returned in recent years? This dissertation identifies three distinct features - one spatial, one temporal, one intellectual - crucial to that aesthetic. Moreover, it explains why that kind of fiction, which I call macrorealism, has come into fashion at two different historical moments.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Anthropology, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed on September 20, 2006). PDF text of dissertation: v., 165 p. ; 0.34Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3209963. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

No description available.

abstract: This paper contains an examination of the impact of the Vampire Hysteria in Europe during the 1700&rsquo;s on Lord Byron's &ldquo;The Giaour.&rdquo; Byron traveled to the continent in 1809 and wrote the poems that came to be known as his Oriental Romances after overhearing what would become &ldquo;The Giaour &rdquo; in &ldquo; one of the many coffee-houses that abound in the Levant.&rdquo; The main character, the Giaour, has characteristics typical of the Greek vampire, called vrykolakas. The vamping of characters, the cyclic imagery, and the juxtaposition of life and death as it is expressed within the poem are analyzed in comparison to vampiric folklore, especially that of Greece. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2010