Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: English Literature
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Newhauser, Richard G
- Creators: Thompson, Ayanna
- Resource Type: Text
Description
As a contribution to what has emerged categorically in medieval scholarship as gentry studies, this dissertation looks at the impact the development of obligatory taxation beyond customary dues and fees had on late medieval English society with particular emphasis given to the emergent view of the medieval subject as a commercial-legal entity. Focusing on Middle English popular romance and drawing on the tenets of practice theory, I demonstrate the merger of commerce and law as a point of identification in the process of meaning and value making for late medieval gentry society. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the historical development of taxation and the emergence of royal authority as an institutionalized form of public welfare, or a state. The second chapter examines the use of contractual language in Sir Amadace to highlight the presence of the state as an extra-legal authority able to enforce contractual agreements. The attention paid to the consequences of economic insolvency stage a gentry identity circumscribed by its position in a network of credit and debt that links the individual to neighbor, state, and God. The third chapter explores conservative responses to economic innovation during the period and the failure of the state to protect the proprietary rights of landowners in Sir Cleges. Specifically, the chapter examines the strain the gradual re-definition of land as a movable property put on the proprietary rights of landowners and challenged the traditional manorial organization of feudal society by subjecting large estates to morcellation in the commercial market. The fourth chapter examines the socioeconomic foundations of late medieval English sovereignty in Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle. By dismissing the cultural fantasies of power and authority bound up in the Arthurian narrative, the author reveals the practical economic mechanisms of exchange that sustain and legitimize sociopolitical authority, resulting in a corporate vision of English society. Collectively, the analyses demonstrate the influence the socioeconomic circumstances of gentry society exerted on the production and consumption of Middle English popular romance and the importance of commerce, law, and taxation in the formation of a sense of self in late medieval England.
ContributorsBump, Nathaniel (Author) / Newhauser, Richard G (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert S (Committee member) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
“Digital Shakespeares” is a study of the ways that Shakespearean theaters and festivals are incorporating digital media into their marketing and performance practices at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The project integrates Shakespeare studies, performance studies, and digital media and internet studies to explore how digital media are integral to the practices of four North American and British Shakespearean performance institutions: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford (Canada) Festival. Through an analysis of their performance and marketing practices, I argue that digital media present an opportunity to reevaluate concepts of performance and relevance, and explore the implications such reevaluations have on the future of Shakespearean performance. The project addresses institutions’ digital media practices through the lens of four concepts—access, marketing, education, and performance—to conclude that theaters and festivals are finding it necessary to adopt practices from multiple media to stay viable in today’s online attention economy. The first chapter considers the issue of access, exploring the influence of social media on audience-institution interactions as theaters and festivals establish online presences on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Chapter two argues that theaters and festivals incorporate digital media into their outreach through poaching the practices of other media and cultural institutions as they strive to become relevant to their online audiences by appealing through the newness of digital media. Chapter three focuses on two digital educational outreach programs, the Globe’s Playing Shakespeare and the RSC’s Young Shakespeare Nation, to understand how each institution seeks to employ digital media to make their educational audiences life-long lovers of Shakespearean performance. Throughout the final chapter, I analyze potential models for incorporating digital media into Shakespearean performance, both in performances that bring digital media onto the stage and in performances that use social media as the platform for dramatic performance. Ultimately, I argue digital media have become an integral part of the practices Shakespearean performance institutions use to establish and sustain their cultural relevance with modern audiences, while raising questions regarding the implications of those practices in an increasingly globalized world.
ContributorsWay, Geoffrey (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Lehmann, Courtney (Committee member) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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
Description
Glocal thinking redistributes Shakespeare’s cultural capital and reimagines Shakespeare studies as a multiplex and integrative network without an original, authoritative Shakespeare at its center. Local Shakespeare criticism focuses exclusively on local place and culture, whereas global Shakespeare explores local adaptations with an international scope that risks homogenizing local identities. I challenge the local/global dichotomy and submit that Shakespearean adaptations are never either global or local. Instead, they are always already glocal insofar as they are translated and performed in a culturally and technologically interconnected network of local and global Shakespeare users. I argue that the intercultural processes of adaptation constitute non-Anglophone Shakespeares as culturally, temporally, and spatially glocal. I hope to show that glocal methodologies in marginalized countries like Albania, which historically lack scholarly attention, are necessary to defuse Shakespeare’s global authority over localities. To reveal how adaptations are multitemporal, multispatial, and multicultural, I employ Jonathan Gil Harris’ palimpsest metaphor which traces both past and present meanings in cultural objects. Specifically, I examine the palimpsestic nature of adaptations through socio-political constructs in translations and performances of Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and II Henry VI from pre-communist to post-communist Albania. Shakespeare critics need a glocal methodology that reciprocates the palimpsestic nature of non-Anglophone Shakespeare adaptations in order to better understand the adaptations and value their contributions to the field.
ContributorsGolemi, Marinela (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Irish, Bradley (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021