Department of English

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A body of suffering: reading Shakespeare's tragedies through cognitive theory
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2009) Helms, Nicholas Ryan; O'Dair, Sharon; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
In this thesis I attempt to build and use a cognitive theory of tragedy. I base this theory upon the work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner, whose studies of embodied metaphor and conceptual blending offer a new linguistic understanding of the way human beings think. When applied to tragedy, these cognitive theories enable a radical rethinking of the tragic hero, catharsis, and suffering itself. My thesis contains three major sections. In the first, I lay out the foundation of my theory, describing the basic processes of embodied metaphor and conceptual blending and linking these processes to theoretical accounts of paradigm shift and pattern, specifically those of Thomas Kuhn and Daniel Dennett. I then describe cognitive theory's relationship to traditional tragic theorists, including Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Terry Eagleton. Finally, I offer a cognitive reading of two plays: Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. Throughout, I hope to illustrate the links between thought, metaphor, and human action. Metaphors are not simply linguistic expressions: they are tools of the mind, and our use of those tools can bring great success or great tragedy. As such, tragedy is not merely an aesthetic genre. It is a cognitive event, a presentation of metaphor and of the consequences of metaphor.
Deny thy father, yet seek to please him?: subversive Shakespeare and the authoritative desire of Shakespearean teen films
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2012) Loper, Natalie Jones; O'Dair, Sharon; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation examines questions of authority in teen adaptations of Shakespeare. Drawing on the fields of Shakespeare studies, film studies, and cultural studies, I focus on four Shakespeare film adaptations ‒ Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You, Tim Blake Nelson's O, and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet ‒ and maintain that discussions of these films must be grounded in discussions of Shakespeare's plays and of the teen film genre. By comparing Shakespeare's plays to other early modern texts, examining early modern cultural practices, and considering the plays' critical and theatrical histories, I argue that Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, and Hamlet present radical challenges to particular structures of authority in early modern England, including marriage, gender roles, racial and cultural difference, and tyranny; these plays seek a future in which traditional forms of authority are questioned, reworked, and reformed. In contrast, teen films, according to scholars of the genre, promote and uphold hegemonic values, typically represented in the form of patriarchal control. Authority operates on different levels, as the films themselves reflect the values of the adult generation and as the young characters within the films express a desire for more, not less, authority in their lives. Using these studies, I argue that Shakespearean teen films frequently present restrictive views of teen autonomy. Rather than challenge, subvert, or rebel against received social structures, these films depict young characters who yearn for parental or social acceptance; similarly, the films themselves limit challenges to authority by presenting a return to order. In comedy, this restoration appears as protagonists learn to navigate social expectations, thus winning approval from peers and adults alike; in tragedy, the police restore authority by arriving to survey the scene and punish wrongdoers, or the media anesthetizes the tragedy by reporting it as just another story on the evening news. In this dissertation, I do not privilege Shakespeare's plays over contemporary films, but rather attempt to demonstrate how Shakespearean teen films adapt and interpret their source texts within a particular set of generic and historical conventions.
The Early Plays of Shakespeare: Chronology, Authorship, and Intertextuality
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2020) Hulse, Mark Charles; Dowd, Michelle M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This dissertation explores ways in which diverse subtopics in literary studies converge to answer questions about the composition history, reception, and thematic content of several plays by Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd. I first endorse the theory that Shakespeare’s career began in approximately 1590–91, presenting a fresh look at how external evidence can be viewed quantitatively to counter the frequent assumption that he began writing years earlier. I then consider the works that have been assigned to his first years in London, demonstrating that Arden of Faversham, Titus Andronicus, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona show strong intertextual debts that indicate compositions after 1590. The study of Shakespeare’s relationship to texts from antiquity to the Renaissance is also instrumental in the newfound recognition of Shakespearean collaborations, and I consider how his distinct habits of classical allusion helps us discern his hand from that of co-authors. Identifying this profile of learning improves our understanding of his first artistic phase across works such as the Henry VI saga, Titus Andronicus, and The Taming of the Shrew. My final chapters look intently at disputes surrounding Hamlet, especially the resurging claim that it was a product of Shakespeare’s earliest development. I contend that important intertextual, bibliographic, and bibliometric analyses reaffirm traditional perspectives about the play’s date and the reliability of its divergent texts. Furthermore, I propose that the study of extant quarto copies likely serves as a reliable and valuable clue to their reception, with important ramifications for critical study of Shakespeare and editorial efforts to procure authoritative texts. As a corollary to these examinations of printed works we discover that the surviving German adaptation of the Hamlet story represents the play largely as it was conceived by Shakespeare’s predecessor, Thomas Kyd. Extending recent studies attributing the anonymous source play King Leir to this same important forebear, I consider several of Shakespeare’s far-reaching modifications to Kyd’s earlier dramas. Collectively they reveal the mature playwright’s thematic interest in performed identity, the frailty of the human psyche, and moral ambiguity, while reminding us to afford due credit to important pioneers of the earlier generation.
Ecological escapism and women in the poetry and prose of Aemilia Lanyer and Lady Mary Wroth
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2018) Hildebrand, Erin; Dowd, Michelle M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This thesis is an examination of the ways in which Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer approach women and ecological spaces. These writers take almost opposite approaches to the types of nature explored and the actions that are possible within such freeing natural settings. This thesis argues that regardless of what type of space is being considered, early modern women writers perceived natural space as a gateway for female community, suffering, and longing. It carefully considers “The Description of Cookeham” from Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, “Song 1” from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth and the ways in which female characters interact outside of the confines of patriarchal society and the ecological forces that afford them escape.
Fates of the Hetzerin: the Hetzerin archetype in Beowulf
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Pate, Tera Katherine; Cook, Alexandra; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This thesis argues that the women in Beowulf are constructed as hetzerin, or women who provoke their will, an archetype originating in Norse myth, though Beowulf’s hetzerinnen differ from their Norse analogues due to a more Christianized outlook on fate in Beowulf. The initial section examines the tripartite technique of provocation- the clever manipulation of location, reputation, and a tool of insult – utilized by hetzerin in Norse literature. I argue that these women always use the same technique, are successful, and suffer death for their actions. This repetition is based in a pagan model of fate, or the idea that the future is predictable due to its similarity to the past. The next section focuses on Wealhtheow and argues that her provocation of Beowulf and Hrothgar displays the hetzerin tripartite provocation form, but in a revised way due to Christianity’s emphasis on a future that is fundamentally inexplicable and, therefore, difficult to manipulate. Wealhtheow provokes Beowulf to kill Grendel in front of the thanes (a public location) using a mead cup (a tool of insult) that, should he fail, will show that Beowulf only acts heroically when inebriated (manipulation of reputation). However, her taunt’s effectiveness is questionable as it hinges on an insult (that Beowulf is only a hero in his cups) occurring in a future clearly coded as predicated not by her, but by a fundamentally unknowable God, a modification that robs the archetype of its effectiveness, leaving Wealhtheow in an uncomfortable limbo in the text. Afterwards, I examine how Grendel’s Mother, though not constructed as a hetzerin, is punished as one due to a cultural longing for certainty in the face of a mysterious Christian deity. Finally, I argue that Thryth represents a new fate for the archetype that does not result in unnerving mystery or death: marriage. By focusing on one archetype in Beowulf, this study advances the research into female character types begun by Damico with her focus on the Valkyrie figure and Nitzsche in her research on the Mary / Eve contradistinction in the text.
Hands and seals: ciphered politics in early modern women's writing
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) DeFurio, Laura; Ainsworth, David; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Ciphered Politics offers a history of women’s secret politicking in the early modern period by tracing the practice across literary genres and neglected archival materials. The book includes studies of more than forty under- and unexamined archival manuscripts to show how women writers encrypted political critiques in pastoral romances, biographies, biblical epics, gossip, letters, and petitions. My subjects include canonical writers, such as Mary Wroth and Lucy Hutchinson, as well as their understudied contemporaries, such as Frances Vane and Helen Hay Wariston. Ultimately, Ciphered Politics argues that politicking women writers influenced public sentiment, shaped literary tradition, and innovated constitutional orders in seventeenth-century England. Chapter 1 argues that Lucy Hutchinson’s self-presentation is advanced at the expense of John’s legacy such that it interferes with the commendatory aims of his biography, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. It shows how Lucy Hutchinson regularly eclipses her protagonist in order to preserve the history of her own expert political activism. Chapter 2 centers upon a single ciphered letter and key—exchanged between two disenfranchised Republican women—in order to reveal a complex tradition of women’s secret epistolary culture. Tracing the material history of this letter which uses ciphers that are borrowed from the names of characters from prose romances, I recover a covert network of women, whose secret politicking was inspired by the romantic tradition. Chapter 3 attends to the letters, petitions, and interrogations of Republican and Royalist women preserved from 1660-1668. It recovers, transcribes, and contextualizes more than thirty archival manuscripts preserved in the State Papers, the majority of which are unpublished and untreated, to recover a complex dialectic exchange wherein female petitioners test and incline the will of the English monarch and his advisors in order to protect themselves, their husbands, and their property. Chapter four examines the material history and reception of Henry Vane’s posthumous writing. Tracing readers’ engagements, preserved in marginal evidence and diary entries, I argue that Henry Vane effectively used the genre of English martyrology to present himself and—importantly—his wife, Frances Vane, as exemplars of a providential genealogy that would inspire Milton’s depiction of Eve in Paradise Lost.
"I will not cease from mental fight": William Blake's Milton and the process of adaptation
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2018) Powell, Jared N.; Tedeschi, Stephen; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Critics have long pondered William Blake's relationship to his literary predecessors. As both a visual and verbal artist, Blake had a bulk of precedence and tradition at his disposal. Many scholars focus on Blake's relationship to Christian sources, most notably biblical and Miltonic narratives, especially with regards to his epic poem Milton. Those critics often read Milton as Blake's attempt to correct the century-and-a-half's worth of misreadings that had accumulated between the writings of Paradise Lost and Blake's own epic. However, my thesis argues that Blake's use of his sources is much more multi-faceted than the one-to-one relationship between Milton and Blake that this reading implies. By bringing the vocabulary of adaptation theory into Blake studies, I argue that Blake's adaptive method becomes a means for him to assert his own cultural capital and purge his network of sources of their impurities. From Paradise Lost, Blake takes the fall plot and the character Sin-Leutha, correcting and updating Milton to better suit Blake's personal mythology and vision for England. Blake turns an even more critical adaptive eye to Homer and Virgil, as he transforms the shields of Achilles and Aeneas to the garment of the Shadowy Female, criticizes the classical glorification of war, and offers a corrective through a purification of that garment. My third chapter revisits the motifs of the fall and weaving and views them through the lens of Norse mythology to show that Blake's adaptive method is multiplicative in its design. This far-reaching and cleansing process of adaptation becomes Blake's means of forging a national myth of England as a mythic paradise, joining Albion with his emanation Jerusalem.
"If the heart be moved": the triumph of the heart in Milton, Herbert, and Donne
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Perdue, Cori Miller; Ainsworth, David; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
John Milton, George Herbert, and John Donne all struggle to hold onto the heart as the center of man and the place of inspiration and volition. In the seventeenth century, four intertwined challenges to how people think about the heart collide. In anatomy, Harvey's treatise On the Motion of the Heart and the Blood (1628) persuaded many people to think of the heart as a mere pump rather than a mysterious seat of knowledge and volition. Milton, Herbert, and Donne respond to this controversial shift and work to realign the heart with the mystical presence of God. In philosophy, Descartes's theory of dualism changed how people thought of the connection between the heart and the mind. Milton confronts Descartes's dualistic theories by upholding monism in his epic Paradise Lost and portraying his archfiend, Satan, as a dualistic philosopher. In economics, anxieties concerning the mass-production of books complicated the Judeo-Christian belief that God writes on individual hearts in a personal, non-manufactured way. Herbert chooses to avoid mass-producing his works during his life due to his fear that "copying out" the writing in his heart would be diluted through the printing process. Milton, however, chooses to use the vehicle of print to advance his belief that the most lasting monuments are inscriptions written by God in hearts. In theology, the impassioned controversy about the interiority versus outward signs of belief that erupted in the sixteenth century continues to be debated in the seventeenth century and affects how these theological poets conceptualize the heart. Herbert and Donne characterize the heart as an intimate sphere that God must personally break and appropriate, whereas Milton demonstrates in "The Passion" that the crucifixion of Christ is a distinct and revered topic that cannot be expressed on physical paper but must be completed by the Spirit of God inside each believer's fleshy heart. This project shows how Milton, Herbert, and Donne reinforce the presence of God working and writing in believers' hearts when the very nature and understanding of the heart is evolving and moving away from any connection with the divine.
Intuition and authority: literary expression and scientific communication
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Emerson, Daniel Geoffrey; Ainsworth, David; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
In my dissertation, I investigate how images—whether pictorial, poetic, or narrative—determine and change human intuitions about the natural world. I argue that by adopting form and content from one another, literary and scientific writers alike break and reframe their reader’s intuition. George Herbert, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Margaret Cavendish, on the one hand, and Galileo, Paracelsus, and Kepler, on the other demonstrate that narrative, poetic, and pictorial images are instrumental in rendering the world intelligible and intuitive. In my first chapter, I provides a survey of sixteenth-century writers from Chaucer to Spenser and from Copernicus to Bacon, showing how they construct authority and attempt to rewrite intuitions about nature and her students. My subsequent chapters on physics, chemistry, and astronomy explore how conventions in poetry and fiction facilitate the communication of novel ideas.
“Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude”: masculinity and the texts of doctor faustus
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Bell, Charles Nathaniel; Dowd, Michelle M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This thesis is an examination of masculinity in Doctor Faustus that pays special attention to editorial theory and the complicated textual history of Christopher Marlowe’s play, which exists in two substantially different forms—the A-text of 1604 and the B-text of 1616. After discussing the textual history of the play, this thesis examines some prescriptive literature from the period that argues that a true man should have restraint in his dealings with other men. By reading the two texts of Faustus against this prescriptive literature, I argue that the B-text Faustus constructs his masculinity with much less restraint than the A-text Faustus, as the B-text Faustus utterly humiliates and emasculates the men around him in a way that the A-text Faustus does not. In creating this reading of the distinction between the masculinity constructed by the two Faustuses, I argue that the two texts of Doctor Faustus should no longer be conflated by either critical or editorial practice in order to create more avenues for critical exploration.
“Madmen and fools": mental illness and disability in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2020) McNamee, Hope Elizabeth; Dowd, Michelle M.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Criticism of The Changeling, while abundant, has historically either neglected the madhouse subplot or treated it as a symbolic reflection of the main plot. While some scholars have examined the historical context of the “Bedlam” scenes, this paper will focus on the text itself, bringing the play, its historical context, and modern-day disability theory into dialogue. A close examination of the subplot’s text reveals a fluidity between the categories of “mad” or “foolish” and “sane.” This fluidity seems to align with historical attitudes toward mental illness, which would have constructed mental illness as a temporary affliction from which the sufferer could recover. The play also prefigures modern disability theories which seek to universalize disability and destabilize it as an identity category. However, the fluidity present in the text contrasts with a sense of distinct boundaries between the madhouse inmates and the “normal” characters, a distinction which was also present during the time period in which the play was written. To resolve this apparent contradiction, I turn to the theory of narrative prosthesis, using it to illustrate the way in which such fluid, universalizing models of disability can be used to re-marginalize the disabled in the play, in critical theory, and in life. Thus, I argue for a balance between the normalization of disability and an understanding of the disabled as uniquely marginalized individuals.
"Make several kingdoms of this monarchy": place and identity in early modern drama
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Ferretti, Alexandra Stewart; O'Dair, Sharon; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
In the phenomenological theory of space and place, best articulated by Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Casey, J.E. Malpas, and Michel de Certeau, an individual’s experiences inscribe a space (or an undifferentiated area) and make it a place; that place and those experiences contribute to an individual’s identity. In applying this theory to early modern English drama, I contend that we can better understand how Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights responded to the displacement of the English population, as many provincial English moved to London and acquired new physical and social places. Elizabethan playwrights Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe suggest physical place is essential to a character’s identity. For later playwrights like William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, however, physical place is significant but not as central. Instead, as phenomenological theorists posit, place and experiences both contribute to identity.
Plucking the rose: attitudes toward nature in the modern American fairy tale
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2011) Wood, Susan E.; Niiler, Lucas P.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This thesis compares modern American fairy tales (hypertexts) with earlier influential fairy stories (hypotexts), in particular those bearing intertextual links to the "Beauty and the Beast" tale type, in order to identify changing American attitudes toward nature and to pinpoint prevailing trends of opinion in mainstream American culture today. The fairy stories chosen, through characterization, identify a human main character with civilization and a fairy main character with the wilderness. In this way, nature is made into an "Other," something super-natural and thus something different from humans. Readers may, through fairy tales, accommodate modern ideas about the preservation of nature with the more traditional role of dominating nature in order to achieve a sense of safety in those spaces not under direct human control. Indeed, to a large extent in these tales the certain, mutually beneficial outcome is human domestication of the fairy creature through sympathetic guidance. This indicates that a belief in the primacy of human communion with nature is becoming a mainstream belief in modern American culture.
Reason, republic, regicide: the logic of testimony in Milton's political prose
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Moran, Benjamin Adam; Ainsworth, David; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
This thesis argues that Milton’s two major polemics of 1649, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, are preoccupied with articulating proper logic and castigating logic Milton views as inferior. I read these two works alongside Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, Milton’s seldom read logic textbook published in 1672 but written in the years immediately preceding the regicide. Artis Logicae outlines the procedure for creating and deploying proper logic, but it also describes one type of inferior logic, what Milton calls testimony. Arguments from testimony depend entirely on the ethos of the speaker. For Milton, this argumentative practice represented a departure from critical thought. Further, it was the same type of logic used to support arguments for monarchy. In Milton’s political prose of 1649, testimony lies at the center of critique. The preface to Eikonoklastes frames Milton’s reading of Eikon Basilike as an act of degrading poor logic. Before the work can teach the English nation the proper mode of logic, and thus the proper mode of reading and thought, it must point out the faulty foundation of testimony upon which Eikon Basilike is built. In Eikonoklastes, Milton foregrounds his assault on testimony; in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, he buries it beneath the surface of polemic. The first edition of the Tenure challenges Presbyterians’ arguments against the right of the people to depose their rulers, drawing upon a range of proofs in support of its position. But when the polemic failed to convince Presbyterians who sought proof from their divines, Milton reoriented his text in the second edition, recasting his tract as a satire of Presbyterian logic. The second edition of the Tenure offers its Presbyterian audience the testimony it desires while undermining the authority that empowers that testimony.
Resurrecting Mary Frith: creating identity in restoration London
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2014) Liebe, Lauren Elizabeth; O'Dair, Sharon; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Mary Frith was immortalized as Moll Cutpurse in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's play The Roaring Girl in 1611. Over the next half century, she appeared in a handful of other works, primarily plays, as a minor comedic character. In 1662, however, another major work centered around her life appeared: The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith, Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse. In this supposed autobiography, Frith is transformed into a royalist hero, using her roguish skills to support the cause of Charles II. What this thesis seeks to examine is the rational behind this overtly political representation of Frith, who is never presented as having a great stake in politics in any of her many other appearances. Initially, it grounds the discussion of The Life and Death in an examination of the earlier texts, primarily The Roaring Girl, and current critical commentary on Frith and her fictional representations. Frith's notoriety makes it necessary to question exactly what shape such fame (or infamy) would have taken during Frith's lifetime. Next, this thesis looks at the literary and political milieu that spawned The Life and Death through a close examination of other contemporary publications concerning royalist highwaymen-heroes. Finally, this work explores the societal changes that allowed Frith and other criminals to be celebrated as royalist heroes and, perhaps, model citizens of a rapidly changing English nation.
The rhetoric of rank in early modern drama from 1590 to 1642
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2021) Smith, Matthew Burdick; Dowd, Michelle; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
My dissertation, “The Rhetoric of Rank in Early Modern Drama from 1590 to 1642,”argues that early modern dramatic works pull from rhetorical theory to shape social status in a period that underwent significant social transformations. Arguing that dramatists use early modern rhetorical manuals to respond to historically specific social tensions, I explore how dramatists use rhetorical figures to comment on social tensions between ranks, define the social role of emergent social roles, and define social values. While I explore the relationship between early modern drama and rhetorical manuals, I situate my analysis alongside the work of social historians to provide a historically situated account. I argue that rhetorical theory plays a central, though underexamined, role in the formation of those emergent social roles—like merchant or factor—and that dramatists dramatize the process of social (trans)formation through rhetorical figures. Furthermore, social formation itself is a process with often contradictory priorities and perspectives, and I show that dramatists use the semantic flexibility of rhetorical figures to support a range of attitudes that are sympathetic, tolerant, or even hostile towards social change, illustrating that social change is not the inevitable product of historical contexts but a process structured in part by rhetoric. My dissertation traces how rhetoric is used to cultivate civic values among ranks with competing interests, a process rife with social tensions that the drama lays bare.
A rhetoric of revival: reimagining museum spaces through digital media
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2016) Stevens, Amanda; Dayton, Amy E.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Though this dissertation’s ideas and theories are grounded in multiple disciplines, its primary focus is on voices. Voices that are heard, voices that are marginalized, and voices that are erased from narratives altogether. Though this focus has been examined in many facets and within many disciplines, examining marginalized voices through visual rhetorical spaces such as museums and art is an area that has not been widely examined in the field of rhetoric and composition. While other disciplines have examined these practices, rhetoric and composition is an important addition to these studies because composing and rhetoric are taking place in these spaces and, while doing so, are leaving out many marginalized voices. My specific topics for inquiry are: the rhetoric of the physical museum; representation of voices through online art spaces and their rhetorical differences to the physical museum; the current interactive and communal spaces to help recover voices through live online spaces; and the possibilities of these spaces for their future community-building and voice recovery. In my dissertation, I argue that, working in tandem, live museums and digital museum spaces have the ability to recover community voices that have been marginalized by the museum in the past by creating inclusive spaces for community voices and new public memories of the museum
Shakespeare in love: appropriation of Shakespeare in popular romance novels
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2013) Whyte, Tamara Lynn; O'Dair, Sharon; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Popular romance authors frequently allude to William Shakespeare's works within their novels. In my dissertation, I survey and analyze the various ways current authors of historical romance novels appropriate Shakespeare and how those appropriations reinterpret his works. I argue in part that the inclusion of Shakespearean allusions has become part of the codes of romance novels, with various types of allusions serving different purposes. Performances of Shakespeare's plays tend to serve as a backdrop for courtship or as a foil to the plot of the novel. When romance authors rewrite Shakespeare's plays to suit the romance novel audience, they often refocus on the heroine and give her more agency. Romance authors also rewrite Shakespeare's tragedies as romance in ways that draw on reader familiarity with the plays. These revisions tend to reduce the plays to key moments or themes and focus on female characters in Shakespeare's works. When romance novel heroes or heroines quote Shakespeare, his words serve as a signal to the reader of elements of their character, such as their intelligence or emotional availability. When authors allude to Shakespeare's works in titles, names, or opening quotations, they openly signal their appropriation of the Bard in ways that distinguish their novels from others. In these more minor appropriations, Shakespearean allusions can function as marketing tools.
Spenser's Burning Light: The Soul's Transformations in the Faerie Queene
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2020) Sharpe, William Franklin; McElroy, Tricia; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
The extent of Spenser’s Neoplatonic influence has long been the subject of debate, and even proponents of a more fully Neoplatonist Spenser have often hesitated to read The Faerie Queene in the full light of this tradition. While the general consensus has acknowledged the deep and abiding influence of Neoplatonism in The Fowre Hymnes, published late in the poet’s career, Spenser uses some of these doctrines and paradigms as early as The Shepheardes Calender. A survey of the shorter poems reveals certain constants in Spenser’s representation of the soul: its immortality, preexistence of the body, and tri-partite structure, and the doctrine of transmigration, which represents spiritual progress through a series of transformations. These characteristics resurface in The Faerie Queene, where they provide an indispensable guide for Spenser’s plan to “fashion” the soul of his reader. While some would object that these Neoplatonic borrowings contradict the poet’s overt Protestantism, especially regarding the doctrine of original sin and the implications of humanity’s fallen nature, Spenser resolves these conflicts through the apophatic teachings of Christian mysticism in the last half of Book I. Spenser’s paradigm of the soul’s progress begins with Holinesse, by which the soul examines its fallen nature in the presence of the divine, before turning to confront worldly and cosmic evil as embodied in the dragon of Book I’s climax. The book’s other evil figures—Archimago, Duessa, and the “Sans Brothers”—reflect the soul’s failure to resolve its own disharmonies in the absence of grace, culminating in Redcrosse’s hellish imprisonment in Orgoglio’s dungeon. Arthur enters the narrative as both a vehicle of divine grace and an adumbration of Redcrosse’s unrealized potential. Redcrosse then enacts the soul’s reorientation towards grace in the House of Holinesse. The subsequent books present the soul’s further development in a series of virtues that project the internal harmonies of the sanctified and sufficiently-fashioned individual into human relationships, through which they can begin to reshape the world of fallen nature in such a way that prefigures the eventual reintegration of the soul, and possibly the entire universe, back into the divine presence.
The spirit in the church: instituting the holy in George Herbert's poetry and prose
(University of Alabama Libraries, 2015) Greene, Clay Paul; Ainsworth, David; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
George Herbert's poetic edifice, called The Temple, has been read according to various schematic forms, usually under the idea that the collection's central unit, The Church, creates an architectural church that in turn models the interior space of the Protestant believer. Turning away from these earlier models of reading, my work puts forward the idea that the "church" of Herbert's poems refers not to a static edifice or interior space but toward the site of communion among the readers of his poetry. Herbert's collection is a "church" in the universalist sense of a church extending backward and forward in time to encompass all communicants of Christ's grace. In Chapter 2, I argue that Herbert's conception of the Holy Spirit works to constitute the audience of his poetry. The problem of understanding how the Spirit creates the momentum behind many of his poems. Most often, this problem becomes expressed through pondering some miracle, such as communion, or an inscrutable biblical passage. In the end, the speaker's anxious desire overcomes this ratiocination and, paradoxically, creates the speaker's own assurance of grace. In Chapter 3, the argument expands to Herbert's pastoral manual, The Country Parson. As a twin to his work in The Church, The Country Parson again worries over the question of creating a unified spiritual community through the Holy Spirit. While in The Temple, his speaker turned inward, the priest of The Country Parson must turn outward, using the iconographic and rhetorical traditions of Counter-Reformation theory to answer the Puritan problem of displaying the Spirit's inward effects.

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