Browsing by Subject "Elegy"
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Item Crafting the cosmopolitan elegy in North India : poets, patrons, and the Urdu mars̤iyah, 1707-1857(2014-08) Knapczyk, Peter Andrew; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Snell, Rupert; Olivelle, Patrick; Selby, Martha; Minault, Gail; Mohammad, AfsarThis dissertation examines the literary and socio-religious development of mars̤iyah, a genre of Urdu elegiac poetry associated with the ritual life of Shiʿi Muslims in South Asia. I use the mars̤iyah tradition as a touchstone for investigating the rise of Urdu literary culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the North Indian centers of Delhi and Avadh. In the early 1700s, mars̤iyah poets were among the first to shape Delhi’s local vernacular into the Urdu literary language. By the mid-1800s, Urdu would assume many of Persian’s literary roles and become North India’s foremost cosmopolitan literary culture. This study focuses on the genre of mars̤iyah and the lives of mars̤iyah poets, while providing a unique perspective on this period’s shifting literary and cultural landscape, and offering a corrective to the discourse of linguistic and religious nationalism that has obscured Urdu’s history. In the first part of this dissertation, I argue that the experiments of mars̤iyah poets to develop the genre’s form, literary language, and aesthetics were instrumental in creating Urdu’s translocal appeal and composite cultural orientation. Among the genres of Urdu literature, mars̤iyah was exceptional in its ability to synthesize Persianate and Indic literary sensibilities, and traditional and contemporary worldviews. These innovations helped to make Urdu a viable alternative to Persian as a cosmopolitan literary culture, and made mars̤iyah a model for later reformist poets as they crafted a response to modernity and colonialism. The second part of this dissertation examines the changing roles and status of mars̤iyah poets within systems of patronage and hierarchies of political and religious authority. Although in the early 1700s mars̤iyah poets were relatively marginalized and even dismissed as “inept poets,” in later generations mars̤iyah poets became celebrated as masters of Urdu literature and revered as religious functionaries. Despite mars̤iyah’s association with Shiʿi sectarian ritual, temporal rulers such as the Navābs of Avadh patronized mars̤iyah poets and promoted the genre among their diverse population as a strategy for fostering social cohesion and a shared cultural ideal. In the mid-1800s, as British rule began to undermine traditional systems of patronage, mars̤iyah poets were at the vanguard of seeking out new sources of patronage in distant centers, advancing the ideals of Avadh’s mars̤iyah tradition, and establishing Urdu as the new cosmopolitan literary culture across India.Item Elegiac adaptations : resisting the closure of mourning in Elizabeth Robinson's Three Novels(2015-05) Cirit, Dilara Safiye; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Bennett, ChadElizabeth Robinson's Three Novels (2011) is a lyric re-exploration of three Victorian novels: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-60), and George Gissing's Eve's Ransom (1895). Robinson ostensibly wrote the poems as an elegy for her father; however, Three Novels also unearths elegiac aspects of its source novels that have been previously unexamined by critics. Each of the Victorian source novels narrates a movement from an initial loss toward an eventual resolution, mirroring the traditional structure of an elegy: mourning is ultimately completed by the acceptance of a compensatory substitute for the loss. While the poetry in Three Novels emphasizes the presence of elegy in its sources, the poems themselves fracture the practice of normative mourning by rewriting these novels in the style of Jahan Ramazani's melancholic "anti-elegy" which forecloses the possibility of loss resolution. Because the loss is not neatly resolved, it becomes an object of focus. Reading the anti-elegy manifest in Three Novels creates a space to mourn the losses incurred by each novel, thereby recuperating the overlooked figures of the female, the landscape, and the self that had been diminished by the narrative's drive to resolution.Item Manifestations of religious individualism in Kharijite poetry(2001-12) Sullivan, Mark Stover; Abboud, Peter F.This dissertation deliberates manifestations of religious individualism Kharijite poetry during the Umayyad era, AD. 661 to 750. The opening chapters discuss various inadequacies in the study of Umayyad poetry in general and Kharijite poetry in particular that often concentrate upon the perceived static nature of form and neglect significant changes that occur in the content and function of poetry. Chapters four and five examine aspects of Kharijite ideology that paved the way for the development of religious individual. Chapter six through ten discuss the various manifestations of this nascent religious individualism in Kharijite poetry. The dissertation argues that specific perspectival shifts that occur predominantly in elegy mark an important departure from Classical and Medieval Arabic poetry in general. In a significant number of Kharijite elegies, the poets' focus on the self replaced or superseded the ritualistic mourning for the martyr, the traditional subject of the elegy during this historical period. Elegy became increasingly a platform and vehicle for self examination, self-reflection and religious self-scrutiny. These characteristics signify the emergence of a nascent religious individualism in Kharijite poetry.Item Writing with an iron pen : gender and genre in early American elegy(2013-05) Delacroix, Julia Penn; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cohen, Matt, 1970-In my dissertation, "Writing with an Iron Pen: Gender and Genre in Early American Elegy," I show how the work of early American women poets engages the same generic questions about the process and use of consolation as modern anti-elegies. The first half of the dissertation focuses on poems written by one of America's earliest poets. In chapters one and two I look to the elegies of Anne Bradstreet to show how, from the first book of poems published by an American colonist, women poets have highlighted the limits of the consolatory elegy when either elegist or elegized was not a valued male member of the community. In chapters three and four, I turn to the Age of Revolutions and eighteenth-century poets Hannah Griffitts and Phillis Wheatley. Their elegies, I argue, extend and expand grief even as they refuse the sympathetic identifications that, in contemporary poems, offer opportunities for demonstrations of sympathy key to the earliest formations of American national identity. Ultimately, I suggest, early American women's poetry offers another location from which to contest the problems of affect, power, identity, and community posed by the conventional elegy.