Du recueil A Boy’s Will (1913) au recueil In the Clearing (1962), l’œuvre du poète américain Robert Frost (1874-1963) déploie sa réflexion sur le concept d’écart, et le présente comme principe majeur de son esthétique et de sa stratégie d’écriture. Utilisant une approche fondée sur la micro-lecture des poèmes, cette thèse entend mettre en lumière la richesse d'une thématique frostienne qui permet de repenser la dialectique entre centre et marge à différents niveaux d'analyse : cette dialectique semble à l’œuvre non seulement dans la représentation poétique des espaces nord-américains mais aussi dans le rapport des textes à l'espace métaphorique du canon, ainsi que dans l'ambiguë mise en scène du sujet dans son rapport aux espaces intime, social et politique. Nous souhaitons montrer que le poète et les personae multiples qu’il adopte au fil des recueils privilégient un positionnement détaché, qui n’est ni complètement au centre ni complètement à l’écart, mais pour ainsi dire dans l’écart. Cette position de léger retrait, à la fois sereine et équilibriste, dessine ainsi un triple autoportrait du poète. Il fait le portrait d’un artiste chez qui la tension entre tradition et modernité, entre formes fixes et libre expérimentation, relève d'une position compliquée et féconde, qui permet à Frost de se situer à la fois à l'intérieur et légèrement à l'écart du genre de la poésie pastorale ; d'autre part, il esquisse le portrait « bougé » d'un sujet en mouvement au sein du paysage de Nouvelle-Angleterre, sujet que des tentatives d’ancrage dans certains territoires installent dans une position de voisinage méfiant avec son prochain, à la fois contre les autres et tout contre eux. Enfin, l’œuvre laisse apparaître en filigrane l’autoportrait d’un Américain utilisant la stratégie de l’écart dans l’habile mise en scène de sa propre iconisation. / From the collection A Boy’s Will (1913) to the collection In the Clearing (1962), the works of American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) can be viewed as a reflection on the concept of deviation, presenting it as a major principle in his aesthetics and writing strategy. This doctoral dissertation provides a close reading of many poems, with a view to highlighting the highly seminal quality of the Frostian theme of the slight deviation, which allows one to rethink the dialectic between the center and the margins at different levels of analysis. This dialectic appears not only in the poetic representation of North American space, but also in the established connection between the texts and the metaphorical space of the canon, as well as in the ambiguous presentation of the poetic figure in relation to the intimate, social or political spheres. We wish to show that the poet together with the multiple personae that he uses in the collected poems, favor a specific vantage point, a detached position which is neither in the center nor completely in the margin, but rather within the limits delineated by some deviation. This slightly withdrawn position, which is both dispassionate and perilous, sketches out a triple self-portrait of the poet. It is the self-portrait of an artist for whom the tension between tradition and modernity, between fixed forms and free poetic experiments, creates a complicated but fertile position which allows Frost to position himself both within, and slightly on the margin of, the genre of pastoral poetry. Frost's poems also depict the portrait of a moving poetic figure in the New England landscape, a figure who is put, because of his attempts at settling in certain territories, in a situation where neighbors are both aware and wary of each other. Lastly, the poems could be regarded as the self-portrait of an American posturing as a marginal figure in the skillful staging of his own iconization.

Thesis--University of Pittsburgh. / Bibliography: p. [285]-289.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universidad de Salamanca, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 381-460).

This study advances and adds detail to our history of the reading of verse in England c.1350-1500. Scholarship has established major twelfth- and thirteenth-century changes in reading, and linked these changes to manuscripts containing the modern Middle English verse canon. Historians of early modern reading have also argued for distinctive changes in their own period. But the examination of reading between these two clusters of change has been limited. This study therefore asks how later medieval Middle English verse was read. The surviving copies of The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, two hugely successful religious instructional poems, form the primary body of evidence. This body is augmented by reference to hundreds of other manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Together, these can reveal much about what was normal and abnormal in reading. They are also an important part of the context for the reading of more canonical Middle English verse. Manuscript studies often proceeds through case studies of individual books and unusual evidence such as marginalia. This thesis turns to codicology to understand more widespread evidence for reading, combining qualitative case studies with quantitative techniques borrowed and developed from continental scholarship. The first chapter examines evidence of provenance, revealing that both The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae were read by an impressive range of people and remained current into the sixteenth century. The second chapter considers the navigational aids used in copies of both poems. Reading in this period has been characterised as 'discontinuous', but it could be discontinuous in diverse ways, and readers also read continuously. The third chapter is a large-scale study of books' size and shape, showing how these features can reveal books' reading histories, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. The fourth chapter contends that readers in this period attended closely to rhyme and probably read for balanced rhyme structures. The fifth chapter uncovers the ways in which these poems were rewritten for new readers and investigates the composition of the Southern Recension of The Prick of Conscience, arguing that this new text was partly a formalist intervention. The conclusion summarises the new 'baseline' history of the reading of Middle English verse which is offered here, and gestures towards implications for our reading of the Middle English poems which are canonical today.

From Preface: In this thesis it is proposed to examine the pastoral vision, symbolized by Eden, which permeates Clare's poetry, as it is reflected in The Shepherd's Calendar, the sonnets (certain of which will be analysed in detail) and a group of lyrics. This pastoral vision, while including time and space, transcends them in such a way that Eternity becomes an important concept in Clare's pastoral poems. The final chapter of this thesis will, therefore, concentrate on this aspect of Clare's pastoral vision, not by attempting to define Clare's understanding of Eternity, but by illustrating it in four of his lyrics. Because of the lack of a full and reliable text of the complete works of John Clare and the inability of the present writer to establish for certain the chronological order of his poems, there will be no attempt in this thesis to show a development in Clare's poetry. Nor will there be an attempt to evaluate in the light of Clare's "madness" those poems known to have been written while he was in a mental asylum - a non-literary study requiring knowledge associated with the discipline of psychology; and the present writer concurs in the opinion that "it is the continuity of Clare's life and ways of thought and feeling which claims one's attention, rather than the disruptions of insanity".

This thesis is a transatlantic examination of self-representational strategies in factory women's poetry from circa 1848-1882, highlighting in particular how the medium of the working-class periodical enabled these socially marginal poets to subjectively engage with and reconfigure dominant typologies of class and gender within nineteenth-century poetics. The first chapter explores how working-class women were depicted in middle-class social-reform literature and working-class men's poetry. It argues that factory women were circumscribed into roles of social villainy or victimage in popular bourgeois reform texts by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Caroline Norton, and were cast as idealized domestic figures in working-class men's poetry in the mid-nineteenth century. The remaining three chapters examine the poetry of Manchester dye-worker Fanny Forrester, Scottish weaver Ellen Johnston, and Lowell mill-girl Lucy Larcom as case-studies of factory women's poetics in mid-nineteenth century writing. Chapter Two discusses the life and work of Fanny Forrester in Ben Brierley's Journal, and considers how Forrester's invocation of the pastoral genre opens new opportunities for urban, factory women to engage with ideologies of domestic femininity within a destabilized urban cityscape. Chapter Three considers the work of Ellen Johnston, “The Factory Girl” whose numerous poems in The People's Journal and the Penny Post cross genres, dialects, and themes. This chapter claims that Johnston's poetry divides class and gender identity depending on her intended audience—a division exemplified, respectively, by her nationalistic poetry and her sentimental correspondence poetry. Chapter Four explores the work of Lucy Larcom, whose contributions to The Lowell Offering and her novel-poem An Idyl of Work harness the language and philosophy of Evangelical Christianity to validate women's wage-labor as socially and religiously appropriate. Ultimately, this thesis contends that nineteenth-century factory women's poetry from Britain and America embodies the tensions surrounding the “factory girl” identity, and offers unique aesthetic and representational strategies of negotiating women's factory labor.