Gardens in Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or a History of a Young Lady provide a place for the characters to gain knowledge; but without preparation to receive this knowledge - if restrained behind the veil of decorum - they come to harm, rather than constructive awareness. A fine line exists between innocence and experience in these works. The ways in which the characters negotiate this line illustrates the complexities involved in the eighteenth-century understanding of virtue and how society attempted to mediate this issue. This negotiation can be seen largely in specific garden scenes in these two novels. In Clarissa, Clarissa's flight with Lovelace early in the novel demonstrates this negotiation; while in Betsy Thoughtless, this demonstration lies in the garden scene at the end with Betsy and Trueworth. Richardson and Haywood present alternate endings for a virtuous heroine tempted by sex and trapped by domestic politics. The different fates of Clarissa Harlowe and Betsy Thoughtless result from not only the difference between tragedy and comedy, but from the differing views of temptation. I wish to investigate the possible didactic messages behind these alternate endings. In investigating the two treatments of the temptation of the virtuous heroine, I hope to provide new material by asserting the importance of flight from the garden as representative of the fallen woman in Richardson's novel, and the triumphantly virtuous in Haywood's. Clarissa's fall out of the garden proves a previous sin punished, while Betsy's flight from the garden proves her virtue. Since both Clarissa and Betsy Thoughtless, and their authors, are seen as groundbreaking, an abundance of scholarship is available. However, little has been done in connecting the two garden scenes to definitions of temptation. Furthermore, though connections between Milton's Satan and Richardson's Lovelace have been drawn and re-drawn, little critical attention has been devoted to the way in which the Paradise Lost expulsion from the garden may mirror the important flights from the gardens that both Clarissa and Betsy experience.

In his Dialogue on the State of a Christian Man (1597), William Perkins articulated the popular early-modern understanding that the individual is a "double person" organised under "spiritual" and "temporal" regiments. In the one, he is a person "under Christ" and must endeavour to become Christ-like; in the other, he is a person "in respect of" others and bound to fulfil his duties towards them. This early-modern self, governed by relationships and the obligations they entail, was profoundly vulnerable to the formative influence of speech, for relationships themselves were in part created and sustained through social dialogue. Similarly, the individual could hope to become "a person...under Christ" only by hearing spiritual speech - Scripture preached or read, or the "secret soule-whisperings" of the Spirit. The capacity of speech to effect real and lasting change in the auditor was a commonplace in seventeenth-century England: the conscious crafting of identity, dramatised by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, occurred daily in domestic and social transactions, in the exchange of civilities, the use of apostrophe, and strategies of praise. It happened when friends or strangers met, when host greeted guest, or the signatory to a letter penned vocatives that defined his addressee. It lacked a sense of high drama but was nonetheless calculated and effective. Speaking Selves proposes that examining the impact of speech upon the "double person" not only contributes to our understanding of selfhood in the seventeenth century, but also, and more importantly, leads to new insights into some of that century�s greatest literary artefacts: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The first chapter turns to conduct manuals and conversion narratives, to speech-act theory and discourse analysis, and draws out those verbal strategies that contributed to the organisation of social and spiritual selves. Chapter 2 turns to Paradise Lost and traces the Father�s gradual revelation to the Son, through apostrophe, how he is to reflect, how enact the divine being whose visible and verbal expression he is. Chapter 3 discusses advice on address behaviour in seventeenth-century marriage treatises; it reveals the positive contribution of generous apostrophe and verbal mirroring to Adam and Eve�s Edenic marriage. The conversational dyads in heaven and prelapsarian Eden enact positive identities for their collocutors. Satan, however, begetting himself by diabolical speech-act, discovers the ability of words to dismantle the identity of others. Chapter 4 traces the development of his deceptive strategies, drawing attention to his wilful misrepresentation of social identity as a means to pervert the spiritual identity of his collocutor. The final chapter explores the reorganisation of the complex social-spiritual person in the postlapsarian world. We watch the protagonist of Samson discriminate between the many voices that attempt to impose upon him their own understanding of selfhood. Drawing on spiritual autobiographies as structurally and thematically analogous to Milton�s drama, this final chapter traces the inward plot of Samson as its fallen hero redefines identity and rediscovers the "intimate impulse" of the Spirit that alone can complete the reorganisation of the spiritual self.

The thesis has two parts. Part One surveys the debate on how to define Christian obedience and Milton�s prose contributions to that discourse. In the century leading up to Milton�s prose writings there was much debate in England over how to define spiritual obedience. Civil authorities argued that matters of religion fell within state jurisdiction and that an individual�s spiritual obedience should be subject to outward scrutiny and external control; but these definitions were contested by Protestant reformers. Chapter One traces the issue up to Milton�s contributions. Chapter Two traces Milton�s thinking about obedience, spiritual and secular, through his own prose writings: Milton defines obedience as a responsible freedom which requires continual critical assessment of authority. In reaction to the political and ecclesiastical developments of his own time, Milton places increasing emphasis on the role of the individual in defining and expressing obedience to God by means of scriptural study and open discussion. Milton argues that liberty is a necessary pre-condition for giving true obedience to God, and this idea comes to the fore in the later prose tracts, which respond to political and ecclesiastical developments that Milton interpreted as threatening the individual�s liberty of conscience. Part Two examines Paradise Regained (1671), in which Milton advances his interpretation of obedience through his characterisation of the Son of God. Chapter Three shows how Milton links those forms of Christian obedience which he rejects in his prose writing to either Satan or satanic influence. Through his depiction of the Son�s responses to Satan, Milton indicates that Satan�s versions of obedience are designed to distract the Son, and any other believer, from giving proper obedience to God. Chapter Four traces how Milton�s depiction of the Son of God demonstrates his understanding of the right reasons for, and ways of, giving proper obedience to God. The Son�s firm obedience is a state of mind and comprises knowledge of God through scriptural study, conversation and meditation. This exemplary obedience is motivated by an appreciation for and desire to participate in God�s glory (ie., Creation), and Milton indicates that it is this appreciation of divine glory that enables the Son of God to successfully resist Satan�s temptations. Chapter Five examines Milton�s final episode, the pinnacle temptation, in terms of the obedience which he has approved throughout the poem. This chapter addresses Milton�s handling of the reader�s expectations for this scene, and the symbolic language and setting of the pinnacle episode. Unlike any other writers on the temptations in the wilderness, Milton invests the Son�s victory (and Satan�s defeat) on the pinnacle with symbolic power by depicting the Son standing in firm obedience to God. Thus Milton presents his reader with the definitive expression of humanity�s obedience to God: the Son�s stand is a symbolic return to the "Godlike erect" stance ascribed to prelapsarian humanity in Paradise Lost (PL, IV.289), and with this firm, upright obedience Milton shows the rest of humanity how to regain Paradise.

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

Today’s modern, Canadian, business corporations are hugely influential in determining public policy and many aspects of people’s lives. Because this influence permeates so much of our social construct, we expect corporations to act in an ethical manner. Yet, at the very baseline of legal incorporation, there is not a requirement for corporations, per se, to be ethical or to act in an ethical manner. This situation has set up a form of ethical dualism, with individual citizens being required to act in certain prescribed manners, while corporations, which in most cases comprise individual citizens, are allowed to ignore or even to flaunt similar ethical rules and standards. In this investigative paper on corporate applied ethics, I will examine arguments for and against the notion of including ethical responsibility statements within the concept of incorporation. This paper will provide a historical framework in which to view some of the complexities involved, and examine certain influential assertions made by Milton Friedman. The paper will begin with a look at what is meant by corporation in this context. This will be followed by an analysis of the arguments put forward by Milton Friedman in his famous essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” and other related arguments. These other arguments, as objections to the inclusion of ethics within the notion of corporation, fall into three main types: objections to concept; to ability; and to process. I will review each in turn, with the hope that, by dispelling the Friedmanian arguments against corporate ethical inclusion, a new baseline for incorporation might be established. The second part of the paper will examine what kind of ethics might best suit the corporation. It will also consider ethical growth with respect to business. The paper will conclude with a suggestion as to how the inclusion of ethics within the notion of incorporation might be accomplished.

In Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald retells the story of the Fall from Genesis through psychologist Dick Diver and his wife and patient Nicole, drawing poetic and thematic inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This essay traces the progression of the Divers’ fall and ultimate separation through the novel’s three books and considers how the highly autobiographical foundation of the novel, which has drawn considerable critical attention, may in fact allow Fitzgerald to craft a work that aligns with and simultaneously expands upon Milton’s interpretation of the Fall.

Today’s modern, Canadian, business corporations are hugely influential in determining public policy and many aspects of people’s lives. Because this influence permeates so much of our social construct, we expect corporations to act in an ethical manner. Yet, at the very baseline of legal incorporation, there is not a requirement for corporations, per se, to be ethical or to act in an ethical manner. This situation has set up a form of ethical dualism, with individual citizens being required to act in certain prescribed manners, while corporations, which in most cases comprise individual citizens, are allowed to ignore or even to flaunt similar ethical rules and standards. In this investigative paper on corporate applied ethics, I will examine arguments for and against the notion of including ethical responsibility statements within the concept of incorporation. This paper will provide a historical framework in which to view some of the complexities involved, and examine certain influential assertions made by Milton Friedman. The paper will begin with a look at what is meant by corporation in this context. This will be followed by an analysis of the arguments put forward by Milton Friedman in his famous essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” and other related arguments. These other arguments, as objections to the inclusion of ethics within the notion of corporation, fall into three main types: objections to concept; to ability; and to process. I will review each in turn, with the hope that, by dispelling the Friedmanian arguments against corporate ethical inclusion, a new baseline for incorporation might be established. The second part of the paper will examine what kind of ethics might best suit the corporation. It will also consider ethical growth with respect to business. The paper will conclude with a suggestion as to how the inclusion of ethics within the notion of incorporation might be accomplished.

<p>Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before </p><p>Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize </p><p>bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of </p><p>activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition </p><p>of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith, </p><p>devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across </p><p>confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal, </p><p>emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans </p><p>and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency </p><p>and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John </p><p>Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis </p><p>of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate </p><p>developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's </p><p>configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives </p><p>towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza </p><p>and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and </p><p>determinism.</p> / Dissertation

The pursuit of the perfect language intrigued and obsessed the literary circle of the seventeenth century, as political turmoil and chaos initiated the desire for the stable even in the aspect of language. As the perfect language is self-explicative, it indicates a perfect correspondence between the signifier and the signified in order to guarantee the purity and singleness of the meanings to avoid confusion and ambiguity inevitably occurring, for instance, in postlapsarian language. The concept of the perfect language, nevertheless, finds evidence in Milton¡¦s prelapsarian world, where unfallen Adam is endowed with divine insights to discern the nature of the animals and translate his comprehension into perfect matching names. However, the presumption of the perfect language in the prelapsarian Eden is challenged by critics as the preconditioned absoluteness could not possibly exist for it would have preempted any possibilities of inferring, implying, and guessing from the context. In my thesis, I argue that languages marked by gender as masculine and feminine dominate in the characterization and narratives of Adam and Eve, for gender is the sole mark distinguishing the first couple along with their hierarchical roles as man and man¡¦s helper. I examine Eve¡¦s gendered discourse in particular as Eve as a lesser vessel turns out to be the main target of Satan¡¦s verbal temptations and sophistries. I analyze the traits of gendered discourses and discuss how they render Eve more vulnerable, disadvantaged, and disempowered in face of Satan¡¦s rhetoric and eloquence. Also scrutinized are the critics¡¦ viewpoints concerning Eve¡¦s gendered discourse, which significantly reveals certain ingrained biases attached to stereotypical expectations for women shown in the critics¡¦ word choices and arguments in regard of Eve.

John Milton begins his Second Defence of the English People by stressing the universal importance of gratitude: "In the whole life and estate of man the first duty is to be grateful to God." Peter Medine has shown the prominence of gratitude in Paradise Lost, but scholars have not fully appreciated the role of this virtue elsewhere in Milton's writing. This thesis is an attempt to redress that oversight with reference to A Mask and Paradise Regained, while also answering a question that Medine raises but does not satisfactorily resolve: Why gratitude? Both texts have been read as responses to the early modern debate about the doctrine of things indifferent, or adiaphora, and I argue that this context helps explain Milton's interest in gratitude. The first section of this thesis accordingly reviews the historical and theological context of the adiaphora controversy, while the second examines Milton's more direct treatment of things indifferent and gratitude, primarily in De Doctrina Christiana. In the remaining sections, historical and literary analysis of A Mask and Paradise Regained illuminates how Milton addresses tensions in the doctrine of things indifferent by emphasizing gratitude. Of the commonly recognized criteria for directing the use of adiaphora—the rule of faith, the rule of charity, and the glorification of God, often through gratitude—gratitude toward God frequently receives less thorough attention, yet Milton gives it a prominent role in A Mask and allows it to overshadow the other guidelines in Paradise Regained. Although gratitude is itself sometimes subject to manipulation in these texts, both A Mask and Paradise Regained suggest that the requirement of God-ward gratitude can serve as a check against subtle distortions of the other guidelines. The effectiveness of this strategy stems from the fact that the vices gratitude guards against—self-indulgent ingratitude, stoical ingratitude, and idolatry—are the vices that underlie licentiousness and superstition, the primary abuses of the doctrine of things indifferent. Milton's privileging of gratitude thus provides a way of cross-checking appeals to the more contested criteria of faith and love, protecting the doctrine of things indifferent from perversions that would undermine Christian liberty.