The architecture of slavery: Art, language, and society in early Virginia

Inspired by the concept of culture as expressed in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, this dissertation traces the roots of modern perceptions of slavery and race by analyzing three sites each of which is associated with a distinct cultural pattern and social ideology. The first, Penshurst in Kent England is described as feudal, organic, vernacular, and popular. The second, Westover in tidewater Virginia is classical, rational, and elite. Thomas Jefferson\u27s Monticello in the Virginia piedmont, the third site, is described as romantic, liberal, and bourgeois. It is only at this third site, the locus for a distinctly modern family type, that concepts of race and slavery unique to our age are found. The new ideas about family structure, race and slavery, evident at Monticello, it is argued, have had a vast influence upon the course of American social and political development

Mind in character : Shakespeare's speaker in the sonnets

Includes indexes.Bibliography: pages 187-190."This book is about poetry rather than theory. Shakespeare's poetry, I find, remains more relevant and more rewarding than any theory, however elaborate, as to who, if anyone, should read a text and, if so, how they should do it. In other words, I do not intend another prolegomena for future studies of the reader in the text and/ or the text in the reader. I simply have written what I think the sonnets are about, what they say and how they say it. I do not attempt to speak for "the reader," as I know little about him or her, but only for myself. What interests me especially is the behavior of Shakespeare's sonnet-speaker, the coherent psychological entity projected by the speaking voice in these poems. I do not identify that speaker with the historical William Shakespeare, knowing scarcely more about him than about "the reader."Ironies of awareness : the cosmic dimension ; The dry mock ; Dramatic irony -- Soliloquy sonnets : self-discovery ; Introspection ; Final statements -- Dialogue sonnets : four modes of address ; Four types of dialogue ; Sonnet 18 as dialogue -- Awareness lost : soliloquies ; Initial dialogues ; Later dialogues : the final breakdown -- Appendix. The sonnets classified by mode of address.Digitized at the University of Missouri--Columbia MU Libraries Digitization Lab in 2012. Digitized at 600 dpi with Zeutschel, OS 15000 scanner. Access copy, available in MOspace, is 400 dpi, grayscale

The works of Mary Birkett Card 1774-1817 originally collected by her son Nathaniel Card in 1834: an edited transcription with an introduction to her life and works in two volumes

This thesis makes available the writings of Mary Birkett Card, a Dublin Quaker, as collected by her son Nathaniel Card in 1834. It provides an annotated transcription of the manuscript collection, with textual and editorial notes, and an introduction recovering her life within her cultural community. The writings consist of a spiritual autobiography, 43 religious letters, other prose pieces and over 220 poems. Two poems were published in her lifetime: A Poem on the African Slave Trade (1792) and Lines to the Memory of our Late Esteemed and Justly Valued Friend Joseph Williams (1807). The introduction is in three parts. Part 1 offers a biographical outline and sets Mary Birkett Card's childhood poems in the context of the Quaker community in which she grew up. Part 2 explores her autobiography, questioning concepts of a separate female autobiographical tradition. It then investigates her encounter with 'deist' thought, and later conflicts, after her marriage. These concern money (seeking to reconcile the spiritual and material) and issues of language and gender (a desire for'a pure language', linked to constraints upon women's speech). Part 3 contrasts her 1790s verse with her later poems, and epistles, arguing that embedded within these works as a whole lies a struggle with her literary imagination. Throughout, the writings are set within the context of contemporary literary forms in poetry, Quaker writing and women's writing. They are considered in relation to now current critical debates - on public and private spheres, autobiography, abolitionist verse, women's intimate friendships, domesticity, philanthropy and sensibility. It is shown that Mary Birkett Card's literary creativity was intimately connected with her Quakerism, and, moreover, with attempts to negotiate an ideal of Quaker womanhood. One important aspect is the challenge her work poses to assumptions, still generally prevalent, about Quaker women's far greater autonomy within marriage in comparison to women in society at large

The man of the renaissance interpreted through the life and plays of Christopher Marlowe

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, and Consumption in the Antebellum American Novel

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human nature, newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the organic angel, a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation\u27s budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at work in sentimental fiction has obscured the thematic and generic traction of this nonmaternal female saint, my project traces her structural impact across a surprisingly diverse range of authors and works—Sylvester Judd\u27s Margaret, Maria Cummins\u27 The Lamplighter, Hawthorne\u27s The Marble Faun, Melville\u27s Pierre, Stowe\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin, and Harriet Wilson\u27s Our Nig. At once a remarkably flexible and legibly constraining trope, the organic angel determines the relationship between narrative form and nationalist commitment; her relative efficacy as an agent of conversion measures authorial confidence in a pre-Civil war era vision of a unified, prosperous, and evangelical nation

Discovering the kinetic language of violence on the early modern stage

“Discovering the Kinetic Language of Violence on the Early Modern Stage” addresses the concern that scholars of early modern literature do not frequently historicize sword combat in their analyses of moments of violence. This project seeks to demonstrate the fruitful areas of inquiry that wait to be discovered. In this project, I theorize sword combat as a conversation, employing a variety of other theoretical frameworks to explain the various ways that swords influence our understanding of embodiment. I describe the conversational model of combat as the “kinetic language of violence,” and I locate this conversation in the movements of swordsmen and the historical valences of their weapon choices. I begin my analysis with a focus on the falchion, a brutal medieval sword that had almost disappeared by the early modern period. Here, I argue that the sword is a “fecund arm” that bridges the gap between the body and the social self. I employ this construction to analyze the representation of disability in Shakespeare’s history plays. The second chapter examines the way that the ballock dagger, which has a phallic hilt, negotiates gender in Macbeth, The Maid’s Tragedy, and Merchant of Venice. The third chapter understands race as a prosthetic notion that can be troubled and naturalized through swords such as the curtle-ax and the scimitar. I focus on constructions of race in Tamburlaine I & II, Titus Andronicus, and Othello. Finally, I examine the extremely popular rapier in Romeo and Juliet, The Little French Lawyer, Othello, and The Roaring Girl to explain how the rapier renegotiates the line between the body and the social self

Public poetry, memory, and the historical present: 1660-1745

Public Poetry, Memory, and the Historical Present: 1660-1745 examines the role public poetry played in the fashioning of social memory during the so-called Augustan age of English literature; further, it traces in the rise and decline of public poetry during this period the emergence and subsequent estrangement of two distinctive modes of public memory: one highly emblematic and allusive in nature, fostering and indeed dependent upon a well-endowed collective sense of historical and literary tradition; the other far more literal and individualistic, fashioning social memory of the historical present--the present moment set against the backdrop of historical consciousness--by encouraging a personal awareness of the immediate, prosaic realities of the everyday world. Both modes of memory, the figurative and prosaic, were made broadly available to English society at large with the rise of public poetry in the years after the Restoration. They are generally united in the work of John Dryden, whose rise as a public figure coincides with the rise of public poetry itself in England, but it was the fate of Dryden\u27s greatest literary inheritor, Alexander Pope, to preside over--even accelerate--what one might call the divorce between the figurative and literal modes of public memory, the subsequent decline of the commercial appeal and cultural authority of formal verse, and the gradual eclipse of the figurative mode of public memory, which had tended to accommodate the habits of mind and memory inculcated by poetry. This divorce coincides with the gradual supplanting of occasional, journalistic poetry (broadsheet ballads as well as formal verse) by prose journalism and the novel, but also at work were the continuing shift from orality to literacy and an evolving sensibility--rationalist, individualist, and mercantilist in nature--in which the habit of emblematic allusion to a shared historical and literary tradition ceased to be relevant and viable. In tracing the broad cultural effects of an important poetic mode, therefore, I explore an important moment in the evolution of social consciousness, a moment that stands as the proximate origin of our own habits of memory

Poetry and the Common Weal: Conceiving Civic Utility in British Poetics of the Long Eighteenth Century

This dissertation pursues a twofold proposition: writers of the long eighteenth century widely presumed that poetry influenced the “common weal” (the common wellbeing, conceived as a national community); and this expectation guided poetic composition even at the level of strategy or “design.” I demonstrate this claim in a series of three case studies, each of which delineates an elaborate, intertextual dialogue in which rival authors developed divergent strategies for civic reform. My analysis emphasizes the category of poiesis (poetic making), negotiated within discursive conventions of neoclassical genres. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that two verse translators of The Works of Virgil exploited to different ends the convention that epic poetry shaped the “manners.” Whereas John Ogilby conceived the Aeneid as a work that inspired “obedience” to an absolute monarch, John Dryden refashioned Virgil’s poetry to serve a limited monarchy in the wake of the English Revolution. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that two satirists of the age of Walpole tackled the “Mandevillean dilemma,” which encouraged satirists, traditionally scourges of vice, to accommodate the controversial idea that private vices had public benefits. Whereas Edward Young imagined vanity as a passion that facilitated its own reform, Alexander Pope’s Dunciad proved that even published expressions of malice might have virtuous effects. Chapters 5 and 6 argue that two West-Indian georgic writers divergently confirmed the commonplace that georgics modeled good agricultural management. Whereas Samuel Martin appealed to local sugarcane planters as “practical philosophers” who made “interest” and “duty” agree, James Grainger courted a metropolitan audience, ebulliently portraying a form of colonial settlement flawed at its core: riddled with disease, neglected by absenteeism, and tragically dependent on transatlantic trade to sustain its human populations. Taken together, these case studies tell a story in which visions of mixed government gradually supplant visions of monarchical absolutism and criticism of powerful public figures is increasingly theorized as a positive force in the polity. By revising our investigation of the relationship between poetry and “politics” in the long eighteenth century, I suggest, we gain access to a sophisticated communitarian discourse about the role of the arts in sustaining government

The invention of Scottish literature during the long eighteenth century

"The invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century" examines the limited place in the canon traditionally allowed to creative writing in Scotland during this period and the overarching reading of creative impediment applied to it in the light of Scotland's fraught and not easily to be homogenised national history and identity. It interrogates the dominant mode of what it terms the Scottish literary critical tradition and funds this tradition to have many shortcomings as a result of its prioritising of literary and cultural holism. In examining the Scots poetry revival of the eighteenth century the thesis challenges the traditional identification of a populist and beset mode, and finds eighteenth-century poetry in Scots to be actually much more catholic in its literary connections. These more catholic "British" connections are reappraised alongside the distinctively Scottish accents of the poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. The poetry of James Thomson, it is also argued, fits more easily into a heterogeneous Scottish identity than is sometimes thought and the work of Thomson is connected with the poets in Scots to show a network of influence and allegiance which is more coherent than has been traditionally allowed. Similarly, the primitivist agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment in creative literature is examined to demonstrate the way in which this provides license for reclaiming elements of the historically fraught or "backward" Scottish identity (thus an essentially conservative, patriotic element within the Scottish Enlightenment cultural voice is emphasised.). Also, with the writers of poetry in Scots, as well as with Thomson, and with those whose work comes under the intellectual sponsorship of Enlightenment primitivism such as Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson, James Beattie and others we chart a movement from the age of Augustanism and neoclassicism to that of sensibility and proto-Romanticism. From Burns' work to that of Walter Scott, John Galt and James Hogg we highlight Scottish writers making creative capital from the difficult and fractured Scottish identity and seeing this identity, as, in part, reflecting cultural tensions and fractures which are more widely coined furth of their own country. The connecting threads of the thesis are those narratives in Scottish literature of the period which show the retrieval and analysis of seemingly lost or receding elements of Scottish identity. Creative innovation and re-energisation rather than surrender and loss are what the thesis finally diagnoses in Scottish literature of the long eighteenth century