Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literary criticism - William Golding'

This thesis undertakes a study of the contradictions embedded in Golding's fiction. It is difficult, as I attempt to show, to treat Golding under the rubric of revolutionary, conservative, liberal humanist, optimistic or pessimistic writer separately. Golding's fiction shows a mind which is at once creative and enmeshed in the mysteries of the universe. However, I attempt in this study to shed light on the many contradictions which I think are present in his work. For this purpose, I concentrate on eight novels as the objects of my analysis. Lord of the Flies, Golding's first novel, displays a contradiction which is at the heart of Golding's vision. WhiIe Golding tries hard to show the hardness of man’s heart, he risks falling into pointlessness if the project were to end only on this note. Golding is caught up in the dilemma of at once believing in Original Sin and wanting to see an alternative future for humankind. If man is "originally" incapable of harmonious living, how is he ever to achieve this harmony? In Pincher Hartin, Golding delves deeper into a religious dogmatism which believes in individual greed. This greed, however, threatens ultimately to undo the "system" within which it exists. But if Golding tries hard to eliminate this individual greed, how then can he emphasise that man is originally sinful? With the removal of this greed and many other sins with it, man is likely to become "pure", something which Golding does not believe in. In Free Fall, Golding explores the idea of art for art's sake. One of the problems of this idea is that it leaves the political implications of any situation completely intact. The Spire enacts a different kind of contradiction. Jocelin, in one sense a saintly figure who can "see" more intuitively than the others, is driven into despair at his own creation. He ultimately loses faith in his own "powerful" vision. In The Paper Men, Golding embarks on a new way of treating his own themes. In its technique, this novel is closer than any of the others to postmodernist literature in its permutations, displacements, and indecisiveness. As for the trilogy, here Golding reaches a position where he can confidently be described as a liberal humanist. The trilogy paradoxically shows Golding at his best. The contradictions of the protagonist Edmund Talbot "reflect" those of a social class that has within it the features of both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. At the end, Golding does not "solve" these contradictions and he leaves us with a proposition that could see the end of all literary criticism and analysis. It is in the conclusion to this study that I address this problem.

This thesis examines the ministerial call in three novels by William Golding, specifically The Spire, Darkness Visible, and Rites of Passage. The central character of each novel, a Christian minister, has a vision, or series of visions, which dominates his life. The call and vision(s) of Golding's ministers are examined in light of Jacques Ellul's The Humiliation of the Word, a work examining the differences between the word and the image. The ministerial call, in this thesis, is linked to Ellul's ideas about the word; the vision, in this thesis, is linked to Ellul's ideas of the image. As a result of following their vision(s) rather than their call, the ministers fail, and their lives end in despair and ruin.

This dissertation provides a critical, systematic survey of economics in literary theory and practice. Since Aristotle, economic categories have been used as interpretive grounds on which to conceptualize the literary text and distinguish it as a moral or normative sphere. Because economic categories presuppose different norms of individual and social action, the use of a specific category as an interpretive ground generates a particular outlook or moral perspective.
In the first part of the discussion, we critique theories in which the literary text is conceptualized as an economy. After distinguishing three distinct models of the "textual economy," we evaluate them in terms of their logical consistency and normative presuppositions. Selecting the model that is the most logically consistent and normatively valuable, we study two early modern works to see if this model operates as an intentional device implicated in a work's form and content. The works chosen are William Shakespeare's Sonnets and William Bradford's history "Of Plimoth Plantation," both of which display a facination with economic discourse.
The second part of the discussion takes up the question of economics in the theory and practice of putting texts in context. We distinguish four different models of contextualization that depend on economic categories. Explicitly or implicitly, contemporary research agendas and critical positions depend on these categories to situate a literary text in a specific setting. An economic category like exchange, for example, is frequently privileged as a common ground, a shared quality or characteristic used to integrate a text with a context. After critiquing models of contextualization, we synthesize the best they have to offer into a new framework. We then use this framework to situate the texts by Shakespeare and Bradford into the historical settings of their production and reception. The result is a picture of the text in context that is vital, a moving picture, quite unlike the customary still life of artifact and background.

Proceeding from the assumption that psychoanalytic theory has yielded insightful literary interpretations, I propose that equally legitimate readings result from analyzing consciousness in literature. William Jamesâ â Stream of Thoughtâ offers a psychological theory of consciousness from which I develop a literary theory that counterbalances the Freudian emphasis on the unconscious. Examining two works by Henry James, I demonstrate how assessing the elements of a characterâ s consciousness leads to conclusions at which other theories do not arrive. This analytical approach leads to not only an alternative critical agenda but also a fuller understanding of the psychological function of the characterâ s and, by extension, the human mind.
Master of Arts

In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.

Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler argue that human perception relies on a form, or gestalt, into which perceptions are assimilated. Gestalt theory has been applied to the visual arts by Rudolf Arnheim and to literature by Wolfgang Iser. My original contribution to knowledge is to use gestalt theory to perform literary criticism, an approach that highlights the importance of perception in William Gibson's novels and the impact of this emphasis on posthumanism and science fiction studies. Science fiction addresses the problem of difference and the relationship between self and other. Gestalt literary criticism takes perception as the interface between the self and the other, the human and the inhuman. Gibson's work is of particular interest as his early novels are representative of 1980s cyberpunk while his later novels push the boundaries of science fiction through their contemporary settings. By engaging with Gibson the thesis makes its contribution to contemporary science fiction criticism explicit. In Gibson's Sprawl trilogy autopoiesis defines life and consciousness, elevating the importance of perception (Chapter I). The Bridge trilogy uses the metaphor of chaos theory to examine dialectic tensions, such as the tension between space and cyberspace (Chapter II). Faulty pattern recognition is a key theme in Gibson's post-9/11 work as gestalt perception allows and limits knowledge (Chapter III). Chapter IV explains how the gestalt in psychoanalysis creates a fragmented subject in Spook Country (2007). Finally, the gestalt appears as a parallax view, a view that oscillates between the world we experience and the world as represented in the text (Chapter V). I conclude that gestalt literary criticism offers an exciting new reading of Gibson's work that recognises its engagement with visual culture and cyberpunk as a whole.

Esta tese procura analisar a obra do ensaísta e crítico inglês William Hazlitt (1778-1830) a partir de um conjunto de imagens que vinculam as diferentes etapas envolvidas durante o ato de confecção do ensaio crítico e literário aos acidentes topográficos e à textura do solo, expressos no arquétipo recorrente do autor, ao résdo- chão. Pela análise interna de texto e do exercício de leitura, perseguimos as passagens em que Hazlitt reflete sobre seu próprio metiê. A defesa do ensaio como forma de arte coloca-lhe a exigência de um altíssimo grau de elaboração que o aproxima, por analogia, à crítica inventiva e a outras formas de arte. Nesse sentido, o estudo desses elementos formais foi indispensável à pesquisa também nos foi de grande valia o exame de alguns aspectos históricos e culturais, como o chamado Romantismo Inglês. Nos interessou, sobretudo, aquilo que definimos como atitudes mentais próprias do ensaísta, experimentadas e vividas por Hazlitt com intensidade, a saber: o retratista, o amigo e o adversário. Desse modo, cada um dos três capítulos desta tese pretende cobrir uma dessas atitudes. No primeiro capítulo, sobre o retratista e o estágio inicial de confecção do ensaio (a inspiração), acompanhamos o autor em suas peregrinações juvenis na leitura cerrada de algumas passagens de dois ensaios em que ele narra a sua experiência de conversão ao mundo das artes, My First Acquaintance with Poets e On the Pleasure of Painting, e no modo como os retratos literários que escreveu de Jean-Jacques Rousseau e de Edmund Burke, seus legítimos precursores, apontaram a ele os caminhos para uma crítica inventiva. No segundo capítulo, sobre a atitude do amigo e a leitura, encontramos Hazlitt ora na solidão de seu quarto, mastigando os pensamentos, ora em companhia de pessoas próximas. Intimidade e convivência são os ingredientes chaves para essa etapa do trabalho. Para Hazlitt, a escrita de ensaio envolve um convite cordial ao leitor, com o qual o ensaísta espera dividir amigavelmente a sua tarefa. No terceiro capítulo, sobre a escrita, investigamos o papel do ensaísta como agente das transformações sociais, própria à atitude do adversário. O ensaio se apresenta como espaço privilegiado onde se travam lutas com ideias e se disputa uma causa; o ensaísta, por sua vez, se apresenta como o homem das ruas (man-about-town), cujas andanças pela metrópole londrina e convivência com os homens, sobretudo aqueles pertencentes às classes baixas, permitiu-lhe combinar à elegância do ensaísta os momentos combativos e ousados de prosa.
This thesis analyzes the works of the English essayist and critic William Hazlitt (1778-1830) from a body of images that binds the different stages involved in the craft of the critical and literary essay to topographical accidents and the texture of the soil, as expressed in the author recurrent archetype on the plain-ground. My point of departure was the internal analysis of texts and close reading of certain passages where Hazlitt reflects on his own metier. The claims he makes in that essay is an art form required from him a high standard of formal elaboration that analogically approaches the literary essay and inventive criticism to other art forms. Thus, a careful examination of these formal elements was indispensable for this study. Moreover, some historical and cultural aspects that encompass Hazlitt and his time, the so called British Romanticism, were also part of my analysis, inasmuch as the author brings them to bear in his writings, and according to what I have conceptualized as mental attitudes proper to the essayist. In my understanding, three are the essayists attitudes as intensely experienced by Hazlitt, namely, the portraitist, the friend, and the adversary. Therefore, each of the three chapters in this dissertation aims at unveiling one of these mental attitudes. In the first chapter, on the portraitist attitude and the first stage in the making of the essay (the insight), I have followed Hazlitt during his youthful pilgrimages from an analysis of a few emblems pertaining in My First Acquaintance with Poets and On The Pleasure of Painting, where he narrates his moment of conversion to a world of art. Furthermore, I have linked these essays to the literary portraits Hazlitt traced of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke, his genuine precursors, in order to understanding the paths along which he was initiated into inventive criticism. In the second chapter, on the friend mental attitude, we find Hazlitt by the fireside, either in the solitude of a room of his own, chewing his thoughts, or in the company of close friends. Intimacy and conviviality are the key ingredients to this stage in the craft of the essay (reading). According to Hazlitt, the writing of essays requires a cordial invitation to readers, with whom the essayist hopes to share his task in a friendly way. In the third chapter, on writing itself, I have inquired into the role of the essayist as an agent of social changes, a mental attitude suitable to the adversary. The essay presents itself as a privileged place where the writer struggles with the world and disputes a cause; and the essayist as the man-about-town, whose rambles in the streets of the metropolis and conviviality with the people, particularly those belonging to lower classes, enabled Hazlitt to combine the sustained and controlled rhythms of the polite culture of the essayist with strenuously argumentative, emphatic speeches.

Scholars have heretofore under-examined William Makepeace Thackeray's early critical essays despite their potential for illuminating Victorian manners and life. Further, these essays' treatments of aesthetics, class, society, history, and politics are all influenced by the pecuniary aspects of periodical journalism and frequently expose socio-economic attitudes and realities. This study explicates the circumstances, contents, and cultural implications of Thackeray's critical essays. Compensatory payments Thackeray received are reconciled with his bibliographic record, questions regarding Thackeray's interactions with periodicals such as Punch and Fraser's Magazine answered, and a database of the payment practices of early Victorian periodicals established. Thackeray's contributions to leading London newspapers, the Times and the Morning Chronicle, address history, travel, art, literature, religion, and international affairs. Based upon biblio-economic payment records, cross-references, and other information, Thackeray's previously skeletal newspaper bibliographic record is fleshed out with twenty-eight new attributions. With this new information in hand, Thackeray's views on colonial emigration and imperialism, international affairs, religion, medievalism, Ireland, the East, and English middle-class identity are clarified. Further, Thackeray wrote a series of social and political "London" letters for an Indian newspaper, the Calcutta Star. This dissertation establishes that Thackeray's letters were answered in print by "colonial" letters written by James Hume, editor of the Calcutta Star; their mutual correspondence thus constitutes a revealing cosmopolitan - colonial discourse. The particulars of Thackeray's Calcutta Star writings are established, insights into the personalities and viewpoints of both men provided, and societal aspects of their correspondence analyzed. In his many newspaper art exhibition reviews Thackeray popularized serious painting and shaped middle-class taste. The nature and timing of Thackeray's art essays are assessed, espoused values characterized and earlier analyses critiqued, and Thackeray's role introducing middle-class readers to contemporary Victorian art explored. Other Thackeray newspaper reviews addressed literature; indeed, Thackeray's grounding of literature in economic realities demonstrably carried over from his critical thesiss to his subsequent work as a novelist, creating a unity of theme, style, and subject between his early and late writings. Literary pathways originating in Thackeray's critical reviews are shown to offer new insights into Thackeray novels Catherine, Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, and Pendennis.

This dissertation examines the arguments against tragedy offered by feminist playwrights in their "re-visions" of the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare.
In the first part, I maintain that feminist dramatic re-vision is one manifestation of an unrecognized tradition of women's writing in which criticism is expressed through fiction. I also argue that the project of feminist dramatic re-vision embodies a feminist "new poetics."
In the second part, I examine the aesthetics and politics of tragedy from a feminist perspective. Feminist arguments against tragedy are, in effect arguments against patriarchy. But it is the theorists and critics of tragedy---not the playwrights---who are unequivocally aligned with patriarchy. Playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare can be seen to destabilize tragedy in their plays.
In the third part, I show how recent feminist playwrights (Jackie Crossland, Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Deborah Porter, Caryl Churchill and David Lan, Maureen Duffy, Alison Lyssa, The Women's Theatre Group and Elaine Feinstein, Joan Ure, Margaret Clarke, and Ann-Marie MacDonald) counter tragedy by extrapolating from the arguments presented by Euripides and Shakespeare in The Medea, The Bacchae, King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Othello , and by allocating voice and agency to their female protagonists.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008.
Title from file title page. Randy Malamud, committee chair; Meg Harper, Paul Schmidt, committee members. Electronic text (61 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 3, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-61).

This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.

Through a close analysis of four plays by Shakespeare, this thesis argues that the question of subjectivity ultimately comes to be negotiated around a structural impasse or certain points of opacity in each of the text's signifying practices. Challenging assumptions about the utatively "theatrical" contexts of Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, I argue that, to varying degrees, the specular economy of each play is in fact traversed by a radical alterity that constitutively gives rise to a notion of subjectivity commonly referred to as "Shakespearean". Elaborating upon the work of both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, I argue that "subjectivity" in the plays is, rather, the articulated confrontation with a non-dialectizable remainder that haunts each text from within. Crucially in this respect I relate each of the texts to Lacan's account of the "gaze" as a species of what he calls the object a: an alien kernel of jouissance exceeding all subjective mediation yet, paradoxically, also that which confers internal consistency both to subjectivity and to the very process of symbolization as such. I am, moreover, also concerned to read the work of Jacques Derrida as providing an illuminating context for how this incursion of alterity that he terms differance (what Lacan calls the Real) may be read as the unacknowledged support of subjectivity. The thesis concludes with a consideration of how this analysis of the Shakespearean object, rather than succumbing to the heady pleasures of an unfettered textuality, opens, ineluctably, onto a rethinking of the very category of the "political" itself.

O presente trabalho compreende traduções anotadas dos seguintes textos: \"Algumas observações sobre William Shakespeare por ocasião do Wilhelm Mei ster\", de August- Wilhelm Schlegel; \"Resenha de \'Algumas observações sobre William Shakespeare por ocasião do Wilhelm Meister\', de August-Wilhelm Schlegel\", de Friedrich Schlegel e \"Sobre o Meister de Goethe\", de Friedrich Schlegel, além de uma dissertação introdutória em que se procura alinhar as principais características da teoria do drama e do romance dos autores, tais como se depreendem dos textos traduzidos, e fazê -la contrastar com a doutrina neoclássica em vigência até então.
The present work was presented as a Master\'s degree dissertation, and comprises the annotated translation of the following texts into Portuguese: \"Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters\", by August-Wilhelm Schlegel; \"Review of \'Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters\', by August-Wilhelm Schlegel\", by Friedrich Schlegel, and \"Über Goethes Meister\", by Friedrich Schlegel, beyond an introductory dissertation, in which the main features of the authors\' theories of drama and novel are sketched such as they might be deprehended from the translated texts, and contrasted to the neoclassicist doctrine so far dominant.

In order to contribute to the body of work on Bolingbroke and on Shakespeare's development of character, this thesis examines various rhetorical and stylistic methods used by Shakespeare in his creation of the character of Henry Bolingbroke.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.

This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.

In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a variety of sources, "[taking] various qualities now from one man and now from another." In this way, Castiglione advocates for a self-fashioning grounded in a discriminating kind of synthesis, the generation of a new ideal form through the selective combination of various source materials. While Castiglione focuses on the moves necessary for an individual to fashion himself through this act of discriminatory mimesis, his views can explain the ways authors of the period use source material in the process of textual production. As poets and playwrights fashioned their texts, they did so by consciously combining various source materials in order to create not individuals, as Castiglione suggests, but characters to represent new cultural ideals and values. Early moderns viewed the process of textual, as well as cultural production, as a kind of synthesis. Creation through textual fusion is particularly common in early modern accounts of the heroic, in which authors synthesize classical conceptions of the hero, which privilege the completion of martial feats, and Christian notions of the heroic, based on the contemplative nature of Christ. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1585), Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), William Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus (1594), and John Milton in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1632) syncretized classical and Christian notions of the heroic ideal in order to comment upon and shape political, social, and literary discourses. By recognizing this fusion of classical heroism with contemplative heroism, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the reception of classical ideas within an increasingly secular society.

This dissertation is an examination of the interiority of American authorship from 1815–1866, an era of political, social, and economic instability in the United States. Without a well-defined historical narrative or an established literary lineage, writers drew upon death and the American landscape as tropes of unity and identification in an effort to define the nation and its literary future. Instead of representing nationalism or collectivism, however, the authors in this study drew on landscapes and death to mediate the crises of authorial displacement through what I term "xenotopia," strange places wherein a venerated American landscape has been disrupted or defamiliarized and inscribed with death or mourning. As opposed to the idealized settings of utopia or the environmental degradation of dystopia, which reflect the positive or negative social currents of a writer's milieu, xenotopia record the contingencies and potential problems that have not yet played out in a nation in the process of self-definition. Beyond this, however, xenotopia register as an assertion of agency and literary definition, a way to record each writer's individual and psychological experience of authorship while answering the call for a new definition of American literature in an indeterminate and undefined space.

This dissertation examines William Plomer's first novel, Turbott Wolfe (1925), within its socio-political and literary context, and also explores the crucial relationship between the author's life and his work. Turbott Wolfe at one level represents Plomer's complex responses to and interpretation of the South African milieu during the early 1920s. During this decade, the foundations of modem Apartheid were being consolidated, and African Nationalism emerged as a powerful challenge to the South African state. Turbott Wolfe is informed by these political developments, and the milieu and events portrayed in the novel vividly express the author's feelings about and attitudes towards the society he finds himself in. Since its publication, ZiZ&stsJBal&a has suffered considerable critical neglect The superficiality of much of the existing criticism about the novel must be challenged, since Turbott Wolfe is not only of tremendous intrinsic literary merit, but also provides valuable insights into the socio-political environment and historical moment in which Plotter wrote. Thus one of the novel's main concerns is the all informing "colour question", which dominated political debate in the 1920s. Plomer's appr< -• "colour question" is unorthodox,« rajor question confronting the reader is how this unusual novel cane to be written. An examination of earlier fiction reveals that Turbott Wolfe is both influenced b; and a reaction against existing literary traditions, while the major themes show in what way and to what extent the novel is engaged with contemporary sociopolitical issues. The key to this crucial question, however, lies in a detailed exploration of the author's personal history. Turbott Wolfe emerges as an important work within the development of South African literature, a novel which encapsulates some of the complexity and diversity of contemporary South Africa, as perceived by its youthful author.

Satire and counsel recur together in the secular literature of the High and Late Middle Ages. I analyze their collocation in Latin, Old Occitan, and Middle English texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century in works by Walter Map, Alan of Lille, John of Salisbury, Daniel of Beccles, John Gower, William of Poitiers, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Skelton. As types of discourse, satire and counsel resemble each other in the way they reproduce scenarios of social interaction. Authors combine satire and counsel to reproduce these scenarios according to the protocols of real-life social interaction. Informed by linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and cultural anthropology, I examine the relational rhetoric of these texts to uncover a sometimes complex and reflective ethical discourse on power which sometimes implicates itself in the practices it condemns. The dissertation draws throughout on sociolinguistic methods for examining verbal interaction between unequals, and assesses what this focus can contribute to recent scholarly debates on the interrelation of social and literary practices in the later Middle Ages. In the first chapter I introduce the concepts and methodologies that inform this dissertation through a detailed consideration of Distinction One of Walter Map’s De nugis curialium . While looking at how Walter Map combines discourses of satire and counsel to negotiate a new social role for the learned cleric at court, I advocate treating satire as a mode of expression more general than ‘literary’ genre and introduce the iii theories and methods that inform my treatment of literary texts as social interaction, considering also how these approaches can complement new historicist interpretation. Chapter two looks at how twelfth-century authors of didactic poetry appropriate relational discourses from school and household to claim the authoritative roles of teacher and father. In the third chapter, I focus on texts that depict relations between princes and courtiers, especially the Prologue of the Confessio Amantis which idealizes its author John Gower as an honest counselor and depicts King Richard II (in its first recension) as receptive to honest counsel. The fourth chapter turns to poets with the uncertain social identities of literate functionaries at court. Articulating their alienation and satirizing the ploys of courtiers—including even satire itself—Thomas Hoccleve in the Regement of Princes and John Skelton in The Bowge of Court undermine the satirist-counselor’s claim to authenticity. In concluding, I consider how this study revises understanding of the genre of satire in the Middle Ages and what such an approach might contribute to the study of Jean de Meun and Geoffrey Chaucer.

This project asserts that much of the cultural anxiety found in Gothic-infused late-Victorian fiction derives from literary revelations of the nested spaces, shifting identities, and spontaneous connections inherent to the late-Victorian metropolis. The three literary texts studied here – The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung, and The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan – all depict London as fundamentally suitable for those who seek to evade the disciplinary gaze and to pursue menacing schemes of criminality and invasion. Doyle’s text illustrates the interconnectedness of the spaces within London as well as the passable threshold between London and the English countryside; both the villain Stapleton and the hero Sherlock Holmes use these connections to attack and defend, respectively, the city and its inhabitants. Hornung’s stories depict the machinations employed by the gentleman-thief Raffles as he alters his identity and his codes of behaviour in order to free himself to pursue criminal ends and thus as he challenges cultural barriers. Buchan’s text, building on the others, explores the dissolution of cultural boundaries and identities incumbent upon the spontaneous connections made between those who attack English culture and those, like Richard Hannay, who defend it. There emerges in these texts a vision of London (and by extension Great Britain) as a swirling vortex of motion, an unknowable labyrinth perpetually threatened by menacing agents from without and within. I have employed Victor Turner’s theories of liminality and communitas to describe how criminal agents, and their equally menacing “good-guy” pursuers, separate themselves from structured society in order to move freely and to gain access to the contested thresholds they seek to infiltrate. I also invoke theories of the Gothic, surveillance, and travel, as well as Jeffrey Cohen’s monster theory, to characterize the anxiety embedded in such invasions.
The transformation of contested space : Baker Street, Grimpen Mire and the battle for thresholds in The hound of the Baskervilles -- Hornung's code-switching monster : threatening ambiguity and liminoid mobility in Raffles, the amateur cracksman -- Towards a more inclusive Britishness : Richard Hannay's transformative connections and evolving identity in The thrity-nine steps.
Department of English