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dissertations

ETD doctoral

The first part explores the theory and practice of Victorian sonnet sequence writers in the light of Elizabethan practices. Major works considered include Shakespeare's Sonnets, Dante Rossetti's The House of Life, and Christina Rossetti's Manna Innominata. Because Romantic and Victorian sonnet writers had grown away from a sense of the way Elizabethans used conventions, they interpreted Elizabethan sonnets in terms of their own autobiographical notions of poetry. This is responsible for the many misreadings of Shakespeare which emphasize the "real" identity of characters like the "dark lady." Poets like the Rossettis reconceived the sonnet sequence, because of such misreadings, as a means of autobiographical expression. Dante Rossetti conceives the sonnet sequence as a grand autobiography structured around individual epiphanies much like Wordsworth's "spots of time." Christina Rossetti, equally compelled to autobiographical expression, structures her sequences as macrosonnets, each sonnet corresponding functionally to one line of a sonnet. This enables her to give a long, confessional poem the cohesion usually associated with individual lyrics. The second part traces the development of Wendell Berry's poetry in the light of his philosophical and critical writings. Beginning as a writer in the tradition of Understanding Poetry, Berry has come increasingly to emphasize history, a sense of place, and his experience as a farmer in his poetry. He believes the writer must not shrink from a role in the affairs of the world. All through his career Berry has written elegiac poems, and these best display his incorporation of such concerns into poetry of increasing individuality and subtlety. The third part is a close reading of "The Dead" with attention to the way Joyce uses a shifting narrative perspective to control our view of his characters. Though some critics have argued that Joyce employed a withering irony against his characters, careful consideration of "The Dead" as an individual work suggests that the irony is actually gentle and embracing, looking forward to the development of his mature work.

Ph.D.

doi:10.7282/T3RJ4GZ9

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