Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 is widely recognized as an example of an intersection between nationalism and religion due to its use of the Christian symbolism of redemption via sacrifice. The religious aura, surrounding its leader and main ideologue, Patrick Pearse, was both a source of his posthumous "triumph" - the Irish independence shaped to a large extent by his legacy, and his "black legend" of the spiritual father of the sectarian violence in the twentieth century Irish politics. Due to the high degree of politicization of the debate over Pearse's role in Irish history, his intellectual legacy was rarely treated sine ira et studio. After a delineation of the problematic legacy of Pearse in the context of Irish Studies and the general introduction to the theme of the relations between nationalism and religion, this work proceeds to the re-examination of the place of religion in Pearse's thought. Pearse's conceptualization of Irish nationalism should be perceived as a synthesis emerging from the interplay between his deep indebtedness to the religious mind-frame and the Romantic and modernist influences that shaped the atmosphere of the pre-1914 Europe. It is based on a structural analogy between the Church and the nation. The analogy is created by means of a mechanism of the transposition of...

ix, 268 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / "Words in the World" details the ways that the place of rhetoric and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changes in response to the transition from natural philosophy to Cartesian mechanism. In so doing, it also offers a constructive challenge to today's environmental literary criticism, challenging environmental literary critics' preoccupation with themes of nature and, by extension, with representational language. Reading authors from Thomas More to Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson through changes in physics, cartography, botany, and zoology, "Words in the World" argues that literature occupies an increasingly separate place from the real world. "Place" in this context refers to spatiotemporal dimensions, taxonomic affiliations, and the relationships between literature and the physical world. George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), for instance, limits the way that rhetoric is part of the world to the ways that it can be numbered (meter, rhyme scheme, and so forth); metaphor and other tropes, however, are duplicitous. In contrast, for an earlier era of natural philosophers, tropes were the grammar of the universe. "Words in the World" culminates with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621/1651), in which the product of literature's split from the physical world is literary melancholy. Turning to today's environmental literary criticism, the dissertation thus historicizes ecocriticism's nostalgic melancholy for the extratextual physical world. Indeed, Early Modern authors' inquiries into the place of literature and the relationships between that place and the physical world in terms of literary forms and structures, suggests the importance of ecoformalism to Early Modern scholarship. In particular, this dissertation argues that Early Modern authors treat literary structures as types of performative language. This dissertation revises the standard histories of Early Modern developments in rhetoric and of the literary text, and it provides new insight into the materiality of literary form. / Committee in charge: Lisa Freinkel, Chairperson, English; William Rossi, Member, English; George Rowe, Member, English; Ted Toadvine, Outside Member, Philosophy

xi, 266 p. / This dissertation employs recent developments in the cognitive sciences to explicate competing social and religious undercurrents in Beowulf. An enduring scholarly debate has attributed the poem's origins to, variously, Christian or polytheistic worldviews. Rather than approaching the subject with inherited terms which originated in Judeo-Christian assumptions of religious identity, we may distinguish two incongruous ways of conceiving of agency, both human and divine, underlying the conventional designations of pagan and Christian. One of these, the poly-agent schema, requires a complex understanding of the motivations and limitations of all sentient individuals as causal agents with their own internal mental complexities. The other, the omni-agent schema, centralizes original agency in the figure of an omnipotent and omnipresent God and simplifies explanations of social interactions. In this concept, any individual's potential for intentional agency is limited to subordination or resistance to the will of God. The omni-agent schema relies on social categorization to understand behavior of others, whereas the poly-agent schema tracks individual minds, their intentions, and potential actions. Whereas medieval Christian narratives, such as Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert and Augustine's Confessions, depend on the omni-agent schema, Beowulf relies more heavily on the poly-agent schema, which it shares with Classical and Norse myths, epics, and sagas. While this does not prove that the poem originated before the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, it suggests that the poem was able to preserve an older social schema which would have been discouraged in post-conversion cultures were it not for a number of passages in the poem which affirmed conventional Christian theology. These theological asides describe an omni-agent schema in abstract terms, though they accord poorly with the representations of character thought and action within the poem. This minimal affirmation of a newer model of social interaction may have enabled the poem's preservation on parchment in an age characterized by the condemnation, and often violent suppression, of non-Christian beliefs. These affirmations do not, however, tell the whole story. / Committee in charge: James W. Earl, Chairperson; Louise Westling, Member; Lisa Freinkel, Member; Mark Johnson, Outside Member

viii, 214 p. / In this study, I examine the various techniques used by poets to provide consolation. With Tennyson's In Memoriam, I explore the relationship between formal and thematic consolation, i.e., the ways in which the use of formal elements of the poem, particularly rhyme scheme, is an attempt by the poet to attain and offer consolation. Early in his laureateship after the Duke of Wellington's funeral, Tennyson wrote "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," but this poem failed to meet his reading audience`s needs, as did the first major work published after Tennyson was named Poet Laureate: Maud. I argue that form and theme are as inextricably linked in Maud as they are in In Memoriam, and in many ways, Maud revises the type of mourning exhibited in In Memoriam. Later, I examine in greater detail the hallmarks of Victorian mourning. Although most Victorians did not mourn for as long or as excessively as Queen Victoria, the form her mourning took certainly is worth discussion. I argue that we can read Tennyson's "Dedication" to Idylls of the King and his "To the Mourners" as Victorian funeral sermons, each of which offers explicit (and at times, contradictory) advice to the Queen on how to mourn. Finally, I discuss the reactions to Tennyson's death in the popular press. Analyzing biographical accounts, letters, and memorial poems, I argue that Tennyson and his family were invested in the idea of "the good death"; Tennyson needed to die as he had lived--as the great Laureate. / Committee in charge: Richard Stein, Chair; Tres Pyle, Member; Deborah Shapple, Member; Raymond Birn, Outside Member

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.

Tracing the Material considers how James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy represent material spaces and objects as a way of engaging with the fraught histories of England and Ireland. I argue that these three writers use spaces and objects to think through and critique nineteenth and early twentieth-century conflicts and transitions, particularly in the areas of empire, nationalism, gender, and family. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, in the decline of British ascendency, the rise of the Irish Free State, and between the World Wars, these writers seek to interpret their history through the material world as a way of articulating their political, cultural, and social dissatisfactions, and to imagine the future. Drawing in part from Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography and Jacques Derrida’s texts on spectrality and mourning, I investigate how the material world becomes the means through which nations and individuals express their guilt and desires, mourn losses, cut their losses, articulate the present, and anticipate the future. A study of the material world in these novels thus yields insights into how literary texts respond to history, both overtly and implicitly, foregrounding the importance of physical spaces and things in the larger narratives of national and personal history. My dissertation offers a new understanding of the way twentieth-century literature navigates its history through materiality, destabilizes subject-object distinctions, and exposes the often-unexpected power of the non-human world.

English title and keywords: Memory in the Novels by Dermot Healy - Dermot Healy, Irish literature, Irish novel, memory, collective memory Despite his large and diverse body of work Irish writer Dermot Healy remains somewhat ignored by scholars. However, his formally diverse writing which spans from novels and short stories to poetry and dramatic work is without a doubt worthy of critical response. One of Healy's themes is an engagement with the formation of memory and with how an experience transforms in the mind of its 'experiencer' and changes into what from a certain perspective may be regarded as fiction. Stemming from his own life experiences the author engages a topic common to all human beings and plays with the concept of memory and its possible distortion in his autobiography The Bend For Home (1996), as well as in his plays and poems. His autobiographic work can be seen as a background for the theme; however, the present thesis will focus on Healy's novels, starting with Fighting with Shadows (1984) through A Goat's Song (1994), Sudden Times (1999) to his final novel Long Time, No See (2011). In these books and in the characters that Healy presents we are able to observe individuals with diverse personal histories who return to individual experienced events through reconstruction and in...

Utilisant un cadre théorique hybride, mêlant travaux de géographie, notamment culturelle, et approche littéraire et stylistique, ce travail de thèse interroge les diverses spatialités mccanniennes et leur écriture, mais aussi les implications éthiques et esthétiques de cette articulation. Il étudie la manière dont la représentation de ces spatialités pousse l’écriture à chercher son équilibre, alors qu’elle s’inscrit dans des espaces diégétiques et narratifs caractérisés par l’entre-deux et l’hybridité. Ces deux notions sont placées au cœur d’un corpus mu par un élan irréductible et kaléidoscopique, définissable comme une quête d’équilibre et dont éthique et esthétique constituent les facettes les plus essentielles.Sont donc observées les formes et modalités des spatialités mccanniennes, la relation que les personnages entretiennent avec elles, ainsi que leur inscription dans un contexte contemporain. L’écriture de l’entre-deux et de l’hybridité, sources potentielles d’équilibre comme de déséquilibre, est également analysée. On voit enfin comment ces états intermédiaires sont propices à un élan impliquant la création de lignes dynamiques constituant un mouvement vers l’Autre. Cet élan interroge bien souvent la relation avec l’Art et avec l’Autre, ainsi que l’équilibre parfois problématique entre esthétique et éthique. Les possibles contradictions entre ces deux derniers pôles sont examinées, de même que le potentiel créatif, voire démocratique des échanges permis par leur dialogue. / This thesis uses a hybrid theoretical approach mixing cultural geography as well as literature and stylistics in order to study the various spatialities that can be found in Colum McCann’s fictional work. It focuses on the writing of space, place and landscape, as well as on its ethical and aesthetical aspects. It analyses the way representing these spatialities forces the texts to try and find some sense of balance while the realities they describe and the world they were written in are characterised by in-betweenness and hybridity. These notions are at the core of this corpus, which is defined by an impetus that is both irrepressible and kaleidoscopic and that can be defined as a quest for balance in which ethics and aesthetics play a most essential role.The forms those spatialities can take, the bond the characters have created or create with them as well as the way they are inscribed in the contemporary world are analysed. This study also examines the writing of in-betweenness and hybridity, which can be factors of both balance and imbalance. This intermediarity encourages the development of an impulse which means creating dynamic trajectories towards the Other. This impetus interrogates relationships to Art and Otherness, as well as the (im)balance between aesthetics and ethics. It is therefore particularly relevant to scrutinize the latent contradictions between these two poles but also the creative, sometimes even democratic potential of their interactions.

<div>This dissertation explores the figure of the mad scientist in Victorian literature through some of the most enduring literary examples, viewing these works not as anti-science cautionary tales but rather thought experiments for dealing with hazardous scientists and hazardous science. It makes a claim for a spectrum of hazardous scientists from the beneficial to the truly mad and argues that the primary difference between them is a matter of socialization. It argues that these novels advocate for the scientist and society to negotiate and co-construct a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.<br></div>

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