The Old English elegies :

The enormous bibliography surrounding the Old English elegies breaks down primarily into studies of structure, cultural context, and genre. This study is concerned first with attempting to define as precisely as possible the limits of the utterances of speakers in the poems. Then an attempt is made to summarize the major currents of criticism which investigate the cultural milieu of Old English literature. Finally, there is a discussion of genre. Starting with a consideration of all the poems which are generally considered to be elegies--The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message, Resignation, The Riming Poem, Wulf and Eadwacer, Deor, and The Ruin--a case is made for including all but the last three as elegies

Transactional bond in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown

The six novels and various other fiction pieces Charles Brockden Brown wrote between 1799 and 1801 coherently demonstrate the operation and effect of literary and artistic representation in early Republican America. In original close readings of Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, Ormond, and several other works, this dissertation identifies transactional bond and describes how Brown charted the establishment of the public and private individual self through transactional bond in three specific arenas: relationships between the developing self and written, visual, or reported representation; relationships between master/mentors and apprentices; relationships among women. Bonds that begin, operate, and dissolve between male characters are exercises in constructing young Republican manhood. Through individual young male\u27s experiences, Brown describes a process for certifying male suffrage. Through the mentor/protege model, Brown makes explicit the questions that surround his society\u27s structuring of that autonomous citizen-self. Female bonds work toward impressing a female self into the useful mold of the good Republican wife/mother. Transactional bonds in Brown\u27s novels are explorations of gender, authority, and autonomy, complicated by the influence of written or visual gesture. Brown actuates the competition among those forces by presenting explicitly visual word portraits in the narratives, employing techniques in text that parallel the directly visual techniques in paint of portraitists of the post-Revolutionary era

The British church and Anglo-Saxon expansion : the evidence of Saints cults.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN018620 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Christian Heroism and Holy War in Anglo-Saxon England.

This dissertation examines the character and development of a Christian heroic ideal in Anglo-Saxon England between the seventh and eleventh centuries and its manifestation through notions of holy war. It provides a valuable case study of the ongoing synthesis which occurred when the Germanic peoples converted to Christianity. The mutual transformation wrought in the traditional Germanic warrior ethos and Christian faith and values permeates the literary sources for Anglo-Saxon history, from the early hagiographies and Bede\u27s Ecclesiastical History, through later histories and chronicles, to the unique corpus of Old English poetry. As early as the first generation of Anglo-Saxon Christianization, the Germanic warrior ethos combined both with an ascetic tradition within Christianity which stressed spiritual warfare and with the martial necessities confronting a Christian society in the violent world of the early Middle Ages. The Viking onslaughts of the ninth and tenth centuries, portrayed in religious terms by Anglo-Saxon contemporaries as a conflict between Christians and pagans, served to crystallize Anglo-Saxon ideas of Christian heroism as expressed in holy war. Whereas previously these ideas had centered around kings, innovations in Christian kingship during the same period had the effect of broadening the ranks of holy warriors to include non-royal figures. The Anglo-Saxon evidence shows that a distinctly martial cast to Christianity usually associated with the age of crusading in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries was from the beginning, in the seventh century, fundamental to the Anglo-Saxon conception of their new faith

Migrations and material culture change in Southern and Eastern England in the fifth century AD: the investigation of an archaeological discourse

This thesis aims to reassess one of the principal concepts used by archaeologists in their attempts to explain how 'Roman Britain' became 'early medieval England': the Anglo-Saxon migrations (i.e. the movement of people(s) from northern Europe or southern Scandinavia to southern and eastern England in the fifth century AD). This reassessment involves examining two inter-related themes. The first is largely historiographical, the aim being to highlight the socio-political and intellectual contexts in which 'the Anglo-Saxon migrations' became an important discourse. This is achieved by contextualizing both the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon archaeology and the archaeological investigation of 'the migrations' as well as the early historical sources that appear to describe those migrations (why and how were they written and by whom?).The second theme concerns material used by archaeologists to address questions such as: who were the people that migrated; where did they come from and travel to; when did this happen? A reassessment of the theoretical underpinnings of those archaeolological approaches is presented. Building on that, an analysis of several brooches types - material that has often been said to be significant for the above questions - is described. This analysis focuses on the contexts in which those brooches were deposited/found and thus highlights how people in the past used them as part of specific social practices. The results demonstrate that the pattern of material culture usually thought to prove that the Anglo-Saxon migrations did take place is actually quite varied and migrations may not be the best explanation for such diversity. Having critiqued the discourse of the Anglo-Saxon migrations, a number of alternative ways in which the Roman-Medieval transition in England might be understood are suggested. These alternatives focus on theories of material culture appropriation and how this relates to changing personal and/or collective identities

Medieval topics and rhetoric in the work of the Cywyddwyr

While foreign influences on certain areas of Welsh poetry have long been acknowledged, the extent to which the very fabric of Welsh verse reveals acquaintance with rhetorical methods and topics has not yet been examined in detail. It is my thesis that medieval Welsh poets employed rhetorical devices and topics which were widely represented in medieval European verse, and which often had their roots in classical antiquity. The following chapters will examine the rhetorical colors and topoi as they appear in the work of representative fourteenth-century Welsh poets. Chapter II will give some indication of the shifting focus of the panegyric as it incorporated ideas of the medieval chivalric world. Chapter III surveys a number of rhetorical figures, while Chapters IV and V review popular medieval topics. Though it is not a topic that I can take up in full here, this introductory chapter will consider the wider medieval background of Wales in the fourteenth century - a transitional period in Welsh literary history which merits an entire volume. Advances in historical knowledge and comparative literary criticism since the early decades of this century, when such men as Lloyd-Jones, Ifor Williams, Henry Lewis, H.I. Bell, J.E. Lloyd, Saunders Lewis and others made their seminal contributions to the study of Welsh literature, have made the re-evaluation of medieval Welsh literary practice both necessary and timely. To date no comprehensive examination of historical factors and political forces at work in the Welsh poetry of the transitional period between the Gogynfeirdd and the fourteenth-century poets has been undertaken, nor has the potentially instructive analysis of the period in terms of cultural developments and cross-cultural contacts been fully researched. Nonetheless, one does find sporadic calls for such research which would establish more particularly the forces and influences effecting changes in subject matter and mode of presentation. The comprehensive scholarship of J.E. Caerwyn Williams which synopsizes Welsh poetry and prose, both religious and secular, stands as a helpful, broad-seeped introduction to those interested in medieval Welsh literature, and our debt to him must be acknowledged. The question of external influences has been raised by a number of scholars, many of the discussions early and by now dated, others, including several recent pieces, too generalized and offering no detailed analysis of the texts themselves. However, D.J. Bowen, though he makes no claim for foreign models and prefers to stress the conservative elements in Dafydd ap Gwilym's work, has nicely surveyed a number of rhetorical devices in Dafydd's verse. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that borrowings and influences are not necessarily signs of native debility, but can be understood as vital signs of cultural development