附作者簡歷. / Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學敎育學院. / Fu zuo zhe jian li. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-145). / Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue jiao yu xue yuan. / Chapter 第一章 --- 導言 / 問題說明 --- p.1 / 有關文獻 --- p.10 / 假設 --- p.31 / 定義 --- p.33 / Chapter 第二章 --- 研究方法 --- p.39 / 研究設計 --- p.39 / 研究對象 --- p.44 / 研究工具 --- p.46 / 實驗程序 --- p.56 / 資料分析 --- p.63 / Chapter 第三章 --- 結果與討論 --- p.69 / 結果 --- p.69 / 討論 --- p.101 / Chapter 第四章 --- 摘要，結論及建議 --- p.127 / 摘要與結論 --- p.127 / 建議 --- p.136 / 參考文獻 --- p.141 / 附錄 --- p.146 / Chapter 一 --- 虛實詞式填字測驗試卷 --- p.146 / Chapter 二 --- 實詞式填字測試試卷 --- p.151 / Chapter 三 --- 虛詞式填字測試試卷 --- p.154 / Chapter 四 --- 多項選擇式理解測驗試卷 --- p.157 / Chapter 五 --- 填字測驗各項平均分、標準差及「兩元次重複測量設計」之電腦計算程序 --- p.174 / Chapter 六 --- 填字測驗成績与理解測驗成績相關係數之電腦計算程序 --- p.178 / Chapter 七 --- 填字測驗中倆種計分法所得成績之相關係數之電腦計算程序 --- p.182

This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of 'art-for-art's-sake' and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater's efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a 'fall' into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic. My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of aestheticism grows out of Swinburne's and Pater's efforts to challenge and refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous generation of Victorian writers - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson - and situates this shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of secularisation.

Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespear has offered the first taste of Shakespearean drama to children for nearly two hundred years. Though it has not always been realised, the book has become one of the most influential publications related to the study of Shakespeare. However, academic studies of Lambs' tales are scarce and often inadequate. This thesis is the first extensive and detailed study of Lambs' tales, which also explores their profound influence. It consists of two volumes. In Volume One, I examine the roles of the Lambs as children' s writers; including, how Charles integrated his Romantic criticism into the six tragic tales, and how Mary campaigned for educational reform through her fourteen comic and romantic stories. Moreover, I have identified which editions of Shakespeare' s plays were used by the Lambs as their textual basis. With fresh evidence, I also bridge over many gaps in the publishing history regarding both Lambs' tales and their rival publications. Volume Two is an edition-based annotated bibliography of prose narratives adapted for children from Shakespeare' s plays 1807-1998. The Annotated Bibliography is the most complete documentation on this subject. It covers 42 different versions of Shakespeare stories, and includes, altogether, 304 entries.

The thesis is approximately 60,000 words in length and is divided into three parts. Part I (Chapters 1-4) deals with Hudibras in relation to seventeenth century literary traditions. Chapter 1 introduces the poem and its author, places Hudibras within its immediate historical context, describes its popularity, and states the problem of determining its genre; several possible solutions to the problem are considered, notably those of seventeenth and eighteenth century writers; "mock-heroic" is defined and adopted. Chapter 2 is a survey: it begins by citing two adverse modern criticisms of Butler's method of ridiculing his principal character, and then sets out to test the justness of them. A number of romances popular in the seventeenth century are described; criticism of them is considered; and several satirical and burlesque works using romantic characters, motifs, and plots are analyzed. Chapter 3 places Hudibras with respect to the works and attitudes described in the previous chapter. The generating circumstances of the first part of the poem are considered in the light of Butler's presentation of them as a romance; Hudibras and Halpho are examined in relation to other mock-knights and squires, especially Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Braggadochio and Trompart. Chapter 4 treats Hudibras in connexion with the seventeenth century tradition of classical burlesque, analyzes Butler's treatment of classical themes and characters for the purpose of satire, and in an extended comparison between Hudibras and Gondibert examines Butler's criticism of the heroic ideals of love and military valour. Part II (Chapters 5 and 6) comprises studies of several elements of Butler's literary method in Hudibras. Chapter 5 analyzes Butler's use of metaphor and of dramatic argument as satirical techniques. Chapter 6 treats the mock-speeches (III,ii) and the burlesque heroical epistles, as well as the narrative method of Hudibras, and the device of the comic narrator. Part III consists of three appendices. Appendix A deals with the question of the identity of the 'West Country knight' upon whom Butler says that he based the character of Hudibras. The evidence in favour of Sir Samuel Luke and Sir Hanry Rosewell is examined and Sir Samuel Rolle is presented as the most likely 'original' of Hudibras A certain amount of evidence in his favour is given for the first time in this appendix. Appendix B criticizes the identification of Ralpho in the 'Key to Hudibras' (1715), presenting for the first time the source from which the author of the 'Key' drew the portrait of 'Isaac Robinson,' the man upon whom (he claims) Butler based his characterization of Ralpho. Appendix C criticizes the attribution to Butler (currently accepted) of Mercurius Menippeus, a political pamphlet first published in 1680 and containing a passage of invective against Sir Samuel Luke. It is argued that the attribution is virtually without foundation.

This dissertation examines the use made of details from the natural world by English poets of the mid-seventeenth century. It is concerned with two main aspects of the subjects the function of natural imagery; and the rhetorical methods by which details from nature are exploited in poetry. It also seeks to demonstrate that the way a poet manipulates his material is influenced both by inherited literary tradition, and also by his age's changing conception of the nature of the universe and of man's relationship to it. Part One of the thesis explores the implications of the title in the light of some early critical treatments of the subject of Nature in poetry and of more recent theories of seventeenth-century imagery and rhetoric, and surveys those changes in the thought and sensibility of the period which seem to have had a bearing on the poetic handling of natural imagery. Part Two investigates the various ways in which details from nature were employed by poets during the years 1645-1668. The material has been organised under three general headings, dictated by the function of the images in the poems in which they occur. Part Three examines the work of seven poets whose contribution is deemed to be of particular interest. Their poetry is related to the wider cultural setting discussed in Part One and to the literary background provided in Part Two. Part Four furnishes a brief survey of some of the major lines of development in the use of natural details in the poetry of the period immediately following the years studied in the main body of the thesis. The study concludes with three appendices and a bibliography of books and articles cited and consulted in the course of its composition.

At present no scholar has provided an in-depth study into the dissemination of the Pater Noster outside the clerical sphere. This thesis provides a detailed consideration of the ways in which the Pater Noster was taught to the laity in medieval England. It explores the central position of the prayer in the lay curriculum, the constitutions which played a fundamental role in its teaching, and the methods by which it was disseminated. Clerical expositions of the prayer and its tabular and diagrammatic representations are examined to consider the material available to assist the clergy in their pedagogical role. The ways in which material associated with the Pater Noster was modified and delivered to a lay audience provides an important component in the holistic approach of this thesis. The thesis itself proposes that the prayer was widely known and recited, drawing on a variety of mediums in which it was presented to the laity. These include sermon material, which would have been delivered in the vernacular; the recitation of Paternosters, an earlier version of the conventional rosary; the performance of the Pater Noster plays in the northern locations of York, Beverley and Lincoln; and representations of the prayer in wall paintings.

The contention of the essay which follows is that the presumption that Wyatt's rhythm can be judged by standards which are impervious to the actual performance of his poetry, to the actual affects achieved and the 'meanings' thereby imparted, leads ineluctably to the rejection of Wyatt's poetry by prosodists and that the rejection of that presumption leads as rigourously to the conclusion that prosody (as that term is widely understood) has no role to play in the assessment of Wyatt's poetry. Evidence in favour of this conclusion is provided by the slight and previously unacknowledged testimony of the punctuation of two principal Wyatt manuscripts (transcripts of which are provided in vols. 2 and 3) and slightly reinforced by attention to the phrasal rhyme-scheme of some of the poems. The evidence is considered suggestive rather than conclusive, but by following through the suggestion of a non-quantitative rhythmical principle an attempt is made to show that in Wyatt's poetry there is a creative and dramatic significance indicative of a pervasive though limited set of preoccupations - metaphysical, political and psychological - within the poems. In conclusion it is maintained that, although no final placing of Wyatt can rest purely upon his rhythmical accomplishment, the approach to Wyatt's rhythm which has been proposed is important in that it reveals a presence of such basic and important preoccupations in the poems and these, set within but transforming the conventions of amour courtois, are finally adduced to establish Wyatt's place in relation to the sixteenth century.

My thesis argues that Gabriele d’Annunzio and Thomas Mann both conceive of artistic creation as a process which is influenced by their interpretations of Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian, and that striking affinities characterise their respective literary portrayals of the relationship between the artist and (a version of) the Dionysian. D’Annunzio and Mann, who were contemporaries, are rarely considered together, and it is widely assumed that there is little common ground between them. This thesis will demonstrate that their creative and critical engagement with Nietzsche, especially his idea of the Dionysian, offers a productive way of comparing the two writers and illuminating hitherto overlooked parallels between their understandings of creativity. The relationship between the artist and the Dionysian will constitute the main point of comparison. For both d’Annunzio and Mann, the Dionysian appears as a drive that can promote creativity, through encouraging liberation from repression and the rediscovery of primordial energies, but also destruction, by threatening self-dissolution, chaos and annihilation. The Dionysian will be seen to offer a highly precarious form of creativity. The artist’s success, and even survival, will depend upon his ability to master this potentially lethal drive, and channel the impulses it triggers into artistic production.

This thesis investigates the conception and development of an English literary canon across the mid- to-late-seventeenth century, examining ideas about literary production, preservation, genre development, literary criticism, notions of fame and the role of the author in a period before the term 'canon' was applied to secular writing. Current scholarship into literary canons often concentrates on the eighteenth century and later. My study argues that many of the ideas, institutions, aesthetic features, and commercial factors that contribute to English literature canon-formation predate the eighteenth century, even if the notion of an English literary canon is not made explicit until this time. I approach this topic through a series of five case studies. Four concentrate on specific categories of writing that I argue influence the development of a literary canon from the mid-seventeenth century onward: printed collections, literary criticism, life-writing and commendatory poetry. The fifth chapter focuses on an individual author, Abraham Cowley, and how he endeavours to position himself into the pantheon of English worthies. I am not arguing that the seventeenth century is where canon-formation begins, but aim to demonstrate that ideas about canonicity existed during the seventeenth-century and have impacted the shape and content of the English literary canon.

This thesis is an examination of the ways in which, in what Bourdieu theorises as the 'space of literary or artistic position-takings', Gertrude Stein has been continually positioned and repositioned, constructed and reconstructed: by writers in her own period, in modernism scholarship, and, particularly, by writers staking their claim as the literary avant-garde of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.1 Since her recuperation by the Language Poets in the 1970s, and in the literary histories proposed by Marjorie Perloff and others, Stein has been positioned as the originator of an alternative avant-garde genealogy which has resisted the 'institutionalised' modernism of the New Critics. This legacy continues to the present day in claims by writers like Kenneth Goldsmith that she is a precursor for Conceptual Writing. Because they are predicated on Stein's resistance to the institution of modernism, and hinge on her removal from its history, none of these arguments discuss in any detail Stein's relationship to the historical movement which is the immediate context for her work - to the institution of modernism itself or to the institutions with which it engages. My thesis challenges the removal of Stein from her milieu by showing how her textual production must be read alongside her activity on her contemporary scene and her representation of and by other modernists. In the thesis, I re-read Stein's work as a series of explicit interventions in the institutions which form the context of the cultural production of the early 20th Century. In doing so, I consider the motivations for the reconstructions and repositionings of Stein, tracing the historiography of her presentation as an exceptional figure dislocated from her context.