<p>Utilizing the strategies of feminist criticism, this study seeks to define masculinity and the issues confronting it as presented in Books III and IV of Edmund Spenser’s <em>The Faerie Queene</em>. The thesis analyzes the means by which Spenser’s poem challenges conventional notions of violence as inherent to masculinity. This includes examining the tropological use of rape to represent masculine lust as animalistic, as seen in the various male pursuers and aggressors of Florimell and Amoret, and the metaphorical conceptualization of love as a violent conquest as a means of contributing to homosocial status elevation.Thus this study contributes to the understanding of the didacticism of Spenser’s allegory concerning the fashioning of a proper gentleman.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>Spenser's design for the second book of The Faerie Queene involves hidden parallel and synnnetrical patterns, previously undetected, that have serious hermeneutic significance for the study of that poem and other literature of the Renaissance. My study is of form. The first chapter considers the structural approach to literature of the Renaissance and discusses my methodology. Chapter II reveals the simultaneous existence of a parallel and a symmetrical pattern of the stanzas of Book II as a whole. Chapters III and IV explore the simultaneous operation of five patterns--three parallel and two synnnetrical--for numerous pairs of cantos. Chapter V demonstrates the simultaneous existence of parallel and symmetrical patterns within each canto of Book II.</p> <p>What is presented is a demonstration of intricate construction along consistently predictable parallel and symmetrical lines. Such patterned composition has been detected previously in shorter Spenser poems, Epithalamion and "Aprill," in particular. My discoveries result from applying a method which, from shorter Spenser poems, one has an expectation will work. The method involves counting stanzas and dividing by two to determine the midpoint or arithmetical centre, then considering the stanzas in parallel and synnnetrical arrangements.</p> <p>Spenser creates, through the parallel and symmetrical placement of the episodes, characters, images, and themes of Book II, a microcosm of hidden analogies. The patterns are intricate and readily iii predictable. Spenser must have composed his poem according to such principles. While the ordinary reader may have experienced only the superficial sense of romance rambling that Spenser obviously intends to give, his more curious readers may have been aware of patterned composition along inevitable parallel and symmetrical lines and may have used presumption of patterning as a means of interpretation. They could have predicted a pattern and used the information of comparison, contrast, and reciprocal connnent to illuminate an image, character, or episode which they did not understand. For example, a reader who discovered the pairing of Belphoebe, a known type of Elizabeth, with Medina or Alma would get the hint that the latter are types of Elizabeth, though otherwise such a conclusion might seem only guesswork. The patterns provide a useful tool for criticism, suggesting and confirming interpretation.</p> <p>The patterns I have detected may not be the only ones awaiting discovery in The Faerie Queene. There may be some underlying principle involved that we don't see at the moment. Perhaps there is a set of mathematical ratios--some sort of mathematical formula for composition--involved in making the goodly framework of the poem. Pythagorean ratios and other symbolic proportions are now known to have been used in Renaissance architecture. Spenser speaks of Book II as a building and fills it with houses and temples as major symbols. He makes his book according to a "goodly frame." The mystique of arcane construction no doubt has Pythagorean, nee-Platonic, hermetic, and numerological significance.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study explores how romance opens the texts of two sixteenth-century authors. The first is the autobiography, Libro de la vida, of Spanish nun, mystic, and reformer, Santa Teresa de Jésus. Amidst the narrative of her life and her instructions on how to better live the mystical life, Teresa uses the mode of romance to construct herself and God in complicated and often conflicting roles: she the wandering (sinning) knight-errant who quests towards the ideal lady, Christ; she the walled garden into which her lover enters for fleeting moments of bliss; she the passive feminine recipient of God's forceful loves; she her own black knight, her own dark forest, through which she must fight to reach the throne of the Beloved. Reading Teresa in this light underscores the ways in which she deconstructs the sublimating, transcending, and bodiless love historically directed towards the God of the Western tradition to reveal a love fraught with mutability and painful separation. As God absents himself from her, mourning assails her and causes her to wish for death, the only bower that promises perfect proximity. In this conflicted realm of mortality in which she longs for death but must continue to live, Teresa moves past her desire into a space for faith. In the second text, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Spenser uses the capaciousness of the romance genre to express his desires for certain political, economical, and spiritual ends by constructing the Faerie Queene as a representative of Elizabeth I who in turn represents the potential for the realization of these hoped for ideals. The study focuses on one particular interchange between the Faerie Queene and the culturally-loaded icon of Arthur, and how Spenser imbues this moment with ambiguity, both posturing Arthur as the Queene's lover and her progenitor. The magical space of romance thus allows Spenser to simultaneously criticize, encourage, and praise Elizabeth, despite the inevitability that she will disappoint him. Despite disappointment, Spenser continues to strive for the temporal perfection of England, which ultimately leads him to an unyielding hope for the perfection of the immutable kingdom of heaven.

"Sacramental Magic" explores the animate statue in early modem romance as an emblem of the potential spiritually transformative power of objects. The tendency of New Historicism to "empty out" theology from Catholicism overlooks the continued power of sacred objects in Reformation literature. My dissertation joins the recent turn to religion in early modern studies--Catholic doctrine and religious experience explain the startling presence of benevolent animate statues in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; one would expect these statues to be empty idols, but instead they animate, revealing a real presence of the divine. I first investigate Spenser's Egyptian lexicon for the Catholic veneration of sacred images in the Temple of Isis in the Faerie Queene. Embedding Britomart's dream vision of an English empire in Egyptian mythology creates a translatio imperii from Egypt to Rome to England, transferring not only political but also religious power. The Isis statue's transformation of Britomart bears striking textual and visual correlations to John Dee's hermetic Monas Hieroglyphica. For Shakespeare, ermetic magic emblematizes the sacrament of penance. Shakespeare's claim "to make men glorious" suggests that Pericles transforms its audience by effecting, not merely signifying, grace. The play emblematizes the restorative aspects of reconciliation, the antidote to the seven deadly sins, with alchemical and medical imagery, culminating in Cerimon's reanimation of Thaisa through an Egyptian magic based on the hermetic ritual to ensoul statues. The Winter's Tale continues Shakespeare's meditation upon the emotional metamorphoses produced by reconciliation. I argue that Shakespeare creates an affective communion among the audience members and the characters, an effect similar to the workings of the Holy Spirit in a Mass, emblematized by the hermetic animation of Hermione. The final chapter examines the Catholic and hermetic parallels in Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Comus. In both works, Milton traces a shared system of correspondences underlying Catholicism and hermeticism in order to explore the relationship between objects and the immaterial, through angelology, Ficinian music theory, the contemplative lives of nuns, the Catholic sacrament of Extreme Unction, and ritual exorcism.

Thesis supervisor: Alvin Snider. Includes bibliographic references (p. 214-227).

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".

ABSTRACT Medieval xenophobia fostered attitudes that viewed anything foreign or distasteful as monstrous. Accordingly, insular inhabitants of the Middle Ages were constantly striving to distinguish Self from Other. My dissertation argues that sixteenth-century England began to reverse this trend: it began to reconcile difference, not by distinguishing Self from Other, but by blurring those distinctions. Visions of ancient Self and contemporary Other began to fuse as proponents of Imperial Britain sought to assimilate foreign monsters that were once considered barbaric, inferior, or inhuman. This method of assimilation is especially apparent during the Elizabethan Age of conquest in the New World. England's prophetic destiny was inextricably tied to its epic history, its Trojan ancestry, and its most glorified rulers, Brutus and his distant successor, King Arthur. Thus, reestablishing and rewriting Britain's legendary past became an exercise in securing its future. I maintain that John Dee (c. 1527-1608/9) and Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599) strategically fused ancient Britain and the New World via the figures of King Arthur and his alleged descendant, Queen Elizabeth. Portions of Dee's Brytanici Imperii Limites are explored to illustrate this connection, as are some of his arcane mystical pursuits. I further examine sections of Spenser's Faerie Queene in relation to Queen Elizabeth and King Arthur, and interpret Arthur in Faery lond as a metaphor for England in the New World. My introduction establishes the key features of the Galfridian tradition and its significance to the Tudor dynasty. It further discusses medieval perceptions of the monstrous that influenced the early-modern era. Subsequent chapters argue that England's assimilation of Other extended to pagan deities and giants, Native Americans, ancient Israelites, and (in Elizabeth's case) to the feminine Other. My final chapter demonstrates how Queen Elizabeth, via her affiliation with King Arthur, became a temporal bridge uniting England's epic past with its future glory.

xi, 198 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In early modern England the word "measure" had a number of different but related meanings, with clear connections between physical measurements and the measurement of the self (ethics), of poetry (prosody), of literary form (genre), and of capital (economics). In this dissertation I analyze forms of measure in early modern literary texts and argue that measure-making and measure-breaking are always fraught with anxiety because they entail ideological consequences for emerging national, ethical, and economic realities. Chapter I is an analysis of the fourth circle of Dante's Inferno . In this hell Dante portrays a nightmare of mis-measurement in which failure to value wealth properly not only threatens to infect one's ethical well-being but also contaminates language, poetry, and eventually the universe itself. These anxieties, I argue, are associated with a massive shift in conceptions of measurement in Europe in the late medieval period. Chapter II is an analysis of the lyric poems of Thomas Wyatt, who regularly describes his psychological position as "out of measure," by which he means intemperate or subject to excessive feeling. I investigate this self-indictment in terms of the long-standing critical contention that Wyatt's prosody is "out of measure," and I argue that formal and psychological expressions of measure are ultimately inseparable. In Chapter III I argue that in Book II of the Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser figures ethical progress as a course between vicious extremes, and anxieties about measure are thus expressed formally as a struggle between generic forms, in which measured control of the self and measured poetic composition are finally the same challenge Finally, in my reading of Troilus and Cressida I argue that Shakespeare portrays persons as commodities who are constantly aware of their own values and anxious about their "price." Measurement in this play thus constitutes a system of valuation in which persons attempt to manipulate their own value through mechanisms of comparison and through praise or dispraise, and the failure to measure properly evinces the same anxieties endemic to Dante's fourth circle, where it threatens to infect the whole world. / Committee in charge: George Rowe, Chairperson, English; Benjamin Saunders, Member, English; Lisa Freinkel, Member, English; Leah Middlebrook, Outside Member, Comparative Literature

The purpose of this thesis was to explore selected works from William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats, in order to expose textual instances of feminist thought. This analysis was aided with feminist theorists falling under the main strains of queer theory, materialism, and gender performance. Specifically, this thesis focused on the ways in which women, particularly virgin daughters, were viewed as property by their male kin. It also looked at how these women engaged in various symbolic masquerades and/or actual cross-dressing as a response to the aforementioned phenomenon. Finally, the thesis exposed how these masquerades can be construed as a queering of identity—manifested through reversals of power and rejection of patriarchal institutions like marriage.

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