Dissertations / Theses: 'Pynchon, Thomas English Literature'

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Raguz, Christopher. "Paranoid Epistemologies: Essays on Thomas Pynchon and the Scene of Disappearance." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2118.

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The following five essays are connected by their reference to a scene – imagined by the author Thomas Pynchon. The disappearance of historical cause, the subject, and the human constitute this epistemological scene. Each essay can be read without logically building off of any other – yet they form a wider assemblage of interpretative theory. These are fragments capable of recombination in any order. They shun systematization but welcome kinship. Pynchon's fiction is the substrate underlying each. Abstract machines of theorists thinking on similar wavelengths are used as catalysts in an effort to force a reaction – an attempt to transmute the stories of paranoid schlemihls into yet more paranoid epistemologies. How do we understand the degree to which we are organized by whatever systematizes? How do we relate to whatever organizes our knowledge, our identities? What, exactly, is playing us? These are the anxieties these essays share with Pynchon's characters and formulate the questions driving their theory. Call it the Post-Modern, the Post-Human, or any other Post, Pynchon anticipated its event horizon half a century before its more obvious implications made themselves clear. If we have passed fully over this horizon, figuring out where we are and what's going on has become a question of survival, and Pynchon's anticipation of our contemporary scene have become increasingly salient. These essays offer paranoid epistemologies for the age of disappearance.

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Li, Xu. "A postmodernist parodic allegory : Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49." Thesis, University of Macau, 2009. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2554106.

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Zadworna-Fjellestad, Danuta. "Alice's adventures in wonderland and Gravity's rainbow a study in duplex fiction /." Doctoral thesis, Stockholm, Sweden : Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1986. http://books.google.com/books?id=Q5laAAAAMAAJ.

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Eigeartaigh, Aoileann N. "'I shop, therefore I am' : consumerism and the mass media in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1790.

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This thesis argues that consumerism and the mass media wield an unparalleled influence over contemporary North American society, and that these forces constitute the primary means through which identity is constituted. The historical and theoretical developments that have led to the foregrounding of these forces are outlined in the introduction - developments, it is argued, that are intrinsically connected to the social upheava1 that characterized America in the late 1960's and early 1970's, while their presence in and effects on the fiction of four contemporary North American writers - Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland - are examined in the main body of the thesis. Chapter I focuses on Pynchon whose novels, it is argued, are the product of a uniquely post-1960's America, which mourns the sacrifice of traditional ideals to the corporate mindset which has been prevalent since ths 1980's Pynchon's dominant metaphor for the direction in which he believes American society to be moving is the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which stipulates that all prqress is towards death. His novels abound with characters who disintegrate due to the information overload fostered by their media-based world. However, he retains his faith that a return to historical values and traditions will stem and even reverse the entropic tide DeLillo, a close contemporary of Pynchon's, draws on a different aspect of the legacy of the 1960's, for his writing is overshadowed by the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy and the years of turbulence that ensued. His novels are ultimately more pessimistic because his characters do not succeed in escaping from the repressive narratives of consumerism and the mass media in order to reassert their own personalities. One reason for this failure, it is argued, is that DeLillo's characters represent a metaphorical dramatization of the dichotomy between the modernist desire for structure and the postmodernist embrace of fluidity and uncertainty. The fictional characters of the younger authors, Ellis and Coupland, inhabit this postmodern world where all experience has been rendered depthless and traditional ontological and epistemological certainties have been collapsed Ellis' characters fluctuate between the extremes of apathy and violence as they search for a way of preventing their psyches from disintegrating amidst the surrounding chaos. Neither one of these options brings - any relief. Coupland is more optimistic about the ability of his characters to survive and even prosper in the contemporary world. He arms them with the linguistic and technological skills necessary to adapt to the rapid social and technological changes. Most importantly of all, he draws on the sense of objectivity fostered by his own background as a Canadian in order to provide them with an alternative and a sense of escape from the media-saturated environment of the American West Coast. What is perhaps most remarkable about these four authors as a group is that in spite of their obvious insight into the nature of the contemporary postmodern world, they are unwilling - or perhaps even unable - to fully relinquish their hold on a number of traditional metanarratives, most notably the ideal of the stable, supportive family unit. This implies a degree of uncertainty and perhaps even of fear on their parts about fully committing to the fluidity of contemporary culture.

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Dvorak, John N. "Lukácsian aesthetics in a post-modern world: understanding Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon through the lens of Georg Lukács’ the historical novel." Thesis, Kansas State University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/3896.

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Master of Arts
Department of English
Timothy A. Dayton
This thesis project seeks to reconcile the literary criticism of Marxist critic and advocate of literary realism Georg Lukács with the writing of postmodern author Thomas Pynchon in order to validate the continued relevance of Lukácsian aesthetics. Chapter 1 argues that Lukács’ The Historical Novel is not only a valid lens with which to analyze Pynchon’s own historical novel, Mason & Dixon, but that such analysis will yield valuable insight. Chapter 2 illustrates the aesthetic transition from the historical drama to the historical novel by using Lukács’ ideas to explicate The Courier’s Tragedy, a historical drama found within the pages of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Chapter 3 applies Lukács’ ideas on the “world-historical” figure and the “mediocre” hero of the classic historical novel to Mason & Dixon. Chapter 4 asserts that Mason & Dixon enables contemporary readers to experience the novel as what Lukács calls a “prehistory” to the present. This chapter also illustrates how the prehistory of Mason & Dixon anticipates Pynchon’s nonfiction essay “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” Finally, this chapter demonstrates how Pynchon avoids the pitfall of modernization in Mason & Dixon, which Lukács defines as the dressing up of contemporary crises and psychology in a historical setting. Chapter 5 ties together the work of the previous four chapters and offers conclusions on both what Pynchon teaches us about Lukács, as well as what Lukács helps us to learn about Pynchon.

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Bewernick, Hanne. "The storyteller's memory palace a method of interpretation based on the function of memory systems in literature ; Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster." Frankfurt, M. Berlin Bern Bruxelles New York, NY Oxford Wien Lang, 2008. http://d-nb.info/1001701801/04.

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Klose, Yvonne [Verfasser]. "«How had it ever happened here?» : A Constructivist Reading of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and its Role in the Pynchon Canon / Yvonne Klose." Frankfurt : Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2012. http://d-nb.info/1042414904/34.

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Sigvardson, Joakim. "Immanence and transcendence in Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" : a phenomenological study /." Doctoral thesis, Stockholm : Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb39265658c.

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Ashford, Joan Anderson. "Ecocritical Theology Neo-Pastoral Themes in American Fiction from 1960 to the Present." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/52.

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Ecocritical theology relates to American fiction as it connects nature and spirituality. In my development of the term “neo-pastoral” I begin with Virgil’s Eclogues to serve as examples for spiritual and nature related themes. Virgil’s characters in “The Dispossessed” represent people’s alienation from the land. Meliboeus must leave his homeland because the Roman government has reassigned it to their war veterans. As he leaves Meliboeus wonders why fate has rendered this judgment on him and yet has granted his friend Tityrus a reprieve. Typically, pastoral literature represents people’s longing to leave the city and return to the spiritual respite of the country. When Meliboeus begins his journey he does not travel toward a specific geographical location. Because the gods have forced him from his land and severed his spiritual connection to nature he travels into the unknown. This is the starting point from which I develop neo-pastoral threads in contemporary literature and discuss the alienation that people experience when they are no longer connected to a spirit of the land or genius loci. Neo-pastoralism relates Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope and the expansion of the narrative voice of the novel to include the time/space dialogic. Neo-pastoral fiction shows people in their quest to find spirituality in spite of damage from chemical catastrophic events and suggests they may turn to technology as an ideological base to replace religion. The (anti) heroes of this genre often feel no connection with Judeo-Christian canon yet they do not consider other models of spirituality. Through catastrophes related to the atomic bomb, nuclear waste accidents, and the realization of how chemical pollutants affect the atmosphere, neo-pastoral literature explores the idea of apocalypticism in the event of mass annihilation and the need for canonical reformation. The novels explored in this dissertation are John Updike’s Rabbit, Run; Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer; Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead; Toni Morrison’s Paradise; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

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Davis, Robert Lawrence. "History and Resistance in the Early Novels of Thomas Pynchon." The Ohio State University, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392046961.

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Dix, Andrew. "Ideology and Utopia in novels by William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1995. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283702.

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Woodhead, David P. "The necessity of innovation : an interpretation of the novels of Thomas Pynchon." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.277904.

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Meresse, Bastien. "Thomas Pynchon ou les territoires de la faille." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017USPCA110.

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Géographe picaresque à cheval sur les côtes atlantique et pacifique, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior signe une œuvre orientée vers l’origine défectueuse et la trajectoire entropique du continent américain, sept générations après la grande migration puritaine à laquelle son ancêtre William fut l’un des premiers à participer. L’enjeu de cette thèse est de revenir sur la façon dont le roman pynchonien cherche à circonscrire les figures de cette latence de la grande faute américaine, un « vice caché, » puisque tel est le titre de son avant-dernier roman, pour retrouver la prairie perdue et composer un contre-espace au sein de la fiction. Ouverte à toutes les modulations historiques, la notion de fantasmagorie occupe une œuvre où le flâneur, dans un dernier geste de résistance politique, est mené à déchiffrer la crise d’une surface surcodée par la déformation optique et les reflets trompeurs de la ville. En traversant les reflets de cette cité sur la colline, Pynchon met à jour une stratigraphie de l’Amérique, une géologie de la faute, où les lignes de faille et brèches dialoguent avec les mythes fondateurs et achèvent de fracturer la géographie idéalisée du continent, signalant la nature défectueuse de son espace mais aussi de son temps, traversé par la crise. Face à l’insuffisance des récits fondateurs et aux spasmes de l’Histoire, l’écriture pynchonienne réagit en s’enroulant autour de nouvelles modalités narratives, pour faire émerger, entre les lignes, les bifurcations et les incertitudes d’un récit historique écrit au « Subjonctif. »
As a picaresque cartographer standing astride the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. stresses the flawed origin and entropic trajectory of the American continent, seven generations after the great Puritan migration to which his forebear William participated. This dissertation aims to recast the way his work defines these latent figures of the American fault, an “inherent vice,” for such is the title of his penultimate novel, in order to recover the lost prairie of the past and recompose an idealized counter-space within the realm of fiction. This work will consider how the notion of phantasmagoria inhabits a cityscape overcoded by optical devices and deceitful distortions that can only be resisted by the flâneur’s politics of loitering. By exposing the dreamworld of this city upon a hill, Pynchon delves into the depths of the continent and starts a stratigraphic study of America: geological fault-lines engage in a dialogue with deficient founding myths and fracture the revered geography of the continent, signaling the defective nature of its space but also of its time, permeated by the cracks of the crisis. To face the failure of founding narratives and the spasms of History, Pynchon’s work unfolds new modalities that, while not essential to narrative, disrupt reading procedures and suffuse his historical novels with the forking paths and counterfactuals of the “Subjunctive” form

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Adams, Brittany N. "From Postmodernism to Psychoanalysis: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1302656178.

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Engelhardt, Nina Malaika. "Mathematics in literature : modernist interrelations in novels by Thomas Pynchon, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7769.

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The focus of this thesis is on four novels’ illustrations of the parallels and interrelations between the foundational crisis of mathematics and the political, linguistic, and epistemological crises around the turn to the twentieth century. While the latter crises with their climax in the First World War are commonly agreed to define modern culture and literature, this thesis concentrates on their relations with the ‘modernist transformation’ of mathematics as illustrated in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1930-1932), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). In the revaluation of mathematics during its foundational crisis, the certainty and rationality of this most certain science is challenged, and the novels accordingly employ mathematics as an example for the dramatic transformation of the modern West, the wider loss of absolute truth, and the increasing scepticism towards Enlightenment values. Crisis, however, also implied some freedoms and opportunities for literature and criticism. When the developing modern notion of mathematics is defined by autonomy and independence from the natural world, it bears traits more commonly associated with literary fiction, and the novels examine the possible convergence of mathematics and literature in the freedom of imaginary existence. The novels thus highlight the unique position of the structural science mathematics in the relation of the (natural) sciences and the humanities and suggest it to escape or straddle the perceived divide between the disciplines. The examination and historicising of relations between fiction and mathematical conceptualisations of the world as introduced in the major works by Pynchon, Broch, and Musil thus also contributes to distinguishing the specific conditions of studying mathematics in fiction in the wider field of literature and science.

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Dalsgaard, Inger Hunnerup. "The fabrication of America : myths of technology in American literature and culture." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.327046.

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Siwiec, Kamil [Verfasser], Simone [Akademischer Betreuer] [Gutachter] Winko, and Claudia [Gutachter] Stockinger. "Strategien der Desorientierung in der postmodernen Prosa : Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49, Elfriede Jelineks Lust, Witold Gombrowicz‘ Kosmos / Kamil Siwiec. Betreuer: Simone Winko. Gutachter: Simone Winko ; Claudia Stockinger." Göttingen : Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, 2016. http://d-nb.info/1105036197/34.

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Chagas, Pedro Ramos Dolabela. "Da impossibilidade da lucidez: a dissolução do Século XX em O arco-íris da gravidade, de Thomas Pynchon." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2007. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=4315.

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Esta tese analisa a relação entre a ficcionalização da História Moderna e o desenvolvimento de uma ética da vida cotidiana no romance O arco-íris da gravidade, do norte-americano Thomas Pynchon. Para a sua análise e interpretação, será desenvolvido, no primeiro capítulo, um aporte teórico-metodológico que coteje a complexidade formal da narrativa (que dificulta a sua síntese temática) para se estabelecer, a partir daí, as condições de possibilidade de detecção de núcleos temáticos recorrentes que, numa rede de interconexões não-concêntrica ou dispersiva , perspectivizam no romance uma totalização fraturada do sistema-mundo moderno e contemporâneo. No segundo capítulo a ficcionalização do século XX é apresentada em suas configurações metafísica e intra-mundana, e no capítulo final são analisadas as condições que ela impõe para a formação, dentro do real ficcional, de rotinas e modos de vida eticamente positivos
This dissertation analyzes the relation between the fictionalization of Modern History and the development of an ethics of daily life in Thomas Pynchons Gravitys rainbow. For the novels interpretation, the first chapter develops a theoretical and methodological approach capable of dealing with its formal complexity (one which obscures thematic synthesis) in order to establish, thereby, the conditions of possibility of detection of recurring thematic elements, which in their turn through a dispersive or non-concentric network of connections puts into perspective some fractured totalization of the modern and contemporary world-systems. The second chapter presents the novels fictionalization of the Twentieth Century in its mundane and metaphysical configurations, whereas the last chapter analyzes the conditions they settle for the formation, within the fictional reality, of ethically positive routines and modes of life

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Slagle, Judith Bailey. "Thomas Shadwell." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/482.

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Book Summary Provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the poetry, drama, fiction, and literary and cultural criticism produced from the Restoration of the English monarchy to the onset of the French Revolution Comprises over 340 entries arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Written by an international team of leading and emerging scholars Features an impressive scope and range of subjects: from courtship and circulating libraries, to the works of Samuel Johnson and Sarah Scott Includes coverage of both canonical and lesser-known authors, as well as entries addressing gender, sexuality, and other topics that have previously been underrepresented in traditional scholarship Represents the most comprehensive resource available on this period, and an indispensable guide to the rich diversity of British writing that ushered in the modern literary era

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Li, Chi-fang Sophia. "Thomas Dekker and Chaucerian re-imaginings." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1091/.

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This study aims to offer a new literary biography of Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632) and demonstrates the ways in which he refashions his principal source, Geoffrey Chaucer. The first chapter considers Dekker in both literary and theatre histories, situating him amongst his collaborators: Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. This chapter also aims to re-evaluate Dekker’s achievement in history, starting from Dekker’s presence in Henslowe’s Diary, his ‘part’ in the War of the Theatres, his theatre writing, followed by his observations of London written during the plague years, his imprisonment, and his posthumous historical reception. The second chapter investigates how Dekker uses Chaucer, whose ‘book’, I argue, is a common theatrical source book that offers the playwrights quick access to stories and plots. To provide evidence of Dekker’s readership of Chaucer, I trace the early modern editions of Chaucer available in Dekker’s time and survey Dekker’s reading of Chaucer from his early career to his late years. The final three chapters concentrate on Dekker’s uniquely creative refashioning of Chaucer in theatrical terms. Chapter Three examines how Dekker turns Chaucer’s serious Clerk’s Tale, a ‘text of loss’, into a comic parody, re-titled as The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil. Chapter Four investigates Chaucer’s legacy of the festive and the carnival, whose ideas of ‘game’ and ‘play’ in The Canterbury Tales directly influence Dekker’s Westward Ho and Northward Ho, wherein I call the Ho plays Dekker’s ‘game’ plays. Chapter Five demonstrates the ways in which Dekker transforms the tropes of Chaucer’s Loathly Lady in The Wife of Bath’s Tale into performative metaphors in The Roaring Girl, a fantasy satire. This is the first attempt to discuss and study, in full, Dekker’s texts alongside their source. Through Dekker’s Chaucerian re-imaginings, we see the playwright’s three-dimensional transformation of his source and the ways he visualises his performances.

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Malton, Sara. "Commanding language, linguistic authority and female autonomy in Thomas Hardy's fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ58482.pdf.

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Grinnell, George C. Clark David L. "On hypochondria: interpreting romantic health and illness (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thomas de Quincey, Thomas Beddoes, Charles Brockden Brown) /." *McMaster only, 2005.

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El-Baaj, Habib. "Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser : a comparative study." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1989. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5539/.

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With the publication of Jude the Obscure (1985) Hardy had finished his work with the novel. Just five years later Dreiser published Sister Carrie (1900), thus making it possible that he could have found in Hardy a model. The resemblances to the Hardyan novel in both the early and later works of Dreiser are striking and varied enough to give encouragement to a hypothesis of direct influence. The evidence in support of this hypothesis we propose to take note of carefully in this study. The study is divided into six chapters. Chapter One focusses on the broadly pessimistic and deterministic philosophy that runs throughout the novels of both authors in the sense that both were `blown to bits' by reading evolutionary theories that attacked accepted views of man, God, and the universe. Thus, both found in the works of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer evidence that man is not the creation of a benevolent deity, but rather of the interaction of unknowable forces existing in a world of struggle where survival of the fittest is the basic law. Accordingly, both concluded that man is basically determined by the natural and social forces operating from within and without to ensure man's unhappiness. In Chapter Two the protagonist of Sister Carrie is discussed in relation to the more deeply tragic heroes and heroines of Thomas Hardy, particularly Tess Durbeyfield. Carrie has the dreaminess of Jude and the natural vitality of Tess, and like Tess she is a child of nature. The chapter goes on to trace the Hardysque and Dreiserian theme of the fallen woman whose natural goodness and self-sacrifice for others keep her `Pure'. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1981), and Jennie Gerhardt (1911), are the novels discussed in relation to this common theme. Chapter Three takes for its subject-matter the novelists' portrayal of society in the context of Herbert Spencer's application of the theory of `the survival of the fittest' to social behaviour. Donald Farfrae in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Frank Cowperwood in Freiser's The Financier (1912), and The Titan (1914), are discussed as aggressive exponents of the Nietzschean superman figure, committing themselves to the values of materialism. Although both men win in the battle of life and survive, nevertheless, they undergo an inner spiritual defeat. Chapter Four probes the depth of the conflict between flesh and spirit, body and soul, vice and virtue in Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Freiser's The `Genius' (1915). Both heroes, Jude and Eugene, are sexually driven and in bondage to desire, but at the same time possess transcendental traits. In Jude's case, this contest between the spiritual and the sensual culminates inevitably in his death; Eugene, less convincingly perhaps, eventually finds temporary ease for his divided being and restless soul in the religious doctrines of Christian Science. Chapter Five examines Jude the Obscure and Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) as tragedies of `unfulfilled aims and aspirations'. Initially, attention is focussed upon the tragic aspect of both stories and the question of whether or not the two novels are in fact tragedies is discussed. Jude Fawley and Clyde Griffiths have opposite aims and ambitions. Jude's intellectual aspirations are contrasted with Clyde's materialistic desires. The ambition of each hero, however, is marked by failure, and the destiny of both is the same. Each is finally frustrated by forces in his nature, his society, and his circumstances. This study concludes, in Chapter Six, by noting that characters in the novels of Hardy and Dreiser rarely come to a satisfactory accommodation with life. The novels' tragic conclusions are due, in large part, to social, cultural, and universal influences which make any sense of personal fulfilment difficult, if not impossible to achieve.

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Pepperney, Justin R. "Religious Toleration in English Literature from Thomas More to John Milton." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1245245934.

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Pokotylo, Heather. "The film break : Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow, Gilles Deleuze's Cinema, and the emergence of a new history." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99743.

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This thesis uses the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983, trans. 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985, trans. 1989) as a methodology for examining the subject of film in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The first half of the thesis provides a review of the literature on the subject of film in Gravity's Rainbow, as well as a review of current scholarship on Deleuze's Cinema books, before providing a close reading of both Cinema books that summarizes and explicates the elaborate taxonomy of cinematic signs and images developed by Deleuze. The second half of the thesis uses Deleuze's cinematic taxonomy to analyze examples of time-images and movement-images in Gravity's Rainbow. The thesis concludes by connecting the work of Pynchon's novel to the work of Deleuze's study in a discussion of how film participates in the emergence of a new concept of history during the postwar period.

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Vye, Shelly Shires Linda M. "Tourist geographies spectatorship, space, and empire in England, 1830--1910 (Mary Kingsley, Thomas Hardy) /." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.

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El, Inglizi Najwa Yousif. "Negotiating the gothic in the fiction of Thomas Hardy." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2003. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/112/.

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The purpose of this research is to investigate Thomas Hardy’s relation to the Gothic tradition, especially that deriving from the classic period 1760-mid-1820s. The main novels chosen for such an investigation are Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Parallels with the following texts form the heart of the thesis: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin, Caleb Williams, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. This investigation has been instigated by three major elements noted in the criticism on Hardy’s literary art in general and on his tragedies in particular. First, although Hardy scholars employ terminology pertaining to the Gothic and romance genres in describing Hardy’s plots, characters and settings, very few of them make a direct and explicit connection to the Gothic novel. Second, the few who do broach the Gothic elements in Hardy’s fiction limit their understanding of the kind of Gothic Hardy employs mainly to the second quarter of the nineteenth century and onwards. Moreover, they seem to be more willing to admit such influence in his minor works, obfuscating the influence of Gothic discourse on his major novels. Therefore, this research will attempt to investigate Hardy’s involvement with Gothic discourse and examine the ways in which the characteristic settings, drama and character-types of such discourse are domesticated, complicated and made more subtle in Hardy’s work. Finally, it envisages further investigation into Hardy’s work in its relation to his architectural knowledge and his philosophic views of life in general, and his views of humanity’s place in it in particular.

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Groom, Nicholas Michael. "Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry : its context, presentation and reception." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359575.

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Westover, Daniel. "R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2011. http://a.co/0Kggfyi.

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Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.
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McNamara, Rebecca Fields. "Code-switching in medieval England : register variety in the literature of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk and Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669980.

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Bulaila, Abdul Aziz Mohammed. "Marriage in the novels of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1992. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13834/.

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This thesis is a developmental and comparative study of marriage in the novels of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. Although this subject is frequently alluded to in recent criticism of both authors, it is rarely discussed in detail. The main interest of the study here is to show how marriage and its sub-themes of love, sex and women, as well as society's perceptions of them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the period between 1870 and 1930, have developed in their social and psychological dimensions, and how these developments are reflected in the novels. Partly for biographical reasons Hardy and Lawrence have different motives in exploring the theme of marriage: one seeks to deconstruct it for its failure to bring fulfilment to husband and wife, the other attempts to reconstruct it anew in order to bring fulfilment to man and woman's relationship. This approach is reflected in the thesis by dividing it into three major parts: Part one is concerned with marriage in reality as it was understood by society and experienced by Hardy and Lawrence; Part two deals with marriage from two points of view; and Part three is allotted to the consideration of marital patterns. While Chapter one surveys the social history of the period and the conceptual changes in the institution of marriage which took place in English society, Chapter two shows how these changes are reflected in the lives of Hardy and Lawrence, particularly in their relationships with women. As a transitional link between reality and fiction, Chapter three examines marriage in two "autobiographical" novels, 'The Return of the Native and Sons and Lovers, in order to show the novelists' conscious and unconscious perceptions of their strong attachments to their mothers and the influence of this on their love and marriage relationships. The following two chapters investigate the presentation of marriage from two different points of view. To demonstrate how Hardy and Lawrence use different methods to tackle the issue of marriage, Chapter four discusses marriage from a female point of view in Far from the Madding Crowd, the Woodlanders and the Rainbow. Chapter five examines marriage from a male point of view in the Mayor of Casterbridge, Aaron's Rod and "The Captain's Doll", trying to show how important it is for the individual to reconcile his 'male' and 'female' elements in marriage. Chapters six and seven examine how Hardy and Lawrence, by the use of a similar marital pattern, reach opposite conclusions which justify their intentions, the sixth chapter focusing on Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Women in Love, the seventh on Jude the Obscure and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

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Harris, Nicola Joy. "'The means of seeing' : looking at reality in the novels of Thomas Hardy." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1998. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/8018/.

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Hardy approached the problem of nineteenth-century realism as an ontological and literary concern largely through images of perception. This thesis suggests that Hardy adopted an innovative approach in an effort to identify the term, and argues that his subversive contribution to the Great Debate occasioned the necessary impetus for the experimental fictions of the twentieth century. In rejecting the orthodox, aesthetic prescriptions established by such authorities as George Eliot and Henry James, it is suggested that Hardy released the Victorian novel from its restricting reliance on ostensibly objective fact and paved the way for a more subjective interpretation of reality and a more introspective kind of narrative. It is contended that Hardy's literary response to a range of optical treatises encouraged his challenging reinterpretation of reality. As a preparatory measure, 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' metaphorically petrifies the perspective; 'Far from the Madding Crowd' interrogates Ruskin's theory of moral perception; 'The Return of the Native' looks at phenomena through an intellectual lens; 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' judges a reality filtered through a sartorially-inclined public eye instructed by Carlyle; 'The Woodlanders', the turning point in the sequence, observes with an eye disillusioned by the evolutionists; 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' creates a reality from the affective eye championed by Comte and Fourier; 'Jude the Obscure' wanders blindly between two literary eras, perceptual incoherences, and dislocations between phenomenal and noumenal compromising the narrative's formal integrity. This thesis maintains that, through an idiosyncratic frame of referentiality as well as regard, Hardy transforms the objective, material world into his own versions of reality, and triumphs over oppressive facts by subjectively appropriating them. Each of Hardy's works offers an alternative yet equally viable perceptual angle from which the creation, form, and function of reality as a psychological, practical, ontological, and literary concern can be judged.

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Salmons, Kim. "The representation of food in modern literature : Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad." Thesis, St Mary's University, Twickenham, 2015. http://research.stmarys.ac.uk/912/.

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This thesis will examine the representation of food in the works of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad to demonstrate how food is used to chart the progress of modernity from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the continuing emergence of capitalism and consumerism to the first decade of the twentieth century when the stability of the British Empire was being questioned. Food becomes the measure of how modern society responded to new innovations in transport, technology and the way in which British society viewed both itself and the colonies from which much of its food was being imported. As a cultural language, traditions and rituals of food solidified notions of what it meant to be civilized but when this cultural language was fused with the food of the Other, the definitions of ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ became increasingly difficult to define. This thesis begins with Section One which introduces the scope and approach of my research. The section is broken into three chapters: the first serves as an introduction considering Conrad’s use of a family anecdote to examine how he borrows from real life experiences while blending fact and fiction to suit his purposes as an author. Chapter two is an analysis of realism, focussing on nineteenth-century debates about its use in the novel and investigating how Hardy and Conrad viewed the process of novel writing. This chapter will also briefly examine food in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations as an example of a traditional realist novel and consider how its handling of food differs from that of Hardy and Conrad’s Modern approach. To conclude, I have provided an overview of the critical reception of these two authors. Finally, to signal my broadly historicist approach, chapter three outlines the changing place of food within British society through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I have chosen to focus my study on the works of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad because, in their novels, these authors span this crucial historical period and between them reflect the changing face of the national food-producing landscape, in Hardy’s case, and the international world which increasingly became the source of imported food, in Conrad’s case. These authors necessarily respond to the key methodologies that provide the frame of reference for this thesis, namely those of history, anthropology, sociology and politics. By narrowing the focus to just two authors, it is possible to consider in greater depth the production, consumption, psychological impact and metaphorical range of food in literature. Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad not only sit well chronologically – Hardy published his last novel Jude the Obscure in 1895, the same year that Conrad published his first, Almayer’s Folly – but also thematically: where Hardy concentrates on the effects of modernity at a national level, Conrad’s perspective is international. Where Hardy laments the decline in the production of food in England and its impact on gender, the countryside and tradition, Conrad considers the impact of colonial expansion at a time when the morality of the Imperial mission was under scrutiny. Food plays an inherent role in this engagement with the Other, posing questions about morality, the rise of globalization, issues of identity, political ideology and the growing power of capitalism. Both Hardy and Conrad respond to the two great social truths about British life during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the great shift of population from the countryside to the cities and anxieties about the decline of the British Empire. Hardy’s novels provide a survey of the changing face of nineteenth-century Britain through the politics of food production; while, drawing upon twenty years in the merchant navy, Conrad brings the colonial world, the world of Greater Britain, into the English novel, and with it the food of the outer world. Selecting these two particular authors enables an investigation into the pervasiveness of food in Modern fiction.

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Kim, Bomin. "Recycling History| Early Modern Fasting and Cultural Materialist Awareness in Thomas Middleton." Thesis, New York University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3557008.

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This dissertation explores the possibility of an early modern cultural materialism in selected dramatic works of Thomas Middleton in which fasting plays a prominent thematic role. The once venerable Christian practice of fasting was compartmentalized into secular and religious components in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in England even as its overall practical contour was preserved largely intact. It was subjected to conflicting representations and programs for reform, and appropriated by differing political and ecclesiastical factions. The vicissitudes that beset fasting offered a fertile ground for cultivating an understanding about the nature of the material basis of cultural formations and the historical dynamic governing their fates. It is this indigenous cultural materialist understanding, I argue, that Middleton's treatment of fasting in his dramatic works exemplifies.

The first chapter offers a history of fasting from the early church to its secularization under Queen Elizabeth as Protestant status quo ante in reference to which later departures and appropriations took place. One such departure by King James is the subject of the next chapter on A Chaste Maid in Cheapside in which the king's attempt to re-sacralize fasting is subjected to a materialist satire and made into a springboard for imagining a utopia of a specifically materialist kind. The next chapter on The Puritan contextualizes the play in terms of the puritan attempts to incorporate fasting as part of the Protestant prayer regime in the place of cunning folk's witchcraft and Catholic ecclesiastical magic. Masque of Heroes and Christmas keeping at the Jacobean Inner Temple are the subjects of the last chapter. I discuss the prominence in the masque of the anthropomorphized Fasting Day in connection with inter-generational and inter-constituency struggle for the custodianship of the valued custom of Christmas keeping.

These studies represent a series of historicist contributions to Middleton scholarship on the individual works. More broadly, they constitute an attempt to exploit insights from cultural history and material culture studies to broaden the scope of the study of religion in early modern English drama.

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Hood, David James Sarty. "A place called 'nowhere': Towards an understanding of St Thomas More's 'Utopia'." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28419.

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St. Thomas More's Utopia has been the subject of considerable debate over the past 75 years. It claims to be concerned with the 'best state of a commonwealth', but how is it concerned? It is a strange little book that records a fictional dialogue between More, his friend Peter Giles, and a very impulsive and opinionated traveler named Raphael Hythloday. Hythloday has recently returned from a voyage, and the Utopia is mostly taken up with a detailed account of the bizarre customs, laws, and rituals of a people he encountered in a place called Utopia. Hythloday praises them as the best and wisest people. More remains skeptical, but does acknowledge that certain of the Utopian practices have merit. The reader is therefore left wondering whether More created this fictional commonwealth to provide a model for reform, or whether he created it as a satire. This thesis has sought to contribute to the wealth of research on this topic, by interpreting the enthusiasm of Hythloday and the skepticism of More as evidence that More did not intend the Utopia to be taken literally, but neither did he intend for it to be read solely as satire. He meant for the Utopia to be a springboard for discussion and debate. He meant to create a platform to address issues plaguing European commonwealths. I have come to this conclusion by interpreting the Utopia within its historical and literary context. In this thesis I examine the circumstances of the Utopia's publication and distribution; the intellectual and cultural influences of Renaissance England, and More's immediate circumstances in the year 1515 when he wrote the Utopia. I then move from a general study of the Utopia to a more concentrated study of its content where I provide a character analysis of More, Giles and Hythloday. I also examine the inconsistencies inherent within the pages of the Utopia, as well as the inconsistencies that existed between More's life and the ideals he seemingly espoused within the Utopia. Lastly, I examine the Utopia in comparison to many of More's other works on the subjects of religion and property such as the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, and More's letters, poems and prayers.

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Gillota, David. "Belly Laughs: Body Humor in Contemporary American Literature and Film." Scholarly Repository, 2008. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/42.

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Belly Laughs: Body Humor in Contemporary American Literature and Film Scholars are more than happy to laugh at but seem somewhat reluctant to discuss body humor, which is perhaps the most neglected form of comedy in recent criticism. In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which contemporary American writers and filmmakers use body humor in their works, not only in moments of so-called "comic relief" but also as a valid way of exploring many of the same issues that postmodern artists typically interrogate in their more somber moments. The writers discussed in this project-Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Charles Johnson, and Woody Allen-were chosen for the divergent ways in which they present the body's comic predicament in psychological, metaphysical, and historical situations. The introduction explains the diverse traditions that these artists draw upon and considers how various theoretical approaches can affect our understanding of body humor. The first chapter examines Jewish-American novelist Philip Roth's use of absurd and grotesque body imagery as manifestations of his characters' moral dilemmas. The second chapter looks at how slapstick comedy informs a worldview dominated by paranioa and chaos in Thomas Pynchon's novels. Chapter Three looks at Woody Allen's early films, in which he parodies and revises the slapstick cinematic tradition of artists like Charlie Chaplin and The Marx Brothers. Chapter Four considers African-American writer and cartoonist Charles Johnson's depiction of the ways in which the body's desires and pitfalls complicate the quest for spiritual enlightenment.

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Moss, Rhiannon Sarah. "Irish modernism in an international frame : Thomas MacGreevy, Sean O'Faolain and Samuel Beckett in the 1930s." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2009. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1592.

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In 1930s Ireland, modernist writing developed at a conjuncture of national and international influences. The second generation of Irish modernism responded to national culture in the context of international debates about literary form. The purpose of this thesis is to present a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Irish and European literary discourse in the work of Thomas MacGreevy, Sean O'Faolain and Samuel Beckett: three writers who formulated Irish writing within a self-consciously international frame. Drawing on recent critical approaches to modern Irish writing and on contemporary theories of modernism, this thesis argues that Irish writing in the 1930s reflected many of the debates and tensions in international modernism. In the first decades of independence, attitudes to literary form, to cultural nationalism, and to the role of the writer in the public sphere were being reshaped. These attitudes formed the basis of alternative formulations of Irish modernism. The three writers considered here approached the relationship between Ireland and Europe from different perspectives, and figured the possibilities of international influence on national literary culture in diverse ways. Consideration of the national and international networks of influence underlying the aesthetic projects of MacGreevy, O'Faolain and Beckett illuminates their 1930s writing, and has broader implications for the understanding of Irish literary culture. The first chapter argues that MacGreevy's critical writing formulated a national version of conservative modernism. MacGreevy combined Catholic and republican attitudes with a high modernist approach to the role of art in mass democracy. The second chapter focuses on O'Faolain's realist aesthetic in relation to contemporary debates about modernism and realism. O'Faolain's attitude to national culture developed from a conflict between artistic integrity and social responsibility which reflected tensions in both national and international literary discourse. The third chapter contextualises Beckett's 1930s fiction in the avant gardist elements of Irish literary culture, and argues that his aesthetic developed as a specifically national manifestation of late modernism.

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Santilli, Nicola. "The problem with the prose poem in English literature : towards a definition." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 1998. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/the-problem-with-the-prose-poem-in-english-literature--towards-a-definition(591aae5a-a4c6-424a-8e14-56444c8915d4).html.

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Green, Brian. "Penned in the first person : setting and theme in the lyrics of Thomas Hardy." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21810.

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Bibliography: pages 240-258.
This thesis arises from the conviction that the Hardyan quality of mind, a mind at once tentative and courageous, is of supreme importance in our time and is most distinctly and decisively present in Hardy's short poems. The chief aim of this thesis has been to offer students of Hardy thematic and aesthetic guidelines for reading his poems so as to encounter that quality of mind first-hand. In order to develop those guidelines, I have rooted them in primary materials and biographical details germane to demonstrating Hardy's achievement as a poet. The main title of this thesis, for instance, is meant to emphasise the complex relationship between the poet and the man: culled from the preface of his third volume of verse, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses, the simple yet apposite phrase, "penned in the first person," is the invention of Hardy himself.

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Abuzeid, Ahmad Elsayyad Ahmad. "The theme of alienation in the major novels of Thomas Hardy." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 1987. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/660/.

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Charlwood, Catherine. "Models of memory : cognition and cultural memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/91139/.

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This thesis brings together the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, revealing their respective work as peculiarly engaged with memory. Poetic memory is examined at different levels: not just what it means actively to remember, but also how a poem might be more or less characteristically memorable. Hardy and Frost are also revealed as poets who see the unique properties of poetry as a genre in which certain phenomena, people and places might be remembered, if not preserved. While having a strong basis in close analysis and literary history, the project breaks new ground in setting concepts familiar to poetry scholarship within a scientific framework. Interdisciplinary in nature, this thesis uses evidence from psychological experiments to emphasise the cognitive fundamentals which underpin those Hardy and Frost poems remembered as aesthetic or cultural artefacts. Four core chapters explore issues of expectation, recognition, voice and identity, showing the meeting points for Hardyean and Frostian memory and offering new readings which connect these canonical figures. Throughout, the thesis foregrounds Hardy’s and Frost’s concern for local memories. Beginning with how the formal properties of Hardy’s and Frost’s verse appeal to human cognitive pre-dispositions, the project ends by considering how identity is culturally conditioned, and how Hardy’s and Frost’s poetry restores to significance those individuating features otherwise forgotten by cognitive and cultural memory systems. Using archival material and the respective letters of Hardy and Frost alongside the poems allows this project to offer a thorough reading of a topic close to both poets’ hearts. Beyond a study of two specific poets, this thesis also reveals why and how poetry might be sought after as a valuable mnemonic device and sheds new light on the act of reading poetry.

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Young, Primrose May Deen. "Bourgeois ambivalence : a comparative investigation of Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7250/.

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The thesis explores important similarities and differences between responses to bourgeois society in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). It examines these texts’ presentations of the shifting morality of bourgeois culture, the prevailing sense of paralysis and fragmentation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and compares the authors’ use of allusions to myth, and their explorations of concepts of time. However, by considering the ambivalent responses to bourgeois society as they are presented within these texts, and a selection of Mann and Eliot’s other creative and critical works, the thesis also highlights significant differences in the authors’ responses to bourgeois society, which are indicative of the broader divergent traditions in which they positioned themselves. Eliot subscribes to a tradition based upon the framework of the Christian faith, and the classical literary canon, with an ‘impersonal’ approach to artistic creation. By contrast, Mann places the German ‘burgher’ at the core of the tradition to which he subscribes, emphasising personality, and favouring a humanistic approach, which values the individual’s capacity for ethical judgement based on reason. This framework demonstrates that the thematic similarities and common allusions in Mann and Eliot’s creative works are underscored by radically different authorial approaches and belief systems.

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Rawson, Katherine W. "A Tale of Two Vicars: Thomas Stothard's and Thomas Rowlandson's Illustrations of "The Vicar of Wakefield"." W&M ScholarWorks, 1998. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626171.

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Darcy, Jane. "Critical attitudes to the novels of Thomas Hardy 1870-1985." Thesis, University of Hull, 1986. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:6981.

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In this thesis an examination is made of criticism of Thomas Hardy's novels from the earliest comments of his publishers and reviewers in the late nineteenth century to the apparently more sophisticated studies of the mid-1980's. The thesis is organised chronologically with each chapter dealing with a specific historical period of not more than a few decades which marks a particular phase of criticism of Hardy's novels and which often reflects more general developments in critical attitudes to the novel as an art form. Thus, while much light is thrown on Hardy's own art as a novelist in the course of this study, its wider purpose has been to trace patterns of development in the theory and practice of novel criticism over the period 1870-1985 as a whole, and to examine the ideological assumptions which have informed it. In this sense criticism of Hardy's novels is a good subject for study because it reveals many features which may be said to be typical of the various phases of novel criticism; indeed, it often tells us far more about critical fashion and critical prejudice than it does about Hardy's art. Because this thesis traces general patterns of development in criticism, there has been no attempt to be all-inclusive in the coverage of Hardy's critics; books and articles have been chosen for their representativeness or their special merit. All the major critics have been discussed, however, and the study concludes that what criticism has gained in sophistication of technique ; and mode of expression appears to have been counterbalanced by its having lost the ability to respond directly to the impact of reading a novel and by the corresponding loss of a sense that literature (in this case Hardy's novels) has any value which can be related to life. It is suggested that recent critics might benefit from a study of the methods of their predecessors so that they might learn from their successes as well as from their mistakes.

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Wenjing, Chen Alexandra. "The Role of Women in Thomas Ostermeier's Production of "Hamlet"." Thesis, Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany), 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10291096.

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This research looks at the production of Hamlet by Thomas Ostermeier, the director of the Schaubühne Berlin. The production presents two female characters with a single female performer, and persents the concept that coporeality is an impossible exteriority. This research uses the playscript of Ostermeier's production of Hamlet as reference, and Judith Butler's book Bodies that Matter for its theoretical method, as well as contemporary critics of feminist study on the gendered body, to interpret the role of female characters in Ostermeier's production of Hamlet. The focus will clarify how Ostermeier cultivates Butler's theory of body performativity as the source for portraying his understanding of the female identity, and as the decoder for the conventional sexgender culture. The research shows how Ostermeier's presentation of Gertrude and Ophelia reflects the contemporary concern for the deconstruction of the normative concept of woman.

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Adams, Aaron. "Victorian representations and transformations : sacred place in Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2010. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/2397/.

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Victorian literary criticism has within it a longstanding tradition of inquiring about the degree to which literature of the period reflects the realities of nineteenthcentury Christian faith. Many of these studies are admirable in the way that they demonstrate the challenges confronting religion in this period of dynamic social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific change and growth. Similarly, this study will examine the critical intersections between nineteenth-century Christianity and literature. However, this project is unique by virtue of the methodology used in order to access both the expressed and latent perspectives on Victorian faith at play within a given text. I propose that that a spatial, place-based reading has heretofore been largely ignored in critical explorations of nineteenth-century faith and literature. While, literary criticism utilising concepts related to spatiality, geography, topography, and place have increased within recent decades, these critical works are largely silent on the issue of the narrative representations of “place” and the expression and understanding of Victorian Christianity. This project suggests a model for just such a reading of nineteenth-century texts. More specifically, this thesis proposes that by reading for sacred place in the Victorian novel one is able to explore the issue of Christianity and literature from a unique and neglected point of narrative and critical reference. Using Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure as primary texts, this study demonstrates that a careful exploration of sacred place within a particular narrative reflects an author's and, more broadly, a culture's perceptions of a faith. Reading Victorian religion from the vantage point of place acknowledges that place is itself an inescapable and fundamental medium through which individuals and cultures mediate the most mundane and the most exhilarating of their personal and collective experiences and beliefs. Similarly, faith, especially in nineteenth-century England, is a dominant and pervasive metaphysical ideology that is connected to and possesses repercussions for virtually all aspects of individual and social life. A critical reading that unites place and faith – these two fundamental paradigms of human experience and understanding – will inevitably provide fertile soil for a productive reading of the texts under consideration.

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Simes, Peter A. "Literature in the Age of Science: Technology and Scientists in the Mid-Twentieth Century Works of Isaac Asimov, John Barth, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2010. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30511/.

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This study explores the depictions of technology and scientists in the literature of five writers during the 1960s. Scientists and technology associated with nuclear, computer, and space science are examined, focusing on their respective treatments by the following writers: John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Despite the close connections between the abovementioned sciences, space science is largely spared from negative critiques during the sixties. Through an analysis of Barth's Giles Goat-boy, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Asimov's short stories "Key Item," "The Last Question," "The Machine That Won the War," "My Son, the Physicist," and Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is argued that altruistic goals of space science during the 1960s protect it from the satirical treatments that surround the other sciences.

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48

Sceats, Sarah Anne. "Food and eating in fiction since 1950 with particular reference to the writing of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Michele Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1996. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1594.

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Eating is a fundamental activity. What people eat, how and with whom, what they feel about food, what they do or do not want to eat and why - even who they eat - are of crucial significance in any reading of human behaviour. In this thesis, I consider the diverse and complex uses of food and eating in fiction since 1950, especially that written by women. I argue both that food and eating carry much of the meaning of a novel or story and that the acts of cooking, feeding and eating depicted are inseparable from issues of power and control: individually, interpersonally, culturally, politically. My discussion centres on the writing of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Michele Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, sociology, anthropology, Foucault, Bakhtin and others, the thesis aims to construct an interdisciplinary perspective which both resists reductive interpretations and emphasises the centrality, complexity and diversity of food and eating in literature in our culture. I begin with an examination of the ambiguities of maternal feeding and nurturing, moving on to explore the links between appetite, eating and sexuality. I explore cannibalism and vampirism as manifestations of oppression, but also as indicating insatiable emptiness and transgressive appetite. The body itself is crucial, and my argument considers the paradox of not eating as control/enslavement, also tracing self-starvation as a positive route towards wholeness and connection. The last part of my argument focuses on social eating, examining conventions, rituals and food itself in connection with power relations, and finally considers how we might truly speak of food and eating in the context of society as a whole.

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Webb, Andrew. "'His country ... not the country he had fought for' : British literatures and world lit. theory : the case of Edward Thomas." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2010. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3812/.

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My Ph.D. is an intervention on three levels: it works on the theoretical level as an investigation into the usefulness of Pascale Casanova’s theory of world literature; it sheds new light on the relation between Welsh and Anglocentric British literary spaces in the twentieth century; and it radically re-positions Edward Thomas, the ‘quintessential English poet’, as a pioneering writer in an Anglophone Welsh literature. This dissertation begins by setting out some revisions to Casanova’s model before investigating whether this modified theory can be applied to dominant and dominated literatures within Britain. Subsequent chapters provide a case-history of how this might be achieved by focusing on Thomas, a figure of division among Welsh and English critics alike. While Welsh critics, for various reasons, have failed to claim Thomas for their literature, other, non-Welsh, critics have placed him in an English tradition. These include Robert Frost and Walter De la Mare, both of whom read his work as a representation of the rural England for which he supposedly died, as well as Edna Longley who, following a critical line initially developed by Philip Larkin, presents Thomas’s poetry as the ‘missing link’ in a native English poetic tradition. By bringing to light Thomas’s literary journalism, mainly out of print since it was written, as well as biographical factors long obscured behind the focus on his death as a British soldier, I am able to show how Casanova’s revised model, when applied to Thomas, reveals a radically different writer to the one who has been critically received. Thomas, I contend, should be read as an English-language Welsh writer who dissimilates from an anglicized British literary space by disseminating Welsh folk material to a wider audience, by promoting writers from other English-language national traditions, by importing French literary models into his work, by defending gay writers in the post-Wilde trial era, and by subverting the Englishness of typical rural locales. Re-positioning the ‘quintessentially English’ Thomas makes more urgent the question that some critics have begun to address: of what will a post-imperial, or even a post-British, English identity consist?

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Majeske, Andrew J. "Equity in English Renaissance literature : Thomas More [sic] Utopia and Edmund Spenser's The faerie queene /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2003. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Pynchon, Thomas English Literature'

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