English Theses and Dissertations
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Item The Influence of Jacob Bryant on William Blake(1969) Svatik, Stephen Jr.; Howard, John; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)To understand William Blake's complex mythology, one must understand the sources of his theories. A primary source of mythic material in the eighteenth century was the research and writings of the antiquarians, principally of Jacob Bryant. Blake shared with the antiquarians a desire to understand the origins of man and of the development of man's political and religious institutions. But while the mythographers concentrated on giving simply a temporal account of the development of man and society, Blake expanded on their accounts of history by analyzing the importance of inner man in the development of his social institutions. In A New System, Jacob Bryant discusses three points of mutual interest for Blake. First, he dismisses Greek mythology for having corrupted the truth concerning man's past. Second, he attributes the degeneration of religion to man's error of materialism. And third, he discusses the fragmentation of society and man's subsequent fall from an earlier period of unity, freedom, and peace. Blake's writings contain concepts similar to those of Bryant, but Blake modified and refined them to fit into his unique mythological structure. Blake's most significant departure from Bryant is his paralleling of man's social and political conflicts with man's failure to maintain an equilibrium of his inner essences in his establishing a ratio between the inner man and the outer world. Blake's mythopoeic imagination surpasses those of Bryant and the antiquarians in meaning and significance when he goes on to forsee man's return to unity, to a Golden Age of freedom and peace.Item Jane Austen: The Moral Imperative(1976) Carter, Barbara Sue; Myers, Robert Manson; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)According to Edward Austen-Leigh and subsequent critical tradition, Jane Austen urged no system of morality save the inferiority of low to high principles. While she propounds no religious doctrine, the six novels reveal, if not a complete code of behavior, a moral imperative, a direction one should take to come to successful terms with life. First, one must face reality. Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, has to learn that Gothic fantasies are neither the stuff of life nor a reliable guide to it. More importantly, she must perceive the motives and feelings of others. Reality, once understood, must be accepted. The tasks of the present must be accomplished; its pleasures, however limited, must be enjoyed, because to squander time in regret for the past or anticipation of the future is to court misery. Sense and Sensibility extends the definition of this duty to include care for the material and emotional welfare of one's family. By failing to provide for his stepmother and sisters, John Dashwood contrasts unfavorably with Sir John Middleton and Colonel Brandon. The difference between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood is not merely between sense and sensibility, but between care for the feelings of others and selfish absorption in one's own troubles. Elinor's sense largely derives from her wish to spare increase of her suffering by spreading its effects . Marianne must nearly die before she comes to a like commitment to practical compassion. In Pride and Prejudice, confrontation of reality and the claims of family are united in a statement of the need for self-knowledge in order to represent our selves accurately to the world and thereby enhance the family's claim to gentility. Elizabeth and Darcy realize they have created erroneous first impressions and must labor to erase these, while Lydia's elopement renews our awareness that what one does individually affects the whole family's position. Mansfield Park elaborates on this theme by arguing for sound judgment in the rearing of children to behave responsibly according to the dictates of society. Although one's station does influence character, there is a better guide available to all: conscience. Mary Crawford, appealing though she is, lacks moral fibre, while Fanny Price, however diffident, delivers accurate judgments because conscience guides her formation of them. In Emma, this eighteenth-century construct of conscience and rationality called right reason is brought to bear on the question of the obligations the privileged have to those less well-circumstanced. Emma must realize that the caste system exists to preserve order, not to gratify conceit. Mr. Knightley emerges as the ideal upper class gentleman: responsible, wise, compassionate. Persuasion shows Sir Walter Elliot as a moral bankrupt, preening himself on lineage and estate instead of laboring to justify the possession of them. He has wasted his substance and dissipated the force of his character to gratify vanity. His daughter Anne has extracted from a bleak existence whatever joy she could find in being useful to others. Her marriage to Captain Wentworth is less a reward for her past endurance than a happy exception to her uncomplaining acceptance of a barren life. Throughout, she has been supported by a belief that in breaking the original engagement she did right in yielding to the persuasion of her older friend Lady Russell, despite her conviction that the advice itself was wrong. The book thus urges clear-sighted evaluation of the real world and its inhabitants, assumption of responsibility for family and dependents, and obedience to the codes needed for social stability.Item ANNUALS: A Collection of Poems(1978) Mackey, John Joseph; Van Egmond, Peter; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The poems in this collection were written during the past year and are arranged in roughly chronological order. My intention in writing the poems was to construct a truthful recreation of experience which would evoke corresponding feeling. By selecting and ordering details of ordinary occurrences, I hoped to create microcosmic situations. The use of literary, mythological, and biblical allusions aided me in this endeavor. These, like all poems, should be read aloud, for the sound of words was a prime consideration in their making. The beauty of poetry, I believe, lies in the expression itself, the art born of ordinary experience and chiseled by the tool of language. My attempt was to create something pleasurable and universal from the raw material of experience. Having begun writing Shakespearean sonnets as a challenge, I soon found that the strict meter and rhyme scheme were excellent aids in producing a poem from a germinal idea. Hence, more than a few that follow are in this mode.Item When Vernal Suns Forbear To Roll: Belief and Unbelief, Doubt and Resolution in the Poetry of Philip Freneau(1977) Griffith, Joseph Jeffrey; Vitzthum, R.C.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This study analyzes and evaluates the pre-1790 lyric poetry of Philip Freneau through close examination of representative poems. Freneau should be taken more seriously as an artist and thinker than he now is: the notions that Freneau was "dwarfed and transformed" or "thwarted" by his environment and that he "entirely congruent" to the literary and philosophic conventions of his day are contradicted by the poetry but have influenced the general critical estimate of the poet. Freneau was a careful poetic craftsman who not only sometimes reversed the poetic and philosophical conventions but also often used his poetry to examine his own philosophical relationship with the universe. The central issue for Freneau was not simply the essential transience of all life, as most critics have argued, but rather the lack of a phenomenological reality which could be reliably known. Thus Freneau was concerned with the development of a meaningful way to live in a world which he speculated might be void of meaning. The introduction reviews past and present critical assessments and summarizes the standard critical views--Pattee's, Clark's, Leary's, Adkins', Bowden's; explains the editorial difficulties in dealing with Freneau's works; and outlines the dissertation's purpose, method, and organization. The body of the study consists of an examination of key lyrics from the editions of 1786 and 1788 which reveal the themes and formal artistic techniques characteristic of Freneau's serious earlier poetry. Each poem is subjected to three kinds of study. First the central thematic concerns of each poem and the patterns of symbol and image with which the poet conveys them are examined. Second the formal structure of each poem, showing how Freneau's manipulation of rime, rhythm, and spatial organization either underscores or undercuts his meaning is considered. Third, the extensive revisions which Freneau made of these poems and their purpose and effect are analyzed. In each case, the first collected edition of the poem is used as the basis for discussion, following the chronology of the poem's publication as closely as possible. The study is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is the introduction; chapters two and three discuss the 1786 edition; chapters four and five the 1788 edition. Chapter six, the conclusion, recapitulates the major points made in the preceding chapters; briefly considers selected poems from the 1795, 1809, and 1815 editions; and assesses Freneau's achievement.Item A Translation of Richard Morison's Apomaxis Calumniarum(1968) Eakin, Mary H.; Zeeveld, W. Gordon; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The thesis includes a foreword and a translation from the Latin of the Apomaxis Calumniarum, a book written by Richard Morison, apologist for Henry VIII, hired by his secretary, Thomas Cromwell. The work was composed as a rebuttal to an attack by the German theologian Johann Coclaeus, and contains a defense of Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and of the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher, and an attack upon the papacy. Morison maintains and supports by Biblical testimony that the divorce merely righted a wrong, as Henry's union with Catherine had been incestuous. He claims that More and Fisher were respectively sick and old, and were seeking the glory of martyrdom, but both were deserving of an ignominious death for the horrendous crime of obstinately upholding the power of the pope in England. He charges that the papacy had a spurious origin, and that throughout history popes have had a harmful effect. A large part of Morison's book consists of a personal attack on Coclaeus.Item The Prophet and the Poet: The Relationship of Thomas Carlyle with Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hugh Clough(1968) Gadziola, David Stanley; Brown, Samuel E.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Thomas Carlyle attempted to put into practice both his theories of poetry and his ideas concerning Heroes and Hero Worship by seeking to influence several poets of his acquaintance to write poetry according to his order. Though he failed, he nevertheless left a significant mark on the poetry of Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Arthur Hugh Clough.Item Lafayette, America's Hero: The Growth of a Legend(1963) Bloxom, Marguerite Doris; Beall, Otho T.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The legend of Lafayette began to grow about the time of his 1784 goodwill visit to the United States. Identical biographical sketches of Lafayette appeared in several early histories of the Revolutionary War, and similar versions were included in other histories. The core of the sketch was the picture of a young French nobleman, inspired by the ideals of liberty and equality, who came to America at great personal sacrifice and his own expense to take part in the fight for freedom. His story was used to add weight to the rightness of the action of the American patriots, and to stimulate feelings of national pride. After the turn of the century, the story of Lafayette became shorter and more routine. It was dropped from some textbooks, and was greatly abbreviated in others. It seems probable that while Lafayette would not have been forgotten, his place in American history would have been small, perhaps even obscure, if he had not visited America again in 1824. During this last visit, after an absence of forty years, the General received an enthusiastic and overwhelming reception. Interest in Lafayette revived quickly, and accounts of him appeared in newspapers, periodicals and separate books. The importance of his contribution to the foundation of the United States was emphasized; as a hero, he approached the position of America's savior. In addition, his personal characteristics endeared him to the people. In all probability, Americans' lasting esteem for Lafayette was developed as a result of the 1824 visit.