Thèse--Faculté de théologie protestante de Strasbourg.

Inaug. Diss.--Bonn, 1970. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: p. 4-10.

The dissertation argues that libertine first-person lyrics of seventeenth-century England reveal a coherent literary strategy in formal, thematic, and ideological terms. My focus is the libertine poems of Donne, Suckling, Carew, Lovelace, and Rochester. I situate the lyrics in a period of historical change, an age of epistemological and ontological questioning. Libertine lyrics concern inconstancy on various levels, from the sexual to the ontological, and they explore the problems of freedom, human nature, identity, and individualism. I argue that the libertine's inconstant selfhood is a creative "solution" to a historical dilemma. This conception of inconstant selfhood is also a response to courtly prescriptions of the behavior of poets and courtiers, a way of claiming an authoritative voice and individualistic freedom. My examination of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics shows that, as part of a transitional age, the poems manifest a contradictory character and they reveal an ideological inconsistency. However, in the final analysis, the imaginative answer to the period's problem of mutability and displacement that libertine lyrics offer turns out to be unsatisfactory. In tracing the development of seventeenth-century libertine lyrics, I suggest that the poems constitute an experimental and transitional development in the lyric tradition of male confessional desire.

Thèse--Université de Paris. / Vol. 2: Notes et références, bibliographie, index.

Thèse--Université de Paris. / Vol. 2: Notes et références, bibliographie, index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2009. Dept. of English. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 157-164).

This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.