"Thy Word is all, if we could spell": Romanticism, Tractarian Aesthetics and E.B. Pusey's Sermons on Solemn Subjects

[missing pages: 34,64,98]The influence of Romanticism on nineteenth-century aesthetics has been well documented. Less well researched, however, has been the significant contribution of the Romantic Movement to the religious discourse of the Victorian church. Focusing on the movement commonly called the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement, I examine the religious significance ofthe Romantic discourse inspired by the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Specifically, I outline the importance of the Romantic sensibility for nineteenth-century preaching, focusing on the works ofE.B. Pusey. Pusey has often been neglected in studies concerning the aesthetic aspects of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England, and though his sermons and theology demonstrate a notable Romantic influence, critics have favoured those members of the Movement who produced explicitly aesthetic works (such as John Keble and his book of verse, The Christian Year). In contrast, this Thesis locates Pusey in relation to nineteenth-century aesthetic concerns. The sermon occupied a place of central importance in the religious and literary discourses of nineteenth-century England. Attendance at sermons was both a religious obligation and a cultural activity. The pulpit functioned as a source of moral pedagogy and social commentary, and the century's famous pulpiteers were the objects of considerable public attention. As a leader of the Oxford Movement, Pusey was at the forefront of one of the most significant cultural events ofthe nineteenth century, and it is in his sermons that the aesthetic and theological vision of that Movement can best be located. To that end, this Thesis elucidates the characteristics of nineteenth-century pulpit oratory and the indebtedness of the Victorian sennon to the aesthetic theories of the Romantics. Pusey's sennons, particularly the Sermons on Solemn Subjects delivered at St. Saviour's, Leeds, are considered in relation to these issues.Master of Arts (MA

The gaze of the listener : representations of domestic music-making in English literature 1550-1918

Introduction 1. Sex and the Virginals: Gender and Keyboards around 1600 2. “Musick in the House, Musick in the Heart, and Musick also in Heaven”: The Harpsichord 3. “Accomplishments, Accomplishments, Accomplishments”: The Piano-Forté 4. “Glorious disability”: The Piano and the Mid-Victorians 5. Triumph and Oblivion: The Piano after 1880 Conclusion Works Cited This study analyzes representations of music in fiction, drama and poetry as well as normative texts in order to contribute to a gendered cultural history of domestic performance. From the Tudors to the First World War, playing the harpsichord or piano was an indispensable asset of any potential bride, and education manuals as well as courtship plots and love poems pay homage to this social function of music. The Gaze of the Listener charts the fundamental tension which determines all these texts: Music is God’s greatest gift and its performance may serve the goal of holy matrimony – but this includes a distracting display of the female body and its attractions. Music is warmly recommended in conduct books and provides standard metaphors for virtuous love such as concord and harmony; but a fundamental anxiety about its inarticulate sensuousness and implicit femininity unsettles all descriptions of actual music-making. The ambivalence of desire and anxiety is strikingly evident in the way in which textual representations privilege visual perception. English men were discouraged from playing instruments for three centuries; implicitly taught to despise music but conditioned to find its performance erotically attractive, they rarely listen appreciatively but instead train an objectifying ‘gaze of the listener’ on women players. This socially institutionalized scenario is omnipresent but consistently accompanied by narratorial disapproval and repression: imposed on all girls in reality, music in fiction inevitably facilitates adultery or husband-trapping, rates girls on the marriage market or exposes performers to bored or lecherous spectators. The Gaze of the Listener is the first coherent account of this discourse and its continuity from the Elizabethan to the Edwardian period. It provides a significant background for more narrowly focused accounts which have been typical of the research field. The Gaze of the Listener is distinguished not only by its historical range and innovative focus but also by a uniquely wide database, which contextualizes numerous ‘minor’ works with classics without limiting itself to the fringe phenomenon of “musician novels”. Including a fresh account of Jane Austen’s texts (which have often been musically lumped with the Victorians), the book is of interest to scholars and students in Gender, English and Cultural Studies as well as to musicologists

Metaphor and "metaphysic" : the sense of language in D.H. Lawrence

This study contributes to the contemporary debate about the language of D. H. Lawrence concentrating on metaphor as the necessary vehicle of Lawrence's 'metaphysic'. The focus is on the different levels of attention to language in his work, and to Lawrence's responsiveness to the levels of metaphor within language. Lawrence is seen here as one who, in the Heideggerean sense, 'poetically thinks'. The texts outlined below are given special consideration, representing a particular body of language and thought within Lawrence's oeuvre Chapter 1 outlines the purpose of the study and establishes the Importance of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur on language, specifically metaphor, in setting up the necessary philosophical context for discussion of Lawrence. Chapter 2 addresses the selfconsciously metaphorical language of the nominally 'discursive' essays, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, underlining Lawrence's alertness to the efficacy of metaphor rather than a referential or conceptual idiom. Fresh emphasis is given to Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious as a central text in the language debate. The insights afforded by these essays make it possible to move to the fiction and, in chapter 3, to Women in Love. Here the thesis builds on Lawrence's philosophical understanding of the concept 'metaphor': in this novel, principally through a consideration of 'love', Lawrence is seen to pull metaphor away from its merely rhetorical status. Chapter 4 examines the different mode and language of The Rainbow focusing on its more enveloping, less 'frictional', medium. By chapter 5, called 'Lawrence and Language', the philosophical questions which emerge from a reading of these texts can be addressed more explicitly. Finally, a conclusion underlines the difficulties of talking about language stressing the importance, implicit throughout, of reading Lawrence on his own terms. The conscious and subliminal levels of metaphor within Lawrence's language have been seen to bear his thought. What philosophy generally explains analytically, Lawrence's language communicates metaphorically

Symbolism and sources in the painting and poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The Thesis examines the symbolism, and the sources of that symbolism, in the poetry and painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chapter 1 considers the significance of the title of Rossetti's sonnet-sequence The House of Life. Chapter 2 looks at the opening sonnets of that sequence. Chapter 3 scrutinises the sonnet quartet of the Willow-wood sequence. Chapter 4 evaluates the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism in Rossetti's art. Chapter 5 is concerned with Rossetti's use of allegory. Chapter 6 surveys the influence of Rosicrucianism on Rossetti and his immediate circle of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and on the Aesthetic School that succeeded it. This chapter closely examines the symbolic motifs of Rosicrucianism, and how these may be traced in the paintings of these artists. Chapter 7 explores the Rosicrucian influence in Rossetti's poetry. Chapter 8 further traces these influences in Rossetti's painting. Chapter 9 investigates the Goddess figure within Rossetti's later paintings

The failure of the poetical drama in the Victorian period, with special attention to Browning, Bulwer-Lytton, and Tennyson.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University

The life and works of D.H. Lawrence.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityD. H. Lawrence, who lived from 1885 to 1930, was during his lifetime known to the wide public only as a writer of supposedly indecent books which were from time to time suppressed. He wrote boldly--in novels, poems and essays--of sexual problems, because he felt that too much repression and intellectualization were destroying the instinctual part of man's nature. Lawrence stressed passion, not because he believed in passion exclusively, but because he felt that it should be brought into balance with intellect. This is his central message. [TRUNCATED

A sense of place and community in selected novels and travel writings of D.H. Lawrence

In 1919 Lawrence left England to search for a better society; his novels and travel sketches (the latter are usually seen as peripheral to the novels) continually questioned the values of Western society. This study examines D.H. Lawrence's great 'English' novels in the light of their vivid portrayal of place and community. However, to procure a new emphasis the novels and travel writing are brought into close alignment, in order to examine the way in which the sorts of philosophical questions Lawrence was interested in - ideas on human character, marriage, social structures, God, time, and history - influence his portrayal of place and community across both these genres. Chapter I, on Sons and Lovers, emphasises the way social and historical factors can shape human relationships as powerfully as personal psychology. In Chapter II, on Twilight in Italy, discussion of the effect of place on human character is broadened into a consideration of the differences between the Italian and English psyche; the philosophical passages are read in the light of revisions made to the periodical version. Chapters III and IV, on The Rainbow and Women in Love, conscious of the critique of English society that Lawrence made in Twilight, recognise that although Lawrence is concerned to show the flow of individual being he is no less interested in the relationship between the self and society, and the clash between psychological needs and social structures like work, marriage and industrialisation. Chapter V, on Sea and Sardinia, examines Lawrence's realisation that the state of travel engages with the present and impacts on individual needs and identity. Chapter VI, on Mornings in Mexico, studies the way Lawrence transcended the journalism usual to the travel genre and maintained a deep spirituality as he pondered the attributes of a primitive society and its appropriateness to Western Society. Because travel writing is both reactive and subjective (a writer's reaction to a country is underpinned by the metatext of his own concerns), I ask if Lawrence's presentation of experience can be thought of as accurate or whether places and people are constructs of his imagination. Chapter VIII examines Lady Chatterley's Lover as Lawrence's attempt to bring together the attitudes to sex, class and education witnessed on his travels with an English setting; to envisage a way of living that would meet the deep-rooted needs of man. Chapter VIII, on Etruscan Places, shows Lawrence conscious of encountering the ultimate journey, death, and pays tribute to the fact that while the book searches for philosophical answers on how to die, it is at the same time a paean to life and the beauty of landscape

Emily Dickinson's Spectrum: An Analysis of the Significance of Colour Imagery in the Poems and Letters.

The implication of the title of this thesis, Emily Dickinson's Spectrum, is that this poet had a highly individual attitude towards colour, an attitude which the analysis of colour-imagery in the poet's writings will illuminate. The first chapter of the thesis demonstrates how the poet's scientific background enabled her to set up a spectrum that differed from the "received" Newtonian spectrum in many ways. The second chapter shows how Dickinson's originality, a quality often noticed by critics, is to a large extent the product of her ability to manipulate the colours of her spectrum in a manner analogous to the practice of the pictorial artist. The third chapter explains, however, that though her use of colour was indeed original, her practice reflects the international anti-Newtonian "colour-revolution" of the era in which she lived, a revolution in which she had a significant role to play notwithstanding her apparent seclusion in Amherst. In the final chapter, Emily Dickinson's spectrum is set out, and each of its chief colours is shown to be a concise means of referring to a different complex or node of emotions that are at once personal and universal in their import.ThesisDoctor of Philosophy (PhD