Browsing by Subject "British literature."
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Item MacDonald’s Antiphon : literary traditions and the "lost church" of English worship.(2012-08-08) Bear, Bethany J.; Prickett, Stephen.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This dissertation examines the ways in which Victorian novelist and fantasist George MacDonald re-imagines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ideas about the religious function of literary traditions. Each chapter of this project argues that Coleridge and MacDonald confront the problems of post-Kantian subjectivity with visions of literary tradition that, in turn, revitalize the idea of a universal Church in English life and letters. Chapter One begins with a study of Coleridge’s participation in the “reinvention of tradition” in the nineteenth century. Chapter Two argues that Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825) is predicated upon the idea that literary recreations of the past can resolve many of the philosophical, historical, and moral challenges to the authority of the Bible. Thirty years after the publication of Aids to Reflection, in Phantastes (1858) and England’s Antiphon (1868), MacDonald developed Coleridge’s ideas into a vision of literary traditions as “chapels” through which readers might enter the Church Invisible. Chapter Three considers why MacDonald writes fairy-tale “parables” in response to those who would reduce the Bible’s meaning either to the empiricism of textual criticism or to the “single plain sense” of plenary-verbal inspiration. Similarly, in Antiphon, MacDonald responds to Coleridge’s problematic theories of allegory with his own narrative of allegory’s importance in the English literary tradition. Chapter Four concludes this study by examining why both Coleridge and MacDonald believe the writers of the seventeenth century--an era of violent religious division in England--hold the key to nineteenthcentury religious unity and to the revitalization of English literature. In St. George and St. Michael (1876), MacDonald modifies Coleridge’s elevation of natural symbols in order to demonstrate that the highest forms of poetry lead to the transformation of conscience and history. Throughout this study, it becomes clear that MacDonald offers a resounding and creative challenge to other nineteenth-century readings of Coleridge, particularly Matthew Arnold’s notions of literary culture. Arguably, it is MacDonald who comes nearest to fulfilling Coleridge’s own hopes for his philosophical labors, namely, providing a theory of literature that could sustain the Church in the face of division and doubt.Item Navigating between two worlds : how portrayals of the Americas in eighteenth-century novels influenced the British identity.(2011-09-14) Mills, Jennifer Aimee.; Gardner, Kevin J.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.In the early English novel British emigrants to the Americas occupied an ambivalent position within the empire; changed by the transatlantic ocean voyage and daily life in the colonies, colonists were distanced spatially and pragmatically from their fellow subjects who remained in England. Eighteenth-century novels often explore the implications to British society when characters migrate from Britain to the American colonies, are changed by their experiences and interactions there, and then return to England. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, The Female American published anonymously, and Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett each depict main characters who amalgamate traits in the Americas that the British had demarcated as separate and opposite, yet they always maintain a self-identity of a British citizen. Moll Flanders, Eliza Winkfield, and Obadiah Lismahago challenge and refine the construct of the British identity. The eponymous Moll Flanders becomes isolated from society as a result of the influence of the Americas on her life from before birth, making her a detached observer unable to fully integrate into English society. Moll learns in the Americas to create new identities for herself that enable her to prey upon society and avoid being known by anyone, including herself. The titular Female American is separated from both English and Native American society because of her dual heritage in both. She stands apart from each culture, able to judge both and to adopt the best features of each. Rejecting the British colonial practices as inherently destructive, Eliza forms a different model for the ideal civilization, though this involves withdrawing to a small society isolated from the rest of the world. Obadiah Lismahago, by contrast, attempts to rejoin British society, but the American taint has reduced his ability to operate in the civilized world. Though at first the other characters exclude him because of these oddities, his marginalization is partially mitigated—though never erased—by his marriage into the Bramble family. However, his union with the family marks them as now unlike their English compatriots and more American by the gifts he bestows upon them and the continuing influence his interactions with them will have.