UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Private Scandal in the Public Sphere: Sexual Scandal as Early Eighteenth-Century Polemics
    (2012) Roby, Joanne W.; Rosenthal, Laura J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Changes in literary strategies and polemical contest in the early eighteenth century legitimized the use of sexual scandal as a means of attack in the mainstream commercial press. Authors embraced scandal to obscure and temper partisan conflicts that motivated animosities, and in doing so they sanctioned inquiry into the private lives of public figures. This strategic use of scandal emerged as a reaction against the political–religious polemics of the English civil war of the mid 1600s. The discourse of scandal developed as an alternative to the discourse of politeness, which similarly evaded explicitly partisan exchanges. Instead of using politeness to cultivate decorous public debate, some authors turned to scandalous (often calumnious) exposés because it allowed them to veil troubling conflicts while still venting animosities. Chapter One examines how early modern sexual libels were transformed after the civil war. I show how in The Rehearsal Transpros’d Andrew Marvell adapted these precedents into his religious polemics; he redirected them against a quasi–public target, the Anglican cleric Samuel Parker, in order to ridicule Parker as an individual. Chapter Two demonstrates how Delarivier Manley perfected this strategy of obfuscation in The New Atalantis. At moments of political crisis throughout the text, Manley’s political narrative pivots towards amatory encounters to distract readers from the crisis at hand. By casting her political tract as a sexual allegory, she legitimized the personalization, privatization and sexualization of political discourse. As Chapter Three illustrates, in the Tatler and Spectator Joseph Addison and Richard Steele repudiated the public’s appetite for scandal, but their very censures reflect that scandalous discourse permeated public debate. Although known for shaping the public sphere, in denouncing scandal, they revealed skepticism of the public’s ability to engage in rational dialogue. Chapter Four shows that Alexander Pope and his literary rivals adapted scandal as a means of satiric attack against each other—that is, against private figures in the public eye—to undermine one another’s cultural standing. I reveal the buried political–religious conflicts that motivated these hostilities, and I demonstrate that Pope refined his use of scandal as a literary tool throughout his career.
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    Coping: Landscapes of the Human Mind
    (2010) Hoffman, Dory E.; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The following novel excerpt and story investigate the ways in which people cope. These works look closely at the way experience affects perception, memory and thought. Characters in these works willingly misinterpret reality and view the world through a lens distorted by their experience. These variations carve pathways in the mind's landscape, restructuring the way the world is understood.