| dc.contributor.author | Cranton, James Frederick. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:36:54Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1993 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1993 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINN93648 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55379 | |
| dc.description | This thesis takes as its starting-point the literary criticism of George Whalley. One theme treated here is the fearfully broad one of literary mimesis. Whalley, following Aristotle's lead, calls mimesis "the bond between poetry and life", and observes that "mimesis is an activity or process and not a thing or product." Much of my attention here is directed to how poems depend upon this active, processive quality, which Whalley also names their "drama, the trajectory of pure action traced out by the whole poem." | en_US |
| dc.description | After an opening chapter wherein I outline and comment on Whalley's criticism, I go on in chapter two to discuss Hamlet with an eye toward examining the nature of the relations that occur (processively, actively) within what Whalley calls poetry's "irreducible unit", the aesthetic triad of poet, poem, and reader. Whalley tells us that readers of poetry should come to their work with "innocence of intent", but without expansion this recommendation may appear simply the product of wishful thinking; Hamlet provides an exemplary instance of how Whalley's notions of the aesthetic triad and innocence of intent can complement each other. I consider a second instance of Shakespearean drama (1 Henry IV) in my third chapter, which concerns the making of history and of history (and other) plays. | en_US |
| dc.description | In chapter four I move to a less strictly "dramatic" form--the dramatic monologue--with the hope of suggesting how in this case too the relations within the aesthetic triad prove informative of what poems do, as does the fact that both speakers and readers of dramatic monologues perform acts of intention that can be either innocent or not innocent. I move to yet another literary form in chapter five when I take up Great Expectations, in response to which I attempt to fathom what it might mean to speak (as Whalley, following Edwin Muir, does) of "the dramatic novel". I conclude with a discussion of Whalley's own The Legend of John Hornby. In this final chapter I examine both Whalley's criticism and The Legend with Aristotelian principles foremost, and again I adhere to the course of considering a particular poetic text with a view toward seeing whether, as he himself says of Aristotle, Whalley has something "absolute" to say about mimesis. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1993. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | Between poetry and life: George Whalley and the drama of mimesis. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
