A study of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's later novels to assess his adaptation of dramatic techniques and Gikuyu oral traditions to the requirements of fiction
- Authors: Erapu, Laban Omella
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, 1938- Folk literature, Kikuyu Oral tradition -- Kenya
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2235 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002278
- Description: This thesis examines Ngugi wa Thiong'o's later writings in order to establish the nature of his quest for a people's literature. It illustrates how the author attempts to break the barriers between traditional oral forms and the relatively new written forms in addressing a basically "illiterate" audience. The research begins with an exploration of Gikuyu oral literature as an essential background to Ngugi's later dramatic and fictional writings as distinct from his earlier literary works in which he initiates the dominant quest for a more just society. Ngugi's return to these roots constitutes the central "homecoming" that characterizes his search for new forms. The analysis is conducted through three significant chronological stages representing Ngugi's writings over a period of about a decade from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Each stage starts with a play and performance followed by a parallel novel, the first pair written in English and the subsequent ones in Gikuyu. The three stages - designated Transition, Homecoming and Realization - mark Ngugi's involvement in the promotion of Gikuyu culture and orature, both as a source of inspiration and as a cause to which he fully dedicates himself. The transitional stage depicts the convergence between conventional and traditional oral literary forms with which Ngugi begins to experiment. The second stage introduces significant departures as Ngugi begins to use the Gikuyu language as his primary medium of creative expression. The final stage demonstrates his ultimate assertion of the primacy of orality over the written word as a dynamic agent of transmission. The thesis concludes that Ngugi wa Thiong'o in these later works - while leaving the possibilities of his vision of a "New Earth" unfulfilled pioneers the African writers' climb down from an "ivory tower" to deal with the realities of the experience of the predominantly non-reading African masses, acknowledged as both recipients of and active participants in the relatively new written literature which purports to speak for their experiences and their times.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
- Authors: Erapu, Laban Omella
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, 1938- Folk literature, Kikuyu Oral tradition -- Kenya
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2235 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002278
- Description: This thesis examines Ngugi wa Thiong'o's later writings in order to establish the nature of his quest for a people's literature. It illustrates how the author attempts to break the barriers between traditional oral forms and the relatively new written forms in addressing a basically "illiterate" audience. The research begins with an exploration of Gikuyu oral literature as an essential background to Ngugi's later dramatic and fictional writings as distinct from his earlier literary works in which he initiates the dominant quest for a more just society. Ngugi's return to these roots constitutes the central "homecoming" that characterizes his search for new forms. The analysis is conducted through three significant chronological stages representing Ngugi's writings over a period of about a decade from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Each stage starts with a play and performance followed by a parallel novel, the first pair written in English and the subsequent ones in Gikuyu. The three stages - designated Transition, Homecoming and Realization - mark Ngugi's involvement in the promotion of Gikuyu culture and orature, both as a source of inspiration and as a cause to which he fully dedicates himself. The transitional stage depicts the convergence between conventional and traditional oral literary forms with which Ngugi begins to experiment. The second stage introduces significant departures as Ngugi begins to use the Gikuyu language as his primary medium of creative expression. The final stage demonstrates his ultimate assertion of the primacy of orality over the written word as a dynamic agent of transmission. The thesis concludes that Ngugi wa Thiong'o in these later works - while leaving the possibilities of his vision of a "New Earth" unfulfilled pioneers the African writers' climb down from an "ivory tower" to deal with the realities of the experience of the predominantly non-reading African masses, acknowledged as both recipients of and active participants in the relatively new written literature which purports to speak for their experiences and their times.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
An examination of the sonnets of E.E. Cummings
- Authors: Hughes, Jeremy Francis
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962 -- Criticism and interpretation Sonnets, English -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2244 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002287
- Description: This dissertation examines E. E. Cummings's writings in the sonnet genre and in those genres to which the sonnet is related in various ways. Its fundamental point is that, despite the surface impression of poetic iconoclasm for which Cummings has a popular reputation, in choosing to write sonnets he engages in a traditional literary practice. He does this because his purpose is always to be an artist, as defined by the Aesthetic movement which influenced him. In order to argue his embracing of a traditional artistic role, the theory of genres espoused by Alastair Fowler in his book, Kinds of Literature, is used. Chapter 1 of the thesis comprises general introductory material, both to the range of Aesthetic ideas to which Cummings subscribed, and to Fowler's theory of genres. Several key generic kinds are also described. The second chapter makes use of two of these generic models, the sonnet sequence and the silva, as a way of examining Cummings's deployment of the sonnet within the larger context of his poetry collections. It is a survey of the structure of the anthologies he compiled from Tulips & Chimneys (1922) to 95 Poems (1958). The third chapter explores the three sonnet modes which Cummings first identifies and names when compiling the manuscript of Tulips & Chimneys, and continues to use in his collections up to and including is 5 (1926). Chapter 4 shows how certain themes and concerns from these early sonnets are altered and synthesised as Cummings matures from an aesthete to a Romantic poet. Sonnets from his later books are taken to be representative of three central kinds in all of his work after is 5. Chapters 3 and 4 proceed by means of relatively close readings of individual sonnets. This practice fulfils a double role: it penetrates the apparent obscurity of the more difficult poems, and it attempts to preserve the integrity of individual poems which exemplify different generic tendencies in Cummings's work. One of Cummings's reasons for writing sonnets is that the form favours the achievement of what Wordsworth calls "a feeling of intense unity". In undertaking close readings of a few sonnets I have attempted to preserve that feeling.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
- Authors: Hughes, Jeremy Francis
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962 -- Criticism and interpretation Sonnets, English -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2244 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002287
- Description: This dissertation examines E. E. Cummings's writings in the sonnet genre and in those genres to which the sonnet is related in various ways. Its fundamental point is that, despite the surface impression of poetic iconoclasm for which Cummings has a popular reputation, in choosing to write sonnets he engages in a traditional literary practice. He does this because his purpose is always to be an artist, as defined by the Aesthetic movement which influenced him. In order to argue his embracing of a traditional artistic role, the theory of genres espoused by Alastair Fowler in his book, Kinds of Literature, is used. Chapter 1 of the thesis comprises general introductory material, both to the range of Aesthetic ideas to which Cummings subscribed, and to Fowler's theory of genres. Several key generic kinds are also described. The second chapter makes use of two of these generic models, the sonnet sequence and the silva, as a way of examining Cummings's deployment of the sonnet within the larger context of his poetry collections. It is a survey of the structure of the anthologies he compiled from Tulips & Chimneys (1922) to 95 Poems (1958). The third chapter explores the three sonnet modes which Cummings first identifies and names when compiling the manuscript of Tulips & Chimneys, and continues to use in his collections up to and including is 5 (1926). Chapter 4 shows how certain themes and concerns from these early sonnets are altered and synthesised as Cummings matures from an aesthete to a Romantic poet. Sonnets from his later books are taken to be representative of three central kinds in all of his work after is 5. Chapters 3 and 4 proceed by means of relatively close readings of individual sonnets. This practice fulfils a double role: it penetrates the apparent obscurity of the more difficult poems, and it attempts to preserve the integrity of individual poems which exemplify different generic tendencies in Cummings's work. One of Cummings's reasons for writing sonnets is that the form favours the achievement of what Wordsworth calls "a feeling of intense unity". In undertaking close readings of a few sonnets I have attempted to preserve that feeling.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
Observing and describing textual "reality": a critique of the claims to objective reality and authentication in new critical and structuralist literary theory, seen against a background of Feyerabend's ideas concerning paradigms, dominance and ideology
- Authors: Masters, Kenneth Andrew
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Feyerabend, Paul, 1924-1994 , Criticism , Structuralism (Literary analysis) , Science and the arts , Reality , Objectivity
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2247 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002290 , Feyerabend, Paul, 1924-1994 , Criticism , Structuralism (Literary analysis) , Science and the arts , Reality , Objectivity
- Description: This thesis sets out to examine the claims to objective reality and authentication in New critical and Structuralist literary theories, concentrating on their claims to "objectivity" and "scientific validity." It examines the nature of these claims in the light of the original ideas proposed by some of the major New critics and structuralists in the development of their respective "sciences" of literary theory. Taking direction from the nature of reality and objectivity shown by the theorists, the thesis then attempts an assessment of the validity of some of the original perceptions and presuppositions concerning scientific objectivity and reality. It proposes that inconsistencies within the literary theories resulted from the theorists' inability to grasp the complexity and fluctuating nature of the borrowed terminology and principles that they were using. It does so by taking a closer look at the development of some of the more influential physical theories and the philosophical ideas raised by these developments. It then uses Feyerabend's work on paradigms, dominance and ideology to attempt an assessment of the reasons for the literary theorists' perceptions and presuppositions regarding objectivity and reality. This amounts to accounting for the specific scientific models chosen as bases, and also to accounting for the desire for the "scientific approach" at all. Its conclusions give an indication of the extent to which these original errors contributed to the theories' necessary adaptations of perspective and eventual loss of influence, and emphasises the need for the total understanding of concepts in one field by researchers in other fields, especially if those concepts are to be used by the researchers with any degree of precision.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
- Authors: Masters, Kenneth Andrew
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Feyerabend, Paul, 1924-1994 , Criticism , Structuralism (Literary analysis) , Science and the arts , Reality , Objectivity
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2247 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002290 , Feyerabend, Paul, 1924-1994 , Criticism , Structuralism (Literary analysis) , Science and the arts , Reality , Objectivity
- Description: This thesis sets out to examine the claims to objective reality and authentication in New critical and Structuralist literary theories, concentrating on their claims to "objectivity" and "scientific validity." It examines the nature of these claims in the light of the original ideas proposed by some of the major New critics and structuralists in the development of their respective "sciences" of literary theory. Taking direction from the nature of reality and objectivity shown by the theorists, the thesis then attempts an assessment of the validity of some of the original perceptions and presuppositions concerning scientific objectivity and reality. It proposes that inconsistencies within the literary theories resulted from the theorists' inability to grasp the complexity and fluctuating nature of the borrowed terminology and principles that they were using. It does so by taking a closer look at the development of some of the more influential physical theories and the philosophical ideas raised by these developments. It then uses Feyerabend's work on paradigms, dominance and ideology to attempt an assessment of the reasons for the literary theorists' perceptions and presuppositions regarding objectivity and reality. This amounts to accounting for the specific scientific models chosen as bases, and also to accounting for the desire for the "scientific approach" at all. Its conclusions give an indication of the extent to which these original errors contributed to the theories' necessary adaptations of perspective and eventual loss of influence, and emphasises the need for the total understanding of concepts in one field by researchers in other fields, especially if those concepts are to be used by the researchers with any degree of precision.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
Pushing out towards the limits, and finding the centre: the mystical vision in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin
- Authors: Hoyle, Gisela Beate
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929- Criticism and interpretation , Mysticism in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2243 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002286 , Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929- Criticism and interpretation , Mysticism in literature
- Description: This thesis explores the major novels of science fiction and fantasy writer, Ursula K. Le Guin: it follows her journey from her first imaginary country, Orsinia, through the inner lands of Earthsea and the outer spaces of the Hainish Ekumen to her Yin utopia in a future California and an Earthsea revisited. In each of these worlds she moves towards an experience of an inner, unified truth which is comparable to the ecstatic experience of the religious mystics and that of which T.S Eliot writes in his Four Quartets. Through her reading of the Taoist sages and the discovery of their perception of Life as a constant and ongoing process rather than as a series of isolated events or states, whether mystical or mundane, these worlds and planets become symbols of a way of life instead of static objects. In her medium, narrative, this way is embodied in the story: the movement towards that moment of enlightenment, which is revealed as the heart, the life-giving centre of each world. It is the home to which each journey returns. "True voyage is return' (The Dispossessed). Owing to this perception of the immanent (w)holiness of life, of the many, different realities, she moves from a serene Taoist equilibrium to an angry feminist rejection of the masculine, dualist, Western civilisation, in which Man has largely been perceived as a creature apart; apart from nature, a guest on this planet, belonging to another world. In her anarchist and feminist utopias she seeks a new spititual home, a less alienated identity for humankind. Despite this apparent "development", at the heart of aU her books there is that same joy in this, mortal life, the search for which she sees as the most essential of aU human pursuits. That, ultimately, is both source and subject of Le Guin's work; and each new world explored is a different manifestation of the joyful Tao, a celebration of life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
- Authors: Hoyle, Gisela Beate
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929- Criticism and interpretation , Mysticism in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2243 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002286 , Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929- Criticism and interpretation , Mysticism in literature
- Description: This thesis explores the major novels of science fiction and fantasy writer, Ursula K. Le Guin: it follows her journey from her first imaginary country, Orsinia, through the inner lands of Earthsea and the outer spaces of the Hainish Ekumen to her Yin utopia in a future California and an Earthsea revisited. In each of these worlds she moves towards an experience of an inner, unified truth which is comparable to the ecstatic experience of the religious mystics and that of which T.S Eliot writes in his Four Quartets. Through her reading of the Taoist sages and the discovery of their perception of Life as a constant and ongoing process rather than as a series of isolated events or states, whether mystical or mundane, these worlds and planets become symbols of a way of life instead of static objects. In her medium, narrative, this way is embodied in the story: the movement towards that moment of enlightenment, which is revealed as the heart, the life-giving centre of each world. It is the home to which each journey returns. "True voyage is return' (The Dispossessed). Owing to this perception of the immanent (w)holiness of life, of the many, different realities, she moves from a serene Taoist equilibrium to an angry feminist rejection of the masculine, dualist, Western civilisation, in which Man has largely been perceived as a creature apart; apart from nature, a guest on this planet, belonging to another world. In her anarchist and feminist utopias she seeks a new spititual home, a less alienated identity for humankind. Despite this apparent "development", at the heart of aU her books there is that same joy in this, mortal life, the search for which she sees as the most essential of aU human pursuits. That, ultimately, is both source and subject of Le Guin's work; and each new world explored is a different manifestation of the joyful Tao, a celebration of life.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
Sylvia Plath images of life in a poet of death
- Authors: Mather, Mary Lynn
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Plath, Sylvia , Plath, Sylvia -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2245 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002288 , Plath, Sylvia , Plath, Sylvia -- Criticism and interpretation
- Description: On a creative and a personal level, Sylvia Plath seems to have been fascinated by the relationship between life and death. Her work reflects an ongoing preoccupation with duality and a sense of tension between two opposing forces suffuses virtually every poem she wrote in the period from 1956 to early 1963. Because her attitude to both life and death is deeply ambivalent, Plath's poetry rests on a strong awareness of conflict and her art is characterized by a continual pull between extremes. This thesis is an examination of how she uses images of life in poems that ostensibly deal with death.While Plath draws on the events of her own life for her poetic material, she also converts her personal experiences into a universal myth. She was familiar with Robert Graves's eclectic study of the pagan nature deity, The White Goddess, and she seems to have incorporated part of his symbolism into her own code of images. In particular, she adopts Graves's triple goddess of nature as one of the dominant figures in her created world, for the White Goddess is associated with life and death alike.Plath's dichotomy of life and death works on different planes. Firstly, she frequently envisages the self as divided and the opposition between life and death takes on the dimensions of an internal psychological war. Secondly, she extends the battle between life and death to the creative sphere. Thirdly, she explores the idea of life as a journey from birth to death. The White Goddess is linked with the three natural realms of earth, sky and underworld. And Plath relies largely on seasonal, lunar and chthonic images in her poetry. Furthermore, the three colours of the goddess - white , red and black - are the dominant hues of her poetry.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
- Authors: Mather, Mary Lynn
- Date: 1992
- Subjects: Plath, Sylvia , Plath, Sylvia -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2245 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002288 , Plath, Sylvia , Plath, Sylvia -- Criticism and interpretation
- Description: On a creative and a personal level, Sylvia Plath seems to have been fascinated by the relationship between life and death. Her work reflects an ongoing preoccupation with duality and a sense of tension between two opposing forces suffuses virtually every poem she wrote in the period from 1956 to early 1963. Because her attitude to both life and death is deeply ambivalent, Plath's poetry rests on a strong awareness of conflict and her art is characterized by a continual pull between extremes. This thesis is an examination of how she uses images of life in poems that ostensibly deal with death.While Plath draws on the events of her own life for her poetic material, she also converts her personal experiences into a universal myth. She was familiar with Robert Graves's eclectic study of the pagan nature deity, The White Goddess, and she seems to have incorporated part of his symbolism into her own code of images. In particular, she adopts Graves's triple goddess of nature as one of the dominant figures in her created world, for the White Goddess is associated with life and death alike.Plath's dichotomy of life and death works on different planes. Firstly, she frequently envisages the self as divided and the opposition between life and death takes on the dimensions of an internal psychological war. Secondly, she extends the battle between life and death to the creative sphere. Thirdly, she explores the idea of life as a journey from birth to death. The White Goddess is linked with the three natural realms of earth, sky and underworld. And Plath relies largely on seasonal, lunar and chthonic images in her poetry. Furthermore, the three colours of the goddess - white , red and black - are the dominant hues of her poetry.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1992
A literary study of paranormal experience in Tennyson's poetry
- Louw, Denise Elizabeth Laurence
- Authors: Louw, Denise Elizabeth Laurence
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892 -- Criticism and interpretation Parapsychology in literature -- Research Romanticism -- 19th century -- Research English poetry -- 19th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2249 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002292
- Description: My thesis is that many of Tennyson's apparently paranormal experiences are explicable in terms of temporal lobe epilepsy; and that a study of the occurrence, in the work of art, of phenomena associated with these experiences, may be useful in elucidating the workings of the aesthetic imagination. A body of knowledge relevant to paranormal experience in Tennyson's life and work, assembled from both literary and biographical sources, is applied to a Subjective Paranormal Experience Questionnaire, compiled by Professor V.M. Neppe, in order to establish the range of the poet's apparently "psychic" experiences. The information is then analysed in terms of the symptomatology of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and the problems of differential diagnosis are considered. It is shown, by means of close and comparative analyses of a number of poems, that recurring clusters of images in Tennyson's poetry may have their genesis in TLE. These images are investigated in terms of modern research into altered states of consciousness. They are found to be consistent with a "model" of the three stages of trance experience constructed by Professor A.D. Lewis-Williams to account for shamanistic rock art in the San, Coso and Upper Paleolithic contexts. My study of the relevant phenomena in the work of a nineteenth century English poet would seem to offer cross-cultural verification of the applicability of the model to a range of altered-state contexts. This study goes on to investigate some of the psychological processes which may influence the way in which pathology is manifested in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. But, throughout the investigation, the possible effects of literary precursors and of other art forms are acknowledged. The subjective paranormal phenomena in Tennyson's poems are compared not only with some modern neuropsychiatric cases, but also with those of several nineteenth-century writers who seem to have had similar experiences . These include Dostoevsky and Edward Lear, who are known to have been epileptics, and Edgar Allan Poe. Similarity between some aspects of Tennyson's work and that of various Romantic poets, notably Shelley, is stressed; and it is tentatively suggested that it might be possible to extrapolate from my findings in this study to a more general theory of the "Romantic" imagination.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
- Authors: Louw, Denise Elizabeth Laurence
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892 -- Criticism and interpretation Parapsychology in literature -- Research Romanticism -- 19th century -- Research English poetry -- 19th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2249 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002292
- Description: My thesis is that many of Tennyson's apparently paranormal experiences are explicable in terms of temporal lobe epilepsy; and that a study of the occurrence, in the work of art, of phenomena associated with these experiences, may be useful in elucidating the workings of the aesthetic imagination. A body of knowledge relevant to paranormal experience in Tennyson's life and work, assembled from both literary and biographical sources, is applied to a Subjective Paranormal Experience Questionnaire, compiled by Professor V.M. Neppe, in order to establish the range of the poet's apparently "psychic" experiences. The information is then analysed in terms of the symptomatology of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and the problems of differential diagnosis are considered. It is shown, by means of close and comparative analyses of a number of poems, that recurring clusters of images in Tennyson's poetry may have their genesis in TLE. These images are investigated in terms of modern research into altered states of consciousness. They are found to be consistent with a "model" of the three stages of trance experience constructed by Professor A.D. Lewis-Williams to account for shamanistic rock art in the San, Coso and Upper Paleolithic contexts. My study of the relevant phenomena in the work of a nineteenth century English poet would seem to offer cross-cultural verification of the applicability of the model to a range of altered-state contexts. This study goes on to investigate some of the psychological processes which may influence the way in which pathology is manifested in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. But, throughout the investigation, the possible effects of literary precursors and of other art forms are acknowledged. The subjective paranormal phenomena in Tennyson's poems are compared not only with some modern neuropsychiatric cases, but also with those of several nineteenth-century writers who seem to have had similar experiences . These include Dostoevsky and Edward Lear, who are known to have been epileptics, and Edgar Allan Poe. Similarity between some aspects of Tennyson's work and that of various Romantic poets, notably Shelley, is stressed; and it is tentatively suggested that it might be possible to extrapolate from my findings in this study to a more general theory of the "Romantic" imagination.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
A study of Tennyson's Idylls of the King
- Authors: Falconer, Marc Stuart
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892. Idylls of the king , English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2237 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002280 , Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892. Idylls of the king , English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism
- Description: This thesis is a study of themes and genre in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. I have not attempted to present a survey of the body of critisicm on the cycle, nor have I attempted a comprehensive comparison of the poem with any of Tennyson's sources. The first chapter is based on A. Fowler's study of genres and I follow the implications of his work in my reading of the Idylls. Tennyson blends various generic strands in his cycle, in particular allegory, epic, dramatic monologue and the Alexandrian idyll, to create a complex psychological allegory of epic scope which both draws on traditional genres and extends them. I believe the Idylls should be read as a cycle and in the order in which Tennyson finally presented them; the ordering process is as much part of the creative process as the actual act of composition. I have adopted Priestley's sensible division of the twelve poems which he says "falls naturally into three groups of four, corresponding closely to the three acts of modern drama" (1960, p.252-254)" The second chapter begins the sequential examination of the first four "spring" and "summer" poems beginning with the symbolic The Coming of Arthur. This idyll begins Tennyson's Arthurian mythopoeia, creating a poetic kingdom of the mind. The "act" closes with the Geraint and Enid idylls, all four works in this section ending happily. The third chapter deals with the idylls which plot the corrupting and ever-widening influence of the adulterous relationship of Lancelot and Guinevere, one cause of the destruction of the institution of the Round Table. Other causes of the demise of Arthur's order are the pernicious influences of the evil Vivien and Modred and the meaningless and sterile spirituality that prompts the quest of The Holy Grail. The last four idylls chart the final collapse of Arthur's realm, the utter disillusionment of individual idealism - personified by Pelleas, an anachronistic spring figure who appears in Camelot's bleak and hostile winter - and the complete social decay which is demonstrated by the fiasco of The Last Tournament. The tragic denouement of the cycle, on both individual and social levels, is evident in Guinevere, in which Arthur's wretched and traitorous queen understands Arthur's vision, but too late to save Camelot from ruin. In the final framing idyll, The Passing of Arthur, Tennyson's myth is elevated to the level of universal significance, the Idylls of the King becoming "not the history of one man or one generation but of a whole cycle of generations" (Memoir, ii, p.127).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
- Authors: Falconer, Marc Stuart
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892. Idylls of the king , English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2237 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002280 , Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892. Idylls of the king , English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism
- Description: This thesis is a study of themes and genre in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. I have not attempted to present a survey of the body of critisicm on the cycle, nor have I attempted a comprehensive comparison of the poem with any of Tennyson's sources. The first chapter is based on A. Fowler's study of genres and I follow the implications of his work in my reading of the Idylls. Tennyson blends various generic strands in his cycle, in particular allegory, epic, dramatic monologue and the Alexandrian idyll, to create a complex psychological allegory of epic scope which both draws on traditional genres and extends them. I believe the Idylls should be read as a cycle and in the order in which Tennyson finally presented them; the ordering process is as much part of the creative process as the actual act of composition. I have adopted Priestley's sensible division of the twelve poems which he says "falls naturally into three groups of four, corresponding closely to the three acts of modern drama" (1960, p.252-254)" The second chapter begins the sequential examination of the first four "spring" and "summer" poems beginning with the symbolic The Coming of Arthur. This idyll begins Tennyson's Arthurian mythopoeia, creating a poetic kingdom of the mind. The "act" closes with the Geraint and Enid idylls, all four works in this section ending happily. The third chapter deals with the idylls which plot the corrupting and ever-widening influence of the adulterous relationship of Lancelot and Guinevere, one cause of the destruction of the institution of the Round Table. Other causes of the demise of Arthur's order are the pernicious influences of the evil Vivien and Modred and the meaningless and sterile spirituality that prompts the quest of The Holy Grail. The last four idylls chart the final collapse of Arthur's realm, the utter disillusionment of individual idealism - personified by Pelleas, an anachronistic spring figure who appears in Camelot's bleak and hostile winter - and the complete social decay which is demonstrated by the fiasco of The Last Tournament. The tragic denouement of the cycle, on both individual and social levels, is evident in Guinevere, in which Arthur's wretched and traitorous queen understands Arthur's vision, but too late to save Camelot from ruin. In the final framing idyll, The Passing of Arthur, Tennyson's myth is elevated to the level of universal significance, the Idylls of the King becoming "not the history of one man or one generation but of a whole cycle of generations" (Memoir, ii, p.127).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
Beyond all words : a psychoanalytic approach to the phenomenon of mysticism in literature
- Authors: Bunyan, David Christopher
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Mysticism in literature Mysticism -- Psychological aspects
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2242 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002285
- Description: The principal claim of this thesis is that the mystical experience is a wide-ranging influence upon literature. It is a recurrent thematic concern of poets, novelists and playwrights; but even when mysticism is not an overt element in a text, analysis of its symbols can reveal references to emotions and experiences of a mystical character - as is frequently the case with fantasy. In a more essential way, certain widely-used techniques of poetry effectively reproduce the character of mystical events for the reader. Some theory does indeed imply that the mystical bearing is quite fundamental, at a certain level, to all creative literature. This thesis explores the link between mysticism and literature through widely differing examples, to show how it continues to be found in otherwise divergent texts and contexts. Indeed, no attempt is made to provide an exhaustive overview; rather, certain special areas of interest are represented by selected cases. Mystical elements in Modernism, for example (especially in T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf), are contrasted with Romantic attitudes to mysticism, which Wordsworth and Coleridge are taken to represent. A further goal is to analyse the character of literary mysticism, and to account for the connection between mysticism and literary practice. The view is adopted that the circumstances in which the infant first acquires language is of crucial importance in this regard, and that literary language often draws upon submerged recollections of these early circumstances. Literature, it is argued, can employ signs and patterns of symbolisation in ways that actually attempt to 'undo' many of the everyday functions of words. The ultimate ideal of such literary techniques is to 'reverse' the process by which language was acquired and to 'return' the reader to a state resembling pre-linguistic experience, a goal which has much in common with the ambitions of mystics. Jacques Lacan's theoretical writings touch at many points upon the early development of the child and the significance of its acquisition of language. This thesis consequently has recourse to Lacan's work and, where relevant, to related psychoanalytic writings by Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva. After an investigation of the main characteristics of mystical experience as such, the Introduction broadly outlines Lacan's theoretical position. Chapter 1 is concerned more specifically with Lacan's discussions of mysticism. Part Two (Chapters 2-4) deals principally with the links between mystical yearnings and the Romantic ideal of the 'sublime'. In Part Three (Chapters 5-7) the relation between mysticism and Modernist developments affecting both theme and artistic technique is examined in works by three writers: T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Fernando Pessoa. Part Four discusses particular literary presentations of 'evil' and of 'good' as embodiments of mystical perceptions. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 'supernatural' fiction is selected to represent the first case, and certain New Testament and early Christian texts the second.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
- Authors: Bunyan, David Christopher
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Mysticism in literature Mysticism -- Psychological aspects
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2242 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002285
- Description: The principal claim of this thesis is that the mystical experience is a wide-ranging influence upon literature. It is a recurrent thematic concern of poets, novelists and playwrights; but even when mysticism is not an overt element in a text, analysis of its symbols can reveal references to emotions and experiences of a mystical character - as is frequently the case with fantasy. In a more essential way, certain widely-used techniques of poetry effectively reproduce the character of mystical events for the reader. Some theory does indeed imply that the mystical bearing is quite fundamental, at a certain level, to all creative literature. This thesis explores the link between mysticism and literature through widely differing examples, to show how it continues to be found in otherwise divergent texts and contexts. Indeed, no attempt is made to provide an exhaustive overview; rather, certain special areas of interest are represented by selected cases. Mystical elements in Modernism, for example (especially in T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf), are contrasted with Romantic attitudes to mysticism, which Wordsworth and Coleridge are taken to represent. A further goal is to analyse the character of literary mysticism, and to account for the connection between mysticism and literary practice. The view is adopted that the circumstances in which the infant first acquires language is of crucial importance in this regard, and that literary language often draws upon submerged recollections of these early circumstances. Literature, it is argued, can employ signs and patterns of symbolisation in ways that actually attempt to 'undo' many of the everyday functions of words. The ultimate ideal of such literary techniques is to 'reverse' the process by which language was acquired and to 'return' the reader to a state resembling pre-linguistic experience, a goal which has much in common with the ambitions of mystics. Jacques Lacan's theoretical writings touch at many points upon the early development of the child and the significance of its acquisition of language. This thesis consequently has recourse to Lacan's work and, where relevant, to related psychoanalytic writings by Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva. After an investigation of the main characteristics of mystical experience as such, the Introduction broadly outlines Lacan's theoretical position. Chapter 1 is concerned more specifically with Lacan's discussions of mysticism. Part Two (Chapters 2-4) deals principally with the links between mystical yearnings and the Romantic ideal of the 'sublime'. In Part Three (Chapters 5-7) the relation between mysticism and Modernist developments affecting both theme and artistic technique is examined in works by three writers: T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Fernando Pessoa. Part Four discusses particular literary presentations of 'evil' and of 'good' as embodiments of mystical perceptions. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 'supernatural' fiction is selected to represent the first case, and certain New Testament and early Christian texts the second.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
The shadowed corners of sunlit ruins: Gothic elements in twentieth century children's adventure fiction
- Authors: Wagenaar, Peter Simon
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Children's literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism , Gothic literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2250 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002293 , Children's literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism , Gothic literature
- Description: This thesis examines the way in which children's adventure fiction makes use of Gothic features, how these features have been modified for a younger audience and how these modifications have been influenced by other developments in children's and popular fiction: Chapter One sets out to define the nature of Gothic and isolate those aspects of it relevant to the proposed study. It puts forward a theory to account for the movement of Gothic trends into later children's fiction. Chapter Two examines the use of landscape, setting and atmospheric effects in Gothic and the way in which children's fiction has used similar trappings to create similar effects. Children's fiction, emphasising pleasurable excitement rather than fear has, however, muted these effects somewhat and played down the role of the supernatural, so intrinsic to Gothic. Chapter Three emphasises the Gothic's use of stereotypes, focusing on the portrayal of heroes and heroines. Those of children's fiction are portrayed very similarly to those of Gothic and the chapter compares and, on occasion, contrasts them noting, inter alia, their adherence to rigid moral codes and narrowly defined norms of masculine and feminine behaviour. Chapter Four looks at the portrayal of villains and the way in which their appearance defines them as such (as, indeed, does that of heroes and heroines). It examines in some detail their relationship to and interaction with the heroes and heroines, noting, for example, the 'pseudo-parental' role of villains who are characteristically older and in socially approved positions to exert power over heroes and heroines. The Conclusion addresses the fantasy aspect of these novels,referred to several times in passing in the course of earlier chapters, and comments on how the features detailed in Chapters Two, Three and Four all operate within the conventions of a fantasy.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
- Authors: Wagenaar, Peter Simon
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Children's literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism , Gothic literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2250 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002293 , Children's literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism , Gothic literature
- Description: This thesis examines the way in which children's adventure fiction makes use of Gothic features, how these features have been modified for a younger audience and how these modifications have been influenced by other developments in children's and popular fiction: Chapter One sets out to define the nature of Gothic and isolate those aspects of it relevant to the proposed study. It puts forward a theory to account for the movement of Gothic trends into later children's fiction. Chapter Two examines the use of landscape, setting and atmospheric effects in Gothic and the way in which children's fiction has used similar trappings to create similar effects. Children's fiction, emphasising pleasurable excitement rather than fear has, however, muted these effects somewhat and played down the role of the supernatural, so intrinsic to Gothic. Chapter Three emphasises the Gothic's use of stereotypes, focusing on the portrayal of heroes and heroines. Those of children's fiction are portrayed very similarly to those of Gothic and the chapter compares and, on occasion, contrasts them noting, inter alia, their adherence to rigid moral codes and narrowly defined norms of masculine and feminine behaviour. Chapter Four looks at the portrayal of villains and the way in which their appearance defines them as such (as, indeed, does that of heroes and heroines). It examines in some detail their relationship to and interaction with the heroes and heroines, noting, for example, the 'pseudo-parental' role of villains who are characteristically older and in socially approved positions to exert power over heroes and heroines. The Conclusion addresses the fantasy aspect of these novels,referred to several times in passing in the course of earlier chapters, and comments on how the features detailed in Chapters Two, Three and Four all operate within the conventions of a fantasy.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1991
Alternative mythical structures in the fiction of Patrick White
- Authors: Bosman, Brenda Evadne
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: White, Patrick, 1912-1990 , White, Patrick, 1912-1990 -- Criticism and interpretation , Myth in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2170 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001821
- Description: The texts in this study interrogate the dominant myths which have affected the constructs of identity and history in the white Australian socio-historical context. These myths are exposed by White as ideologically determined and as operating by processes of exclusion, repression and marginalisation. White challenges the autonomy of both European and Australian cultures, reveals the ideological complicity between them and adopts a critical approach to all Western cultural assumptions. As a post-colonial writer, White shares the need of both post-colonising and post-colonised groups for an identity established not in terms of the colonial power but in terms of themselves. As a dissident white male, he is a privileged member of the post- colonising group but one who rejects the dominant discourses as illegitimate and unlegitimating. He offers a re-writing of the myths underpinning colonial and post-colonising discourses which privileges their suppressed and repressed elements. His re-writings affect aboriginal men and women, white women and the 'privileged' white male whose subjection to social control is masked as unproblematic freedom. White's re-writing of myth enbraces the post-modern as well as the post- colonial. He not only deconstructs and demystifies the phallogocentric/ethnocentric order of things; he also attempts to avoid totalization by privileging indeterminacy, fragmentation, hybridization and those liminary states which defy articulation: the ecstatic, the abject, the unspeakable. He himself is denied authority in that his re-writings are presented as mere acts in the always provisional process of making interpretations. White acknowledges the problematics of both presentation and re-presentation - an unresolved tension between the post-colonial desire for self-definition and the post-modern decentring of all meaning and interpretation permeates his discourse. The close readings of the texts attempt, accordingly, to reflect varying oppositional strategies: those which seek to overturn hierarchies and expose power-relations and those which seek an idiom in which contemporary Australia may find its least distorted reflexion. Within this ideological context, the Lacanian thematics of the subject, and their re-writing by Kristeva, are linked with dialectical criticism in an attempt to reflect a strictly provisional process of (re) construction
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
- Authors: Bosman, Brenda Evadne
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: White, Patrick, 1912-1990 , White, Patrick, 1912-1990 -- Criticism and interpretation , Myth in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2170 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001821
- Description: The texts in this study interrogate the dominant myths which have affected the constructs of identity and history in the white Australian socio-historical context. These myths are exposed by White as ideologically determined and as operating by processes of exclusion, repression and marginalisation. White challenges the autonomy of both European and Australian cultures, reveals the ideological complicity between them and adopts a critical approach to all Western cultural assumptions. As a post-colonial writer, White shares the need of both post-colonising and post-colonised groups for an identity established not in terms of the colonial power but in terms of themselves. As a dissident white male, he is a privileged member of the post- colonising group but one who rejects the dominant discourses as illegitimate and unlegitimating. He offers a re-writing of the myths underpinning colonial and post-colonising discourses which privileges their suppressed and repressed elements. His re-writings affect aboriginal men and women, white women and the 'privileged' white male whose subjection to social control is masked as unproblematic freedom. White's re-writing of myth enbraces the post-modern as well as the post- colonial. He not only deconstructs and demystifies the phallogocentric/ethnocentric order of things; he also attempts to avoid totalization by privileging indeterminacy, fragmentation, hybridization and those liminary states which defy articulation: the ecstatic, the abject, the unspeakable. He himself is denied authority in that his re-writings are presented as mere acts in the always provisional process of making interpretations. White acknowledges the problematics of both presentation and re-presentation - an unresolved tension between the post-colonial desire for self-definition and the post-modern decentring of all meaning and interpretation permeates his discourse. The close readings of the texts attempt, accordingly, to reflect varying oppositional strategies: those which seek to overturn hierarchies and expose power-relations and those which seek an idiom in which contemporary Australia may find its least distorted reflexion. Within this ideological context, the Lacanian thematics of the subject, and their re-writing by Kristeva, are linked with dialectical criticism in an attempt to reflect a strictly provisional process of (re) construction
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
The idea of gaiety in Yeats's lyric poetry
- Authors: Brady, Bronwyn
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 -- Criticism and interpretation , Lyric poetry -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2324 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015642
- Description: In June 1917 W.B. Yeats wrote to his father : Much of your thought resembles mine . . but mine is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will I hope interest you as a form of poetry. I find the setting it all in order has helped my verse, has given me a new framework and new patterns. (Wade 1954, 627) The new framework and new patterns that he claimed to have found in his system generated a new, and for Yeats, radically different sort of poetry. Before 1919 (The Wild Swans at Coole), the poetry had as its subject various traditional themes: the pity of love; the romance and heroism of Irish mythology; the threat of age, change and death. The poetry up to this point is, formally speaking, highly skillful, but locked into its own admissions of failure to touch or incorporate reality in any but a romantically defeatist way. However, the order which Yeats refers to in his letter, and the system he generated as a propaedeutic to this new order, once assimilated into the habit and texture of the poetry, generated new topics of its own which made those of the earlier work seem subjective, self- indulgent and intellectually uninformed. Yeats's poetry now changed drastically in focus and form, from subjective to objective poetry. Whereas the earlier poetry had opposed reality with romantic heroism or selfdestructive despondency, the poetry subsequent to his change of practice, incorporates a new vision of reality as the intrinsic architechtonics of poetry itself. Now the measure of human and aesthetic completion is no longer an inexplicable and inscrutable sadness, but an intelligent and informed detachment, an energy of mind that Yeats called "gaiety". My thesis explores this energy of mind and what it meant for Yeats and his poetry. My contention is that the idea of gaiety provides a way for Yeats to grant meaning to his life, a way for him to create himself. As the poetry is completed thanks to the new system, so is the poet. In order to see this, it is necessary to read the poems as a series of collections, or stories, that resonate back and forth with meaning and qualification and understanding. Yeats's system is his myth, and he writes his poetry in terms of and informed by that myth, shaping and re-shaping the experience of the created and fictional self until it has meaning in a way that the real self does not. The thesis explores this process of creation firstly in theoretical terms, using Lotman's ideas of Story and Myth, and looking at Yeats's intellectual and poetic inheritance. It goes on to examine some of the great poems in an attempt to define gaiety, and how Yeats achieves it in the poetry, and then to look at the early, pre-system poems to see how they differ. Finally, it takes the last of Yeats's lyric collections, Last Poems, and shows how gaiety works in the most mature poetry when the poems are read as narrative events within a story.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
- Authors: Brady, Bronwyn
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 -- Criticism and interpretation , Lyric poetry -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2324 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015642
- Description: In June 1917 W.B. Yeats wrote to his father : Much of your thought resembles mine . . but mine is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will I hope interest you as a form of poetry. I find the setting it all in order has helped my verse, has given me a new framework and new patterns. (Wade 1954, 627) The new framework and new patterns that he claimed to have found in his system generated a new, and for Yeats, radically different sort of poetry. Before 1919 (The Wild Swans at Coole), the poetry had as its subject various traditional themes: the pity of love; the romance and heroism of Irish mythology; the threat of age, change and death. The poetry up to this point is, formally speaking, highly skillful, but locked into its own admissions of failure to touch or incorporate reality in any but a romantically defeatist way. However, the order which Yeats refers to in his letter, and the system he generated as a propaedeutic to this new order, once assimilated into the habit and texture of the poetry, generated new topics of its own which made those of the earlier work seem subjective, self- indulgent and intellectually uninformed. Yeats's poetry now changed drastically in focus and form, from subjective to objective poetry. Whereas the earlier poetry had opposed reality with romantic heroism or selfdestructive despondency, the poetry subsequent to his change of practice, incorporates a new vision of reality as the intrinsic architechtonics of poetry itself. Now the measure of human and aesthetic completion is no longer an inexplicable and inscrutable sadness, but an intelligent and informed detachment, an energy of mind that Yeats called "gaiety". My thesis explores this energy of mind and what it meant for Yeats and his poetry. My contention is that the idea of gaiety provides a way for Yeats to grant meaning to his life, a way for him to create himself. As the poetry is completed thanks to the new system, so is the poet. In order to see this, it is necessary to read the poems as a series of collections, or stories, that resonate back and forth with meaning and qualification and understanding. Yeats's system is his myth, and he writes his poetry in terms of and informed by that myth, shaping and re-shaping the experience of the created and fictional self until it has meaning in a way that the real self does not. The thesis explores this process of creation firstly in theoretical terms, using Lotman's ideas of Story and Myth, and looking at Yeats's intellectual and poetic inheritance. It goes on to examine some of the great poems in an attempt to define gaiety, and how Yeats achieves it in the poetry, and then to look at the early, pre-system poems to see how they differ. Finally, it takes the last of Yeats's lyric collections, Last Poems, and shows how gaiety works in the most mature poetry when the poems are read as narrative events within a story.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1990
An "unobtrusive art" : Elizabeth Gaskell's use of place in Ruth, North and South, and Wives and Daughters
- Authors: Eve, Vivian Jeanette
- Date: 1989
- Subjects: Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 , Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2173 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001824
- Description: The purpose of this study is to show how Elizabeth Gaskell creates a sense of place and why place is important in her novels. Gaskell's life and works indicate an interest in place and an ability to recreate it, but, although most critics mention her descriptive powers, few examine how a sense of place is achieved. Indeed, setting as a tool of analysis has received critical attention only fairly recently. Here the term 'place' has been chosen because it embraces the social, physical, and personal aspects of setting as well as the objects with which spaces are furnished, and for the purpose of discussing its significance a model of the novel has been devised which shows the interrelationships of character, action, setting, language, and ideas, as well as the influence of context (Introduction). Gaskell creates a sense of place in many unobtrusive ways, but particularly important are point of view, windows as vantage points, the connection of place with memory, and similarities in perception between scenes in the novels and fashions in painting (Chapter One). An analysis of Ruth illustrates the interrelationship of character and place. Ruth's journey mirrors her spiritual development, and character is often revealed through response to environment or the displacement of emotions onto it, while place is also used to signify innocence and to emphasize the plea for understanding of the unmarried mother and her child (Chapter Two). Places in North and South represent important aspects of newly industrialized Britain, and are significant to the novel's vision of a coherent society; an examination of how apparently irreconcilable communities are shown to be mutually dependent underlines the importance of place to the novel's ideas (Chapter Three). Wives and Daughters has a complicated plot based on a number of parallel, interlocking stories each centred on a home in the neighbourhood of Hollingford. How event, story, and plot are connected to these places shows their relationship with action (Chapter Four). Thus is an appreciation of Gaskell's literary achievement enhanced, and place shown to be a significant element in her novels.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1989
- Authors: Eve, Vivian Jeanette
- Date: 1989
- Subjects: Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 , Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2173 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001824
- Description: The purpose of this study is to show how Elizabeth Gaskell creates a sense of place and why place is important in her novels. Gaskell's life and works indicate an interest in place and an ability to recreate it, but, although most critics mention her descriptive powers, few examine how a sense of place is achieved. Indeed, setting as a tool of analysis has received critical attention only fairly recently. Here the term 'place' has been chosen because it embraces the social, physical, and personal aspects of setting as well as the objects with which spaces are furnished, and for the purpose of discussing its significance a model of the novel has been devised which shows the interrelationships of character, action, setting, language, and ideas, as well as the influence of context (Introduction). Gaskell creates a sense of place in many unobtrusive ways, but particularly important are point of view, windows as vantage points, the connection of place with memory, and similarities in perception between scenes in the novels and fashions in painting (Chapter One). An analysis of Ruth illustrates the interrelationship of character and place. Ruth's journey mirrors her spiritual development, and character is often revealed through response to environment or the displacement of emotions onto it, while place is also used to signify innocence and to emphasize the plea for understanding of the unmarried mother and her child (Chapter Two). Places in North and South represent important aspects of newly industrialized Britain, and are significant to the novel's vision of a coherent society; an examination of how apparently irreconcilable communities are shown to be mutually dependent underlines the importance of place to the novel's ideas (Chapter Three). Wives and Daughters has a complicated plot based on a number of parallel, interlocking stories each centred on a home in the neighbourhood of Hollingford. How event, story, and plot are connected to these places shows their relationship with action (Chapter Four). Thus is an appreciation of Gaskell's literary achievement enhanced, and place shown to be a significant element in her novels.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1989
An analysis of the structural use of music, song and dance in certain novels by West African writers in relation to concepts of time
- Authors: Baxter, Marion
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Music and literature
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2174 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001825
- Description: The topic of this thesis is time in the West African novel in English and French, and the key approach is that West African time is readily grasped through a study of West African music. Though Western time is not exclusively or only linear, mechanical and exploitative, and African time not exclusively cyclic, synchronic and experiential, yet there is a characteristically African view of time and preferred modes of its employment in West African fiction. The novelists considered here wrote in European languages, yet each was a member of a specific cultural group and concerned to portray the aesthetics of his inheritance, an important aspect of which is the predominance of repetitive formulae, both in music and in oral literature. The Introduction offers an historical survey of some of the main notions of time that have been manifest in the West, and compares them with notions of African time. Chapter One examines the structural use of rhythm and repetition in the novels of Camara Laye. Chapter Two discusses the griot and other traditions of oral literature in the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and Yambo Ouologuem, novels which are concerned with the griot 's continuing role in the creation and dissemination of historical perspective. Chapter Three analyses Chinua Achebe 's portrayal of the values of pre-colonial life in Igbo society where the role of music is to limit behaviour through the structures of ritual which thus create static/cyclic time. Chapter Four describes the syncretic art-form, 'highlife', as used by novelists such as Wole Soyinka, which, because it is transitory and always changing, underscores the ironies of modern city life. The thesis concludes that the authors discussed above are aware that music, because it is predominantly social in Africa, is a powerful medium for achieving a healing synthesis between the traditional past when communalistic values were binding, and the urban-orientated present with its insistence on individuation and material enrichment.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
- Authors: Baxter, Marion
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Music and literature
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2174 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001825
- Description: The topic of this thesis is time in the West African novel in English and French, and the key approach is that West African time is readily grasped through a study of West African music. Though Western time is not exclusively or only linear, mechanical and exploitative, and African time not exclusively cyclic, synchronic and experiential, yet there is a characteristically African view of time and preferred modes of its employment in West African fiction. The novelists considered here wrote in European languages, yet each was a member of a specific cultural group and concerned to portray the aesthetics of his inheritance, an important aspect of which is the predominance of repetitive formulae, both in music and in oral literature. The Introduction offers an historical survey of some of the main notions of time that have been manifest in the West, and compares them with notions of African time. Chapter One examines the structural use of rhythm and repetition in the novels of Camara Laye. Chapter Two discusses the griot and other traditions of oral literature in the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and Yambo Ouologuem, novels which are concerned with the griot 's continuing role in the creation and dissemination of historical perspective. Chapter Three analyses Chinua Achebe 's portrayal of the values of pre-colonial life in Igbo society where the role of music is to limit behaviour through the structures of ritual which thus create static/cyclic time. Chapter Four describes the syncretic art-form, 'highlife', as used by novelists such as Wole Soyinka, which, because it is transitory and always changing, underscores the ironies of modern city life. The thesis concludes that the authors discussed above are aware that music, because it is predominantly social in Africa, is a powerful medium for achieving a healing synthesis between the traditional past when communalistic values were binding, and the urban-orientated present with its insistence on individuation and material enrichment.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
Defined by wine : a study of sacramentalism in George Herbertʾs poetry
- Authors: Goddard, Kevin Graham
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Herbert, George, 1593-1633 -- Criticism and interpretation , Christian poetry, English -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2177 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001828
- Description: This dissertation proposes that George Herbertʾs poetry may profitably be understood as a sacramental means by which the divine is made present in temporal existence. In order to support this claim, the relation between sacramental symbolism and literary symbolism, particularly Herbertʾs, is examined from a number of perspectives. The symbolic meanings suggested by Herbertʾs title (The Temple), and their relation to sacramentalism are considered in the opening chapter. This includes a consideration of some of the background to the analogical thinking prevalent in both the seventeenth-century and Herbert. It is followed in the second chapter by an examination of some of the modern theories about how literary symbolism may relate to sacramental symbolism, a discussion which is followed by a consideration of this dissertation's argument in relation to modern scholarship. The chapter ends with a reading of ʺThe Flowerʺ. The third chapter discusses the poet's attempt to imitate the divine by ʺcopyingʺ both Scripture and Nature, and this includes a consideration of the allegorical and hieroglyphic modes of thought prevalent in the poems. The concern with imitation encourages an examination of the poet's frequent invitation for God actually to assume the poet's role, and this is the subject of the fourth chapter. The argument suggests that the poet's attempt to ʺsacrificeʺ his own writing may be seen in his concern with corporate imagery and corporate (impersonal) structures. The five ʺAfflictionʺ poems are examined as examples of the first, while structures such as synecdoche and metonymy are examined as examples of the second. The final chapter considers aspects of narrative time in the poems, particularly the sense often evoked of the eternal being imminent in the present. This involves a consideration of both liturgical imagery, and what may be called liturgical structures as they can be seen to operate in the poems. Particular examples of the latter are the relation between the liturgical anamnesis and the poems, as well as certain narrative structures that may be called ʺachronisticʺ.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
- Authors: Goddard, Kevin Graham
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Herbert, George, 1593-1633 -- Criticism and interpretation , Christian poetry, English -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2177 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001828
- Description: This dissertation proposes that George Herbertʾs poetry may profitably be understood as a sacramental means by which the divine is made present in temporal existence. In order to support this claim, the relation between sacramental symbolism and literary symbolism, particularly Herbertʾs, is examined from a number of perspectives. The symbolic meanings suggested by Herbertʾs title (The Temple), and their relation to sacramentalism are considered in the opening chapter. This includes a consideration of some of the background to the analogical thinking prevalent in both the seventeenth-century and Herbert. It is followed in the second chapter by an examination of some of the modern theories about how literary symbolism may relate to sacramental symbolism, a discussion which is followed by a consideration of this dissertation's argument in relation to modern scholarship. The chapter ends with a reading of ʺThe Flowerʺ. The third chapter discusses the poet's attempt to imitate the divine by ʺcopyingʺ both Scripture and Nature, and this includes a consideration of the allegorical and hieroglyphic modes of thought prevalent in the poems. The concern with imitation encourages an examination of the poet's frequent invitation for God actually to assume the poet's role, and this is the subject of the fourth chapter. The argument suggests that the poet's attempt to ʺsacrificeʺ his own writing may be seen in his concern with corporate imagery and corporate (impersonal) structures. The five ʺAfflictionʺ poems are examined as examples of the first, while structures such as synecdoche and metonymy are examined as examples of the second. The final chapter considers aspects of narrative time in the poems, particularly the sense often evoked of the eternal being imminent in the present. This involves a consideration of both liturgical imagery, and what may be called liturgical structures as they can be seen to operate in the poems. Particular examples of the latter are the relation between the liturgical anamnesis and the poems, as well as certain narrative structures that may be called ʺachronisticʺ.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
The functions of narrative : a study of recent novelistic nonfiction
- Authors: Carlean, Kevin John
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Reportage literature -- History and criticism , Nonfiction novel
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2176 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001827
- Description: Since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences was published in 1965, there have been many attempts to define and explain the phenomenon of the "non-fiction novel" as a unified narrative genre. Some of these attempts have been highly theoretical and scholarly, but most have been rather loose definitions referring to an extremely wide range of diverse factual narratives. Over the years, so many different works have been called "non-fiction novels" that it now seems as if the notion of such a unified genre is questionable. Surely it is not generically useful to say that such functionally distinct works as Oscar Lewis's La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (1967) and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart ot the American Dream (1971) belong in the same narrative category. The purpose of this study is to show that many of the works routinely referred to as "non-fiction novels" perform fundamentally different narrative functions and do not belong together in a unified genre. Roman Jakobson's model of communication and his notion of the "dominant function" are used to identify three functional categories into which the narratives discussed in the study logically fall: first, there are predominantly sociological works in which the referential function is the most important element of the communication; second, there are predominantly journalistic works in which the opinions of the writer or emotive function constitute the central narrative concern; and thirdly, we have works performing a dominant novelistic or aesthetic function in the sense that the secondary meanings and themes implied are the most important elements communicated. The thesis follows the following structure. In the introductory chapter, a critique of some of the major generic theories of the "non-fiction novel" as unified genre is offered. The purpose here is not to caricature what are sometimes extremely sophisticated studies. (Indeed, in my own analysis of texts, I am often indebted to the critical insights of the scholars whose theories I question in the introduction.) My purpose is merely to show that the corpus of works each writer refers to can be divided more logically between different dominant narrative functions. The introduction ends with a more detailed explanation of the adaptation of Jakobson's notion of "the dominant" and how it relates to the functional categories identified. Chapter 2 offers analyses of a group of documentary narratives that perform a dominant sociological function but have often been referred to as "non-fiction novels." The chapter starts with an analysis of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a text widely regarded as the first real American example of the "genre." This is followed by an examination of the anthropological works of Oscar Lewis: Five Families: Mexican Case Studles in the Culture of Poverty (1959), The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1964), Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and his Family (1964) and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. I conclude the chapter with an analysis of the recent sociological works of Studs Terkel: Division Street: America (1968), Hard Times: An oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do (1974). In Chapter 3, the notion of subjective participation journalism is explained. This is followed by an analysis of three of the most famous and creative of the works that fall into this functional category: Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (1966), Michael Herr's Vietnam classic, Dispatches (1977), and Norman Mailer's account of a famous protest march, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (1968). Chapter 4 offers a discussion of three works that perform a dominant novelistic function in the realistic tradition of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment. All three are based on actual murder cases, but the facts of the stories are subordinated to the novelistic themes the author wishes to abstract. They are: Meyer Levin's Compulsion (1957), Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979) and Capote's In Cold Blood. From this outline, it may appear as if the study is loaded in favour of the sociological works discussed in Chapter 2. This is intentional because, although many critics have referred to them as "non-fiction novels", very little systematic and detailed analysis of these works as a corpus has been forthcoming. This long chapter is an attempt to redress the balance.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
- Authors: Carlean, Kevin John
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Reportage literature -- History and criticism , Nonfiction novel
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2176 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001827
- Description: Since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences was published in 1965, there have been many attempts to define and explain the phenomenon of the "non-fiction novel" as a unified narrative genre. Some of these attempts have been highly theoretical and scholarly, but most have been rather loose definitions referring to an extremely wide range of diverse factual narratives. Over the years, so many different works have been called "non-fiction novels" that it now seems as if the notion of such a unified genre is questionable. Surely it is not generically useful to say that such functionally distinct works as Oscar Lewis's La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (1967) and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart ot the American Dream (1971) belong in the same narrative category. The purpose of this study is to show that many of the works routinely referred to as "non-fiction novels" perform fundamentally different narrative functions and do not belong together in a unified genre. Roman Jakobson's model of communication and his notion of the "dominant function" are used to identify three functional categories into which the narratives discussed in the study logically fall: first, there are predominantly sociological works in which the referential function is the most important element of the communication; second, there are predominantly journalistic works in which the opinions of the writer or emotive function constitute the central narrative concern; and thirdly, we have works performing a dominant novelistic or aesthetic function in the sense that the secondary meanings and themes implied are the most important elements communicated. The thesis follows the following structure. In the introductory chapter, a critique of some of the major generic theories of the "non-fiction novel" as unified genre is offered. The purpose here is not to caricature what are sometimes extremely sophisticated studies. (Indeed, in my own analysis of texts, I am often indebted to the critical insights of the scholars whose theories I question in the introduction.) My purpose is merely to show that the corpus of works each writer refers to can be divided more logically between different dominant narrative functions. The introduction ends with a more detailed explanation of the adaptation of Jakobson's notion of "the dominant" and how it relates to the functional categories identified. Chapter 2 offers analyses of a group of documentary narratives that perform a dominant sociological function but have often been referred to as "non-fiction novels." The chapter starts with an analysis of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a text widely regarded as the first real American example of the "genre." This is followed by an examination of the anthropological works of Oscar Lewis: Five Families: Mexican Case Studles in the Culture of Poverty (1959), The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1964), Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and his Family (1964) and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. I conclude the chapter with an analysis of the recent sociological works of Studs Terkel: Division Street: America (1968), Hard Times: An oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do (1974). In Chapter 3, the notion of subjective participation journalism is explained. This is followed by an analysis of three of the most famous and creative of the works that fall into this functional category: Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (1966), Michael Herr's Vietnam classic, Dispatches (1977), and Norman Mailer's account of a famous protest march, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (1968). Chapter 4 offers a discussion of three works that perform a dominant novelistic function in the realistic tradition of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment. All three are based on actual murder cases, but the facts of the stories are subordinated to the novelistic themes the author wishes to abstract. They are: Meyer Levin's Compulsion (1957), Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979) and Capote's In Cold Blood. From this outline, it may appear as if the study is loaded in favour of the sociological works discussed in Chapter 2. This is intentional because, although many critics have referred to them as "non-fiction novels", very little systematic and detailed analysis of these works as a corpus has been forthcoming. This long chapter is an attempt to redress the balance.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1988
"All vistas close in the unseen" : a study of the transcendent in the fiction of E. M. Forster
- Authors: Butler, Ian
- Date: 1987
- Subjects: Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970 -- Criticism and interpretation , Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2175 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001826
- Description: From introduction: It has become something of a commonplace among critics to remark Forster's relative lack of success in offering an alternative to the world which he satirises with such wit and humour. His comic treatment of the suburban absurdities of the Edwardian Englishman is, on the whole, far more compelling and memorable than the often vague, symbolic gestures by means of which he implies the possibility of something better. With the exception of his last and greatest novel, A Passage to India, his "alternatives" are largely factitious and contrived. Worse, the reader senses a fundamental uncertainty on the part of the author: his characteristic ambivalence in itself an indication of a perceptive and discriminating mind -- all too often suggests lack of conviction rather than an intelligent awareness of the infinitude of human possibilities.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1987
- Authors: Butler, Ian
- Date: 1987
- Subjects: Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970 -- Criticism and interpretation , Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2175 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001826
- Description: From introduction: It has become something of a commonplace among critics to remark Forster's relative lack of success in offering an alternative to the world which he satirises with such wit and humour. His comic treatment of the suburban absurdities of the Edwardian Englishman is, on the whole, far more compelling and memorable than the often vague, symbolic gestures by means of which he implies the possibility of something better. With the exception of his last and greatest novel, A Passage to India, his "alternatives" are largely factitious and contrived. Worse, the reader senses a fundamental uncertainty on the part of the author: his characteristic ambivalence in itself an indication of a perceptive and discriminating mind -- all too often suggests lack of conviction rather than an intelligent awareness of the infinitude of human possibilities.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1987
Pauline Smith : between worlds
- Authors: Driver, Dorothy
- Date: 1987
- Subjects: Smith, Pauline, 1883-1959
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2266 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004792
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1987
- Authors: Driver, Dorothy
- Date: 1987
- Subjects: Smith, Pauline, 1883-1959
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2266 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004792
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1987
A view of Herrick's poetic world and its values: with some reference to his fairy poetry
- Authors: Letcher, Valerie Helen
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674 , Fairy poetry, English , English poetry -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2265 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004773 , Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674 , Fairy poetry, English , English poetry -- History and criticism
- Description: From the preface: Herrick was a prolific poet, and a remarkably consistent one. Hesperides encompasses a lifelong collection of poems on themes as diverse as serious reflections on life's brevity and the playful examination of the minutely imagined world of the fairies, yet his vision of life remains coherent. My purpose in this study is to try to see ·Herrick's secular work in its unity and as a whole, without claiming to consider every aspect of his secular poetry. (I have not attempted, for example, to consider his classical sources.) As my interest lies mainly in his values and vision, my emphasis is on theme and tone, and the way they indicate his conception of life. For this reason, I only occasionally consider Herrick's poetic techniques, such as his versification and language, and there are no detailed analyses of individual poems which examine them from every angle. In addition, I am almost entirely concerned here with Hesperides , the secular poetry, and not with Herrick's religious verse, which is collected under the title of His Noble Numbers. (Although Herrick calls his book Hesperides: or The Works both Humane and Divine, the arrangement within is clearly a division into Hesperides, the secular poetry, and His Noble Numbers, the religious verse.)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986
- Authors: Letcher, Valerie Helen
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674 , Fairy poetry, English , English poetry -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2265 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004773 , Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674 , Fairy poetry, English , English poetry -- History and criticism
- Description: From the preface: Herrick was a prolific poet, and a remarkably consistent one. Hesperides encompasses a lifelong collection of poems on themes as diverse as serious reflections on life's brevity and the playful examination of the minutely imagined world of the fairies, yet his vision of life remains coherent. My purpose in this study is to try to see ·Herrick's secular work in its unity and as a whole, without claiming to consider every aspect of his secular poetry. (I have not attempted, for example, to consider his classical sources.) As my interest lies mainly in his values and vision, my emphasis is on theme and tone, and the way they indicate his conception of life. For this reason, I only occasionally consider Herrick's poetic techniques, such as his versification and language, and there are no detailed analyses of individual poems which examine them from every angle. In addition, I am almost entirely concerned here with Hesperides , the secular poetry, and not with Herrick's religious verse, which is collected under the title of His Noble Numbers. (Although Herrick calls his book Hesperides: or The Works both Humane and Divine, the arrangement within is clearly a division into Hesperides, the secular poetry, and His Noble Numbers, the religious verse.)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986
Elie Wiesel's fictional universe : the paradox of the mute narrator
- Authors: Berman, Mona
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: Wiesel, Elie, 1928- -- Criticism and interpretation , Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives , Auschwitz , Narration , Silence , English literature , Criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2178 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001829
- Description: The approach I have chosen for my study is to analyse the narrative techniques in Wiesel's fiction, with particular emphasis on the role of the narrator and listener in the narratives. This will not only highlight aspects of his authorial strategy involving the reader's response to various dimensions of the Holocaust, but will allow an appraisal of the literary merit of Wiesel's novels. The hushed reverence that tends to accompany allusions to Auschwitz and its literature has impeded certain theoretical investigations, with the result that most critical studies undertaken on Wiesel's works have dealt predominantly with themes and content rather than with form. A narrative approach, however, while it accounts for themes, does so within the narrative process of the work. Form and content are examined as interwoven entities in the particular context of an individual work. My decision to adopt this pursuit is based on the conviction that Wiesel's fiction is a significant contribution to the literature of testimony, not only because of its subject matter, but also because of the way in which his narrators unfold their stories with words suspended by silence in the text. The paradox of the mute narrator, the title of my study, is intended to convey the paradoxical quality of Wiesel's fiction and to show how silence, which is manifested in the themes of his work, is concretized by his strategy of entrusting the transmission of the tale to narrators, who, for various reasons have been silenced. A mute by definition cannot emit an articulate sound. A narrator, on the other hand, is a storyteller who is reliant on verbal articulation for communication. This contradiction in terms is dramatized in the novels and is symptomatic of the dilemma of Wiesel's narrators who are compelled to bear testimony through their silence. In my study of Wiesel's fiction, I will follow the chronological sequence in which the novels were written, although I will not be using a developmental approach, except to point out that the trilogy which marks the beginning of his exploration into narrative strategies, and The Testament, the last book I will be dealing with, are a culmination of his previous fictional techniques. While a developmental analysis of his fiction, particularly from a thematic point of view, enables the reader to gain insight into his background, which is important in a comprehensive study of his works, I feel that this avenue of investigation has been competently dealt with by other critics. Ellen Fine's Legacy of Night, one of the first book-length studies of Wiesel, puts forward a convincing argument for examining his fiction in chronological sequence as a kind of serialized journey from being a witness in l'univers concentrationnaire to bearing - witness in a post-Holocaust world. Furthermore, it is possible to trace the direction Wiesel's fiction follows, as in each book the seeds are sown for new ideas which are expanded upon in subsequent books. My discussion, however, will deal with the narrative process of each novel as an individual work in its own particular context. Apart from the trilogy which is examined in one chapter, and The Testament which serves as a conclusion to the study, I have not used cross references to Wiesel's other fiction when analysing specific books. Moreover, I have deliberately avoided including Wiesel's comments on his works and references to them in his essays, interviews and non-fiction writing. The reason for this approach is that I consider each novel to be a separate narrative work which merits an interpretative response that is independent of the comparative criteria that has up to now influenced the assessment of his fiction. (Introduction, p. 12-14)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986
- Authors: Berman, Mona
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: Wiesel, Elie, 1928- -- Criticism and interpretation , Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives , Auschwitz , Narration , Silence , English literature , Criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2178 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001829
- Description: The approach I have chosen for my study is to analyse the narrative techniques in Wiesel's fiction, with particular emphasis on the role of the narrator and listener in the narratives. This will not only highlight aspects of his authorial strategy involving the reader's response to various dimensions of the Holocaust, but will allow an appraisal of the literary merit of Wiesel's novels. The hushed reverence that tends to accompany allusions to Auschwitz and its literature has impeded certain theoretical investigations, with the result that most critical studies undertaken on Wiesel's works have dealt predominantly with themes and content rather than with form. A narrative approach, however, while it accounts for themes, does so within the narrative process of the work. Form and content are examined as interwoven entities in the particular context of an individual work. My decision to adopt this pursuit is based on the conviction that Wiesel's fiction is a significant contribution to the literature of testimony, not only because of its subject matter, but also because of the way in which his narrators unfold their stories with words suspended by silence in the text. The paradox of the mute narrator, the title of my study, is intended to convey the paradoxical quality of Wiesel's fiction and to show how silence, which is manifested in the themes of his work, is concretized by his strategy of entrusting the transmission of the tale to narrators, who, for various reasons have been silenced. A mute by definition cannot emit an articulate sound. A narrator, on the other hand, is a storyteller who is reliant on verbal articulation for communication. This contradiction in terms is dramatized in the novels and is symptomatic of the dilemma of Wiesel's narrators who are compelled to bear testimony through their silence. In my study of Wiesel's fiction, I will follow the chronological sequence in which the novels were written, although I will not be using a developmental approach, except to point out that the trilogy which marks the beginning of his exploration into narrative strategies, and The Testament, the last book I will be dealing with, are a culmination of his previous fictional techniques. While a developmental analysis of his fiction, particularly from a thematic point of view, enables the reader to gain insight into his background, which is important in a comprehensive study of his works, I feel that this avenue of investigation has been competently dealt with by other critics. Ellen Fine's Legacy of Night, one of the first book-length studies of Wiesel, puts forward a convincing argument for examining his fiction in chronological sequence as a kind of serialized journey from being a witness in l'univers concentrationnaire to bearing - witness in a post-Holocaust world. Furthermore, it is possible to trace the direction Wiesel's fiction follows, as in each book the seeds are sown for new ideas which are expanded upon in subsequent books. My discussion, however, will deal with the narrative process of each novel as an individual work in its own particular context. Apart from the trilogy which is examined in one chapter, and The Testament which serves as a conclusion to the study, I have not used cross references to Wiesel's other fiction when analysing specific books. Moreover, I have deliberately avoided including Wiesel's comments on his works and references to them in his essays, interviews and non-fiction writing. The reason for this approach is that I consider each novel to be a separate narrative work which merits an interpretative response that is independent of the comparative criteria that has up to now influenced the assessment of his fiction. (Introduction, p. 12-14)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986
For love and money: Beatrice Grimshaw's Passage to Papua
- Authors: Gardner, Susan Jane
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: Grimshaw, Beatrice, 1871-1953 -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2259 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004509
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986
- Authors: Gardner, Susan Jane
- Date: 1986
- Subjects: Grimshaw, Beatrice, 1871-1953 -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2259 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004509
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1986