Interjections and Individual Style: a study of Restoration dramatic language

This paper examines the manifestation of individual style through the lens of a specific language category: the interjection. The analysis considers how interjections are used as a resource in the dramatic dialogue of three Restoration playwrights: Aphra Behn, John Dryden and Thomas D’Urfey, and how their preferences and practices of use compare to previously identified trends in the history of English. Using the concept of the repertoire as a frame for situated language use, the paper examines how genre, time, and characterisation shape the selection and frequency of interjections in the plays of each author. Corpus linguistic methods are used to provide a quantitative and qualitative overview of each author’s interjection repertoire. The results suggest that whilst genre, time, and characterisation are influential in shaping the selection and implementation of interjection forms, the choice of expressive language in dramatic contexts is also distinctive and coherent at an authorial level

The Apothecary's Tales: a game of language in a language of games

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the 1ih and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions) and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure, provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world -can be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic discourse

Hafters and crafters : verbal unruliness and the contest for artistic discourse in the english renaissance

Chapter One argues for the recovery of the word haft. An account of the denotative varieties of haft provides a way of looking back into an implicit logic of rhetorical practice which has fallen out of use. Chapter Two focuses on two texts by John Skelton which demonstrate the rhetorical texture of literary contests: the flyting Agenst Garnesche (1514) and the interlude Magnyfycence (c. 1515). In the former, Skelton falls to verbal blows with his opponent, Christopher Garnesche, in an effort to exalt his own reputation at court while humiliating Garnesche. In Magnyfycence, Skelton enlarges an understanding of haft through characters who explicitly claim to be hafters. Chapter Three examines oppositional discourse in the English Renaissance as it appears later in the sixteenth century in Sidney\u27s Defense of Poesie and Puttenham\u27s The Arte of English Poesie. As opposed to the ostentatious style and heavy-handed nature of earlier-century flytings, the manner in which authors wage later-century verbal combat is more restrained, and private contests for a reputation as a distinguished poet must be disguised as a public effort to imitate courtly decorum in the form of poesie. Here, haft marks out the places where professional status and style intersect. In Chapter Four, haft serves as a means of indicating the aptness of one\u27s ideas about language. Herein the quarrel between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey is considered as a later sixteenth-century flyting disguised as criticism. This debate helps shape the identity and boundaries of the profession of English literature, setting out the limits of decorum by means of their eristic nature. Chapter Five examines haft as a transgression of boundaries via indecorous language of rogues, vagrants, and ruffians in Jonson\u27s Bartholomew Fair. Just as the actual fair event places a number of the dramatis personae in close proximity to rogues and cut-purses, Bartholomew Fair offers playgoers the opportunity to slum in an anti-pastoral carnival world without risking injury to their own purse or person. The dramatist benefits from exchanging a performative text with an audience whose admiration fills the symbolic coffers of Jonson\u27s cultural strongbox

Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange Early Modern to Present

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange

Early Modern Theatre People and Their Social Networks

This thesis contributes new knowledge to an understanding of how people's social networks in the early modern theatre shaped the drama they created. By studying the lives of people working in the theatre, attending to biographical details not hitherto fully considered, it recasts received narratives of theatre history. Where theatre historians often tell stories of competition and combat, it finds evidence too for considerable amity across webs of relationships that are here called 'social networks'. This thesis offers new biographical facts about life events for the actor Richard Bradshaw and the actor-writer William Rowley. In addition, it endeavours to change the way historians think about collaborative playwriting in the period. Based on quantitative analysis, this thesis shows the rates of collaboration to be about half the rate of heretofore accepted estimates. Chapter One considers in detail the narratives that historians construct about the early modern theatre and the problems associated with them. It reviews the various classes of evidence used in later chapters and the uses to which such evidence can reasonably be put. Chapter Two explores an industry in expansion in the 1590s, re-examining the well-known duopoly narrative and reconsidering the various professional pursuits and diverse residences of actors and playwrights in the period. Chapter Three looks at the following decade, the 1600s, and the re-emergence of troupes of boy actors into an expanding and stabilising industry. Chapter Four shows how collaborative writing, though prevalent, was not as frequent as is usually thought; it also shows stark differences in rates of staging collaborative drama between companies. Each chapter closes with a biographical case study of a theatre person whose life is considered in terms of their social network. An examination of such networks is then used to reshape the way we understand events in their life and broader currents that involve the entire early modern theatre industry. Thinking about who interacted with whom and why adds a new layer of complexity to our collective model of how this entertainment industry produced the period's extraordinary proliferation of highly valued plays

A study of the language in Tobias Smollett's 'Roderick Random'

The language of Smollett is often commented on, but seldom described. This thesis attempts to describe the language of his first, formative novel. The ten chapters form two "Parts," of five chapters each, reflecting the two methods of description used. "Part I" analyses and compares selected, representative passages. The central passage from Roderick Random for each chapter appears again in "Appendix 1,1: photographed from the fourth edition of 1755. "Part I" is weighted towards narration. "Part 11," weighted towards dialogue, traces certain pervasive language features throughout the novel: names, regional dialects, occupational dialects, idiolects, and proverbs and catch-phrases. The aim of the study is not, primarily, to characterize Smollett's idiosyncracies, but to discover in this novel his effective devices. The "Conclusion" summarizes these devices, in arguing that most of them work to create that 'vigour' which impresses so many commentators as a fundamental aspect of Smollett's prose. Also included are two appendices, on grammatical terms and phonemic symbols, to assist the bias towards linguistics that occasionally manifests itself in this description of language. "Appendix IV" is a personal supplement to the New English Dictionary. This "Abstract" is enlarged upon in the "Introduction.

When rhetoric is a lady : rhetorical identity and Shakespearean female characterization

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département d'études anglaises

Intertextuality and mimesis in 'Jude the Obscure' by Thomas Hardy

The aim of this thesis is to explore the role of quotation in Jude the Obscure. Quotation will be defined not only as literary quotation, allusion, or motto, but also as any structural citation (such as literary conventions or narrative paradigms) that represents both material and non-material references. I will analyse the poetical role of quotation in the novel's representation, observed as the work of intertextual relationships producing mimetic effects. This heterogeneous approach requires an investigation of the text's poetics through its external referents co-ordinated by the dominant discourses. Thus quotation will be investigated in two ways: stylistic, directed at the dialogue between the semantic fields in the text (Kristeva's vertical intertextuality), and textual, focused on the figurative meaning of the relationship of the text with other texts (Kristeva's horizontal intertextuality). The main objective is to understand the allegorical sense of references as they represent the world in Jude the Obscure, and to deduce Hardy's attitude towards the mimesis underpinning the Realistic convention. This thesis argues that quotation is not only evidence of the intertextual affiliations of the novel, but also an engine of Hardy's self-referential poetics. This will be concluded from the interplay between the signs in the text which, on the one hand, form material and non-material quotations and, on the other, elicit a metatextual discourse of symbolic figures that trigger their mutual contextual references. From this interplay emerges the anti-mimetic and self-consciously critical attitude Hardy manifests towards the realistic representation that, ironically, encompasses his own novel