Browsing by Subject "Heroism"
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Item Between Christ and Achilles : Christian humanism in crisis and a new heroic ideal in English fiction, 1713-1813(2021-05-07) Hall, Kirsten Anne; Barchas, Janine; Hedrick, Elizabeth A.; Bertelsen, Lance; Bowden, Martha; Marshall, AshleyThis dissertation is about the disintegration of Renaissance Christian humanism in the Enlightenment and the literary efforts to reunite those fragments. The tension between the classical philosophical tradition and Christian theology is an old problem, one that up until the Renaissance had found compromise in Christian humanism. Under the changing historical conditions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, it resurfaced as a new problem that old solutions could no longer manage. In England, the so-called “latitudinarians,” English theologians of the Restoration whose ideas were to mark the mainstream of Anglican thought well into the 1800s, were among the last torchbearers of Christian humanism and yet largely responsible for its decline. The latitudinarian emphasis on ethics over doctrine, in the wake of the civil strife of the seventeenth century, rendered the ethically-based systems of ancient writers newly tempting, opening the gates to the rising tide of freethinkers, atheists, and deists who in their efforts to free morality from the shackles of religion, turned to classical moral philosophy not as a complement to but as a replacement for Christian moral teachings. This conflict was memorably articulated by Richard Steele at the start of the century when he asked in The Christian Hero, “Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations?” While Steele’s concern that his contemporaries had become too enthralled with the ancient world at the expense of Christianity is echoed throughout the period, what makes Steele’s essay especially noteworthy is the way he carves out a place for literature’s crucial role in this philosophical and religious crisis. Hs rallying cry for “Elegant Pens” to take up the cause of Christianity and win back not just the minds, but the hearts of its readers by offering attractive and powerful Christian “heroes” is one, I argue, that prompts the response of early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and, later, Jane Austen.Item Feeling heroic : affective response and the he-man action film(2007-05) Ayers, Drew Robert, 1981-; Staiger, JanetUsing the he-man genre as a case study, this study examines the ways in which film solicits affective responses from the viewer. The he-man genre is defined as those Hollywood action films produced during the 1980s and early 1990s that feature a hardbodied hero as the main protagonist. This study, using a broadly cognitive theorization of affect, examines three specific areas in which these films solicit affective states: the areas of narration, spectacle, and depictions of masculinity and the male body.Item Marlovian parody and asinine heroism in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Dido, Queen of Carthage(2014-05) Cressler, Loren Michael; Mallin, Eric Scott; Barret, Jennifer KWilliam Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, which has previously been denied a dramatic source, in fact features a deep engagement with Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage on both structural and thematic grounds. I suggest that MND features a conscious, parodic engagement with Dido that derives from both the overriding Ovidian mode in which both plays are written, and more importantly from Shakespeare's direct parodying of the romantic plot features in Dido, a play that itself parodies Virgil's Aeneid and undermines its pius Aeneas. Shakespeare's deployment of multiple Marlovian techniques--in a nearly identical fashion to Marlowe's--generates a comic appropriation of Marlowe's story- line that constitutes interpretation of and commentary upon Dido and the stakes of Aeneas' heroism in Marlowe's play. Shakespeare adapts a number of dramaturgical methods from Marlowe: instantiations of triangular erotic desire; "gender inversion" and the pursuit of men by women; substitution and conflation of maternal and erotic relations; infantilization of male lovers; and wooing queens with Cupid's polarizing arrows. Each of these dramatic techniques figures prominently in both Dido's relationship with Aeneas and Bottom's with Titania. Shakespeare's comic subplot about the interaction between Bottom and Titania can thus be read as a microcosmic, mock-epic retelling of the main plot of Dido. Rather than a subplot that parodically or comically rehearses the events of MND's main plot, Shakespeare writes a subplot that is tangential to the play's main action and in it interprets Dido as a comic storyline with potential to defer or avoid the harm caused by Aeneas' abandonment of Dido. Bottom's tryst with Titania parodies Dido by using multiple Marlovian tactics directly from Dido and Aeneas' affair, yet lowering the stakes of erotic entanglement in order to suggest a feasible alternative to Aeneas' catastrophic departure from Carthage. Within MND, Bottom and Titania's tryst serves as a counterpoint to the sometimes violent silencing--and consistent male domination--of women in Athens proper under Theseus' ruthless patriarchy. By parodying Marlowe's Aeneas and foregrounding Duke Theseus' past abuses of woman, Shakespeare interrogates classical heroism and suggests a benign form of heroism in the character Bottom.