English

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers’ responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets’ first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers’ interests in Shakespeare’s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Download link contains individual chapter abstracts.

This thesis argues that chivalry and its attendant values of love, sex and conflict were a source of serious debate during the Middle Ages, and that this debate featured prominently in the various versions of the Grail legend. There are quite a few variations on the Grail legend, but for the purpose of this study three have been selected: Chretien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. These three texts have been selected because they are arguably the most influential medieval Grail narratives. The problematic nature of chivalry is dramatically testified to by the wide variety of mediums used in attempting to shape and control knighthood, including papal bulls, royal edicts, chivalric histories, handbooks of chivalry and war, and, of course, romances. All of the romances, by the very nature of the genre, deal with the themes of love, sex and conflict, but the Grail legends, in particular, provide us with a gl...

The theory of the abject mother has often been applied to William Friedkin's 1973 film 'The Exorcist' when discussing Regan's relationship with her mother. While the theory provides the tension between mother/daughter as a source for the supernatural events of the film, it also provides an interesting basis for reading the role and experiences of Father Karras in the film.

Rough Draft: The purpose of this project is to explore the ways in which gaslighting represents a kind of narrative border crossing wherein the teller becomes an outsider within their own personal experience narrative. Separate from the sorts of other-ing between the protagonist and teller that result naturally from the passage of time and the nature of identity, in the process of gaslighting, the narrator is estranged from their own experience through the intrusion of outside narratives that become adopted by the narrator as their own. My hope is to move beyond just seeing the experience of gas lighting as a traumatic experience to be related and recounted as part of the therapeutic use of personal experience narrative, but to also see the ways in which the storytelling space becomes dangerous and the story traumatized through the process of gas lighting and the ways this correlates to the trauma of colonialism.

Images of the drowned man plague James Joyce’s Ulysses, suggesting the sea and characters’ relationships to water as sources of tension and potential threat. By examining a few of the ways that water and the threat of drowning appear with regards to Stephen, Bloom and Molly, the reader can see associations between the motif and guilt, poverty, and identity (both socially and personally constructed). Further, the various images of water and the threat of drowning combine with the form of the novel to create interesting moments of mimesis that potentially reveal who has drowned and who has survived their individual threatening seas.