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1رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Mason, David
المساهمون: Watts, John
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, English Literature, History
الوصف: Each society generates a historical culture, which here is understood to encompass the media through which the past is discussed, the institutions that seek to shape and form ideas about the past, and the prevailing ideas, ideologies and approaches that influence thinking about the past. This thesis examines the historical culture that was endemic to citizens of London in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The fifteenth century saw rising literacy amongst urban dwellers, an increase in manuscript production, and the onset of print culture. London also saw a localised phenomenon: the development of a civic chronicling tradition, the London chronicles, that had its high point in the period 1430-1516. This thesis situates London chronicles within the broader historical and literary culture of the period. It focuses on urban citizens, namely the merchants, craftsmen and others enfranchised freemen of London. In order to understand the historical writing of this period, education and governance are vital contexts. Many chronicles were used in households, in the education of young people and apprentices. Prevailing ideas encouraged both authors and audiences of historical literature to view history as a pedagogic genre. Citizen household turned to historical literature as a means to teach morals, manners and political education. Governance is also vital to understanding London historical culture. Governing institutions such as the Guildhall commissioned historical writing and founded archives and libraries to direct and control access to information. Citizens used origin stories to discuss the purpose and meaning of the institutions and offices of the city. Many officeholders owned or authored histories. Londoners used historical literature to reflect upon the politics of the day, discussing both the ideals and reality of government in London and the wider realm.
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2رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Elias, John Marcel Robert
المساهمون: Cooper, Helen
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, Crusades, Emotion, Middle English Romance, East-West relations, Chivalry, English literature, History
الوصف: This thesis offers an assessment of late medieval public response to the crusades through an investigation of emotional rhetoric in the Middle English crusading romances. It argues that the prevailing climate after the fall of Acre in 1291 and the evacuation of the last Christian strongholds in the Levant was characterized by a mixture of enduring enthusiasm and fascination, but also of concern, anxiety, and self-questioning, engendered by the enterprise's failures. The loss of the Holy Land had enduring repercussions on Christian crusading mindsets, marking a culminating point in Islam's seemingly relentless victories in wars believed to be ordained by God, and the collapse of Christendom's ambitions to secure lasting dominion over Christ's patrimony. The late thirteenth century was also a turning point in the history of insular romance, with the progressive displacement of Anglo Norman by Middle English, expanding the genre's audience. Reworking the emotional depictions of their sources, authors or adaptors of late medieval English crusading romances engaged with, and elicited reflection on, the cultural anxieties of the time: man's relation to God, the workings of divine providence, Christianity's ascendency over Islam, human agency, the connection between morality and fortune, the bearing of motives on actions, and the moral limitations of violence.
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3رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Dolmans, Emily
المساهمون: Ashe, Laura
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, History, Medieval, Literature, Medieval, Anglo-Norman literature, English literature--Middle English, Anglo-Norman romance, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, Anglo-Norman Romance, English identity, medieval borders, Gesta Herewardi, Boeve de Haumtone, Gui de Warewic, Regional identity, Gaimar, Medieval romance, Medieval historiography, Gesta Herwardi
الوصف: This thesis explores the geographic complexity of English identity in the High Middle Ages by examining texts that reflect moments and spaces of cultural contact. While interaction with a cultural Other is often thought to reinforce national identity, I challenge this notion, positing instead that, in the texts analysed here, cultural meetings prompt the formation or consolidation of regional identities. These identities are often simultaneously local and cross-cultural, inclusive but based in community ties and a shared sense of place. Each of the four chapters examines a different kind of regional identity and its relation to Englishness through romances and historiographical texts in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. Discussion primarily focuses on the Gesta Herwardi, Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, Gui de Warewic, Boeve de Haumtone, Le roman de toute chevalerie, and Richard Coer de Lyon. Each of these texts negotiates English identity in relation to a cultural Other, and balances various aspects of cultural identity and scales of geographic affiliation. While some focus exclusively on a particular locality, others create inclusive regional identities, draw together the foreign and the familiar, or depict England as a region on the edge of an interconnected world. These texts show that Englishness can carry different meanings, nuances, and identitary strategies that depend on context, location, or ideology. Together, they forge an image of England that is diverse and multinucleated. Its borders become spaces of meeting, connection, and cultural overlap, as well as division. These works establish a strong English identity while articulating England's necessary relationship with other places, spaces, and peoples, challenging not the borders of England, but the borders of Englishness.
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4رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Holloway, Sally
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, Gender, Material Culture, Cultural History, History of Emotions, Romantic Love, Courtship, Adultery, Life-Cycle, Marriage, History
الوصف: This thesis explores romantic love during premarital and extramarital relationships in England between c. 1730 and 1830. It is situated within the fields of Cultural History, Gender History, the History of Emotions, Marriage, the Life-Cycle and Material Culture. It uses evidence from sixty-eight different relationships, from which twenty-seven were selected for detailed scrutiny. These include both courting and adulterous couples, which have previously been problematically elided by historians. It draws upon a broad source base, including letters, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, ballads, poetry, prints, paintings, religious texts, medical treatises and court records. After the historiographical introduction in Chapter One, Chapter Two explores the indispensable role played by creating, exchanging and physically handling love tokens on the path to matrimony. Chapter Three reveals the quasi-public nature of love letters, the myriad dichotomies between male and female epistles, and the haptic power of letters as material objects. Chapter Four unearths the secret codes and disappearing ink utilised by adulterous couples, outlining the unique features of the language of forbidden love. Chapter Five challenges preconceptions of romantic love as 'innate' or 'transhistorical' by outlining the religious, medical and literary developments shaping conceptions and expressions of love. The final two chapters focus on the darker side of love; Chapter Six argues that languishing from heartbreak was redefined as a uniquely female malady from the mid-1750s, while men were expected to resist to maintain their pride and self-control. Chapter Seven charts the evolution of breach of promise actions under the common law, and the objects invoked as 'proof' of an attachment. The thesis recognises that the understanding and expression of romantic love was historically and culturally contingent upon social and cultural shifts. It locates romantic relationships firmly within the material world, as letters and tokens guided couples from initial intimacy to a deeper emotional connection.
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5رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Madrinkian, Michael Alex
مرشدي الرسالة: Horobin, Simon
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, Transmission of texts, England, History, To 1500, Manuscripts, Editing, English literature, Middle English, History and criticism
الوقت: 1100-1500
الوصف: My doctoral thesis, "Producing Piers Plowman to 1475: Author, Scribe, and Reader," charts a new material history of William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, from its earliest composition to the onset of print in England. The study is divided into three sections, which examine the production of Piers from three perspectives: textual history, manuscript circulation, and medieval reception. The first section of the thesis conducts a study of Langland's revisionary process, presenting a new theory of authorial revision from the A to B version that has important implications for our understanding of authorship in Piers Plowman and for the future editing of the poem. The second section transitions into an examination of the early circulation of the Piers manuscripts in various geographical and social milieux. It examines two case studies of manuscript circulation in the Southwest Midlands and East Anglia, linking them to regionalized networks of scribes and patrons. Finally, Section III moves into a discussion of the literary contexts in which Piers circulates, particularly in multi-text manuscripts, examining how the poem's reception by a medieval audience affected its development as a literary text. This section treats production from a more theoretical standpoint, investigating the relationship between the poem's audience and the "production" of meaning in a social and historical context. As I will argue, each of these sections acts as an important frame of reference for understanding the multifaceted formation of Piers Plowman as a literary text and cultural landmark. In particular, the thesis emphasizes the importance of Piers's various contexts, from its textual genesis in the author's composition and revision to its circulation and reception in an unstable manuscript culture. It suggests that the people and the places that surrounded Piers Plowman in its early development fundamentally shaped the poem we have today.
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6رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Hone, Joseph
مرشدي الرسالة: Kewes, Paulina ; Womersley, David
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, Politics and literature, Great Britain, History, Political parties, English literature, Early modern, History and criticism
الوقت: 17th century, 18th century, 1500-1700
الوصف: This thesis provides the first full-length account of the political and cultural significance of the accession of Queen Anne. It offers a critical reassessment of the politics of the royal image across a spectrum of texts, events, and artefacts - from panegyrics, newspapers, sermons, royal progresses, and processions to medals, coins, and playing cards. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of party politics to the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century. This thesis nuances that assumption by arguing: (1) that the principal focus of partisan texts was competing representations of monarchy; and (2) that the explosion of partisanship at the start of the eighteenth century was triggered by unrest about the royal succession. Anne was the last protestant Stuart. She had no surviving children. This thesis explores how authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and a great many lesser known and anonymous writers and propagandists conceptualized the end of the Stuart dynasty. Anne's accession forced writers to conjecture on the future succession. There were two rival claimants to the throne after Anne's death: the protestant Electress Sophia of Hanover and Anne's Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward. Sophia's claim was statutory, James's hereditary. Factions emerged in support of both claimants. Almost all topical writing took a stance on the issue. Many sided with the government, supporting Hanover. Yet some writers favoured the illegal but hereditary claim of James Francis Edward; they had to express support in covert ways. This succession crisis triggered not only printed polemic, but also swathes of clandestine manuscript literature circulating in the Jacobite underground. The government took a hard line on Jacobite writers and printers; this thesis documents both their persecution and the techniques they used to evade the law. The thesis concludes by suggesting that this oppositional literary culture only disintegrated after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, and the consequent settlement of the Hanoverian succession, in late 1716. After this point, royal succession ceased to be a major source of political discontent.
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7رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Knox, Philip
مرشدي الرسالة: Perkins, Nicholas ; Swift, Helen J.
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, Transmission of texts, History, To 1500, English literature, Middle English, History and criticism, Allegory
الوقت: 1100-1500
الوصف: This thesis traces the afterlife of the Romance of the Rose in fourteenth-century England. Whether it was closely imitated or only faintly recalled, I argue that the Rose exercised its influence on fourteenth-century English literature in two principal ways. Firstly, in the development of a self-reflexive focus on how meaning is produced and transmitted. Secondly, in a concern with how far the author's intentions can be recovered from a work, and to what extent the author must claim some responsibility for the meaning of a text after its release into the world of readers. In the Rose, many of these issues are presented through the lens of a disordered erotic desire, and questions of licit and illicit textual and sexual pleasures loom large in the later responses. My investigation focuses on four English writers: William Langland, John Gower, the Gawain-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In my final chapter I suggest that the Rose ceased to be a generative force in English literature in the fifteenth century, and I try to offer some explanations as to why. In examining the influence of the Rose in England I am not trying to suggest a linear transmission of cultural dominance, but rather a complex and plural process of interaction that expands to include texts that both antedate and post-date the Rose - especially Neoplatonic allegories and Ovid, on the one hand, and, on the other, Deguileville and Machaut. The individual English writers I look at are not seen as having a single and stable attitude towards the Rose; instead, I argue, the Rose emerges as a way of thinking about the interaction between texts, how meaning is produced, and how authorial ownership is claimed or refused. Using not only literary evidence but also detailed archival research into the manuscript circulation of the Rose, I question the usefulness of 'English' and 'French' as critical categories for the study of late-medieval literature, and attempt to show that, for a certain kind of literary activity, the Rose occupied a central position in England: not a stable foundation of cultural authority, but a realm of self-questioning subversion and instability.
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8رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Jennings, Emily
مرشدي الرسالة: Kean, Margaret
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, English literature, Early modern, History and criticism, Prophecy in literature, Politics and literature, Great Britain, History, Literature and society, Stuarts
الوقت: 1500-1700, 17th century, 1603-1714
الوصف: This is a study of the political prophecy in England in a period delimited by the accession of King James I (1603) and the end of the Interregnum (1660). It combines the analysis of hitherto obscure manuscript texts with that of printed works to provide a nuanced account of the uses and reception of prophecies in this period. Chapter One (which focuses on the first decade of James's reign) and Chapter Two (which covers the period 1613-19) approach the analysis of dramatic treatments of political prophecy through the study of prophecy both as a rhetorical buttress to the Jacobean state and as a protest genre. Attentive to the elite bias of the legal documents wherein allegedly oppositionist uses of prophecy are recorded, these chapters heed the counsel of historians who have found literary scholars insufficiently suspicious of the rhetoric of these materials. A focus on dramatic texts, neglected by the historians, reveals that Jacobean playgoers were encouraged to regard both official prophetic rhetoric and official rhetoric about prophecy with scepticism. Chapter Three considers how native and continental prophetic traditions were expanded and repurposed in England around the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, when belief in the purportedly inspired status of prophecies was rare but recognition of their utility as a vehicle for political discussion was nonetheless widespread. Chapter Four explores the adaptation and tendentious exposition of medieval, sixteenth-century, and Jacobean manuscript prophecies in printed propaganda for both the royalist and parliamentarian causes in the mid-seventeenth century. This study of literary and archival sources finds that previous scholarship has overestimated the extent of popular faith in the authenticity of allegedly ancient and inspired prophecies in the early Stuart period. The longevity of purported prophecies, it concludes, was ensured through the recognition, appreciation, and exploitation of their rhetorical affordances.
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9رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Dawkins, Charlie
مرشدي الرسالة: Whitworth, Michael
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, Modernism (Literature), Great Britain, History, English periodicals, Intellectual life
الوقت: 20th century
الوصف: This thesis studies five mainstream British weekly magazines: 'Time and Tide', the 'Nation and Athenaeum', the 'Spectator', the 'Listener', and the 'New Statesman'. It explores how these magazines reviewed, discussed and analysed modernist literature over an eighteen-year span, 1920-37. Over this period, and in these magazines, the concept of modernism developed. Drawing on work by philosopher Ian Hacking, this research traces how the idea of modernism emerged into the public realm. It focuses largely on the book reviews printed in these magazines, texts that played an important and underappreciated role in negotiations between modernist texts and the audience of these magazines. Chapter 1, on 'Time and Tide', covers a period from the magazine's inception in 1920 to 1926, and draws particularly on Catherine Clay's work on this magazine. It discusses the genre of 'weekly review' that this new magazine attempted to join, and the cultural place of modernism in the early 1920s. Chapter 2, on the 'Nation and Athenaeum', covers Leonard Woolf's literary editorship (1923-30), under the ownership of J. M. Keynes, and makes use of Keynes's archive at King's College, Cambridge, and Woolf's at the University of Sussex. Chapter 3, on the 'Spectator', covers Evelyn Wrench's editorship (1925-32), and explores the relationship between this magazine, ideologies of conservatism, and modernism. Chapter 4, on the 'Listener', focuses on the magazine's publication of new poetry, including an extraordinary 1933 supplement that printed W. H. Auden's 'The Witnesses'. This work revolves around Janet Adam Smith, literary editor in these years, and draws on Smith's archive at the National Library of Scotland as well as the BBC archives at Caversham. Chapter 5, on the 'New Statesman' in the 1930s under new editor Kingsley Martin, explores a period when modernism was more widely recognized, and pays particular attention to a short text by James Joyce printed in 1932, 'From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer'.
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10رسالة جامعية
المؤلفون: Mukhopadhyay, Priyasha
مرشدي الرسالة: Boehmer, Elleke
مصطلحات موضوعية: 820.9, South Asian literature (English), History and criticism, Bengali literature, Books and reading, India, History, Publishers and publishing, Intellectual life
الوقت: 19th century
الوصف: This thesis constructs a history of reading for South Asia (1857-1914) through an examination of the eccentric relationships that marginal colonial agents and subjects - soldiers, peasants, office clerks and women - developed with everyday forms of writing. Drawing on the methodologies of the history of the book, and literary and cultural histories, it creates a counterpoint to the dominant view of imperial self-fashioning as built on reading intensively and at length. Instead, it contends that the formation of identities in colonial South Asia, whether compliant or dissenting, was predicated on superficial forms of textual engagement, leaving the documents of empire most likely misread, unread, or simply read in part. I illustrate this argument through four chapters, each of which brings together extensive archival material and nonliterary texts, as well as both canonical and little-known literary works. The first two discuss the circulation of unread texts in colonial institutions: the army and the government office. I study Garnet Wolseley's pioneering war manual, The Soldier's Pocket-book for Field Service, a book that soldiers refused to read. This is juxtaposed, in the second study, with an examination of the reception of the bureaucratic document in illiterate peasant communities, explored through the colonial archive and ethnographic novels. In the third and fourth chapters, I focus on texts consumed in part. I turn to the Bengali Hindu almanac, a form that made the transition from manuscript to print in this period, and examine how it trained its new-found readership of English-educated office clerks to oscillate smoothly between British-bureaucratic and local forms of time, as well as to read quickly and selectively. I end with a study of The Indian Ladies' Magazine, and suggest that the cosmopolitan form of the periodical and editorial practices of extracting and summarising gave women unprecedented access to a network of global print.
