Matching Items (26)
Description
This study examines transnational connections between art as advertising and the tourism industry. The development of railroads, and later airlines, played a crucial role in the growth of travel. Art posters supported this expansion. By the mid-twentieth century, art posters gained wide acceptance for encouraging leisure travel. Posters and paintings were constructed by artists to visualize destinations, underscoring the social status and modern convenience of tourism. This thesis describes how advertising, as an aspect of popular visual culture, offered compelling parallels to stylistic developments in modern art.
ContributorsO'Dowd, Sarah (Author) / Sweeney, J Gray (Thesis advisor) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers.
ContributorsSwann, Alaya (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
In 1999, Geneviève Hasenohr announced the discovery of a fragment of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des Simples Ames, a work condemned by the Church at the University of Paris in 1310, hidden in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque municipale in Valenciennes. The fragment corresponds with roughly two chapters in the only extant French version of the manuscript (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS F XIV 26), and when compared with other editions of the Mirouer, it appears to be composed in what might have been Marguerite Porete's native dialect. The discovery changed scholars' perceptions of the weight of the various versions and translations - the Chantilly manuscript had been used previously to settle any questions of discrepancy, but now it appears that the Continental Latin and Middle English translations should be the arbiters. This discovery has elevated the Middle English editions, and has made the question of the translator's identity - he is known only by his initials M.N. - and background more imperative to an understanding of why a work with such a dubious history would be translated and harbored by English Carthusians in the century that followed its condemnation. The only candidate suggested for translator of the Mirouer has been Michael Northburgh (d. 1361), the Bishop of London and co-founder of the London Charterhouse, where two of the three remaining copies of the translation were once owned, but the language of the text and Northburgh's own position and interests do not fit this suggestion. My argument is that the content of the book, the method of its translation, its selection as a work for a Latin-illiterate audience, all fit within the interests of a circle of writers based in Yorkshire at the end of the fourteenth century. By beginning among the Yorkshire circle, and widening the search to include writers with a non-traditional contemplative audience, one that exists outside of the cloister - writers like Walter Hilton, the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and the Chastising of God's Children, and Nicholas Love - we may have a better chance of locating and understanding the motives of the Middle English translator of the Mirouer.
ContributorsStauffer, Robert F (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT Emile Zola is considered one of the fathers of 19th century French Naturalist literature. He is famous for his eloquence, sarcasm and is well known for being a provocateur. He wants to follow the principles of science: observation of his characters in their living environment (or milieu). He holds that individuals inherit physical and personality traits from their ancestors, such as atavism, which can be passed from grandfather to father and father to son. This assumption leads to Social Darwinism and impacted Zola like many other European intellectuals who believed in the new social sciences. Religion was going extinct on the old continent and the trend was to apply these theories to literature and humanities. The author also captures the political and social unrest of a struggling working class in his novel Germinal, where starving miners rebel against the bourgeois class that exploits them. Baldomero Lillo is a Chilean naturalist follower of Emile Zola who found inspiration in Germinal to write Sub Terra-short stories depicting the grim life of the coal miners. The author knows them well since he shared his existence with the miners in Lota, in the southern region of Santiago. Unlike Zola, Lillo, who was less educated and less inclined to trust science, opts for a compassionate Naturalism which relates more to his culture and personal inclinations. Le milieu or el medio ambiente in the Sub Terra stories is dreadful and the author seeks to expose the master/slave relationship in a society that still resembles the European Middle Ages. Le milieu, that is to say the external forces that surround the miners (their geographical, social and political environment), eventually engulfs and condemns them to a life of servitude and misery. Determinism on both continents decides the fate of each member of the society.
ContributorsValente, Marie-Anne (Author) / Canovas, Frédéric (Thesis advisor) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Foster, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Self-awareness and liberation often start with an analysis of the relationship between individual and society, a relationship based on the delicate balance of personal desire and responsibility to others. While societal structures, such as family, tradition, religion, and community, may be repressive to individuals, they also provide direction, identity and meaning to an individual's life. In Kate Chopin's The Awakening and André Gide's L'Immoraliste the protagonists are faced with such a dilemma. Often informed by gender roles and socio-economic class, the container or filter that society offers to shape and mediate human experience is portrayed in both novels as a fictitious self donned for society's benefit --can seem repressive or inadequate. Yet far from being one-dimensional stories of individuals who eschew the bonds of a restrictive society, both novels show that liberation can lead to entrapment. Once society's limits are transgressed, the characters face the infinitude and insatiety of their liberated desires and the danger of self-absorption. Chopin and Gide explore these issues of desire, body, and social authority in order to portray Edna's and Michel's search for an authentic self. The characters' search for authenticity allows for the loosening of restriction and embrace of desire and the body, phenomena that appear to liberate them from the dominant bourgeois society. Yet, for both Edna and Michel, an embrace of the body and individual desire threatens to unsettle the balance between individual and society. As Edna and Michel break away from society's prescribed path, both struggle to find themselves. Edna and Michel become aware of themselves in a variety of different ways: speaking and interacting with others, observing the social mores of those around them and engaging in creative activity, such as, for Edna, painting and planning a dinner party, or for Michel, teaching and writing. Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening and André Gide's 1902 novel L'Immoraliste explore the consequences of individual liberation from the constricting bonds of religion, society, and the family. In depicting these conflicts, the authors examine the relationship between individual and society, freedom and restraint, and what an individual's relationship to his or her community should be.
ContributorsMcCulla, Jessica (Author) / Canovas, Frédéric (Committee member) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Losse, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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
Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) is one of the greatest playwrights of the Romantic era. The most attractive fact of his work is the diversity of topics, genres, tones, opinions and styles. Musset's theater was created in the romantic drama period, which was influenced by abroad. He sought freedom of creation and sometimes showed independence from writers taking his own initiatives to change and mix different writing styles. Throughout the different parts of this thesis, I analyzed in detail the dramatic work of Musset, especially through his two plays, Les Caprices de Marianne (1833) and On ne Badine pas avec l'Amour (1834), to study the artistic originality of such an exceptionally talented artist. He lived in the Romantic period but never forgot his predecessors to whom he paid tribute. He was influenced by them while preserving his work's originality. This thesis consists of two chapters, the first is devoted to the Romanticism and its influence on Musset's dramatic work, and the second is about the different literary doctrines that have left their mark on Musset's theater. By studying them, I show how Musset used his talent to mix and match these several types of doctrines to create a unique artwork that is still alive and interesting today.
ContributorsAlavi, Azadeh (Author) / Canovas, Frédéric (Thesis advisor) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Gallais, Sylvain (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Graffiti at the Arena Chapel and Issogne Castle engage in conversation with the frescoes and the functions of the spaces. These marks produce discussions of cultural issues. The graffiti found in the chapel and castle can be considered ritual and performative acts, visually documenting conversations among diverse audiences in the late medieval and early modern periods. Scholars of the Arena Chapel frescoes have studied the intricate painted iconography. Adding graffiti to the analysis of the chapel allows for a different interpretation of one of the most famous fresco programs. Abundant marks appear on figures in the scene of Hell in the Last Judgment, and are analyzed in terms of the medieval concepts of optics and sight, as well as in respect to class. At Issogne Castle, visitors inscribed graffiti on figures and scenes to represent their responses to key social issues. These included questions of class and occupation, along with political and religious concerns. Contextualizing graffiti in this way enables contemporary scholars to uncover a more complex and subtle understanding of the conversations on the wall in the late medieval and early modern periods through case studies of two monuments of art history.
ContributorsLuksenburg, Stephanie (Author) / Schleif, Corine L. (Thesis advisor) / Sweeney, J. Gray (Thesis advisor) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines the relationship between secular law and Old and early Middle English hagiography in order to illustrate important culturally determined aspects of early English saints’ lives. The project advances work in two fields of study, cultural readings of hagiography and legal history, by arguing that medieval English hagiographers use historically relevant legal concepts as an appeal to the experience of their readers and as literary devices that work to underscore the paradoxical nature of a saint's life by grounding the narrative in a historicized context. The study begins with a survey of the lexemes signifying theft in the 102 Old English saints’ lives in order to isolate some of the specific ways legal discourse was employed by early English hagiographers. Specialized language to refer to the theft of relics and moral discourse surrounding the concept of theft both work to place these saints lives in a distinctly literal and culturally significant idiom. Picking one of the texts from the survey, the following chapter focuses on Cynewulf’s Juliana and argues that the characterization of the marriage proposal at the center of the poem is intended to appeal to a specific audience: women in religious communities who were often under pressure from aggressive, and sometimes violent, suitors. The next chapter addresses Ælfric of Eynsham’s Lives of Saints and discusses his condemnation of the easy collaboration of secular legal authorities and ecclesiastics in his “Life of Swithun” and his suggestion in the “Life of Basil“ that litigiousness is itself a fundamentally wicked characteristic. Lastly, the project turns to the South English Legendary’s life of Saint Thomas Becket. Rather than a straightforward translation of the Latin source, the South English Legendary life is significant in the poet's inclusion of a composite version of the Constitutions of Clarendon, demonstrating the author's apparent interest in shaping the reception of legal culture for his or her readers and emphasizing the bureaucratic nature of Becket's sanctity. In sum, the study shows that the historicized legal material that appears in early medieval English hagiography functions to ground the biographies of holy men and women in the corporeal world.
ContributorsBolton, William E (Author) / Bjork, Robert E. (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard G. (Committee member) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Committee member) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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