Religious spaces are inextricably bound to the seventeenth century's most challenging theological and epistemological questions. In my dissertation, I argue that seventeenth-century writers represent specifically religious spaces as testing grounds for contemporary theological and philosophical debates about the material foundations of religious knowledge and the epistemological foundations of religious community. By examining how religious concerns shape the period's construction of literary spaces, I contend that religion's developing privacy reflects this previously unexamined conversation about religious knowledge and communal belief. My focus on the central theological and philosophical ideas that shape these literary texts demonstrates how this ongoing conversation about religious space contributes to the increasingly individuated character of religious knowledge at the beginning of the long eighteenth century and shapes the history of religion's social dimension. I explore this conversation in two distinct parts. I first examine those writers who contend with new sensory and experiential bases of religious belief as they represent dedicated religious spaces. After considering how Nicholas Ferrar's family pursues religious knowledge through dedicated religious spaces, I argue that John Milton's Paradise Regained evaluates competing bases of religious knowledge through an extended debate about religious space and knowledge. Finally, I contend that Margaret Cavendish transforms an imagined convent space into an argument that nature serves as the sole source of religious knowledge. In the second part, I examine writers who contend with the social consequences of individual accounts of religious knowledge. The sequel to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress articulates the writer's struggle to reconcile an individual epistemology with the concerns of the religious community. Like Bunyan, Mary Astell seeks to unify individual believers with her proposal for a rationally persuasive Cartesian religion. Finally, William Penn relies on the solitary space of the conscience in his advertisements for Pennsylvania. As these writers seek to reconcile the individual's role in the production of religious knowledge with religion's social manifestations, they associate religious belief and practice with increasingly private, bounded constructions of space. These complex articulations of religion's place in the world play a significant role in religion's developing spatial privacy by the end of the seventeenth century. / English

viii, 261 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / My dissertation analyzes the rake, the libertine male, a figure whose liminal masculinity and transgressive appetites work both to stabilize and unsettle hegemony in the texts in which he appears. The rake may seem no more than a sexy bad boy, unconnected to wider social, political, and economic concerns. However, my project reveals his central role in reflecting, even shaping, anxieties and desires regarding gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. I chart the rake's progress from his origins in the Restoration era to the early twenty-first century. Chapter II examines William Wycherley's comedy The Country Wife in concert with John Dryden's Marriage à la Mode and Aphra Behn's The Rover to analyze the rake's emergence in seventeenth-century theatre and show that his transgression of borders real and figurative plays out the anxieties and aspirations of an emerging British empire. Chapter III uses John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, a satiric interrogation of consumerism and criminality, to chart the rake in eighteenth-century British theatre as Britain's investment in global capitalism and imperialism increased. My discussion of Opera is framed by Richard Steele's early-century sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers and Hannah Cowley's late-century The Belle's Stratagem, a fusion of sentiment and wit. Chapter IV hinges the project's theatre and film sections, analyzing Oscar Wilde's fin-de-siècle comedy The Importance of Being Earnest as a culmination of generations of theatre rakes and an anticipation of the film rakes of the modern and post-modern eras. Dion Boucicault's mid-century London Assurance is used to set up Wilde's queering of the rake figure Chapter V brings the rake to a new medium, film, and a new nation, the United States, as the figure catalyzes American tension over race and gender in early twentieth-century films such as Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat, George Melford's The Sheik, and Ernest Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise. My final chapter reads contemporary films, including Jenniphr Goodman's The Tao of Steve, Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz's About a Boy, and Gore Verbinski's trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean for Disney Studios, to assess the ways in which millennial western masculinity is in stasis. / Committee in charge: Dianne Dugaw, Co-Chair; Priscilla Ovalle, Co-Chair; Kathleen Karlyn; John Schmor

No description available.

Critics and audiences alike have neglected the idea of Wilde as a precursor to Beckett. But I contend that a closer look at each writer's aesthetic and philosophic tendencies-for instance, their interest in the fluid nature of self, their understanding of identity as a performance, and their belief in language as both a way in and a way out of stagnancy -will connect them in surprising and highly significant ways. This thesis will focus on the ways in which Wilde prefigures Beckett as a dramatist. Indeed, many of the themes that Beckett, free from the constraints of a censor and from the societal restrictions of Victorian England, unabashedly details in his drama are to be found residing obscurely in Wilde. Understanding Beckett's major dramatic themes and motifs therefore yields new strategies for reading Wilde.

Publicado em 1956 em inglês, Malone Dies foi o segundo romance do que se convencionou chamar de trilogia de romances do pós-guerra de Samuel Beckett. O presente trabalho estuda como o narrador em primeira pessoa, Malone, cria, ao longo das mais de 120 páginas, um tipo de narrar diferente, recheado de incertezas com base na aporia e na memória em frangalhos, o que leva o leitor a um terreno pantanoso em que as antigas certezas do romance tradicional foram eliminadas. O objetivo desta dissertação está em explorar como a materialidade histórica tanto do período de produção do romance, a Segunda Guerra Mundial na França ocupada, quanto o da sua publicação, imediatamente após o encerramento do conflito, são pontos cruciais para esse novo tipo de narração desenvolvido por Samuel Beckett. Paralelamente, este projeto tenta dar a sua pequena contribuição ao movimento crítico de resgate empirista realizado por uma série de críticos beckettianos que, nos últimos anos, passaram a se focar na materialidade histórica da produção do romancista e enfrentar a ideia até então consensual de que Samuel Beckett era um autor a-histórico e focado apenas em questões metafísicas. / Malone Dies was published in 1956 in English, being the second novel of what became Samuel Becketts trilogy. This work aims to study how the first person narrator, Malone, is able to establish, in 120 pages, a different kind of narration, full of uncertainties based upon aporia and in his memory in shambles, which leads the reader to an unstable ground in which the old certainties of the traditional novel are eliminated. The main goal of this dissertation is to explore how the historical materiality of both the period of the novels writing, the Second World War in occupied France, and that of its publication, soon after the war ended, are crucial points to this new type of narration developed by Samuel Beckett. At the same time, this project attempts to make its small contribution to the empiricist trend developed by many Becketts scholars which, in the last years, have focused on the historical materiality of the novelists production to confront the hitherto consensual idea that Samuel Beckett was an ahistorical author, focused only in metaphysical issues.

Neste trabalho, desenvolvemos uma reflexão sobre uma das principais obras do romance gótico e da prosa de ficção romântica em língua inglesa Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), do clérigo dublinense Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824). Buscamos analisar Melmoth como um sermão gótico irlandês, isto é, um híbrido de romance gótico e sermão sacro, cuja forma é estruturada pelo contexto sócio-histórico da Irlanda do início do século XIX, época caracterizada pelo acirramento das tensões entre católicos e protestantes. Nessa análise, consideramos também a produção sermonística e ensaística do autor. A religião, que se mostra o princípio organizador do romance, foi entendida em sua natureza dialética entre o eterno, as doutrinas teológicas e suas proposições transcendentais, e o temporal, a práxis dos fiéis no mundo. Demonstramos como o escritor-reverendo utiliza uma série de procedimentos retórico-argumentativos da oratória sagrada na tessitura do romance a fim de amplificar o seu grau persuasivo, transformando-o em arma de propaganda política contra a campanha pela Emancipação Católica. Discutimos ainda a fortuna crítica e a recepção do romance em vários países europeus, em especial na França, onde influenciou sobremaneira escritores como Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo e Charles Baudelaire. / This study looks at one of the masterpieces of the Gothic novel and the Romantic prose fiction in the English language: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), written by the Dubliner cleric Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824). One tries to analyze Melmoth as an Irish Gothic sermon, ie, a hybrid of gothic novel and sermon whose shape is structured by the sociohistorical context of 19th century Ireland, a period characterized by the deepening of tensions between Catholics and Protestants. This analysis also takes into account Maturin´s sermons and essays. Religion, which is the organizing principle of the novel, is understood in this study by its dialectic between the eternal (theological doctrines and their transcendental propositions), and the temporal (the practice of the faithful in the world).The study argues that the writer-cleric uses a series of rhetorical-argumentative procedures of sacred oratory in the making of the novel in order to increase its persuasive appeal, turning it into a weapon of political propaganda against the campaign for Catholic emancipation. It also assesses the novel´s reviews and reactions in several European countries, particularly in France, where it greatly influenced writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Charles Baudelaire.

<div> <div> <div> <p>Medieval fairies are chaotic and perplexing narrative agents—neither humans nor monsters—and their actions are defined only by a characteristic unpredictability. My dissertation investigates this fairy chaos, focusing on those moments in a premodern romance when a fairy or group of fairies intrudes on a human community and, to be blunt, makes a mess. I argue that fairy disruption of human ways of thinking and being—everything from human corporeality to the definition of chivalry—is often productive or generative. Each chapter examines how narrative fairies upset medieval English culture’s operations and rules (including, frequently, the rules of the narrative itself) in order to question those conventions in the extra-narrative world of the tale’s audience. Fairy romances, I contend, puzzle and engage their audiences, encouraging readers and hearers to think about and even challenge the processes of their own society. In this way, my research explores the interaction between a text and its audience—between fiction and reality—illuminating the ways in which premodern narratives of chaos and disruption encourage readers and headers to engage in a sustained, ethical consideration of the world. </p> </div> </div> </div>

"Minstrels in the Drawing Room" is an investigation of the representation of musical listening in the nineteenth-century novel. Theoretical accounts of the novel have tended to see it as a universal form, one that opportunistically subsumes all others as its represented content; descriptions of the novel's implied audience often interpret novel-reading as an essentially absorptive activity linking private reading to public belonging through an act of identification. For the writers I discuss here, however, musical listening is interesting because it is a rival mode of shared aesthetic experience that, before the advent of sound recording, was necessarily social. This dissertation draws on recent developments in the history of reading and media theory to describe how novels by three central figures of the European novelistic canon - Goethe, Scott, and Eliot - turn to musical listening to reflect upon the ways in which the absolutely open nature of the novel's mode of address is nevertheless prone to limitation. The dissertation thus complicates often all-or-nothing theories of novel-reading, offering instead a description of how novels model a distanced identification between reader and text.

Publicado em 1956 em inglês, Malone Dies foi o segundo romance do que se convencionou chamar de trilogia de romances do pós-guerra de Samuel Beckett. O presente trabalho estuda como o narrador em primeira pessoa, Malone, cria, ao longo das mais de 120 páginas, um tipo de narrar diferente, recheado de incertezas com base na aporia e na memória em frangalhos, o que leva o leitor a um terreno pantanoso em que as antigas certezas do romance tradicional foram eliminadas. O objetivo desta dissertação está em explorar como a materialidade histórica tanto do período de produção do romance, a Segunda Guerra Mundial na França ocupada, quanto o da sua publicação, imediatamente após o encerramento do conflito, são pontos cruciais para esse novo tipo de narração desenvolvido por Samuel Beckett. Paralelamente, este projeto tenta dar a sua pequena contribuição ao movimento crítico de resgate empirista realizado por uma série de críticos beckettianos que, nos últimos anos, passaram a se focar na materialidade histórica da produção do romancista e enfrentar a ideia até então consensual de que Samuel Beckett era um autor a-histórico e focado apenas em questões metafísicas. / Malone Dies was published in 1956 in English, being the second novel of what became Samuel Becketts trilogy. This work aims to study how the first person narrator, Malone, is able to establish, in 120 pages, a different kind of narration, full of uncertainties based upon aporia and in his memory in shambles, which leads the reader to an unstable ground in which the old certainties of the traditional novel are eliminated. The main goal of this dissertation is to explore how the historical materiality of both the period of the novels writing, the Second World War in occupied France, and that of its publication, soon after the war ended, are crucial points to this new type of narration developed by Samuel Beckett. At the same time, this project attempts to make its small contribution to the empiricist trend developed by many Becketts scholars which, in the last years, have focused on the historical materiality of the novelists production to confront the hitherto consensual idea that Samuel Beckett was an ahistorical author, focused only in metaphysical issues.

Love and growing old are thematically inseparable in W.B. Yeats' poetry, yet it is the former with which this great Irish poet is often associated. The poet's attitudes toward aging are made clear through his symbolism, complicated Irish allusions, and a sometimes jarring treatment of women. As it turns out, these devices have as much to do with Yeats' concern over aging as they have to do with the infamous Maud Gonne. This thesis attempts to not only expose and analyze these intricacies, but also challenge the way the literary canon typically isolates Yeats’ more famous poems without the context of his other work.