Browsing by Subject "Medieval literature"
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Item Hacia Cervantes : confluence of the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions in the Quijote(2011-05) Meierhoffer, Lynn Vaulx; Zimic, Stanislav; Litvak, Lily; Lindstrom, Naomi E.; Harney, Michael D.; Biow, Douglas G.Miguel de Cervantes’s novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha Part One (1605) and Part Two (1615) has delighted readers for centuries. The literary criticism analyzing just this one product of Cervantes’s literary genius is voluminous. In particular, the novel’s structure has received significant scrutiny, and discussions regarding its unity, or lack thereof, abound. This debate rages today with Cervantine experts still espousing various theories. Puzzling over this quandary and asking why a truly convincing explanation regarding the structure has not emerged, we arrive at a partial answer. We believe that there is unity in the Quijote and that Cervantes created a unified work by ingeniously taking full advantage of the elements of both the “Byzantine” and the chivalric literary traditions, combining them in a harmonizing synthesis. Moreover, he resolved the problem of unity within variety by establishing thematic consistency throughout. The purpose of our study is to explore the confluence of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions in works that precede Cervantes and to examine how Cervantes innovatively worked with this element in the Quijote of 1605. We present a panoramic view of works written between the thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, which reveal writers’ efforts to combine, consciously or unconsciously, the various characteristics of the “Byzantine” and chivalric literary traditions. For this project, we look at six representative works written in Spanish or Italian that represent significant antecedents to the Quijote and Cervantes’s unique method of synthesizing the traditions: Libro de Apolonio, Libro del caballero Zifar, Orlando innamorato, Orlando furioso, Palmerín de Olivia, Los amores de Clareo y Florisea y los trabajos de la sin ventura Isea. We investigate each author’s approach at coupling the two traditions and determine his/her degree of success in merging them artistically to produce a coherent whole. Our analysis reveals that not only does Cervantes systematically integrate the two literary traditions in his parody, but he also skillfully devises a way to unify thematically the delightful variety in his work. To wit, Cervantes embraces the theme of literature (fiction) and life (reality) and explores the need for distinguishing judiciously between them.Item Monstrous Silhouette: The Development of the Female Monster in British Literature(2017-07-11) Woodworth, Savannah J.; Courtney, LeeIn this thesis, I analyze the effects of social, political, and economic change and the historical effects of said change on the literary representations of female monsters as portrayed by male authors in medieval and Victorian literature. To contextualize the literature selected, each chapter involves extensive research which I argue influenced the presentation of the characters selected. Each chapter also includes extensive textual analysis to show direct examples in the text relating to the historical context, followed by a section tying the ideology of the thesis with the context provided in the historical and textual analysis sections. The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate the repercussions of social change on the social standings of women and the manifestation of those changes within literature as a form of expression for the conflicting representations of the nature of femininity and the anxieties of the male writers in these moments of upheaval. At the beginning of this analysis, there was some expectation for a direct correlation between masculine anxieties and increases in female independence resulting in wholly negative portrayals of women, resulting on monstrous images; however, each character, despite their clearly monstrous traits, was nuanced in a way that was frequently empathetic, particularly when placed within the historical context of social change.Item The Rökstone as an educational stone(1999) Crockett, Michelle Lynn; Weinstock, John M., 1936-Item Unknowing the Middle Ages : how Middle English poetics rewrote literary history(2014-08) Taylor, Christopher Eric; Heng, Geraldine; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-The concept of the unknown captivated medieval theologians, mystics, lovers, and travelers for centuries, and yet literary scholars too readily reduce this topos to a romance trope. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" reconsiders the grounds of late-medieval literary discourse by showing how canonical Middle English literary texts eschew the historical knowledges that informed them and, instead, affirm impossibility as a productive site for a literary poetics. My dissertation identifies what I call a "poetics of unknowing" as an important component of a budding late-medieval literary discourse that offers a way to discuss not only what can be known, but also that which exceeds exegetical, geographic, historical, and sensory comprehension. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" makes its argument through four chapters, each of which focuses on a narrative tradition extending at least five hundred years. Each chapter follows a figure---Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde---from the texts that established their axiological significance to their appearances in Middle English texts, which attempt to unknow these figures. In their Middle English narratives these figures negotiate between an inherited religious ethics and an intellectual context compelled increasingly by that which eludes comprehension. In each case, material concerns regarding the unknowable infiltrate the formal composition of the text itself, and resonate at the level of a literary ethics. The "poetics of unknowing" that inhabit these texts reveal an epistemology less encumbered by the practical demands of clarity to which other modes of medieval writing are beholden, and also---perhaps of interest to scholars of modern literature and contemporary theory---refute the critical tendency to view the epistemological valorization of the unknown as a distinctly modern phenomenon.