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- All Subjects: English
- All Subjects: Religious history
- All Subjects: Touch in literature
- Creators: Sturges, Robert
- Status: Published
Description
This thesis examines Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander and George Chapman's Continuation thereof through a theoretical lens that includes theories of intimacy, sexuality and touch taken from Lee Edelman, Daniel Gil, James Bromley, Katherine Rowe and others. Hands are seen as the privileged organ of touch as well as synecdoche for human agency. Because it is all too often an unexamined sense, the theory of touch is dealt with in detail. The analysis of hands and touch leads to a discussion of how Marlowe's writing creates a picture of sexual intimacy that goes against traditional institutions and resists the traditional role of the couple in society. Marlowe's poem favors an equal, companionate intimacy that does not engage in traditional structures, while Chapman's Continuation to Marlowe's work serves to reaffirm the transgressive nature of Marlowe's poem by reasserting traditional social institutions surrounding the couple. Viewing the two pieces of literature together further supports the conclusion that Marlowe's work is transgressive because of how conservative Chapman's reaction to Hero and Leander is.
ContributorsHardman, Katherine (Author) / Fox, Cora (Thesis advisor) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St Albans' record of Christina's personal history and religious career, is viewed in its original literary environment. The high volume of extant material from twelfth-century St Albans makes it possible to view Christina's depiction in several original ways: as a textual construction (at least in part) influenced by Bede's narratives of holy women in his widely read Ecclesiastical History; as a portrayal of contemporary devotional prayer in the style of Anselm of Canterbury, a major authority on devotional practices of the time; and as a prominent addition to St Albans' own liturgy, the record of its celebrated saints and local patrons, as an object of devotion herself. The strategy of Christina's endorsement in her Life is also notably different from strategies on display in St Albans materials related to Katherine of Alexandria, an important saint for Abbot Geoffrey, which further suggests he was not her sole promoter at the abbey, if he was involved in the process of her textual production at all. Finally, the historical fact that she was employed as a patron of St Albans before none other than Pope Adrian IV, to whom St Albans was appealing for numerous institutional benefits at the time, shows that the prevailing opinion of Christina at the abbey can not have been entirely negative. Placing the Life within the literary and cultural circumstances of its production thus provides a fresh reading of Christina's institutional and devotional roles at St Albans, medieval views of women's spirituality and its place within the western European Christian tradition, and the compositional process of a major work of medieval hagiographical literature.
ContributorsVanGinhoven, Bryan (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Often when considering John Milton's greatest work, Paradise Lost, the general public operates under a number of assumptions which are patently false. One of these assumptions is that Milton was an orthodox Christian when writing Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. This thesis sheds light on the issue by examining his personal beliefs about the trinity in De Doctrina Christiana, defending the use of the treatise in analyzing the poems, and explaining how Milton uses veiled language in order to hide his heterodox beliefs. I contend that deriving an antitrinitarian mode of thought from De Doctrina Christiana and reading the poem with this antitrinitarian belief, the cognitive frame of reference in which Milton was when writing both poems, in mind is a more consistent reading of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained than reading both texts with a traditional, orthodox, Christian perspective. Examining a variety of selections from Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, I demonstrate the powerful nature of the antitrintarian reading of Milton. Many passages, for example the invocation in the opening lines of Book III of Paradise Lost, become much clearer with an antitrinitarian reading. Reading the texts with an antitrinitarian view reduces ambiguity in the text and clarifies a number of passages and details which, from a Trinitarian view, are left completely unanswered in Paradise Lost. In addition to clarifying confusing passages, an antitrinitarian reading demonstrates Milton's masterful use of 17th century English Protestantism "buzz-words" to mask his true beliefs without compromising his personal religious convictions about the second member of the Christian Triune Godhead.
ContributorsGould, George Andrew (Author) / David, Hawkes (Thesis director) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
In the mid-twentieth century, a number of vital and quietly revolutionary gay male writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and John Rechy, increasingly wrote about explicitly homosexual experiences and culture despite social and legal opposition. Both individually and collectively, these four authors ultimately merged disjointed identities to establish a tradition of visibility and resistance in the United States. Divided into four main sections, this thesis examines each author’s portrayal of homosexual experiences and culture through his distinct approach with a close literary analysis of various works. The first section considers Christopher Isherwood and how milieu affects his depictions of homosexuality in The Berlin Stories (1945), Down There on a Visit (1962), and A Single Man (1964). The second examines Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948) and the relationship between homosexuality and masculinity. The third section looks at how James Baldwin writes about the intersection of homosexuality, race, nationality, and class in both Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). Finally, the fourth section considers the emergence of queer communities built around resistance in John Rechy’s City of Night (1963). In addition to these literary texts, original reviews of each novel published in The New York Times capture their reception and acceptance into a mainstream American readership. Through their distinct approaches, these four authors collectively present a varied, although somewhat limited, look at the homosexual experience in postwar, pre-Stonewall America.
ContributorsBramlett, Charles Paul (Author) / Sturges, Robert (Thesis director) / Bryant, Jason (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Comm (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
“The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies—literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs—shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, “The Moral Sense of Touch” provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses.
ContributorsRussell, Arthur J. (Author) / Newhauser, Richard G (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Malo, Robyn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
ContributorsPanosian, N. Zari (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis director) / Fortunato, Joe (Committee member) / Talerico, Daniela (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
This dissertation analyzes presentations of death in late-medieval English Arthurian literature through the optic of the Ricardian and 15th-century English vernacular ars moriendi tradition. The period under examination begins in 1380 and ends with a discussion of the gradual loss of the artes moriendi and reimagining of King Arthur in Tudor England. The Arthurian texts examined are the Alliterative Morte Arthure (AMA), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), and Malory’s Morte Darthur. The theological texts examined include the following: De visitacione infirmorum (A Text), BL MS Royal 18 A.X and The Book of Vices and Virtues (both ME translations of Friar Laurent’s Somme le roi), Learn to Die (a ME translation of Heinrich Suso’s Horologium sapientiae), A Tretyse of Gostly Batayle supplemented by illuminations from MS Harley 3244 (Summa de vitiis f.27v-f.28r), The Boke of the Craft of Dying, Martin Luther’s Sermon on Preparing to Die, Thomas Lupset's A Treatise of Dying Well, Richard Whitford's Daily Exercise and Experience of Death, and Desiderius Erasmus's Preparation of Death. My methodology combines Comparative Literature, New Historicism, and Jane Gilbert’s Lacanian approach. The primary research method is a comparison of the death sequences of major Arthurian figures in late-medieval English literature with the major tenets of several ars moriendi tracts. Further, these source materials are examined and compared to the earlier Arthurian texts. Lastly, some ars moriendi expedients already present in the Arthurian source materials are compared with contemporaneous rituals to elucidate which of them belong to an earlier tradition and therefore are not updates. This dissertation demonstrates the following: Malory and the authors of the AMA and SGGK captured a uniquely late-medieval English understanding of death by updating their source materials, battlefield expedients for the dying included in late-medieval English Arthurian literature can be traced back well before the Black Death, and finally, that the English knight developed into a figure who spiritually battles accidental sudden death, or mors improvisa, in the memento mori tradition, which in turn influenced English Arthurian legend.
ContributorsPike, Daniel (Author) / Newhauser, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Wheeler, Bonnie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022