Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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

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    Fettering Ignatius to Verse: Donne's Reckoning with the Spiritual Exercises in the Holy Sonnets
    (2008-05-01) Gilbert, Brian; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this project is to reestablish the Jesuit influence on John Donne's Holy Sonnets in order to better understand the spiritual stagnancy expressed by his speakers. In doing so, this thesis will not examine Donne's poetry as the reproduction of a meditative experience, but as the poet's conscious efforts to contend with his formative traditions by "fettering" them to verse. In these sonnets, Donne dramatizes a conflicted spiritual heritage through the speakers' ambivalent responses to the Jesuit meditative model. As Donne's speakers engage and ultimately reject the requirements of the Spiritual Exercises they uncover the tension between acknowledging one's past and asserting one's selfhood.