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 "Many Hands Hands": Early Modern Englishwomen's Recipe Books and the Writing of Food, Politics, and the Self(2006) Field, Catherine; Donawerth, Jane; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)"Many Hands Hands" is a study of early modern Englishwomen's recipe (or "receipt") books. It traces how women explored and expressed matters of food, politics, and self in culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic recipes. The receipt book genre was closely associated with the work of the early modern house, where women were accepted as authorities in matters of household management; thus, the receipt book was particularly accessible to women as they searched for modes of self-expression. Through recipe practice, the housewife managed her own body, as well as the bodies of those under her care (such as her husband, children, servants, and neighbors); at the same time, she occasionally exerted pressure on the body politic of the state. In this period, domestic activities within the home were often politicized, and I argue that the housewife's role and recipe practice were considered central to definitions of English nationhood. In addition to surveying women's manuscript recipe collections, I also analyze printed representations of their recipe practice from the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well (c.1604), the female practitioner is represented as powerful and capable, yet Helen's specialized knowledge about the (royal) male body makes her a troubling and disturbing figure to the other characters in the play, including Bertram of Rossillion, the man she hopes to marry. The play ultimately valorizes Helen's practice, however, and it reinforces an empirical world view, where with the proper "how to" (or recipe), bodies are knowable and healable, in spite of their transgressive (if predictable) desires. By the middle of the seventeenth century, "how to" books of recipes (in print and in manuscript) come to be increasingly influenced by utopian writings. Printed cookbooks attributed to women reveal utopian longings in the form of royalist nostalgia, a desire to reclaim the past as a place of good household management and national economy. Recipes became a mode through much women and men could reflect on the "how to" workings of the body in order to improve the health of the individual and, ultimately, the body politic of the state.Item Conrad's Secret Sharer as the Pole within: The Polish Father as Doppelgänger(1996) Strohecker, Dorothy Pula; Kleine, Donald W.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)"Conrad' s Secret Sharer as the Pole Within: The Polish Father as Doppelgänger" establishes an As If hypothesis that presents "The Secret Sharer" as a paradigm for reading the Conradian canon. Although other critics have written on Conrad 's father figure, his Polishness, and the double, my essay assumes a combined methodology based on biographical, psychological, symbolic, and doppelgänger strategies for setting up my thesis and text decoding. The first three chapters provide the background and methodology to be applied to "The Secret Sharer" explication in the last two chapters. Beginning with Chapter I, "Conrad's Polishness and the Dual Polish Father Figure," the biographical and cultural basis for Conrad's Polish matrix and his ambivalence as "Homo Duplex" are explored. Chapter II, "Conrad and the Fictional Father," reviews the proliferation of Conradian father figures, seeing the Lacanian metaphor of the father in its conflict over law and desire as significant in Conrad's generation of themes of crisis over identity involving betrayal, guilt, and questions of fidelity to paternal ideals. In addition, the father is discussed as "symbol" in preparation for equating the Polish father, Apollo, with the doppelgänger. Chapter III, "Conrad's Symbolic Approach to Fiction: The Double as Symbol: Motifs of the Doppelgänger" stresses Conrad's claim that all great art is symbolic. The double is examined as symbol of the unconscious in its many doppelgänger motifs. Finally, in Chapters IV and V, "The Secret Sharer as Pole Within: The Doppelgänger as Apollo, the Polish Father" Parts I and II, concepts from preceding chapters are used to formulate the thesis for "The Secret Sharer" as paradigm for interpreting Conrad's fiction. In this hypothetical approach, there is no attempt to be definitive and no intention to be dogmatic; the only purpose is to explore cognitive possibilities of meaning to enrich, not reduce, the close reading of "The Secret Sharer" and provide a paradigm of thesis generation for Conrad's major fiction.Item African-American Modernism in the Novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen(1992) McManus, Mary Hairston; Joyce, Joyce Ann; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Because early critical evaluations of the literary works of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen were superficial, their reading audience generally regarded both writers as sentimentalists and authors in the genteel tradition. A close analytical study of Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, Quicksand, and Passing reveals the presence of a feminist sensibility not widely discerned. The themes which these two writers employ are typically mainstream modernist, whereas their strategies are African-American. Both Fauset and Larsen depict the mulatta as alienated, restless, and confused in her quest for autonomy and self-expression. Because the mulatta image is acceptable to a wide reading audience, it becomes an ideal narrative strategy for deflecting attention from issues of female sexuality, female subjectivity, and female spaces. Fauset and Larsen bring their writing into the modern era by conjoining the historical, African-American technique of masking with thematic strands which adhere to the modernist ideology. Such a literary plan requires a redefining of modernism to include race and gender. When the execution of that plan results in an empowering of oppressed groups and a heightened consciousness of the female presence in literature and in society, we have African-American modernism. Fauset and Larsen expand upon a sensibility which their literary predecessor Frances Harper suggested in her novel. These two writers of the Harlem Renaissance anticipate by approximately fifteen years the handling of feminist issues by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry. Fauset's and Larsen's novels, along with those of Hurston, West, and Petry, demonstrate the evolution of sexuality from a masked female issue for reasons of morality and respectability to the greater openness seen in later works. The mulatta's significance as a masking strategy diminishes as these writers exercise a female subjectivity. Fauset's reliance upon a female subjectivity results in greater use of material consumption while Larsen explores unconventional female spaces. Both writers display African- American modernist tendencies through experimenting with greater sexual expression, individuality, and displacement of the woman from a male-centered perspective. Fauset and Larsen use the mulatta in their novels to explore new and broader arenas for female expression. Likewise, a re-configuration of modernism to include empowerment of race and gender insures both Fauset and Larsen a less marginalized position in the literary world.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 JOHN PAYNTER'S JOINING THE NAVY: AN EXPRESSION OF LITERARY ASSIMILATIONISM AT THE NADIR(1999) Warner, Charles Fletcher III; Logan, Shirley; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This thesis examines the travel narrative Joining the Navy, or A broad with Uncle Sam, written by African-American enlisted sailor John Paynter in the late nineteenth century. Paynter's narrative is considered in terms of what Dickson Bruce calls "literary assimilationism," a phenomenon describing the strategy of late nineteenth and early twentieth century black authors to reproduce American mainstream values in their writing, in order to de-emphasize their racial otherness. Like civilian America, the American navy embraced Jim Crow policies during the post-Reconstruction era, and Joining the Navy adopts an assimilationist approach to a critique of these policies. Specifically, the thesis shows how Paynter's construction of his identity, his descriptions of his interactions with his shipmates, and his observations of the European, Asian, and African cultures with which he comes into contact are informed by an assimilationist strategy. The thesis suggests how Paynter's assimilationism both consciously and unconsciously critiques American racial attitudes.Item "On One Fix'd Point": The Evolution of Philip Freneau's Rational Philosophy(1992) McNair, Mark Hill; Vitzthum, Richard; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Although most critics who have examined Philip Freneau's work have contended that the poet's philosophic enquiries were scattered and therefore not worthy of critical attention, this dissertation asserts that Freneau's search for an ordered universe that included the presence of a supreme being and the immortality of the soul was in fact more structured than has been previously thought. It focuses on the disappointing results of Freneau's application of Scottish Common Sense realism to the physical world and the rational presuppositions he initially formulated in previously unstudied prose essays that would ultimately lead to the deistic tenets he embraced after 1800. Though much of his early poetry bears a strong resemblance to the work of English pre-romantics such as Cowper, Collins, and Thomson, Freneau's Common Sense empiricism undercuts both the pastoral romanticism and Berkeleyan idealism of these works with realistic images of natural decay and violence, thereby displacing romantic tendencies with empirical observation. But Freneau's hard-nosed realism proves disappointing during the 1780's, for his Common Sense approach, which posited that humans have direct contact with objective reality, finds no evidence of the existence of a deity, little hope of human immortality, and a natural world that both nurtures and destroys indiscriminately. The contradictions of renewal and decay in nature become so great that the poet questions humanity's ability to perceive and understand the physical world. But out of his pessimism Freneau constructs a rational solution that accounts for nature's contradictions and the limits of human perception. In a group of four "Philosopher of the Forest" essays appearing in the 1788 Miscellaneous Works, Freneau determines that discord in nature is part of a divine plan beyond human understanding that has been conceived and set into motion by a remote deity who is also beyond comprehension. From this seed Freneau builds over the next thirty years a rational vision of a universe that, while too complex for humanity's limited intellect, nonetheless provides the materials by which humans, through the active application of reason and science, can begin to comprehend nature's discord as part of a larger design that is necessarily perfect.