Global ETD Search
Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 20 of 32 for “"Early modern literature"”.
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Your Change Is Still Behind: Futurity in Early Modern Literature
<p>A study of Renaissance literature's engagement with temporality, my project is a critical evaluation of the concept of early modern futurity, of which I propose three categories: "Material futurity"; "Biological futurity"; and "Political futurity." In the moments that I identify in texts …
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Madmen and mad money: psychological disability and economics in medieval and early modern literature
In medieval and early modern literature, people with psychological disabilities are commonly represented as nuisances, monsters, and pitiable wretches. This ableist paradigm is partly attributable to the fact that ‘mad’ characters evoke economic anxieties rooted in the socioeconomic climate of the …
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This Prison Where I Live: Authority and Incarceration in Early Modern Drama
The image of the prison looms large in early modern literature. By the sixteenth century, the prison was as much a part of everyday life as the public theatre. Although scholars have recently focused on the prison as a cite of cultural production, the depictions of fictionalized prison have not …
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Elemental Anxieties in Jacobean Drama
Early modern literature and politics alike are littered with the language of the classical elements. In particular, elemental language comes to the fore in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's plays produced in the mid-portion of King James's reign. In this thesis, I argue that Shakespeare and …
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Flowers for the Book-binder's Wife: An Investigation of Florilegia and Early Modern Women's Writing
… the presumed tutelage of ancient Roman scholars, early modern writers embraced the notion of florilegia, passages or quotations, which once deemed pleasing or insightful were extracted for use in the writer’s own work. The category of florilegia, or flowers, particularly included the subcategory …
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Colour in Early Modern English Literature and Culture
In early modern England, colour was both a material and a textual preoccupation. However, the polychromatic palette that surrounded English men and women, and the particoloured palette of early modern writers, has thus far received little scholarly attention. This thesis rethinks the culture of …
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Trans Metamorphoses: Gender, Race, and Classical Receptions
… express gender variance in late medieval and early modern literature: the monstrous birth, the virgin, the hermaphrodite, and the angel. Drawing together trans theory, premodern critical race studies, and classical reception history, I construct a long genealogy of what we now call …
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Exiles, Knowledge, and Power: Utopian and Dystopian Worlds in Early Modern England
… seeks to investigate the ways in which exiled early modern writers and literary characters engage with power and access knowledge, often through the creation of utopian and dystopian worlds, which either leads to their exilic identities and disempowerment or allows them to renegotiate their …
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Take heed what ye hear : Shakespeare's "Measure for measure" and the Bible.
This dissertation explicates Shakespeare’s allusions to Christian Scripture in Measure for Measure, his most biblical play. It takes the play as Shakespeare’s sincere response to his new king and patron’s well-known aspiration to be a “good textuary” of the Bible. Working through a network of …
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From borders to topographies: identities and expansion in British literature, 1620-1750
… among peoples across the world—in the early modern period; specifically, I focus on representations of borders in early modern literature—their permeability, their shifting configurations, and the ways in which they are reinforced. I analyze how the English became increasingly obsessed …
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"How the Fishes Live in the Sea": Shakespeare's Daughters and the Market of Romance
… Imogen, and Miranda each enact and embody an early modern London’s conflicting understandings and reactions to the cultural shifts this dynamic economy brought with it. In Pericles, Shakespeare fuses romance with the genre of choice of his fellow playwrights, the city comedy, and as such uses …
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Early modern melancholia and present day depression : a comparative study of the female experience in dramatic and medical sources
This thesis examines the relationship between the early modern understanding of female melancholia and women’s depression today. Working with proto-medical treatises and Shakespearean drama from the early modern period (1580-1665), alongside contemporary diagnostic frameworks and psychosocial …
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"The Island Has Two Sides": Female Subjectivity in Postcolonial Adaptation
… and misunderstood female characters in early modern literature. Thus, this study asks for us to reassess the kinds of complex and problematic female characters represented by Miranda, Sycorax, and Claribel, not only in the early modern period, but in the present day. Further, I argue …
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Gentlemen’s Anxiety: Contesting Authority in Shakespeare’s Plays
This thesis examines how Shakespeare engages with early modern debates about gentility through close readings of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry VI, Part 2, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. Rather than treating gentility in Shakespeare's drama as a broad social identity or a loose symbolic …
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Discordant Poetics: Spenser to Milton
… of harmony as an organising principle in early modern conceptions of art and the universe, and to its influence on the literary production of the time. The opposing concept of discord, however, has only received limited critical consideration. This thesis offers a sustained exploration of …
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On Beauty And Ethics In Shakespeare And His Contemporaries
<p>Early modern literature abounds in references to beauty. However, in the past few decades, discussions of beauty have been sidelined in part due to the influence of approaches such as cultural materialism and new historicism; as a result, beauty often gets viewed as some kind of ideological mist …
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Masculinity and Politics in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's Dramatic Works
<p>In my dissertation I examine to what degree the representation of masculinity in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's dramas--in its multiple forms--serves as commentary on the historical-political realities facing seventeenth-century Silesia. Silesia's population was predominantly Protestant, which …
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Circulating the Female Figure In the Marketplaces of Print and Reputation: Women and Defamation In Early Modern England
… the marketplaces of print and reputation in the early modern period. The prevalence of defamation cases indicates the extent to which sexual reputation impacted social position for women, particularly in the marriage market. Since reputation was so important for women to remain in the sexual …
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