OpenUCT :: Browsing by Subject "English Literature"

Browsing by Subject "English Literature"

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Action and activism in selected novels by Ursula K. Le Guin
(1994) Deetlefs, Dorothea Maria; Cartwright, John
This thesis examines individual and societal action and activism in five science fiction and utopian novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, namely, The left hand of darkness, The word for world is forest, The lathe of heaven, The dispossessed, and Always coming home. Le Guin is a politically committed author whose ideological perspective is informed by feminism, Taoism, and anarchism, as well as a strong ecological awareness. These determine the structure of her fictional societies and the actions of her characters. Each novel is approached on its own terms, with the commentary adhering closely to the text. Individuals and their societies are conceived of as embodying different and conflicting ways of being and doing. The author is seen as an activist by virtue of her political commitment, especially in the case of the self-reflexive, self-critical Always coming home. Included in the Introduction are sections on: Tom Moylan's concept of the critical utopia, which tailors the utopian genre to fit modern views; Le Guin's concept of the yin utopia, one possible form of the critical utopia; and a short section on Taoism, familiarising the reader with concepts and terminology used in the thesis.
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The aesthetics of radical critique : Kant or the dialectic and revolution
(2004) Malcomess, Bettina
This dissertation attempts to account for the paralysis of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and thus of radical critique in relation to practice in general. It begins by demonstrating that there is a methodological problem in the connection of the dialectical method to Adorno and Horkheimer's philosophy of history, which posits Enlightenment both as break with the history of reason, and as ahistorical concept of that history. The dissertation takes as its point of departure their discussion of Kant, as exemplary Enlightenment thinker. I will use Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination and Axel Honneth's Critique of Power- Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory here. The strategy of the next section is to rehistoricise Kant's thought and thus the Enlightenment within its historical moment. This follows a close reading of Kant's political philosophy in his' An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' and 'Contest of the Faculties' to show that Kant poses the problem of the morality versus politics in terms inseparable from his historical context: the emergence of the Modem state, and the French revolution. Two solutions to this problem present themselves within Kant's separation of public and private uses of reason. Public and private anticipates the Modem separation of state and civil society: 'moral-political' problem is thus solved by 'publicity', which plays a mediating role. A subtextual reading however, proposes that the public/private split refers to an internalisation of the political principle in what Etienne Balibar calls the 'citizen subject'. We will use Balibar's paper, ""Citizen Subject"", to show that the 'citizen subject' of Modernity emerges with the French revolution. Finally, these two possible solutions to the Kantian moral-political problem will be mapped to the political philosophical models of power of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault respectively. Foucault's model of 'disciplinary' power will be connected to the 'citizen subject' while Habermas and Arendt's normative conceptions of publicness in their juridico-political models of power will be mapped to the first solution based on the dualism state/civil society. I will make use of Cohen and Arato's Civil Society and Political Theory, as well as various other secondary texts on political philosophy here. The last section will work out more clearly the relationship between Foucault's genealogical critique, the 'citizen subject' and the French revolution. It will show the similarity between Foucault's genealogy and the dialectical method in relation to Kant's historical reflection on his own present. To work out the conditions of this mode of what we will call radical critique of the present by Kant, and its basis on a Modern philosophy of history we will turn to Hannah Arendt's reading of Kant's political philosophy from his Aesthetics. Here Reinhart Koselleck' s Futures Past - On the Semantics of Historical Time will prove instructive on the link between Kant's philosophy of history, based on the metahistorical concept of revolution and Kant's judgement of the French revolution as historical event. The main thesis of this dissertation is that the radical critique of the present, in this case that of Foucault's genealogy and the dialectical philosophy of history of Adorno and Horkheimer are caught up in the same contradictions as Kant's radical judgement of the French revolution; and that this problem takes on an aesthetic form .
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An analysis of selected ""cyberpunk"" works by William Gibson, placed in a cultural and socio-political context
(2005) Blatchford, Mathew
This thesis studies William Gibson's ""cyberspace trilogy"" (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). This was an extremely interesting and significant development in 1980s science fiction. It was used to codify and promote the ""cyberpunk"" movement in science fiction at that time, which this thesis also briefly studies. Such a study (at such a relatively late date, given the rapid pace of change in popular culture) seems valuable because a great deal of self-serving and mystifying comment and analysis has served to confuse critical understanding about this movement. It seems clear that cyberpunk was indeed a new development in science fiction (like other developments earlier in the twentieth century) but that the roots of this development were broader than the genre itself. However, much of the real novelty of Gibson's work is only evident through close analysis of the texts and how their apparent ideological message shifts focus with time. This message is inextricably entwined with Gibson's and cyberpunk's technological fantasias. Admittedly, these three texts appear to have been, broadly speaking, representations of a liberal U.S. world-view reflecting Gibson's own apparent beliefs. However, they were also expressions of a kind of technophilia which, while similar to that of much earlier science fiction, possessed its own special dynamic. In many ways this technophilia contradicted or undermined the classical liberalism nominally practiced in the United States. However, the combination of this framework and this dynamic, which appears both apocalyptic and conservative, appears in some ways to have been a reasonably accurate prediction of the future trajectory of the U.S. body politic -- towards exaggerated dependency on machines to resolve the consequences of an ever increasingly paranoid fantasy of the entire world as a threat. (It seems likely that this was also true, if sometimes to a lesser degree, of the cyberpunk movement as a whole.) While Gibson's work was enormously popular (both commercially and critically) in the 1980s and early 1990s, very little of this aspect of his work was taken seriously (except, to a limited degree, by a few Marxist and crypto-Marxist commentators like Darko Suvin). This seems ironic, given the avowedly futurological context of science fiction at this time.
Open Access
Athol Fugard : his dramatic work with special reference to his later plays
(1987) Sarzin, Anne; Haresnape, Geoffrey
In the introduction, the writer highlights Fugard's regional artistry, his authentic reflection and recreation of a nation's tormented soul. The first chapter deals with Fugard's early plays, revealing the embryonic playwright and those characteristics of imagery, construction, language and content to be developed and refined in later plays. Briefly examined within this context are No-Good Friday, Nongogo and Tsotsi, the playwright's only novel. A chapter on the Port Elizabeth plays written in Fugard's apprenticeship years, The Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena, focuses on his growing skill as a dramatist, his involvement in his milieu both geographically and emotionally, as well as providing detailed analysis of the plays in terms of major features such as national politics, universal values, existentialism and Calvinism. The period of collaboration in which Fugard responded to the suggestions, imaginative projections and creative stimulus of his actors, forms the content of a chapter devoted to detailed study of the improvised plays: The Coat, Orestes, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and The Island. The later Port Elizabeth plays, A Lesson from Aloes and "Master Harold ' ... and the boys, are explored from political and personal perspectives respectively, with attention paid to the intensely human dramas that dominate even the overtly ideological considerations. A chapter on the television and film scripts - The Occupation, Mille Miglia, The Guest, Marigolds in August - traces Fugard's involvement in these media, his economy of verbal descriptions and his taut control of his material generally. A chapter is devoted to Fugard' s women, the characters who present affirmative points of view, whose courage, compassion and determination infuse a hostile world with a range of possibilities beyond survival and existence. Milly in People are Living There, Frieda in Statements After An Arrest Under The Immorality Act and Miss Helen in The Road to Mecca form a Fugardian sorority of survivors. The final chapter of the thesis is devoted to Dimetos, regarded as an intensely personal artistic statement, an examination of the dramatist's alterego, the playwright's persona.
Open Access
Beowulf - Hæleð under Heofonum
(1986) Viljoen, Leonie; Van der Westhuizen, J E
This study of the design of Beowulf examines the possible function of the 'digressions', the poet's concept of time, the nature of the hero and the generic status of the poem. Finally, a suggestion as to the possible intention of the poem is proposed.
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Charles Dickens and the private life of the imagination
(1978) Strauss, Peter Erik
This thesis takes as its point of departure the analysis of a certain formal element which appears in narrative during the nineteenth century. It concentrates especially on the form this element takes in Dickens's works, particularly in Great Expectations, and in so doing it joins a large group of recent writings in which critics have tried to develop more flexible ideas about the formal structure of Dickens's novels than had been current before. This new focus of attention has been important, because Dickens presents the critic with certain problems which can only be overcome if he develops a fairly complex sense of what might constitute the novel form when Dickens is handling it.
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The collapse of the heroic tradition in 20th century war poetry
(1979) McArthur, Kathleen Maureen; Birkinshaw, Philip
In the last two decades there has been a growing interest in the English poetry of the First World War. One of the products of this interest has been a great deal of literary criticism culminating in three major studies: by John H. Johnston in 1964; Bernard Bergonzi in 1965; and John Silkin in 1972. All of these critics have felt the need to look back to the past to establish the literary forebears of the trench poets. Johnston believes that the roots of war poetry are in the Germanic and Greek epics; Bergonzi that they are in the anti-heroic poetry of the Elizabethans; and Silkin, in the liberal, humanitarian poetry of the Romantics. Their approaches are valuable in giving new insight into the poetry of the First World War and helping to place it in an historical perspective, but their surveys seem inadequate and even misleading. There is, for instance, no epic war poetry in English literature, and so Johnston's criticism of the trench poets for failing to maintain epic standards seems unjust; and while it is true that Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg's work proceeded from the same impulse that stimulated the humanitarian poetry of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, neither Bergonzi nor Silkin recognizes that the dominant tradition in English war poetry, from the Battle of Maldon to the outbreak of the First World War, was an heroic one, and that the poets of the Great War wrote largely in reaction to this tradition.
Open Access
Curious astringent joy : an exploration of major Nietzschean echoes in the writing of William Butler Yeats
(1977) Bohlmann, Otto; Birkinshaw, Philip
William Butler Yeats first came under the thrall of / Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in the Dublin summer of 1902. 0 His friend and patron, the New York lawyer John Quinn, had sent Yeats a modest volume of Nietzsche with the imposing title of Nietzsche as Critic, PhiZosopher, Poet and 'Prophet, containing 'Choice Selections from His Works' compiled by Thomas Common, who was to become a major contributor to the Oscar. Levy English edition of Nietzsche's Werke.
Open Access
Detection and the modern city
(1993) Rossouw, Jean-Pierre; Marx, Lesley
This dissertation examines detective fiction as a form which has evolved in close relation to the modern city from the nineteenth century to the present. The argument runs that the link between the urban setting and the detective story is an essential characteristic of the form which has been undervalued in the study of detective fiction. The importance of this relationship to the genre is delineated and emphasized through the use of representative examples, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe and then moving to Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett and finally a number of later writers in the field, all of whom use the city as setting for the narrative, as well as a problematizing element. The city can be a comfortably known environment wherein the detective operates, but it can also be a labyrinth of confusing forces and misleading clues. For the detective, whose goal is the solution of the puzzle, this environment causes by turn reassurance and distress. In a comparison between these authors, fundamental differences pertaining to the detective as individual and his interaction with the city are explored, and a development is described which sees the detective becoming increasingly unsure of the city and of his position within it. In terms of the genre, this relation shows how the detective becomes a figure who has to be dealt with in ever more complex terms, a shedding of the sureties of the past. On the personal level, the detective becomes a symbol of the modern individual in the city, who tries to make some sense of the living environment which the city offers, and the difficulties which the city creates for perception of the environment and the development of self-realization in terms of this environment. The study therefore operates on three levels: the formal, where the epistemology of the detective form is traced from early confidence to later manifestations of disruption of these confidences; the socio-urban, where the representation of the city is described as it changes; and the linked concern operating on the individualistic level, the development of the detective as unitary individual and "hero".
Open Access
Educating the other : the politics of somatic difference in Frankenstein
(2013) Melvill, Oliver; Young, Sandra; Sofianos, Konstantin
The dissertation engages in a postcolonial reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It argues that Frankenstein and the education of Frankenstein's creature are both deeply rooted in colonial discourse, the nature of the colonial other and the place of this other within Western society. By charting how this discourse functions in the construction of physical alterity, this paper argues that through his exposure to language and society Frankenstein's creature becomes complicit in this process of imposition in which he is placed as the object of a discourse which construes him as other.
Open Access
The efficacy of song itself : Seamus Heaney's defence of poetry
(2009) Rowan, Sarah; Watson, Stephen
The defence of poetry dates back, in English literature, to Sidney's 'An Apology for Poetry' (1595), and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen an increasing number of writers advancing arguments in support of an art form that seems, more than ever, to be under threat. In this thesis, Seamus Heaney's essays on the purpose of poetry are considered as they constitute a defence of the art form. While Heaney's poetry and prose have, as a result of his popularity and standing as a poet, generated an almost unprecedented body of critical work, his defence of poetry has not been recognised as such, nor has it come under sufficient critical scrutiny. Essentially a defence of a defence, this thesis redresses that omission by examining Heaney's apology as it takes shape in his essays, and in its application to a selection of his own poems.
Open Access
Emerging HIV communities and self : the representation of self and community in South African HIV/AIDS literature
(2010) Cumpsty, Rebekah; Clarkson, Carrol; Chirambo, Reuben
HIV/AIDS is a prominent part of contemporary South African experience that has found expression in many forms, one of which is literature. This thesis analyses the relation between self and community as it is represented in South African HIV/AIDS literature. The argument of the thesis is underpinned by a dual theoretical strand.
Open Access
Frankenstein: a monstrous romanticism
(2010) Königkrämer, Lobke; Tiffin, Jessica; Clarkson, Carrol
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the relationship between Mary Shelley's first novel Frankenstein and her own understanding of Romanticism. The overarching theme is to illustrate how Mary Shelley navigates her criticism of Romanticism through the medium of Victor Frankenstein as a character. With the inspection of Victor Frankenstein some autobiographical similarities are drawn between the protagonist and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Another aim and extension of this autobiographical project is to examine how Percy Shelley's editing of the original manuscript of Frankenstein added or detracted from the plot. Finally, the genre implications of Frankenstein are examined in this thesis. In the first chapter, Romanticism is examined in relation to how the Romantics themselves envisioned their ideology so as to ascertain which aspects Mary Shelley draws particular attention to. The Romantic theorists used in this section specifically, Abercrombie and Schueller, are used to highlight the fact that Romanticism can be defined as a unified system of belief. Certain tenets of this ideology are then shown to be the main points that Mary Shelley criticises. In the second chapter, the autobiographical element of Mary Shelley's relationship with Percy Shelley is examined. The parallels between Victor Frankenstein and Percy Shelley are made apparent through the use of biographers Hoobler and Seymour. From that, the precise changes that Percy Shelley made to the original manuscript of Frankenstein are scrutinised with Mellor's insightful explication of the original that exists in the Bodleian Library. The conclusion of this chapter solidifies the argument of the first chapter, and as close attention is paid throughout both chapters to the novel as a primary source of confirmation, the complex navigations and articulations of Romanticism throughout Frankenstein are made apparent. In the third chapter, attention is given specifically to the genre implications of Frankenstein, and the relationship and consistent oscillation between Romanticism and the Gothic is traced. The theorists used in this part of the thesis vary widely and include Botting, Golinski and Alwes. It is argued that in her destabilisation of Romanticism, Mary Shelley invariably incorporates the Gothic into her text. It is this complex weaving of genres which is particularly interesting in relation to how Mary Shelley's disillusionment with Romanticism produces a text that has such a vast array of genre possibilities. Finally, this thesis looks at the negative interpretation of Romanticism specifically in relation to Mary Shelley's critical expressions of its ideology in Frankenstein. As a cautionary tale, the consequences of Romantic principles unchecked by a societal conscience, Mary Shelley seems to have used Frankenstein as a way of expressing her disillusionment. The repercussions of what ultimately is an original story of a scientist who unleashes his creation without concern for its welfare are still present in the common consciousness of modern society.
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Hindsight and sexuality in the French Lieutenant's Woman
(2012) Diamond, Ariella
The following thesis investigates the role of hindsight and sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. In this instance I look closely at the two main characters of the novel, namely Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, and I show the varying levels of freedom that each character displays in a Victorian world.
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The image of woman in the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
(1972) Kaplan, Gloria
The purpose of this study is to examine the development of W.B. Yeats's concept of woman as it is revealed in his poetry and to evaluate its literary treatment. It is generally accepted that women played an important part in Yeats's life and that they exerted a significant influence in various directions - a fact that is borne out by the numerous friendships and relationships with women throughout his lifetime. It is not sufficiently realized, however, that they provided him with both a powerful source of poetic inspiration and an important subject matter throughout his poetic career. Woman, as an object of contemplation and speculation, forms an integral part of the very stuff and fibre of Yeats's poetry, as is testified to by the range, depth and inclusiveness of his vision, which comprises not only the expression of his personal dreams and longings but a more far-reaching and penetrating study of women's relationship to society, history and ethics. It is surprising, therefore, that the significance of woman in Yeats's poetic development has been so scantily treated by Yeats's critics.
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"In the shadows" : David Foster Wallace and multicultural America
(2017) Joffe, Daniela Franca
This dissertation reads David Foster Wallace's literary output against the complicated history of identity politics and multiculturalism in America. Wallace's career coincides with the institutionalisation of second-wave feminism in the 1980s (including at his own university, Amherst College), the turn towards multicultural education and alternative literary canons in the 1990s, and the rising tide of nationalism and right-wing patriotism after 9/11. I depart from the universalist, ahistorical, post-racial framework of traditional Wallace scholarship to consider the literary and rhetorical strategies that Wallace employs as he tries to make a name for himself and remain relevant in a time of rapid social change, shifting reader demand, and growing hostility towards the elite postmodernist style in which he was trained. I argue that Wallace's fiction is marked not so much by an effort to adapt the writing to be more multicultural, race-conscious, feminist, and so on, but rather by an effort to signal that the author is aware of multiculturalism, feminism, and race matters, and that he is on the winning side of the ongoing culture war. Looking at The Broom of the System, I highlight the negotiation that takes place in the book between Wallace's desire to appear as the erudite and masterful postmodernist, versed in the tenets of metafiction and poststructuralism, and his desire to appear as the sensitive white male, attuned to an increasingly politicised female readership. In Infinite Jest, I examine Wallace's attempt to almost "out-traumatise" black women's writing of the 1990s by delivering a sprawling anthology of white hardship and anguish (grounded mainly in upper-middle-class experience). In The Pale King and Wallace's other post-9/11 writing, I show how the author wraps his unmistakably conservative vision of America and American masculinity in socially liberal, progressive-sounding discourse. The postscript offers a brief reflection on the significance of Wallace's work in the age of a Donald Trump presidency, and suggests that Wallace, had he lived to witness the 2016 election, might not have been as unequivocal in his rejection of Trump as his admirers might assume.
Open Access
John Barth's later fiction : intertextual readings, with emphasis on Letters (1979)
(1994) Nas, Aloysia Antonia Sophia Maria; Coetzee, John M
This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter I serves as an introduction to intertextuality; it focuses on John Barth's narrative crisis and discusses structuralist and poststructuralist theories of intertextuality. Chapters II, III and IV discuss the agencies of reader, author and text respectively. Chapter II looks at structuralist and poststructuralist notions of reading and John Barth's parodic play with these notions; it also provides an in-depth analysis of the external and internal readers of LETTERS. Chapter III concentrates on the roles of the reader as re-writer and the author as re-arranger and looks closely at the roles of the different narratorial agents in LETTERS. Chapter IV starts off with a discussion of the discourse of the copy in postmodern culture and moves, via poststructuralist and narrativisit mimesis, to different forms of repetition as developed by Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Chapter V focuses on John Barth's rethinking of notions of authorship and authority. It first gives an historical introduction to authorship, starting off in the Middle Ages, and then moves, via eighteenth-century Samuel Richard, son and nineteenth-century Edgar Allan Poe and Soren Kierkegaard, to twentieth-century· notions of authorship as developed by Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Culler,to end with Jacques Derrida's signature theory. Bibliography: p. 340-356.
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K. Sello Duiker's realism: form, critique, and floating kingdoms
(2017) Rourke, Warren Jeremy; Higgins, John
Before drawing together composite elements from his works of novelistic art, as well as his life in writing, the intention of this thesis is to argue that Duiker's realism is an 'authentic' one. Furthermore, Duiker's 'commitment' as an authentic literary realist is to 'articulate' an oppositional world outlook that I am codifying as 'alter-native'. The alter-nativism is expressed not only by the 'interplay' of the 'lumpen' protagonists of the novels but by Duiker himself in the extra-generic marginalia to his short literary career. In order to give 'value' to the contention of this thesis as a whole I will utilize a number of theorists working critically with the relation between language and consciousness, and therefore, as I argue, the 'zero point' of social being.
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Marguerite Poland and the Shades Archive: The Use of the Author s Archive in Close Analysis
(2024) Webster, Emily; Anderson, Peter
Marguerite Poland's Shades combines the histories of South Africa's Eastern Cape and her own missionary ancestors to create a novel which utilises fictionality for postcolonial criticism and a search for identity. Shades is therefore deeply situated within the historical archive on which the text leans heavily to provide credibility to the semi-fictional historical narrative. However, a closer examination of Poland's research points towards the existence of a cache of information which informed the writing of her text. This thesis has consequently termed this concept the ‘author's archive'. When the author's archive is examined in conjunction with Shades, a deeper understanding and far stronger analysis emerges – resulting in authoritative conclusions rather than speculation. The purpose of this thesis is ultimately to introduce the theoretical concept of an author removing and manipulating material from the archive with the intention of constructing their own archive of sources. Because of the focus on the creation of a theoretical framework, a theoretical rather than methodological approach is most suited. This thesis has therefore sought to construct and define a theory to examine the relationship between the auctorial and the archival rather than create and apply a method of analysis. Poland's Shades presents itself as an ideal case study due to Poland's intentional and obvious employment of the archive. Firstly, her adaptation and subsequent utilisation of intermingled archival fact and original fiction prompts an investigation of what led Poland to select specific material from the archive. Secondly, Poland's characters are predominantly based on fact. Many were inspired by the oral and written history of her missionary ancestors, which she in turn adapts and subverts through fictionalisation to suit her narrative. An analysis of these characters provides an opportunity to examine Poland's interweaving of historical versus imaginative due to their varying range of fictionality. The reconstruction and examination of the archive Poland created for Shades has undoubtedly led to a substantial analysis of Shades and Poland's creation of the text. However, a conclusion has also been reached that analysing the author's archive reveals how fiction can be supported by fact rather than fact simply supported by fiction, and how this can lead to the emergence of an accreditable historical narrative.
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Moving passions: theories of affect in Renaissance love discourse and Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays
(2004) Gordon Colette
The 1998 film, Shakespeare in Love, sets Will Shakespeare (and itself) the challenge to "show the nature and truth of love ... to make it [love] true" - with an ideal presentation of Romeo and Juliet. The film finally achieves this by ensuring that Will and Viola end on stage as Romeo and Juliet, playing the parts they respectively inspire. The film, and the play within the film, can achieve the satisfactory embodiment of true love only, it seems, through the replacement of stage lover/player with 'real' lovers. The film attempts to unite love and art, but finds stage representation naturally adverse to its idea of true (authentic) love. Persuasion is similarly suppressed as inimical to the film's notion of art as expressive (of authentic emotion). But, where love is conceived as spectacularly mobile, mimetic and transformative - as I show it was, in the early modem period - to effectively communicate and to affectively produce love are, of necessity, linked. Joseph Roach has pointed persuasively to rhetoric's strong connection with humoral theory. Using texts from Wilson, Wright and Bulwer, I pursue and extend his focus on the early modem passionate, rhetorical actor; the interface between body and mind; and the possibility of powerful rhetorical passions, generated in performance. The film assumes (true) love as an emotion that is rare, elusive and, crucially, authentic. But as a renaissance 'passion', love would have very different qualities. Such passions would be vital, dynamic forces, directly communicable and contagious, commonly available and commonly shared. I argue that love, more properly "affect" or "passion", was frequently valued in the Renaissance, not as a stable locus of inner truth and authenticity (the thinking that necessitates the suppression of the actor in Shakespeare in Love), but for its very ability to 'move' where, in Rosemond Tove's words, "the unity of the process moving: persuading is not disturbed." I look for this movement in a number of Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays, particularly The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labours Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night and examine the forms of passion in compelling topoi that attend love in the plays - Petrarchan tropes powerfully linked to early modem ideas of representation (especially dramatic) and the interaction, in imitation, between bodies and minds. Early modem passions threaten clear distinctions between desires and emotions, body and mind and, importantly, self and other. I argue that, when passions are communicable and shared, the passionating actor participates in ideal forms beyond realistic imitation or personal, interior emotional experience - a process to which the real, ideal love of Shakespeare in Love is superfluous.

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