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 Women's Search for Identity in Modern Fiction (1881-1927): Self-Definition in Crisis(1987) Grant, Wilda Leslie; Panichas, George A.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)A study of eight women in the novels of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf reveals the validity of the statement of Henry James that "the novel is history." Each of the eight characters reflects the position of women at a specific point in the history of the modern world. The situations in which the eight women find themselves demonstrate the unique ability of each author to develop a character who parallels conditions that existed for women in the period in which the author wrote. Conventions governing the place and expectations of women changed radically toward the end of the nineteenth century. Modern English fiction dramatically recorded theses changes over time in the evolution of the female character as it was developed in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and in The Golden Bowl (1904) by Henry James, in Nostromo (1904) and in Victory (1915) and in Women in Love (1921) by D.H. Lawrence, and in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and in To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf. James's Isabel Archer and Charlotte Stant, Conrad's Emilia Gould and Lena, Lawrence's Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay are endowed with charm, intelligence, courage, moral integrity, and patience. These virtues do not vary qualitatively as one generation leads to the next. What does vary, as the eight novels show, is the measure of free choice available to the women; and this measure is significantly connected to their places in historical time. The eight novels register the continuous process of women's search for self-definition. Viewed separately, the novels offer insightful character studies of eight women with remarkable emotional strength, whose actions respectively set the pace in the novels. Grouped as a unit, the novels in which these women appear present a poignant commentary on the status of women in the years between 1881 and 1927, years that included not only the havoc of the Great War, but also a growing reassessment of social and moral values.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 Philip Freneau's Wildflower: An Analysis of the "Amanda" Poems(1981) Lovelock, Frank A.; Vitzthum, Richard C.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)According to Philip Freneau's biographers, an early disillusionment appears to have resulted from Freneau's first experiences at sea as well as from an abortive love affair that began on the island of Bermuda in 1778. Freneau left behind scores of poems which detail his years in the Caribbean, seven of which, after much revision, he grouped together in 1809 and linked directly to his experiences in Bermuda. And although it can be shown that Freneau, incorporated diverse biographical material into these poems, the resulting fiction demonstrates that the poet was able to transcend his own unhappiness through literary art. These seven poems, subsequently labelled the "Amanda" poems in honor of the woman they seem to celebrate, have been ignored by Freneau's critics, who often regard them as little more than conventional love verses. The present study challenges this assumption and attempts to demonstrate that the creation of the "Amanda" story was of central importance to Freneau. The research has included a linear comparison of the known variants of the "Amanda" poems and has found that although the series comprises only seven poems in its final format, it holds major clues to unlocking the mysterious forces which shaped Freneau's intellectual, emotional, and artistic maturity. The study examines not only the poems in the "Amanda" series but also many other poems with structural or thematic ties to the series. Since Freneau's experience in the West Indies is the most pervasive motif in his work, "Amanda" surfaces in numerous poems, and her image becomes a vehicle through which the poet tests a sequence of metaphysical abstractions. To Freneau, she first comes to represent unattainable beauty, then disappointment, and finally resignation. As such, the myth of "Amanda" is arguably more important to Freneau than her real-life model. Whoever she was, "Amanda" profoundly affected the poet, his philosophy, and his art; and her influence on him has been overlooked far too long.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 Harold Frederic: His Fictive Imagination and the Intellectual Milieu(1980) Clark, Jean Marshall; Thorberg, Raymond; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Harold Frederic reflects in his novels and stories the intellectual milieu of the latter nineteenth century. Most of the major philosophic concerns of the age are present in one way or another in his fiction: metaphysical idealism, Comtian positivism, Darwinism, the Higher Criticism, pragmatism, and, as the power of reason-indeed reason itself-came more and more into distrust, a voluntarism deriving from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. While Frederic tended to synthesize ideas rather than to develop his own systematic philosophy, the psychological penetration of his characters evidences his awareness of such concerns. He is a careful craftsman in the drawing of his fictional personalities, and he often makes explicit note of the inclusion of intellectual elements in their delineations. Frederic's atypical writing possibly reflects his atypical lack of artistic isolation. His continued journalistic activity as well as his membership in various literary and political clubs might account for his remaining highly responsive to contemporary politics, economics, and religion. His fictional canon reads like a small compendium of the thought of the century's closing decades, tracing its broad diverse movements and interrelated philosophic strands. His early writing was vitalized by the new currents of thought generated by sociologists and economists in revolt against the social Darwinists, and by new approaches instituted by the Bible exegetes. Included among these were the views most compatible with his own liberalism and his optimistic attitude toward life. Later such hopes as they inspired found themselves weighed in the dramatic balance of his fiction against an unvanquished Darwinism, a spreading skepticism, as well as the darker visions of voluntarism. His final work, while yet bearing witness to an open, inquiring mind, shows a receptiveness to the blending of the spiritual and scientific conceived by American pragmatism. Frederic's writing, according to Walter Taylor, "anticipates the mingled realism, naturalism, and disillusion of the twentieth century." It is to employ a wrong set of terms, however, to assess him, as Charles Child Walcutt does, as "a kind of naturalist manqué," making implicit comparison thereby with, say, Crane or Dreiser. More to the point is the statement by Austin Briggs that "in the works of no other American novelist does one so fully sense what it was like to be alive in those turbulent years."Item The Fragmented Vision of Claude McKay: A Study of His Works(1989) Griffin, Barbara Jackson; Bryer, Jackson; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, played a significant role in the development of Black American literature. His search for a Black aesthetic and his poems of defiance gave inspiration to young Black artists hungry to explore new ideas. Their creative spirit flowered into the Harlem Renaissance. But, McKay, whose themes helped to stimulate this movement, was plagued by the very concepts that helped to define it. Throughout his life, he was ambivalent about three things: his Afrocentric universe, his role as rebel spokesman, and his relationship to Jamaica. Already a poet of some consequence in Jamaica, McKay thought of America as a grander arena for his voice, but when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in 1912, he was shaken by the intense racism of America. His upbringing in rural Clarendon Hills had not prepared him for what he witnessed. By nature, a proud man, McKay turned his lyrical expression into an instrument that would change the arrogance of the Whites. "Harlem Dancer" and "Invocation" (1917) implied the nobility of African roots and affirmed the superiority of primitivistic value system over Western cultural standards. But in McKay's psyche lay the germ of ambivalence that rejected the code of any "world" not sanctioned by the West. During the years following World War I, when relations between Whites and Blacks were strained, McKay became a rebel spokesman for the masses with his defiant poem "If We Must Die" (1919). It urged oppressed people to stand valiant in the face of defeat. But McKay later denied that the poem spoke for Blacks and further questioned the artistic worth of his other "militant" poems. McKay was also ambivalent about his homeland. Throughout most of his life, he ignored in his writing the political, social, and economic realities of Jamaica and evoked instead the image of an Edenic island that offered him refuge from the complexities of the twentieth century.Item John Payne Collier and the Shakespeare Society(1980) Wagonheim, Sylvia Stoler; Schoenbaum, Samuel; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)During the early years of the nineteenth century, the heightened interest in manuscripts and early printed editions precipitated the growth of publishing and printing societies which subsequently flourished throughout the 1800's. The object of these societies was generally to preserve through reproduction--and distribution to a select few--rare literary documents. One of the first societies to limit its scholarly scope to William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but to open its resources to a far-flung literary community, was the Shakespeare Society founded in 1840 through the efforts of several eminent Victorian editors, most prominently John Payne Collier. Throughout its eleven years of active existence (1841-52), the Society produced forty-eight full-length scholarly studies and four volumes of Papers including the first accurate biography of Inigo Jones, the first printed edition of Sir Thomas More (three pages of which are thought by many to be in the hand of Shakespeare), the first publications of the full cycle of the Coventry mystery plays and the Chester Whitsun cycle, and the reprints of several Shakespearean source plays including Timon. Moreover, the Society represents a dramatic advance in conscientious investigative scholarship over the limited and exclusive social book clubs of the early part of the century and, for this reason alone, deserves attention and recognition. The aim of this study is to explore the origin of the Shakespeare Society and to document its contributions to the continuum of Shakespearean and Elizabethan scholarship. The first chapter charts the cultural currents from which the Society originated. The focus here is primarily on the unrestrained bibliomania of the period and on the steadily increasing desire of the English middle class to read, see, and understand the work of their national poet. Chapter two serves a dual purpose. It recalls previous Shakespeare associations in order to illustrate the advances in structure and scholarly objective demonstrated by the Shakespeare Society of 1840, and it examines the financial troubles which plagued the Society throughout its existence and contributed to its demise. Subsequent chapters recall and assess in the light of modern scholarship the individual dramatic and nondramatic achievements of the Society. They examine the Society's attempts to apply historical methods to the study of Shakespeare's non-dramatic literary milieu, and they record the disheartening evidence of systematic and premeditated fraud perpetrated by John Payne Collier on the scholarly community--often through the pages of the Society's publications. Chapters five and six highlight the Society's editorial achievements in dramatic literature: its ground-breaking editions of early English drama, its critical attention to the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and its painstaking researches into the life and work of Shakespeare himself. Chapter seven reviews the four-volume sequence of The Shakespeare Society's Papers, which fostered cooperative literary scholarship through short contributions from amateur as well as professional scholars. The final segment represents an attempt to characterize, through the use of manuscript as well as published sources, the gentlemen of the Society's Councils. This study concludes on a bitter-sweet note since the questions of authenticity directed to the scholarship of John Payne Collier not only damaged his reputation, but also cast suspicion on all of his scholarly activities. On the other hand, Collier's industry in forming and maintaining the Shakespeare Society is unquestionably laudable. Through his efforts, the Society gathered together the most knowledgeable men of the period in the first cooperative attempt to encourage the systematic dissemination and exchange of literary information and to apply methods of historical research to Elizabethan literary scholarship.Item John Fellows: A Minor American Deist(1956) Stevens, George L.; Aldridge, Alfred O.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)