The purpose of this thesis is to determine the importance of biographical inreading to a study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life. Although most of Rossetti's critics have predicated a biographical imperative in examining this work, the validity of their approach can be seriously questioned. The tendency to employ biographical criticism perhaps stems from an excessive concern on the part of both biographers and critics with the sensational details of Rossetti's life. Because of this concern, The House of Life has been treated more as an autobiographical record than, as an integral work of art. It is necessary to re-examine the poem through some approach other than the biographical. Chapter One outlines three standard approaches to the study of literature. The first, the historical or extrinsic, includes the study of the poet's biography as well as the various external influences on him. The second, the organic or intrinsic, concentrates on internal aspects of the literature, such as imagery and form. The third, the synthetic, is a more fluid approach than the other two in that it attempts to employ all available tools of literary criticism, including biography. Chapter Two reviews certain pertinent facts about Rossetti's life and considers a number of biographies and biographical studies which have appeared since his death, and which, to a considerable extent, have created an inaccurate legend about him. Chapter Three considers the specific problem of biographical inreading in The House of Life, and discusses some of the criticism based on that inreading. It also traces the general development of The House of Life from the two essentially biographical preliminary versions (the Fortnightly Review sonnets, and the Kelmscott sonnets) to the complete version of 1881. Chapter Four examines The House of Life as a work of art rather than as a biographical document. A reading of the poem is suggested in which The House of Life is seen as a series of cycles depicting the "transfigured" life of the poet. An exegetical analysis of The House of Life necessarily involves the critic in an examination of biographical data. However, once the development of the sequence has been traced, the critic must employ intrinsic criteria in order to determine the essential structure of the poem. In other words, the best approach to The House of Life synthesizes both the extrinsic and intrinsic methods of criticism. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Inaug.-Diss.--Tübingen. / Lebenslauf. "Bibliographie": p. 47-49.

Throughout her life Christina Rossetti was pursued by the thought of death. Many of her poems, especially her later poems, display her concerns about death. Her early poems show death as the destroyer of mortal things, reflecting her pessimism and her sometimes naturalistic views on life. Her death wish is sometimes associated with her thwarted desire for absolute love in the world. Her religious poems describe death as the gate to heaven or to hell, the final resting place from the pains of her life. Either as her religious yearning for a better place of Resurrection or as her way of expressing her unfulfilled desire in the world, her persistent theme of death is an expression of the conflict between a sometimes skeptical, sometimes religious view.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bonn. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. [103]-104.

This dissertation studies depictions of the Middle East in the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. My discussion focuses on two prominent members of the Brotherhood—Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt—and utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that examines the poetry, prose, unpublished correspondence and journals, sketches, watercolours, and oil paintings that they produced prior to 1856. I argue that Rossetti and Hunt make use of the Middle East as a repository for and reflection of the ambiguities and ambivalences of their own positions as avant-garde artists and authors. Chapters Two and Three focus on the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chapter Two examines Rossetti’s juvenilia in order to trace the ways in which the young author-artist uses the Middle East as a platform from which to work out the interplay between narrative and image, the conceptualization of the role of the author and artist, and the use of realistically depicted elements in religious painting. Chapter Three continues this discussion of Rossetti through an investigation of the 1850 edition of his poem “The Burden of Nineveh,” which centres on an encounter with an ancient Assyrian statue, and I argue that Rossetti links this artifact to the P. R. B. and uses it to critique the artistic ideals of mid-nineteenth-century England. The next two chapters shift to an investigation of William Holman Hunt’s first visit to the Middle East in 1854-6, a journey that became a focal point of the author-artist’s career. Chapter Four makes extensive use of Hunt’s unpublished diaries and letters from his sojourn in the Holy Land to destabilize the widespread conception of the artist as a staunch imperialist and the foremost English religious painter of the nineteenth century. Building on this foundation, Chapter Five looks back to the three months that Hunt spent in Egypt in 1854 and investigates the ways in which the complex experiences that the author-artist describes in his unpublished letters from this period filter into the watercolours, sketches, and oil paintings that he executed in Egypt. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-06-16 15:46:17.016

Inaug.-Diss.--Bonn. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. [103]-104.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1971. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Leland B. Jacobs. Dissertation Committee: Maxine Greene. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1959. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 367-373).

This MA thesis is concerned with the analysis of three poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The theoretical basis of this work is the theory of "ut pictura poesis" which examines the relationship between poetry and fine arts. In the case of Rossetti, this theory can be easily applied since Rossetti was not only a poet but mainly a painter. "The Blessed Damozel" which is the first poem to be analyzed, exists as a painting as well as a musical composition by Claude Debussy. The second poem in this thesis is "The Card Dealer" which was inspired by an actual painting by Theodor Van Holst, a copy of which Rossetti himself owned, though the original visual image is considerably modified in the poem. The last poem is "My Sister's Sleep" whose dramatic elements of individual scenes are quite outstanding. Just like the two preceding poems, "My Sister's Sleep" uses "painterly techniques" as well (the spatial composition of figures on the scene, emphasis on details, "painting" the scene and atmosphere, characterization, gestures, colours, materials, slowed-down tempo, general stasis of depiction, elongation of the tense moment to which the entire poem aspires, symbolism, mysticism, etc), which in effect create an easily imaginable mental picture that can be compared to actual Pre-Raphaelite paintings. These (and...