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This thesis explores the representation of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in four epic poems spanning the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, investigating how the politico-historical conditions of early modern Spain and Mexico gave rise to varying concepts of heroism. Through an analysis of Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega's *Mexicana* (1594), Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán's *El peregrino indiano* (1599), Juan Cortés Osorio's *Las Cortesiadas* (c. 1665), and Juan de Escoiquiz's *México conquistada* (1798), this thesis establishes a transatlantic dialogue between poets writing from both the Peninsula and the Americas, exploring what the diversity of heroisms embedded in their epics reveals about the complex economic, cultural, religious, and political matrix of early modern Spanish and colonial society. In my consideration of how the figure of Cortés is used as a tool to explore issues of patronage, creole identity, evangelisation, and nationalism, I question not only how heroic discourse is conditioned by historical context, but also by the poets themselves, who, far from objective recorders of Cortés' deeds, harbour their own personal motivations and ideological agendas. Through tracing the epic genealogy of Cortés across three centuries, this thesis not only follows the journey of the conquistador, but also that of the epic genre and its intimate relationship with the history of Spanish imperialism.

This thesis examines the similes of Apollonius Rhodius in the context of their intertextual and cultural value to demonstrate that imagery of the natural world, such as sunlight, trees, water, fire, and the stars is used in association with initiation ritual in the Argonautica. This study combines philology with myth and ritual theory to examine how Apollonius has reworked the association between nature, ritual, and human life cycles in Greek literature and culture to highlight important moments on his characters' initiatory journeys into adulthood and to substitute for missing aspects of rituals which are unable to be performed in the mythical narrative of the epic. This study examines how Apollonius combines the cultural legacy of epic natural imagery and the psychological tradition of tragic animal imagery with contemporary values to create a unique genre of natural imagery which is intrinsic to the narrative and themes of the Argonautica, as a tool for the poet to reframe the values of heroism and romance through intertextual references to other sources during pivotal moments in the epic. The first chapter examines natural imagery in the initiation of Jason and explores conceptualisations of heroism and masculinity as he transitions from a boy into a man. The second chapter analyses the nymph abduction of Hylas and discusses the role of nature as a setting for an initiation through a sexual consummation. The third chapter examines natural imagery in the initiation of Medea as she transitions from a maiden to a wife and discusses themes of womanhood and psychology. The fourth chapter analyses the marriage of Jason and Medea and demonstrates how the poet uses natural imagery to connect and conclude both of their initiatory journeys with their wedding. In these chapters, I examine how different initiation rituals for both men and women are described, represented, or substituted with natural imagery. This thesis takes inspiration from similar studies of natural and animal imagery in epic and tragedy to provide the Apollonian similes with a close reading which takes into consideration their intertextuality, connection to ritual, cultural background, interconnectivity, and thematic value, which defines Apollonius' innovative way of using intertextual natural imagery in association with initiation ritual to enhance the narrative and themes of the Argonautica.

The Old French and Old Occitan epic poems, called 'chansons de geste', have long been held up as a celebration of the medieval warrior elite. Although they build a world of great deeds and noble families, the epics are nonetheless a poetry of violence whose outlook challenges prescriptive notions of ideality and perfection. This thesis problematizes the laudatory view by asking readers to reconsider the fine line the 'chansons de geste' present between heroism and catastrophe. It does this by reframing how the 'chansons de geste' conceive of the passage of time in their own narratives, how they move through the world as cultural artifacts, how they enter into conversation with their immediate cultural surroundings, how they straddle past and present, and how they contribute to imagined futures across eras. The first chapter uses Roland Barthes to read repetition and death in the 'Roland' tradition and in the 'Chanson de Guillaume', and contends that when death scenes are repeated, they create an echo that brings the past forward and renders time uncertain. The second chapter employs Kristevan abjection to read selections from the Old French Crusade Cycle as a locus for memory and a focus for anxieties about the extremities of violence. In a departure from previous scholarship, it frames abjection as being dependent on proximity, or temporal closeness, which relies on 'witnessing' as a process of repetition in which events are re-lived and re-presented. The third chapter reads the thirteenth-century 'Canso de la crozada' through selections from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy with a focus on 'mythic thinking' and community-formation. Through its analysis of the unfinished manuscript decorations and the presence of two politically opposed poets, it shows that the creation of myth in 'chansons de geste' is the result of historical desires. The final chapter applies medieval biblical exegesis and the senses of scripture to the subgenre of 'Enfances', reading them as a philosophical exercise in which temporal layering and mythmaking come full circle when poets take up the practice of writing predictive histories for the epic heroes, turning both triumph and catastrophe into destiny. Time in the 'chansons de geste', whether narrative, historical, or grammatical, is not neutral, nor are the myriad ways in which the passages and movements of time are marked. The experiences of time that the 'chansons de geste' underpin are necessarily affective and the possible degrees of temporal affectivity are malleable depending on the content of the poems themselves and the context in which they are received. Reading these affective temporalities as signs is one way to test the limits of violence in the epic tradition, and, critically, to rethink how experiences of violence alter the role the epic poems play in either supporting or challenging historicizing narratives.

This thesis examines Lev Tolstoy's diachronic reception of Homeric epic poetry. Situated in the field of classical reception in nineteenth century Russian literature, it argues that Tolstoy's writing initially celebrated the Homeric notion of heroism by adapting it to a nationalistic discourse; then transitioned to problematizing traditional epic heroism in Tolstoy's middle period by means of a historiographical critique; and culminated in a reconciliation with heroic epic in Tolstoy's later work by spiritualizing the category of Homeric poetry. By applying a Nietzschean reading to Tolstoy's published and unpublished material, this study contends that Tolstoy's historiographical approach was essentially nihilistic, a position which prompted Tolstoy's creation of the radical intellectual category istoriia-iskusstvo, or history-art. I show how this historical-aesthetic orientation provided a theoretical justification for Tolstoy's deliberate manipulation of Homer's poetry and identity. An investigation of how Tolstoy appropriated, adapted, and reconfigured elements of Homeric material in his writing, from some of his earliest short stories, 'The Raid' and 'The Woodfelling', to his final significant work of fiction, Hadji Murat, sheds light on how Homer's poetry served Tolstoy not only as an aesthetic model, but as an ethical, historiographical, and spiritual reference point. In doing so, this thesis explains Tolstoy's constantly shifting literary and intellectual projects and concerns from the perspective of his commitment to traditional heroic epic, which remained constant throughout his writing career. Finally, I demonstrate how Tolstoy developed, legitimized, and canonized his own version of Russia's cultural identity, collective memory, sociopolitical values, and religious faith, by drawing on Homer's poetry. I will contextualize Tolstoy's reception of Homeric material in relation to the Crimean War, the social responsibility of artistic and historical disciplines, and the empire's expansion into the Caucasus.

This thesis explores the generic identity of the Argonautica of the Hellenistic poet Apollonius Rhodius. The strong similarities between the Argonautica and Homeric poetry in terms of language, structure and content have also, inevitably, affected the generic reception of the poem, typically understood as an epic after the Homeric manner. This thesis will attempt to demonstrate that, regardless of the undeniable significance of the Homeric epics as the dominant generic matrix of the Argonautica, Apollonius' poem consists of a remarkably more nuanced generic layering. An entry point into the decipherment of the Argonautica's generic identity is offered, as in most works of classical literature, through the poem's proem. The Argonautica, however, entails the novelty of containing not one but at least three proems which, it will be proposed, affect both the poem's structure and its generic tissue. With each new beginning, as announced with each proem, readers are invited to recalibrate their generic expectations. It will be argued that the ensuing structure resembles that of Cyclic poetry, with the poem's separate sub-sections organised as semi-independent poems. Books 1 and 2, which jointly comprise the first sub-section and strongly emphasise Apollo's contribution to the Argonautic mission, are significantly influenced by the Homeric Hymns; their structure assimilates that of a (Homeric) Hymn to Apollo. Book 3 is structured as a martial epic progressively obtaining elements of didactic poetry which reflect the instructions and assistance which Jason receives from Medea. Finally, Book 4 comprises a double generic articulation, that of a nostos poem for the returning Argonauts and that of a wedding poem for the fleeing Medea, with the two generic structures inscribed in the narrative in parallel, like opposite sides of the same coin. This thesis, which offers the Argonautica's first systematic study of literary genre in and of itself, will attempt to demonstrate that an in-depth exploration of the Argonautica's generic identity uncovers hidden layers of meaning and has a profound impact on our understanding of the poem.

The aim of this thesis is to use the various characters who play a part in the Epic Cycle as a tool with which to understand more about the Cycle and the pre-Homeric oral tradition. In Part 1, I use characters as a way to approach the different sources of information we have for the Epic Cycle, namely the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus and the various fragments from later writers and scholiasts. I take the view that these sources are, on the whole, less valuable than Proclus' epitomes. By looking at the characters unique to these accounts, I assess the value and utility of Apollodorus and the fragments for our knowledge of the Epic Cycle. Nevertheless, the thesis also raises questions about the status of Proclus' epitomes and the extent to which they give us access to the 'authentic' Epic Cycle. Part 2 is dedicated to the individual characters who play a part in the narrative of Proclus' epitomes. Using a mixture of methodological tools from the camps of both Neoanalysis and Oral Theory, I attempt to trace out a full account of how these different characters were depicted in the tradition of the Trojan War. By using the information given by both Proclus, the fragments, and the Homeric poems, the aim is to build as full a picture as possible of the position and characterisation of these characters in the pre-Homeric oral tradition of the Trojan War. The individuals discussed are both major (Achilles, Diomedes, Odysseus, and the Trojan Princes) and minor (Protesilaus, Philoctetes, Polypoites, Leonteus, and Palamedes).

This thesis addresses the general issue of formulaic variation in early Greek epic - not formulaic change, in that I do not adopt a diachronic perspective or seek to restore the original form of any formulae, but simply to describe how different variants of the same formulae coexist, and what their patterns of variation can tell us about formulaic language. I introduce the concepts of formula and formulaic variation in part I, which is functionally a two-part introduction (chapters I and II). Part II addresses the issue of syntactic variation, focusing on formulae composed by an adjective and a (common) noun; the behaviour of these formulae is analysed in a corpus made of Homer, Hesiod, and the major Homeric Hymns, and compared to the behaviour of similar structures in a non-formulaic 5th-century baseline corpus. The final chapter in part II (chapter V) analyses the behaviour of the same Adj + N pairs in a Hellenistic poem, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. Part III focuses on semantic variation, and applies Distributional Semantics in order to study the range of meaning that objects of transitive verbs can take in Homer and Hesiod. Both Parts II and III have an introductory chapter of their own (chapters III and VI, respectively), in which the linguistic framework that will be used in the whole section is introduced and applied to a smaller-scale study.

This dissertation explores the interaction between the theme of civil war and the epic genre. The focus is on three Latin epic poems composed in the mid-late first century AD: Lucan’s Pharsalia, Statius’ Thebaid and Silius’ Punica. A special contribution is given to the understanding of the Domitianic poems, the Thebaid and the Punica, in the light of their late-Neronian model, the Pharsalia. At the heart of this project lies the idea that Lucan provided Statius and Silius with a key model for interpreting the rise of the Flavian dynasty from the civil wars that affected Rome after Nero’s death, in AD 68-69. The work is structured in four chapters, by topic; and each chapter is structured in sections, by author. The first chapter explores the relationship between the bipartite structure of these poems and the twofold assessment of civil war, now a wicked struggle for absolute power, now a noble form of tyrannomachy. The second chapter is about the problem of repetition in epic and the theme of civil war, a kind of conflict which, especially in Roman history, is characterised by cyclical recursiveness. The third chapter deals with the theological issue, as civil wars seem to deny the providential teleology, presided over by Jupiter, which traditionally sustains the unfolding of the epic plot towards its telos. The fourth chapter presents a new form of civil struggle, psychomachy, a war of the self fought within one’s soul against vices and passions – a legacy of markedly (though not exclusively) Stoic brand destined to great fortune among later Christian poets.

This thesis examines female voices in Hellenistic Poetry. It argues that fictions of female voices in Greek literature produced in this period assume unprecedented importance. Fictions of female voices of course appear within these poems in the form of character voices. They also, however, structure crucial elements of the plot and style of these poems. It is the contention of this thesis that Hellenistic poems characteristically straddle tradition and innovation in the presentation of these fictions. I define the traditional fictions of female voices in Part 1 of my thesis through an analysis of Archaic Poetry. Part 2 then looks at the complex ways in which Hellenistic poetry engages with this tradition, and how it brings about innovation. Part I of the thesis is made up of two chapters. Chapter 1 deals with Homeric epic poetry, a type of song context that was undoubtedly gendered male. The female voice in these poems, it is argued, represents a foil to the voice of the hero. Whereas the language of heroes gives a performance of their strength, women act out their weakness in direct speeches. Chapter 2 concentrates on Archaic choral songs sung by choruses of young women: partheneia and wedding songs, namely songs in praise of women. These songs, it is argued, strive to act out the beauty of the female body. Visual imagery and deixis of various forms combine in concentrating the audience's gaze onto the spectacle of beautiful dancing bodies in performance. Part II of the thesis studies how Hellenistic poems adopt and rework these traditional modes of fashioning the female voice. Chapter 3 focuses on the Argonautica of Apollonius. The poem responds pointedly to the Homeric codification of the female voice; this is detectable at the level of narrative voice and in several junctures of the poem. The chapter shows that women in the Argonautica make claims to power in a way that is unthinkable in Homer and thereby blur the stark gendered lines that traditionally demarcate the difference between male and female language in epic. Chapter 4 looks at Ps.Theocritus Idyll 27 and Moschus' Europa-poems featuring parthenoi on the cusp of their gamos. These poems, in addition to responding to traditional fictions of the female voice, engage with previous Hellenistic fictions. The traditional fiction of the female choral voice structures the plot of both poems-wedding song in the case of Ps.Theocritus 27, and partheneia in the case of Moschus' Europa. Striking innovation is displayed in the presentation of fictions of female voices of both poems. Idyll 27 requires us to imagine its παρθένος protagonist as a bucolic singer to-be, thus inventing, largely thanks to Theocritean intertexts, the female herder-singer-a figure that does not exist in genuine Theocritean bucolics. Similarly, the Europa constructs epic that is gendered female by making a choral plot the central focus of epic action. Indeed, the plan of Aphrodite is central to the denouement of the story, and sexual attractiveness and desirability enable Europa to wield power. A remodelling of voices and experiences of Homeric Nausicaa and Apollonian Medea structure the creation of the character of Europa.

This is an investigation of the epic poetry produced in and about the Ibero-American world during the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in trilingual perspective: in addition to the more familiar Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts, consideration is also––and, for the purposes of the thesis, above all––given to material in Latin. Latin was the third of the international literary languages of the Iberian imperial world; it is also by far the most neglected, having fallen between the cracks of modern disciplinary boundaries in their current configurations. The thesis seeks to rehabilitate the Latin-language component as a fully-fledged member of the Ibero-American epic tradition, arguing that it demands to be analysed with reference not only to the classical and classicising traditions but to those same themes and concerns––in this case, the centre|periphery binary––as are investigated for counterparts when in Spanish or Portuguese. The crucial difference is that––while the ends may be the same––the means of thematising these issues derive in form and signifying power from interactions with the conceptual vocabularies and frameworks of the Greco-Roman epic tradition. How is America represented and New World space figured––even produced––in a poetic idiom first developed by ancient Mediterranean cultures with no conception whatsoever of the continent of the western hemisphere? At the core is one such long neglected Ibero-American Latin-language epic by a figure who lived across the Iberian imperial world: the 'De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio' (Faenza, 1777) by Catalan-born Jesuit José Manuel Peramás. Peramás’s epic––which has never been the subject of a literary-critical study before––is offered as a test case: an exercise in analysing a Latin-language Hispanic epic qua Hispanic epic and setting it into Ibero-American literary-cultural context. This is to be understood in relation to the field of so-called ‘New World poetics’: an at present emergent zone of inquiry within Iberian colonial studies which until now has been developing almost completely without reference to the Latin-language portion of the corpus.

Reading David Jones’s The Anathemata, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems as epics, this doctoral dissertation challenges the old but persistent notion that epic poetry ceased being written at a particular point in the past and instead examines the particular formal, philosophical and political difficulties writers of this genre had to confront in the second half of the twentieth century. Twentieth-century epic poetry will primarily be defined in terms of its purpose or function, which is the representation of the identity of a ‘community’, while the literary period beginning with the end of the Second World War will be defined as late modernism. Chiefly inspired by Anthony Mellors’s Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne, late modernism will be discussed as an aesthetico-political challenge with which writers had to come to terms in the wake of twentieth-century European totalitarianism. Georges Bataille’s philosophy of community, it will be argued, paradigmatically illustrates these aesthetico-political difficulties in philosophical terms, and the discussions of the three epic poems are therefore preceded by an analysis of Bataille’s Summa Atheologica, which constitutes the core of his philosophy of community.

This thesis explores the theme of the motivation of soldiers in Greek lyric poetry while holding it up against the backdrop of epic. The motivation of soldiers expressed in lyric poetry depicts a complex system that demanded cohesion across various spheres in life. This system was designed to create and maintain social, communal, and political cohesion as well as cohesion in the ranks. The lyric poems reveal a mutually beneficial relationship between citizen and polis whereby the citizens were willing to fight and potentially die on behalf of the state, and in return they received prominence and rewards within the community. It is no coincidence that these themes were so common in a genre that was popular at the same time as the polis and citizen army were both developing.

The introduction of radio broadcasting in the early twentieth century, at a time of rapid development in global communications and travel technologies, prompted a radical re-imagining of the poet - and poetry's - role in this new public, communal space. This thesis seeks to explore and define, critically and creatively, the poetics of the multi-vocal poetic radio play, a sub-genre fundamentally shaped by this reconfiguration. The thesis examines the development, form, and functioning of the multi-vocal poetic radio play which, I argue, is a sub-genre distinct from both the prose radio play and single-voice works of radio poetry. This thesis proposes that the multi-vocal poetic radio play is a reworking of western oral poetry traditions - originating in the oral heroic epic as authoritative, mnemonic, pre-literate repository of collective cultural memory - in the context of the twentieth and twenty-first century's increasingly globalised, pluralistic and documentary modes of representation. Through the simultaneous mechanical reproduction of multiple poetic voices - through the troubling and breaking down of boundaries regarding presence and absence, intimacy and distance, subjectivity, mortality, time, and space - the multi-vocal poetic radio play tends to evoke and refer to dialogic and polyphonic traditions grounded in the liminality of communal ritual and festival. My original multi-vocal poetic radio play script The Blown Definitions imagines a long-distance, elegiac dialogue between a man whose indigenous culture and land is disappearing and his second-generation English-speaking granddaughter. The play examines the potentials of the poetic radio voice, utilising telephone conversations, electronic dictionary definitions, and (fictional) radio broadcasts. The Blown Definitions, and the multi-vocal poetic radio play more generally, through its form and function, exposes and interrogates poetry's functioning in relation to social dynamics - the "social moorings" of the poetic utterance - underlining poetry's capacity to celebrate, critique and reconfigure the imagined communities that shape it.

This thesis charts divine assembly scenes in ancient Mesopotamian narrative poetry and the early Greek hexameter corpus, and aims to contribute to a cross-cultural comparison in terms of literary systems. The recurrent scene of the divine gathering is shown to underpin the construction of small- and large-scale compositions in both the Sumero-Akkadian and early Greek traditions. Parts 1 and 2 treat each corpus in turn, reflecting a methodological concern to assess the comparanda within their own context first. Part 1 (Chapters 1-4) examines Sumerian narrative poems, and the Akkadian narratives Atra-hsīs, Anzû, Enûma eliš, Erra and Išum and the Epic of Gilgameš. Part 2 (Chapters 5-8) considers Homer's Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod's Theogony. The comparative approaches in Part 3 are developed in two chapters (9-10). Chapter 9 offers a detailed comparison of this typical scene's poetic morphology and compositional purpose. Relevant techniques and effects, a function of the aural reception of literature, are shown to overlap to a considerable degree. Although the Greeks are unlikely to have taken over the feature from the Near East, it is suggested that the Greek divine assembly is not to be detached form a Near Eastern context. Because the shared elements are profoundly embedded in the Greek orally-derived poetic tradition, it is possible to envisage a long-term process of oral contact and communication fostered by common structures. Chapter 10 turns to a comparison of the literary pantheon: a focus on the organisation of divine prerogatives and the chief god figures illuminates culture-specific differences which can be related to historical socio-political conditions. Thus, this thesis seeks to enhance our understanding of the representation of the gods in Mesopotamian poetry and early Greek epic, and develops a systemic approach to questions of transmission and cultural appreciation.

This thesis is a systematic study of the representations of Telamonian Ajax in archaic and classical Greece. Its aim is to trace, examine, and understand how and why the constitutive elements of his myth evolved in the way they did in the long chain of its receptions. Particular attention is paid to the historical, socio-cultural and performative contexts of the literary works and visual representations I analyse as well as to the audience for which these were produced. The study is divided into three parts, each of which reflects a different reality in which Ajax has been received (different with respect to time, place, or literary genre). Artistic representations of the hero, as well as his religious dimension and political valence, are consistently taken into account throughout the thesis. The first part - Ajax from Salamis - focuses on epic poetry, and thus investigates the Panhellenic significance of the hero (rather than his reception in a particular place). It treats the entire corpus of early Greek hexameter poetry that has come down to us in written form as the reception of a common oral tradition which each poem has adapted for its own purpose. I establish that in the larger tradition of the Trojan War, Ajax was a hero characterised by his gift of invulnerability. Because of this power, he is the figure who protects his companions - dead or alive - par excellence. However, this ability probably also led him to become over-confident, and, accordingly, to reject Athena's support on the battlefield. Hence, the goddess's hostility towards him, which she demonstrated by making him lose the reward of apioteia (Achilles' arms). His defeat made Ajax so angry that he became mad and committed suicide. I also show how this traditional Ajax has been adapted to fit into the Iliad's own aesthetics. The second part - Ajax in Aegina - concentrates on the reception of Ajax in the victory odes of Pindar and Bacchylides for Aeginetan patrons. I argue that in the first part of the fifth century, Ajax becomes a figure imbued with a strong political dimension (especially with regard to the relationship between Athens and Aegina). Accordingly, I show how the presence of Ajax in Pindar's and Bacchylides' poems is often politically charged, and significant within the historical context. I discuss the influence this had on his representation. Finally, the third part moves to Athens, as I consider Ajax's reception during three distinct periods: the sixth century, the first half of the fifth century, and finally the rest of the classical period. I equally insist on the political dimension of the figure. I demonstrate that his figure undergoes a shift of paradigm in the early fifth century, which deeply affects his representation. By following in the footsteps of Ajax, this study prompts a series of reflections and comments on each of the works in which the hero features as well as on the relationship of these works to the historical context in which they were produced.

This thesis is concerned with the pseudo-Hesiodic Aspis, also known as the Scutum or Shield of Herakles (Heracles). It is divided into two halves: the Introduction, consisting of four chapters, is followed by detailed line-by-line commentary on a portion of the Greek text. Chapter I surveys the evidence for the poem's origins and dating before moving on to its scholarly reception since Wolf. It then argues that, for a proper understanding of the Aspis, the methodologies of oral poetics must be balanced with an awareness of its responses to fixed texts (in particular the Iliad). Chapter II examines the author as a poet within the oral tradition, focussing on: narrative style and structuring; type-scenes; similes; poetic ethos; the poem's position relative to the Hesiodic corpus; the use of formular language; and the growth of the poem in the author's hands. These problems are most fruitfully approached by taking account of the interplay of tradition on the one hand and of allusion to specific texts on the other. Wider points about the advanced stages of the oral tradition also emerge; in particular, from an analysis of narrative inconsistencies in the Aspis it is suggested that writing played a role in the poem's composition. Chapter III positions the poet within the literary tradition: his interactions with other songs and tales are sometimes sophisticated engagements of a kind more often detected in Hellenistic and Roman poetry. The presentation of the protagonist of the Aspis evinces the poet's skilful handling of myth, here manipulated for political purposes. Chapter III concludes with a survey of the poem's reception in early art and in literature up to Byzantine times. In Chapter IV the central section of the poem, the description of Herakles' shield (vv. 139-320), is examined in detail, both in relation to the Homeric Shield of Achilles and within the context of the Aspis. The second half of the thesis comprises a critical edition of and lemmatic commentary on vv. 139-237.

This thesis is a narratological study of Nonnus of Panopolis' Dionysiaca, focussing on the figure of the narrator whose interventions reveal much about his relationship to his predecessors and his own conception of story-telling. Although he presents himself as a follower of Homer, whom he mentions by name in his poem, the Dionysiaca are clearly influenced by a much wider range of sources of inspiration. The study of narratological interventions brings to light the narrator's relationship with Homer, between imitation and innovation. The way he renews and transforms epic narratorial devices attests to his literary skills as he strives for ποικιλία in his poem. His interventions hint at sources of inspiration other than Homer, such as lyric poetry, historiography, and didactic epic. Another innovation is the way the narrator intervenes not to draw the narratee's attention to the contents of his text, but to underline his own role as story-teller. Some interventions signal a change in tone or the integration of another genre; the expected proems and invocations to the Muse become spaces for a display of ingeniousness, a discussion of the sources and a reflection on the role of the poet. The efforts made by the Nonnian narrator to renew well known devices also denotes his mindfulness of his narratee, whom he involves in the story through metaleptic devices, or by drawing on a shared cultural background to enhance the narrative with allusions to extradiegetic references. The study of narratorial interventions proves that the Dionysiaca were not written only in an attempt to recreate a Homeric epic, but are a compendium of influences, genres, and myths, encompassing the influence of a thousand years of Greek literature.

This thesis examines the genre of epic, and particularly Milton’s Paradise Lost. It argues that it is only in attending to the contextual interactions within Paradise Lost that its full meaning can be comprehended. It demonstrates that the poem not only narrates the Fall, but actively performs its consequences in its thematic and linguistic structures, which continually stress the impossibility of approaching perfect (divine) totality. Chapter one outlines the theoretical response to epic, read as a petrified genre in contrast to the newness, openness and linguistic flexibility of the novel. It then challenges these assumptions through a reading of the invocation to book III of Paradise Lost. The chapter closes by examining seventeenth-century writings on epic, demonstrating that Milton’s contemporaries saw the epic as defined by the possibility of didactic intervention into its context. Chapter two examines the forms of the epic metaphor, which serve as a temporal link between the ‘mythic’ past of epic and contemporary events. It then shows that the nationalistic impulse of epic was a method by which the mythic past of a country was deployed as an exemplary narrative for the present. The chapter closes by considering the ways in which shifts in national conception were mapped onto the epic. Chapter three outlines Paradise Lost’s thematic engagement with the concept of representation. It focuses on the twin images of the music of the spheres and the Tower of Babel, used in Paradise Lost to represent man’s relationship with God. It argues that the poem uses these tropes to explore the linguistic effects of the Fall. Both these images are deployed to suggest that postlapsarian expression is too open and ambiguous to properly portray divinity. Chapter four moves that discussion to a linguistic level, arguing that the poem is characterised by indeterminacy. It argues that Paradise Lost calls into question the possibility of expressing perfect truth in fractured, postlapsarian language. It shows that punning is the mark of fallen creatures in the poem, and suggests that the poem’s own puns exploit this category to linguistically question its own status as representation through performances of ambiguity. The conclusion synthesises these local readings of Paradise Lost into a reading of the poem as a whole. It argues that these individual instances demonstrate the poem’s continual reflexive concern over its theodicean project. By continually expressing ambiguity, at the level of imagery and language, Paradise Lost draws attention to its status as postlapsarian art, and the consequent impossibility of approaching the divine perfection exemplified by the celestial music or prelapsarian language.

Landscape in Roman literature is manifest with symbolic potential: in particular, Vergil and Ovid respond to ideologically loaded representations of abundance in nature that signal the dawn of the Augustan golden age. Vergil's Eclogues foreground a locus amoenus landscape which articulates both the hopes of the new age as well as the political upheaval that accompanied the new political regime; Ovid uses the same topography in order to suggest the arbitrary and capricious use of power within a deceptively idyllic landscape. Moreover, for Latin poets, depictions of landscape are themselves sites for poetic reflection as evidenced by the discussion of landscape ecphrases in Horace's Ars Poetica. My thesis focuses upon the depiction and refiguration of the locus amoenus landscape in the post-Augustan epics of the first century AD: Lucan's Bellum Civile, Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, Statius' Thebaid and Silius Italicus' Punica. Landscape in these poems retains the moral, political and metapoetic force evident in the Augustan archetypes. However, I suggest that Lucan's Neronian Bellum Civile fundamentally refigures the landscapes of Latin epic poetry, inscribing the locus amoenus with the nefas of civil war in such a manner that it redefines the perception of landscape in the succeeding Flavian poets. Lucan perverts the landscape, making the locus horridus, a landscape of horror, fear and disgust, the predominant landscape of Latin epic; consequently, the poems of Valerius, Statius and Silius engage with Lucan's refiguration of landscape as a means of expressing the horror of civil war. In the first part of my thesis I examine archetypal landscapes, including those of the Augustan poets and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Taking an approach which engages with literary reception theory and the concept of the â horizon of expectationâ as a framework within which literary topographies can be understood as articulating a response to the thematics of civil war, in the second part of my thesis I demonstrate the manner in which landscapes represent a coherent and paradigmatic response to Lucan's imposition of his civil war narrative within the literary landscape of Roman literature.

The Thesis analyses and evaluates how Gavin Douglas (Eneados, 1513) has refocused Virgil's Aeneid, principally by giving more emphasis to the serial particularity inherent in the story, loosening the narrative structure and involving the reader in its retelling. Chapter I pieces together (from the evidence not merely of what Douglas explicitly says, but of what his words imply) what for him a "text" in general is, and what accordingly it means for a translator or a reader to be engaged with it. This sets the scene for what follows. The next four Chapters look in turn at how he re-expresses important (metaphysical) characteristics of the story. In Chapter II his handling of time is discussed, and compared with Virgil's: the Chapter sets out in detail how Douglas consistently refocuses temporal predicates, foregrounding their disjunctiveness and making them differently felt. In Chapter III spatial position and distance are analysed, and Douglas' way of dealing with space is found to display parallels with his treatment of time: networks are loosened and nodal points are accentuated. In Chapter IV the way in which he presents individuals is compared with Virgil's, and a similar repatterning and shift reveals itself: Douglas provides his persons with firmer boundaries. Chapter V deals with fate, where Douglas encounters special difficulties but maintains his characteristic way of handling the story. The aim of these four Chapters is to characterise formally how Douglas concretises and vivifies the tale of Aeneas, engaging his readers throughout in the retelling. Finally, Chapter VI looks at certain general principles of translation theory (notably connected with the ideas of faithfulness and accuracy) and argues for a way in which Douglas' translation can be fairly experienced by the reader and fairly evaluated as a lively retelling which (albeit distinctive) is fundamentally faithful to Virgil.

Epic texts have long been recognized as demonstrating a profoundly sympathetic interest in human suffering, as well as an abiding concern with proper behavior. In this dissertation, I argue that representations of grief in epic texts from the Iliad to Joseph of Exeter’s De bello Troiano in the twelfth century CE are shaped by powerful but hitherto unstudied frameworks of appropriateness. By setting late and rarely read poems alongside canonical ones over a broad diachronic span, the dissertation shows that anxieties about excessive mourning, especially that of female characters, are a constitutive feature of epic poetry throughout the tradition, forming a literary analogue to the restrictions on public displays of grief by women attested in ancient legislation. On a larger level, this work sheds new light on Greco-Roman approaches to loss—arguably the most timeless human experience of all—to reveal emotional resonances between antiquity and the present. Drawing on evidence from ancient philosophy, grammar and rhetoric, and the visual arts, I demonstrate in the introduction that the Greeks and Romans viewed decorum as not an absolute moral doctrine, but a relative property of proportionality and coherence. In the chapters that follow, I apply this understanding to scenes of mourning in a range of epic texts to show how flexible codes of propriety enabled poets to depict grief in ways at once deeply traditional and fiercely innovative. Throughout, the analysis is informed not only by ancient theories of propriety, but also by modern work on human bereavement from the fields of psychology and anthropology, which offer terminology for various experiences of loss. Chapter 1 approaches extreme grief in the Iliad and Odyssey through the lens of appropriateness and shows that male and female mourners handle their losses in different but equally unproductive ways. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that Apollonius’s Argonautica in some ways upends the Homeric framework by characterizing male mourners as helpless and making a woman the most active—and dangerous—lamenter. Turning from there to the Latin tradition, Chapter 3 examines how Virgil portrays the hero’s emotional control and sets excessive female grief in opposition to the epic mission of the Aeneid, while Chapter 4 argues that Ovid’s Metamorphoses transforms the decorum of epic grief by developing a new system that exposes the contradictions between different models of appropriateness. In Chapter 5, on Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and Silius Italicus’s Punica, I show how earlier tensions surrounding obstructive grief and excessive emotional suppression contribute to the poets’ handling of teleology and heroic characterization. The final two chapters, Chapters 6 and 7, address selected late-antique and medieval texts that demonstrate the enduring relevance and adaptability of the frameworks of decorum and grief seen earlier in the study. As a whole, this project reveals how poets in the Greek and Latin epic tradition grappled with the place of grief in society and creatively represented reactions to loss despite constraints that dictated what was considered appropriate to the genre. Through original readings of individual poems, the dissertation develops the first in-depth treatment of decorum and grief in epic and calls attention to the persistence of anxieties about excessive mourning across texts from antiquity to the Middle Ages.

This thesis engages with texts from the British Romantic period (1780-1830) and particularly with the poetry of Robert Southey (1774-1843) in order to position his writing within its original context of journalism, political commentary and travel narratives, during a period of large-scale exploration and colonial settlement. While critical studies have often examined Romantic poetry in the context of the social and political conditions of Britain and Europe, this thesis argues that because there was a massive increase of empire during this period, events in the wider geo-political arena need to be taken into account. My aim is therefore to restore Southey to the canon in an historicised manner that demonstrates the relationship of Romantic writing to imperial politics. The particular focus of my study is the use that Southey made of foreign cultures in his writing in order to define what he considered to be correct British values, thereby contributing to an early form of nationalism. It considers particularly the poetry Southey wrote that reflects his responses to foreign cultures and colonial politics during the years between 1794 and 1810. It also examines Southey's journalism - where he discussed contemporary political events within his own country and abroad - in order to provide a historical context for his poetic representations. Each chapter of my thesis is organised around a geographical or thematic structure but also conforms to a chronological development through Southey's life and literary career. It thereby delineates a narrative of progression from political radicalism to conservatism that encompasses his developing aspirations for the British Empire.

Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards, Florida’s most recent K-12 educational standards to promote literacy, lack the rising art of Spoken Word Poetry. However, Florida’s Department of Education should integrate Spoken Word into Florida’s Secondary curriculum. Spoken Word Poetry, by its definition, holds researched benefits that align with the B.E.S.T. Standard’s poetry recommendations and literacy-centered goals. In light of such benefits, Florida’s Department of Education should consider various Spoken Word poets and poems to include in Florida’s Secondary Curriculum, as well as explore the resources and integration methods included in this thesis for both teachers and students.

The most distinctive feature of Greek epic poetry, especially of the Iliad and Odyssey attributed to Homer, is its highly developed system of epithets that mark out heroic characters and allowed for improvised oral performance. The question of how the epithet system conveys the identities of particular heroes, and of what “identity” means in the context of oral poetry, has generated a great deal of discussion, but some problems have yet to be dealt with. In particular, the leading proposed theories of signification and characterization grapple insufficiently with the need for narrative character development. This dissertation attempts to offer a correction, and to demonstrate how oral-formulaic characterization through repeated tellings of traditional stories is not only compatible with narrative but enriches it. This dissertation also attempts to demonstrate the Homeric tradition’s awareness and deliberate manipulation of the possibilities and limits of oral-formulaic characterization, as well as the afterlife of Homeric characterization and identity in one of the lyric poets, Pindar. Although chapter 3 contains a brief discussion, by way of example, of some treatments of identity in modern social psychology, the primary method throughout is philological, both internal and comparative. Examples from other poetic traditions in the greater Indo-European language family are used where appropriate.

This dissertation examines the role of elegy in the Thebaid by Statius, from allusion at the level of words or phrases to broad thematic resonance. It argues that Statius attributes elegiac language and themes to characters throughout the epic, especially women. Statius thus activates certain women in the epic as disruptors, emphasizing the ideological conflict between the genres of Latin love elegy and epic poetry. While previous scholarship has emphasized the importance of Statius’ epic predecessors, or the prominence of tragic allusion in the plot, my dissertation centers the role of elegy in this epic. First, I argue that Statius relies on allusion to the genre of elegy to signal the true divine agent of the civil war at Thebes: Vulcan. Vulcan’s erotic jealousy over Venus’ affair with Mars leads him to create the Necklace of Harmonia. Imbued with elegiac resonance, the necklace comes to Argia with corrupted elegiac imagery. Statius characterizes Argia within the dynamic of the elegiac relicta puella and uses this framework to explain Argia’s gift of the necklace to Eriphyle and her advocacy for Argos’ involvement in the war. By observing the full weight of the elegiac imagery in these scenes, I show that Argia mistakenly causes the death of Polynices and the devastation at Thebes as the result of Vulcan’s elegiac curse.Next, I analyze Hypsipyle’s elegiac role in the text in two distinct ways. I first argue that Statius uses elegiac vocabulary from multiple points of view to describe Hypsipyle and her narrative. Her depiction of the Lemnian massacre is indebted to the elegiac topos of militia amoris, and her experiences with Jason, leader of the Argonauts, is characterized by servitium amoris. Then, I examine this elegiac background via Julia Kristeva’s theoretical perspective. Influenced by the association between the elegiac relicta puella and the Kristevan semiotic chora, I expand Hypsipyle’s connection to this topos vis-a-vis Kristeva’s feminine, counter-cultural semiotic. Hypsipyle’s engagement with elegiac topoi throughout the Lemnian and Nemean episodes indicate her oscillation between Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic orders. Hypsipyle further exhibits the temporal attitude of the relicta puella—repetition and immobility—and hinders the forward progress of the epic. This affects both the forward progress of the Argive army as they delay in Nemea, and the successful conclusion of the epic plot. Finally, I conclude with Book 12 and analyze the elegiac revision of Polynices’ epic march Argia proposes to Antigone. Hippolyta makes an appearance as a foil to Argia and Hypsipyle and a signal that the destructive repetitions of the Theban saga are far from over. This project outlines major elegiac influences on the Thebaid. In it, I argue that Statius’ use of the elegiac mode spreads beyond individual allusion to foreshadow, hinder, and construct the very plot and teleological outcome of the epic as a whole. By incorporating multiple theoretical methodologies from intertextual analysis, genre theory, and Kristeva’s post-structuralist perspectives, my research demonstrates the importance of Latin love elegy to Statius’ epic poem.

The genre of heroic epic poetry known as olonkho stands at the forefront of Sakha cultural revival. Its importance has roots in early Soviet nationality policies encouraging ethnic expression and the importance of literary culture in Soviet society. UNESCO’s recognition of olonkho as a “masterpiece of intangible heritage” in 2005 prompted the government of the Sakha Republic to create institutions and policies to promote and preserve it. These institutions engage in debates with performers on the authenticity of contemporary expressions of the epic and how to best ensure that olonkho remains relevant in the lives of Sakha. Olonkho is being integrated into the education of Sakha children as well as being translated for distribution on a global scale. As olonkho solidifies as a signifier for Sakha culture, state sponsorship of the epic indicates support of the expression of Sakha identity in way that resembles early Soviet policies. Current trends indicate that interest in olonkho is growing. Plans for epic-themed projects including the Sakha culture park Olonkholand demonstrate the continuing desire of the Sakha government to invest in the expression of Sakha culture with olonkho at the center.

This dissertation identifies an internal contradiction or inherent tension in the Renaissance epic and reads four early modern English epics in light of this generic feature. Vertical pressure from poets' monarchical patrons to craft teleological political narratives legitimating their rule collided with horizontal pressure from the poets’ humanists peers who expected their poems to reflect cutting-edge humanist historiography and its new methods of critically evaluating documentary evidence. Crises in English politics—from the Elizabethan succession, to the unification of the Crowns under the Stuarts, to Civil War and Restoration—made unitary myth-making more imperative than ever, but advances in history-writing made this task more difficult. Before my readings of English epic commence, a wide-ranging, comparative prologue chapter considers the potential relationship between monotheism and teleological narrative in order to isolate politics as the determinative factor. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596) engages deeply with the legendary matter of Britain popularized centuries earlier by the medieval chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, even as Spenser seems to acknowledge how the legends have been discredited. Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) works through much of the same material, but largely foregoes any attempt to connect the old fables to current political realities, preferring instead to embed these anecdotes from the ancient British past into systematic descriptions of the landscape. Rather than spinning Trojan-British legends into a justification for British unification, Drayton uses the figure of the Severn to remind his readers of the Welsh rights and particularity that has been erased by English hegemony. Abraham Cowley’s Davideis (c. 1640s), while ostensibly about the troubles of King David, also maps onto the exile of the Stuarts during the Interregnum, and rather awkwardly tries to find a Biblical precedent for the Stuarts’ version of absolutist kingship. Finally, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), written after the Restoration of Charles II and Milton’s utter alienation from power politics, rejects English politics and instead dives deep into human prehistory, to the origins of humankind. I argue that Milton’s narrative about the gradual unfolding of human nature and our capabilities resembles the speculative, rational histories couched in the subjunctive written by Hobbes, Vico, Rousseau, and especially Kant. Rather than subjecting these epics to a deconstructive critique that would that expose the poets’ subconscious anxieties, I argue that Spenser, Drayton, Cowley, and Milton were aware of these contradictions, and had the courage—however fleeting—to face destabilizing, disillusioning facts and include them in their great poems.

For years, scholars of medieval German have grappled with how to analyze formal characteristics of the lyric and epic poetry while taking into consideration performance, musicality, mouvance, linguistic variation, and aggressive editing practices. The scholarship has justifiably resorted to restricted explorations of specific texts or poets, or heavily criticized region-specific descriptions with several caveats. The many challenges this multifaceted poetry presents has also obscured one of its most central features—–the medieval voice. With the little evidence we have often being ambiguous or contradictory, how are we to understand the role of the medieval voice in the German corpus as a whole? This project seeks to shed light on this forgotten aspect by taking advantage of computational methods to demonstraterelative formal and thematic relationships based on sound and voice. In doing so, it presents several new prosodic analytical methods. The first chapter of this project underlines the importance of sound and voice to medieval performance and composition. It additionally justifies the syllable as the foundation of the novel formal methods presented in the following chapters. Chapter two presents a newsyllabification algorithm that combines two linguistic principles: the Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Legality Principle. This algorithm is then customized and computationally implemented to perform accurately on medieval German across dialects and editing practices. Chapter three employs this syllabification algorithm to characterize different phonological soundscapes in reference to theme and voice using a modest corpus of only medieval German lyric poetry. While chapter three intends to quantify the vocal affect of a soundscape, chapter four aims to account for the sequencing of these soundscapes within the larger text and corpus. Chapter three therefore lays the foundation for a structural model of medieval German form. Finally, chapter five reduces the corpus once again to a very small subset of medieval German Vierheber (epic poetry with four stresses per line). It presents a supervised machine learning model to predict scansion for these texts according to the theory proposed by Andreas Heusler, and draws conclusions from how different poets took advantage of the freedom this structure allowed.In each chapter, I present the aggregate statistics to confirm and supplement our knowledge of the medieval German corpus as a whole. Yet more importantly, I return to individual texts in order to demonstrate how these newly discovered formal soundscapes manifest and function within a smaller narrative. This combination of “distant reading” and “close reading” supports my overarching argument that medieval German form and content were demonstrably and quantifiably highly intertwined. In many cases markedly different formal, phonologically-influenced structures were implemented to trigger connections to related texts and formats. This project thus creates a new understanding of intertextual relations in medieval German literature.

Whether viewed as an attempt from a pious man to rationalize the acts of God or an exploration of free will, Milton’s Paradise Lost has cycled through diverging, occasionally contradictory, readings since its publication nearly 400 years ago. A sizeable portion of the poem’s complexity lies in the manner in which it chooses to depict God, who is split into the characters of The Father and The Son, and and the Devil. The most notorious figure in Milton’s ouvre, Milton’s Satan stands apart from former depictions of the Devil in its unapologetic identification with the fallen angel’s goals and desires. This, paired with a God that is noticeably less merciful than is traditionally depicted, gives rise to unsettling questions regarding the nature of Christianity and the mind of a poet who would write such a work in a time when, even amongst growing heterodoxy, certain components of Christian faith were considered unshakable truths. The route that I have taken to solve this incongruity is to divorce the text from its source material and view it as something other than just an expression of religious devotion or theological study. Drawing extensively from Milton’s life, historical predicament and political tracts, this reading views the text as an expression of political disillusionment, an examination of the act of revolt from a man who had passionately supported a doomed revolution.

During the Middle Ages, oral poets often sang the tale of the hero Siegfried, his murder, his widow Kriemhild';s revenge, and the downfall of the Burgundian kingdom. A medieval epic poem written in Middle-High German, the Nibelungenlied is widely known among German citizens and scholars alike. Its historical and mythological roots include the defeat of the Burgundians during the Volkerwanderung (Great Migration Period) and the legend of Siegfried. I applied my own knowledge of medieval Germanic literature and music by performing this work in its original language, and this paper discusses the research and planning that went into my performance. Medieval epic poetry was often sung when performed, and the Nibelungenlied is no exception. To prepare the performance, I selected sections of the text to perform and set them to the Hildebrandston, a melody that is believed to be similar to that of the Nibelungenlied, whose original melody is no longer known. I also examined certain phonological aspects of Middle High German so as to present the text as authentically as possible. I accompanied my singing of the Nibelungenlied on a lap dulcimer, a three-stringed, fretted instrument and member of the zither family. I used variations in dynamics, vocal color, and accompaniment to enhance the dramatic aspect of the performance.After my investigations, I was able to consider the cultural context and reception of the Nieblungenlied, as well as interpret its many themes such as honor, duty, betrayal, revenge, and destruction. The entire work can be viewed as a commentary on the shift in ideals from heroic victory to lawful rule and order. In completing this project, I have had the opportunity to explore the relationship between literature and music in their historical and cultural context.

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

In this dissertation I offer an analysis of the ideological significance of Juan de Castellanos' writings in light of the epic model provided by Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana. My main goal is to demonstrate that, unlike Ercilla, Castellanos embraced and manipulated the resources at the disposal of epic poets not only to praise the deeds and defend the rights of the first wave of colonists, but also to challenge the policies of Hapsburg monarchs concerning the administration of the recently established Viceroyalties in the New World. Hence, this dissertation aims to foreground the complexities and ambiguities of a text that bears evidence of an internal ideological fissure that significantly shaped Spain’s political and territorial expansion and contributed to the emergence of a new type of literature. If epic, as has been persuasively argued by Elizabeth B. Davis "was invaluable to the ruling circles of the imperial monarchy, who used it to forge a sense of unity and to script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest" (10), then the heroic poems written by Castellanos on behalf of the conquistadors and encomenderos represent the boldest attempt to turn the most prestigious vehicle of Spanish imperial propaganda, epic poetry, into a tool for the expression of colonial political concerns, a project which included but was not limited to the deployment of aggressive practices of poetic imitation, the expression of a new sense of selfhood, and the demarcation of a new sense of patriotism. Nevertheless, from its inception Castellanos' project was also plagued by many contradictions, most of which are the result of his nostalgia for the values and practices commonly associated with the warrior nobility of the feudal era, and by the constraints imposed by simultaneously having to point to and erase the trace of Ercilla's text.

En este trabajo se analiza cómo Francisco de Terrazas incorpora en su poema Nuevo Mundo y conquista el discurso historiográfico sobre la conquista de México, a partir de los modelos de imitación de la épica. Este procedimiento literario ofrece una visión más compleja sobre los acontecimientos históricos de la conquista. This work studies the rewriting of the historiographical models pertaining to the conquest of Mexico, by focusing on their relationship to the tradition of epic poetry. Terraza’s poem Nuevo mundo y conquista engages in a process of imitation and revision of the historical discourse that narrates the Conquest of Mexico.

This dissertation reconsiders Satan in Paradise Lost outside of the well-worn hero vs. fool debates by linking Satan's meaningfulness in the narrative directly to the conditions of meaning that underlie the poem. Because Satan is for Milton both the embodiment of fallenness and its cause, his journey through the poem demonstrates how the world in which Paradise Lost constructs itself comes to be. For this reason, "Satan's Poetry" argues that Satan's development in the poem underlies the poem's own development, providing us with a way to understand how the poem situates itself as a part of the fallen world and what it means for it to be thus fallen. The first chapter demonstrates that the language of poetry is the language of Satan, or fallen language more generally, and that this language is negatively constructed, a language of "enigmas" in the Adornian sense. By making this connection between Satan and Milton's poetics, this dissertation then goes on in the second and third chapters to rethink Paradise Lost's relation to its poetic tradition, arguing that this negative language produces negative relationships between individuals (human or poetic) in the fallen world. These relationships demand that we read allusion as the use of old words and images to mean something new, demonstrating Paradise Lost's distance from its predecessors rather than its proximity; reading in this way, as the second chapter demonstrates, allows us to read Milton's poem against multiple texts at once, rather than confining our readings to the linear model of influence relations. The third chapter argues that these differential relationships force us to rethink Milton's tradition not as a coherent whole or "canon" whose authority restricts subsequent literary endeavors, but as a constellation of specific relationships between individual texts that demands creation instead of repressing it. This turn to the creative individual that is the result of the fall is, the final chapter argues, the crucial problem with which Paradise Lost grapples, and "Satan's Poetry" ends by demonstrating that the very negativity that is the symptom of fallenness also bears with it the promise of redemption.