Department of English Language and Literature
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Item The life of Fannie Coddington Browning.(1983) Slavik, Sherrell A.; Herring, Jack W., 1925-1999Fannie Coddington was born in New York on September 6, 1853. Her father, Thomas B. Coddington, was a wealthy metal merchant with locations in both New York and London. In 1868, Fannie moved with her family to London where she became acquainted with the poet, Robert Browning, and his family. Pen Browning, Robert's son, was attracted to Fannie and after a few years proposed marriage. The Coddington family disapproved of the match and in 1875, Fannie returned to New York. There, she dedicated herself to religious and charitable work with Grace Church. After the deaths of her father, mother, and elder sister, Fannie traveled to England with her younger sister, Marie. She was reunited with Pen Browning and on October 4, 1887, the couple were married. They purchased the Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice as their home. The poet, who had the greatest love and admiration for his daughter-in-law, was visiting them when he became ill and died on December 12, 1889 . Although the couple had many friends and were socially active in Venice, their life was unhappy. Fannie was unable to bear a child and suffered frequently from disabling physical pain as well as from the resulting emotional strain. Pen hired a beautiful Venetian nurse/model who aroused Fannie's jealousy and eventually caused a separation. In 1893, after six years of marriage, Fannie left for New York where she spent the next few years in philanthropic endeavors. In 1899, at the encouragement of her friend Enid Layard, Fannie agreed to meet Pen to try to reconcile their differences. In May, she returned to Venice and her husband but left again in January of 1900 to live at Enid Layard's until she finally acquired her own apartment in March of that year. She lived independently, boarding nurses and working with various charitable organizations. In 1906, Fannie chose to leave Italy and to make her home at Oxford in England. In July 1912, Pen died and because he left no will, an auction of the Browning estate was held the following May. Fannie moved to America, making her home in Washington, D.C. in 1914. In 1928, she published Some Memories of Robert Browning. In 1931, Fannie returned to England to Hayward Heath, London. There, in 1933, she hired Miss Dorothy Ivatt, an employee of Hayward Heath Hospital whom she had come to know and trust; she consequently dismissed her companion of twenty years. Miss Louise Vincent. Shortly afterward, she tried to break the trust fund of almost $400,000 which she had established a few years earlier, but lost the case because the judge ruled that she was influenced by Miss Ivatt. Fannie lived with Miss Ivatt in Anchorhold cottage in Hayward Heath until her death on September 20, 1935.Item Descant.(1983-05) King, Carliss.Item Mythic form and mythic function: Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods(1992) Waldron, Peter J.; Barcus, James; Baylor University.Lord Dunsany, an Irish peer and prolific author of fantasy who lived from 1878 to 1957, wrote in the midst of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Compared to such contemporaries as Yeats and Synge, however, Dunsany has received relatively little critical attention. Much of the Dunsany criticism that does exist over-subordinates the content of Dunsany's work to its beautifully ringing style. This emphasis produces criticism that tends either to praise his writing as merely lyrical and charming or to condemn it as mere escapist fancy devoid of any deeper meaning. But the mythological themes of Dunsany's early short stories demonstrate both high style and a strong, underlying message of human self-empowerment; they merit closer attention. Because Dunsany is little known, in my Introduction I provide a brief biographical sketch. In Chapter One I summarize Joseph Campbell's theories on myth to provide a context for my analysis of Dunsany's short stories. Campbell identifies four basic functions of myth: 1) the cosmological, which enables humanity to form a universal scheme; 2) the metaphysical, which helps humanity cope with the often harsh realities of such a scheme; 3) the sociological, which establishes an unimpeachable social order; and 4) the psychological, which provides the means to transform subconscious dream images into an understandable form. In this way, according to Campbell, myth has always served as an interpreter of reality; therefore, a myth system can reveal much about the world-view of the group or individual that holds it. In Chapter Two, I apply Campbell's theories to Dunsany's world-view as revealed in his first volume of short stories, The Gods of Pegana (1905). The stories in The Gods of Peoana, a set of interdependent fragments, read much like myths both in style and in content; each story represents a passage from the "bible" of Pegana's world. By performing the functions of mythology, especially the creative psychological function, the stories in The Gods of Pegana become mythological themselves, and thus provide insight into Dunsany's own world-view. Reading the stories as myth reveals that for Dunsany, even in a universe that seems entirely under the sway of fate and chance, humanity can at least partially control its own destiny. In this chapter, I demonstrate how Dunsany associates this control with the creative power of myth. In Chapter Three I turn to Dunsany's second volume of short stories, Time and the Gods (1908). In Time and the Gods, Dunsany returns to the world of Pegana and to his theme of mythic self-empowerment. But the stories in Time and the Gods are more fully developed than those in The Gods of Pegana and the message more emphatic. In The Gods of Pegana. Dunsany offers a prophetic message of empowerment that his characters mostly ignore; in Time and the Gods the prophecy begins to be realized, and some of the characters gain a kind of spiritual control over their tyrannical gods. I compare the two volumes and discuss the progression of Dunsany's theme from The Gods of Peoana to Time and the Gods. A failure to recognize this humanist theme in Dunsany's work, along with an unwillingness to acknowledge fundamental similiarities between Dunsany and contemporaries like Yeats, has kept previous criticism from placing Dunsany in the literary context his work merits. In my concluding remarks, I summarize Dunsany's mythological world-view as it appears in these first two volumes of short stories, and classify it as essentially Romantic.Item Between reality and mystery: food as fact and symbol in plays by Ibsen and Churchill.(2006) Pocock, Stephanie J.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.In Henrik Ibsen's and Caryl Churchill's plays, food is both fact and symbol, a reminder of both the shared physicality of the actors and spectators and of an equally powerful human desire for symbolic significance. This thesis examines the depictions of both facets of human consumption in Ibsen's A Doll House and The Wild Duck and Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. By emphasizing the physical hunger and subsequent fulfillment of their characters, the playwrights draw audience and actors together in a community based on the recognition of shared human needs and experiences. Simultaneously, by exploring the variety of symbolic understandings that give those experiences meaning, they create unpredictability, individuality, and creativity. Through this balance, Ibsen and Churchill demonstrate the potential of theatre to construct a site where communities of actors and spectators can continually re-examine the dynamic space between reality and mystery.Item Subversive pseudo-dialogic: W.B. Yeats's use of the dialogic to present the monologic.(2006-07-25T18:58:33Z) Parris, Molly V.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.The application of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic provides unique insight into the poetry and plays of W.B. Yeats. Though this early twentieth century Irish writer favored poetry over the novel form on which Bakhtin based his studies, his compositions can be better understood and his intentions further elucidated in light of Bakhtin's explanations of dialogic and monologic writing. Yeats often employs the form of dialogue, but the external dialogic form conceals a monologic discourse that states a truth on which the author has already decided. The form nevertheless serves to strengthen the poet and playwright's words by endowing them with the rhetorical strength of a conclusive truth resulting from a true dialogic pursuit.Item The Anglo-Catholic quality of Christina Rossetti's apocalyptic vision in The Face of the Deep.(2006-07-30T23:24:33Z) Armond, Andrew D.; Wood, Ralph C.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Critical scholarship on Christina Rossetti's The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, where it exists at all, tends to interpret the work as an individualistic and subversive foray into biblical interpretation. However, this dissertation argues that Rossetti's apocalyptic vision in The Face of the Deep is formed by the interpretive presuppositions of the Anglo-Catholic movement, which sought to reinvigorate the interpretation of Scripture with the traditional exegetical methods of patristic and medieval scholars. The central concern of this dissertation is thus to identify particular ways in which Rossetti's The Face of the Deep relies on an identifiable ecclesiastical interpretive tradition and to tease out the implications of Rossetti's use of these traditions for her work both as a budding theologian and as an established poet. Chapter two demonstrates that Rossetti's ostensibly individualistic and pietistic tendencies toward the personal appropriation of the Scriptures are governed less by a Romantic notion of the individual reader of Scripture than by presuppositions with which medieval monks and scholars approached Scriptural study. Chapter three examines Rossetti's anagogical interpretation in The Face of the Deep, particularly the ways in which Rossetti’s mature view of patience draws on patristic and medieval understandings of the temporal relationship of the Christian to God. Chapter four notes carefully Rossetti's use of the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of Reserve, as promulgated by Isaac Williams in Tracts 80 and 89, in The Face of the Deep. I look first at the manifestation of the doctrine in Rossetti's prose, especially as it relates to both her own self-abnegation and her exhortation to her readers to avoid "evil knowledge," and secondly at the doctrine as it helps explain the stylistic oscillation of poetry and prose in the commentary. In chapter five, finally, I examine several of Rossetti’s early poems, including "Symbols," "The Convent Threshold," "Goblin Market," and "The Prince's Progress," to explore the ways in which The Face of the Deep serves as a kind of "grammar," a symbolic and theological vocabulary, by which all of Rossetti's poetry can be interpreted.Item A collaborative work of art in action: the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer, Rite II.(2006-11-22T19:31:23Z) Nobles, Heidi Gabrielle.; Barcus, James E., 1938-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.In his book, Art in Action, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that a work of art can only truly be understood within the context of its action. This paper presents the Eucharistic Rite II of the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer as a work of complex and aesthetically engaging literary art. Yet while Rite II offers plenty of aesthetic appeal, the text's greater significance comes from its liturgical identity as fundamentally active: Rite II refuses to stand solely as an object of aesthetic contemplation; rather, it demands that its readers respond to it in action, and it participates in its work alongside its readers. The key to Rite II's action lies in the collaboration between the text and its readers, for the two parties come together to perform work beyond themselves: they join in prayer to bring themselves and the world into communion with God through adoration, intercession and personal transformation.Item Fate, providence, and free will: clashing perspectives of world order in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.(2006-12-11T15:52:03Z) Lasseter, Helen Theresa.; Wood, Ralph C.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Through the medium of a fictional world, Tolkien returns his modern audience to the ancient yet extremely relevant conflict between fate, providence, and the person's freedom before them. Tolkien's expression of a providential world order to Middle-earth incorporates the Northern Germanic cultures' literary depiction of a fated world, while also reflecting the Anglo-Saxon poets' insight that a single concept, wyrd, could signify both fate and providence. This dissertation asserts that Tolkien, while acknowledging as correct the Northern Germanic conception of humanity's final powerlessness before the greater strength of wyrd as fate, uses the person's ultimate weakness before wyrd as the means for the vindication of providence. Tolkien's unique presentation of world order pays tribute to the pagan view of fate while transforming it into a Catholic understanding of providence. The first section of the dissertation shows how the conflict between fate and providence in The Silmarillion results from the elvish narrator's perspective on temporal events. Chapter One examines the friction between fate and free will within The Silmarillion and within Tolkien's Northern sources, specifically the Norse Eddas, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the Finnish The Kalevala. Chapter Two shows that Tolkien, following Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, presents Middle-earth's providential order as including fated elements but still allowing for human freedom. The second section shows how The Lord of the Rings reflects but resolves the conflict in The Silmarillion between fate, providence, and free will. Chapter Three explores the extent to which a person can respond before powers of fate, such as the Ring and also deterministic circumstances. The final chapter argues that providence upholds the importance of every person by cooperating with his or her free will, not coercing it; however, providence reveals its authority over all things, including fate, by working through the person’s final failure before fatalistic powers.Item "Sacramental Resistance" to pastoral dreams: the Midwestern land in the works of Sherwood Anderson and his contemporaries.(2007-02-14T21:42:25Z) Buechsel, Mark Peter.; Fulton, Joe B., 1962-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This project investigates the neo-sacramentalism of various Midwestern modernists, particularly that of Sherwood Anderson. Modernists from the Midwest tended to draw from Midwestern nature a sacramental vision of the world that questioned the literalist epistemology bequeathed by New England Calvinism and embodied in industrialism.Item Chesterton and his interlocutors: dialogical style and ethical debate on eugenics.(2007-12-04T19:58:59Z) Shipley, Don M.; Wood, Ralph C.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Before Nazi Germany’s eugenic practices had been completely exposed and denounced, G. K. Chesterton, a British writer best known for his fiction and Roman Catholic apologetics, published Eugenics and Other Evils in 1922. Therein he fiercely opposed eugenics and state sponsored eugenic practices; but his was not an isolated text offered in monologic argument to some vague social menace. In fact, Chesterton never wrote monologically but always in an intrinsically dialogical manner. As this dissertation attempts to demonstrate, this dialogical style, epitomized in the eugenics debate, energized Chesterton’s fiction, most notably his novel The Man Who Was Thursday and serves as a way of reading all of Chesterton, his fiction and non-fiction alike. This dissertation will attempt to demonstrate the historical and dialogical context of that conflict, explicate the exact arguments of both Inge and Chesterton, provide commentary on the dialogical style inherent in Chesterton’s literary works specifically The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and Manalive and demonstrate both the prophetic nature and the literary excellence of Chesterton’s dialogical discourse. The importance of this dissertation is, at least, three-fold: first, to recover the historical context of Chesterton’s writings concerning eugenics, particularly his Eugenics and Other Evils, by returning him to conversation with his sparring partner on the subject, Dean Inge; secondly, to explicate Chesterton’s argument against eugenics by showing its relationship to Chesterton’s other writing, more particularly to those texts which are intrinsically dialogical. Nothing to date has been written concerning Chesterton’s dialogical style, and only a handful of articles attempt to explicate Chesterton’s position against eugenics. It is my hope that the explication of Chesterton’s dialogical style will serve as a new way of reading all of Chesterton’s works. The dissertation is important furthermore because it will attempt to uncover an important theological development in Christian ethical practice, even as it will also offer an example about how such monumentally important moral questions might be engaged dialogically rather than polemically and thus monologically. Obviously the work of the Russian literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin will figure prominently in this effort.Item Journeying toward the beatific vision: the uses and abuses of Dante in Robert Elsmere.(2007-12-04T20:02:28Z) Dammon, Hope.; Prickett, Stephen.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.In Robert Elsmere, Mrs. Humphry Ward addresses the Christological concerns of Victorian England. Robert’s crisis of faith and resulting inability to maintain a belief in the divinity of Christ is juxtaposed against his wife’s focus on the divinity, occasionally at the expense of his humanity. It is in the traditional orthodox teaching of the Incarnation that these two must meet in order to commune with each other and with God. Mrs. Humphry Ward intends to debunk the superstitious elements of traditional Christianity and replace orthodoxy with a humanist version of the Gospel; however, in tying Robert to Dante and Catherine to Beatrice, she aligns her novel with Dante’s poetic rendering of everyman’s spiritual journey from ignorance to full knowledge of the Incarnate Christ. In doing so, Mrs. Humphry Ward undermines her own goal, instead allowing the paradoxical union of divinity and humanity embodied in the doctrine of the Incarnation to drive the movement of her narrative, much as it drives Dante’s Divine Comedy. By tracing Dantesque allusions throughout Ward’s tale of spiritual struggle, we will see that it is the Incarnation, in all of its paradoxical and poetic beauty, which enables the salvation of both the heretic and the saint.Item “A woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised”: an ethical-critical analysis of theological rogues in Mark Twain’s personal recollections of Joan of Arc and L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series.(2008-06-05T13:42:46Z) Terry, Natalie Ann.; Fulton, Joe B., 1962-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This thesis uses ethical criticism to examine the transformative nature of the interaction between authors, characters, and readers, focusing on Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. By presenting socially transgressive figures in a sympathetic manner, Twain and Montgomery encourage a reevaluation of cultural and religious standards. The authors accomplish their goals by utilizing the form of Sunday school books while drastically altering the content, challenging readers’ expectations and urging ethical reform within the texts, as well as within the various historical audiences.Item Charles Dickens’s Bleak house: Benthamite jurisprudence and the law, or what the law is and what the law ought to be.(2008-06-09T14:12:23Z) Welch, Brenda Jean.; Losey, Jay Brian.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Dickens’s foggy world of the nineteenth-century Chancery Court is famous, and infamous, for keeping its litigants in a constant and never-ending state of legal confusion, costs, and “conglomeration” (Bleak House 1873 I: 1: 15, 13), and many readers remember Dickens’s indictment of the Law: “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself” (III: 39: 153). Not surprisingly, then, Bleak House was popular with its audiences, layperson and legalist alike, for the attack it made on the great social institution called Law, and, also not surprisingly, interest in Bleak House remains. We find in Bleak House several intriguing areas of the Law, three of which I specifically address in this dissertation because they still resonate: marital relationships, parent-child relationships, and legal advocacy and professionalism. In this study, I analyze Bleak House in the context of the then-existing Laws that governed marriage, parenthood, and the legal profession and also analyze the novel and the Law in light of the legal philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. My study is similar to Anita L. Allen’s analysis of Jane Eyre (“The Jurisprudence of Jane Eyre”) in which she says, “Lawyers can contribute to the study of literature by illuminating the legal philosophy, that is, the jurisprudence, in works of literary fiction” (180). I agree with Allen’s belief that “Scholars who extract and elaborate the jurisprudential dimension of literature have something important to add to scholarly efforts to understand works of fiction, their authors, and their authors’ intellectual milieus” (181-82). When considering Bentham’s philosophy, we need to know and understand the Laws that operate in Bleak House in order to appreciate Dickens’s efforts to expose and censure the Law. The laws governing marriage, parenting, and the legal profession involve legal fictions that I argue Dickens rightfully uses to demonstrate his concern for a legal system that is tempered by Equity, unlike Bentham’s concern for a legal system that can do without separate Equity jurisdiction, which can more fully provide people with a sense of justice that dispenses with the wastefulness and wantonness of inequity.Item Beneath the surface: psychological perception in Jane Austen's narration.(2008-06-10T20:02:20Z) Werley, Erin D.; Vitanza, Dianna M.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This thesis argues that Jane Austen’s novels are more psychologically sophisticated than they have been given credit for and that the psychological depth of her heroines is revealed by Austen’s unique narration. First, I examine episodes in which the characters exhibit behavior that evinces psychological realism. As a basis of comparison, I juxtapose Erik Erikson’s theories of psychosocial developmental stages as evidence of Austen’s intuitive understanding of human behavior. Next, I examine the narratological means by which Austen reveals her characters’ psychological realism. I investigate Austen’s use of subjective phrases and pragmatic signals to reveal the narrator’s presence and her employment of free indirect discourse to reveal her heroines’ psyches.Item "The waters return": myth and mystery in Graham Swift's Waterland.(2008-10-14T14:33:29Z) Schrock, Laura.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.The following chapter will engage Waterland in isolation from Swift’s other novels and collection of short stories, not because these texts do not mutually illuminate one another, but because Waterland deserves a treatment of the kind of depth that warrants an extended, concentrated study. That chapter seeks specifically to counter several of the blatant misreadings of the narrator’s posture and intent within the novel, and to adequately evaluate that posture and intent as they emerge within the full context of the wealth of literary devices Swift employs, including irony, mythical imagery, and scriptural allusion. The mythical images and allusions that are touched upon by other critics comprise here the central study; close reading, biblical hermeneutics, and specific strains of French feminism will interact to allow for a reengangement of Waterland beyond the exhausted circular terms of deconstructive relativism.Item E-textuality, e-medieval, e-Malory : the rebirth of Le morte d'Arthur on the web.(2008-10-14T15:06:13Z) Brown, Karen Grace.; Hanks, Dorrel Thomas.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Until recently, traditional textual criticism has been unable to account for the rich historical and literary contexts surrounding medieval textual culture, especially the culture of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d'Arthur. Finally, though, electronic resources provide the means for reconstructing these contexts. This study focuses on showing how the application of the postmodern theories of Derrida, Bakhtin, and Foucault allow modern scholars to understand these older textual contexts in new ways. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how the use of these theories in conjunction with a social-text editing model effectively reconstructs these same contexts. Finally, in this study I show how I am currently applying these theories and models to an online transcription of the Winchester manuscript of the Morte Darthur in order to enrich the current context available for electronic research.Item Cormac McCarthy's heroes : narrative perspective and morality in the novels of Cormac McCarthy.(2008-10-14T16:44:57Z) Cooper, Lydia R.; Fulton, Joe B., 1962-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Critics writing on Cormac McCarthy often note the striking paucity of revelations of interior thought in his novels. James Bowers, for instance, claims that few modern writers reject “the Joycean tradition of interiority” as comprehensively as does McCarthy, while Jay Ellis notes “the absence of regular psychologizing” (Bowers 14, Ellis 5). These critics associate the moral bleakness and prevailing mood of despair in the novels with a stylistic absence of revelations of characters’ thoughts, a style consistent with many American naturalist writers. Although McCarthy limits revelations of interior thought, however, he does not eliminate them entirely. The distant, omniscient third-person narrative style typical of McCarthy’s works at times shifts into the limited third person voice, revealing the perspective of a particular character. At times, third-person narration even moves into first-person narration. This striking shift into the close third or first-person point of view most often reveals the thoughts of characters who exhibit moral awareness and ethical behavior. When the narrative shifts to the perspective of immoral characters, that shift draws attention to that immoral character’s humanity, simulating an empathetic response that encourages readers to recognize their shared humanity with even the most despicable representatives of the human race. Shifts in point of view are thus consistently associated with morality, revealing characters’ yearning for community, valuation of life, or commitment to justice and compassion. To date, no one has systematically explored narrative perspective and its connection to morality in McCarthy’s novels. The worldview of McCarthy’s novels is notoriously difficult to identify, since his novels and plays, when placed in conversation with each other, dialogically pit arguments for the self-destructive nature of humankind against arguments for a rather mystical divine providence. This dissertation will explore McCarthy’s range of narrative techniques, focusing on the early Appalachian novels, The Border Trilogy, and The Road, whose styles are representative of the whole corpus, in order to demonstrate how McCarthy privileges ethical behavior and moral attitudes. Revelations of the internal ethical struggles of moral men like John Grady Cole in The Border Trilogy or the father in The Road illuminate their imperfect heroism.Item Analogy, causation, and beauty in the works of Lucy Hutchinson.(2008-10-14T18:44:51Z) Getz, Evan Jay.; Donnelly, Phillip J. (Phillip Johnathan), 1969-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Lucy Hutchinson's translation of the ancient epic De Rerum Natura is remarkable in light of her firm commitments to Calvinist theology and the doctrine of Providence. David Norbrook and Jonathan Goldberg offer strikingly different explanations for the translation exercise. For instance, Norbrook argues that Hutchinson translates Lucretius in order that she might learn from the false images in Lucretius and make better ones in such works as Order and Disorder (Norbrook, “Margaret” 191). In contrast, Goldberg argues for compatibility between Lucretian atomism and Hutchinson’s Christianity, seeing no contradiction or tension (Goldberg 286). I argue that neither critic accounts for the aesthetics of beauty in Hutchinson's poetry; both critics instead attribute an aesthetics of the sublime to Hutchinson. In making this argument, I show that Hutchinson's theory of causation has much in common with Reformed Scholasticism, whereby she is able to restore a metaphysics of formal and final cause. Hutchinson also revives the doctrine of the analogy of being, or analogia entis, in order to show that the formal cause of creation is visible as God's glory. After a discussion of her metaphysics and ontology, I then show that Hutchinson's poetry reflects a theological aesthetics of beauty and not the aesthetics of the sublime. In the fourth chapter, I compare the typological accounts of Abraham found in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and Hutchinson's Order and Disorder with a view to virtue as the proper basis of authority. I conclude that the virtues of Hutchinson's Abraham invite individual participation in a way which is prevented by Hobbes. In my final chapter, I show that Hutchinson writes a hagiographical account of her husband in the Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson.Item Augustinian Auden : the influence of Augustine of Hippo on W. H. Auden.(2008-10-28T16:35:00Z) Schuler, Stephen J.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.It is widely acknowledged that W. H. Auden became a Christian in about 1940, but relatively little critical attention has been paid to Auden’s theology, much less to the particular theological sources of Auden’s faith. Auden read widely in theology, and one of his earliest and most important theological influences on his poetry and prose is Saint Augustine of Hippo. This dissertation explains the Augustinian origin of several crucial but often misunderstood features of Auden’s work. They are, briefly, the nature of evil as privation of good; the affirmation of all existence, and especially the physical world and the human body, as intrinsically good; the difficult aspiration to the fusion of Eros and agape in the concept of Christian charity; and the status of poetry as subject to both aesthetic and moral criteria. Auden had already been attracted to similar ideas in Lawrence, Blake, Freud, and Marx, but those thinkers’ common insistence on the importance of physical existence took on new significance with Auden’s acceptance of the Incarnation as an historical reality. For both Auden and Augustine, the Incarnation was proof that the physical world is redeemable. Auden recognized that if neither the physical world nor the human body are intrinsically evil, then the physical desires of the body, such as Eros, the self-interested survival instinct, cannot in themselves be intrinsically evil. The conflict between Eros and agape, or altruistic love, is not a Manichean struggle of darkness against light, but a struggle for appropriate placement in a hierarchy of values, and Auden derived several ideas about Christian charity from Augustine. Augustine’s influence was largely conscious on Auden’s part, though it was often indirect as well. Auden absorbed important Augustinian ideas through modern sources such as Charles Williams, Charles Norris Cochrane, and Denis de Rougemont, although he was himself an observant and incisive reader of Augustine’s major works, especially the Confessions. This dissertation demonstrates that the works and ideas of Augustine are a deep and significant influence on Auden’s prose and poetry, and especially on his long poems.Item Through the lens of the land: changing identity in the novels of Bernard MacLaverty.(2008-11-10T21:47:47Z) Gibson, Jordan Leigh.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Many critics, like Oona Frawley, believe the land of Ireland has the unique power to connect the collective Irish conscience to the past and is often a rallying cry to garner support for the freedom of Ireland. MacLaverty explores this cultural mindset in Lamb (1980) and Cal (1983) and eventually refutes it as a healthy and effective way for Northern Irish Catholics to identify themselves and find purpose in their lives. Grace Notes (1997), MacLaverty’s third novel, eschews the romantic view of the land, and allows Catherine McKenna to explore the possibilities of finding an international identity through her connection with foreign lands although she still finds strength through her connection with the land. Northern Ireland, it seems, could not provide contemporary citizens with a hope and a future; therefore, they must look towards a transnational identity open to outside influence while being rooted in the local landscape.