| Title | Date | Views | Brief Description |
|---|
| Penitentials to poetry: the literary critique of avarice in fourteenth-century England |
2019 |
380 |
My dissertation elucidates how three extraordinary late-fourteenth-century writers—William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer—address the challenge posed to Christian ethics due to the proliferation of urban markets and increased personal wea... |
| Negotiating normativity: the disruptive wonder of subversive giants : and, Embracing ambiguity: shifting symbols in Sir Gawain and the green knight |
2020 |
367 |
This paper confronts the traditionally held motif of the violent, lewd giant in medieval literature to explore giants that resist the normative behavior of their nomenclature. The relationship these nonnormative giants have with humans is innocuous a... |
| “Swiche illusiouns and meschaunces”: magic as a catalytic agent in the Breton lay : and, “Keep it secree, I yow preye”: esoteric alchemy in the Canon’s Yeoman’s tale |
2020 |
263 |
Until recently, the function of magic within medieval literature was seen as little more than a convenient plot device; however, with recent scholarship suggesting that, because magical thought affected nearly every aspect of life in the Middle Ages,... |
| Love may be blind, but Dante isn't : the development of the gaze in Vita nuova and the Commedia |
2006 |
2777 |
"In literature, the usual course of the othering process of a female character is for her image, as the subject of a male gaze, to become dissected and objectified so much that she is nothing more than a detached body. Traditionally, if the subject i... |
| Place, paradise, and perfection: the narrative function of three Middle English versions of paradise |
2010 |
4950 |
This dissertation explores the concept of paradise as it is used as a physical space within Middle English literature. In examining the narrative function of this space, the fundamental question that it explores is whether the image carries with it a... |
| Reading incest: tyranny, subversion, and the preservation of patriarchy |
2011 |
9999 |
British literature is rich in stories crafted around the problem of incest. Incest has long been seen as a universal, or near-universal, taboo, yet dynasties have been founded upon it--and have fallen because of it. This dissertation explores usage o... |
| Courtly Contradictions: A Case for Guenevere |
2007 |
6871 |
The purpose of this paper is to examine unusual characterizations of Guenevere in the Arthurian tradition relating to the tensions between courtly love, chivalry, and Christianity. Texts are drawn from the medieval and Victorian periods and include w... |
| Quarrels of Sir Conscience: Langland’s critique of knighthood in the visio of Piers Plowman AND “And harped at his Owhen Wille”: developing bardic kingship in the lay of Sir Orfeo. |
2015 |
1407 |
Piers Plowman was written in its three forms roughly between 1365 and 1388, in the midest of the Hundred Years' War. This war spanning 1337 through 1453 saw English knights in France performing acts of violence, theft, pillaging, and ransom which dir... |