Because of the allegorical nature of much of Hawthorne’s work, it is appropriate to discover symbolism in the author's selection of given names and surnames for his characters. Name symbolism includes both sound and meaning of names or parts of names. Symbolic naming is defined as that technique through which a character's name, straightforwardly or ironically, reveals his inner nature and his relationship to other characters. This revelation, in turn, serves to underscore thematic points in the works. In Hawthorne’s five finished novels, there are at least four distinct sources for the symbolic names of characters; there are actual historical names, Biblical, classic, or literary names, common foreign or provincial names, and names probably original with Hawthorne. There are, of course, frequent combinations of these sources. In this investigation into Hawthorne’s use of name symbolism in the five finished novels, it will be noted that the technique is closely related to the degree of development of a character. The closer a character comes to being a purely symbolic character, the more obvious is the name; conversely, the more individualized the character, the more subtle and ambiguous is the name. This thesis analyzes the names of all the characters in <i>Fanshawe</i>, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>, <i>The Blithedale Romance</i>, and <i>The Marble Faun</i>, in that order, and attempts to show that an understanding of the symbolic meaning of characters’ names can be helpful in leading the reader to a more thorough comprehension of Hawthorne's characters and themes. / M.A.

Rhetoric is a matter of control. It is, in fact, the process of ordering the components of speech and action to produce a desired end. Drama is an ideal manifestation of rhetoric in that it shows the word becoming action in the flesh of the actors on stage. The rhetorical process (drama) is as much a focus of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614) as its apparent thematic material: self-possession, which is expressed in the play as family relations, marriage customs, and noblesse oblige. John Webster knew rhetoric and was himself an excellent rhetorician. And he creates a female protagonist who "stains the time past, lights the time to come": the Duchess of Malfi. Webster's creation serves as the playwright's spokesperson, and her conspicuously amoral behavior reflects the power of the age and its dissolution. The Duchess confronts the sinister, idiosyncratic, patriarchal worlds of the court and of the Church and snubs both, preferring, rather, to make her own path, to make her own meaning, to make her own morality. She is totally self-possessed; she resists the irrational demands of her male siblings; she defies the social codes of matrimony; she negates the authority of the Church's representative, the Cardinal. Ultimately, she defies the rhetoric of her environment: its content, its structure, its rhythm, its style. In doing so, she becomes her own rhetor, creating and ordering a noble world apart from an uncaring universe. As a rhetor she is successful, maintaining her own argument, causing others to change. Yet she cannot change the entire corrupt environment. She dies, but an audience is better for its exposure to her and realizes its loss at her death in Act V. Critics, however, object to Webster's dependence on the grotesque and melodramatic elements in Act IV and Act V of the play. Webster's dramatic vision is not flawed at all: the grotesque elements in Act IV and the resulting anticlimatic nature of Act V are pivotal to the irony operating in the play. The play reflects the age and its dissolution; therefore, the precise verbal irony must dissolve into gross action. Without the Duchess physically present to maintain justice in the world, only physical horrors remain. Webster wanted to demonstrate what happens in a world that destroys its rhetor, its morally organizing force. The result is defensive laughter. The irony is cosmic. / Master of Arts

William Styron is one of the most respected and frequently studied authors of his generation. Critical recognition of his role as a shaping force in post-modernist fiction has resulted in the production of a large body of published work: a full-scale descriptive primary bibliography and an extensive annotated secondary one; a collection of recent Styron criticism; and two published casebooks that explore Styron's most recent novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Traditional scholarly study of Styron's work is, however, sorely lacking. This study addresses this need by examining several extant Styron manuscripts: Chapter I deals with the holograph manuscript, the “working" typescript, and the "editorial" typescript of Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Chapter II treats the unpublished discarded opening to the author's second novel, Set This House on Fire (1960). The final chapter focuses on Styron's annotations on the endpapers of his copy of William S. Drewry's The Southampton Insurrection, an important source for The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). These documents supply clues to Styron's compositional method and therefore add to our understanding of the author, his fictions, and his reading public. / Master of Arts

An unusual sensitivity to nature and an exceptional power of transforming that sensitivity into artistic expression are among the most frequently remarked traits of D.H. Lawrence's genius. But few critics have examined the individual phenomena so transformed. This study makes an effort to correct that neglect by focusing on Lawrence's treatment of flowers in his fiction. Daniel Stiffler has opened the way with his dissertation, "'Say It With Flowers': A Study of Floral Imagery in the Novels of D. H. Lawrence," but much work can still be done. Because Lawrence conceived of the flower as "the most perfect expression of life" and believed with Ursula Brangwen that art is "only the truth about the real world," my emphasis is upon Lawrence's fictional flowers as representatives of his philosophy of life, a philosophy of complementary opposites. Arguing that the female aspect of his philosophy is the "root" of unconscious awareness and that the male aspect is the "blossom" of language or "verbal consciousness," I describe the flower as a perfect expression of the union between the female and male aspects of life. But because such union is never fully achieved, the flowers in Lawrence's fiction demonstrate the dynamic tension between the female and male aspects, as they approach a moment of balance. Though H. M. Daleski argues that Lawrence's fiction records a struggle to heal the "breach" in his own nature as the "male principle" within himself separated from the more intrinsic "female principle," I try to demonstrate that Daleski's description is simplistic and that the very character of the flower as a symbolic model indicates that Lawrence's consciousness was by nature perennially growing away from itself, withering back to its "root" source, and then growing outward once more. / Master of Arts

The three major satires by the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden are reassessed for their mutual similarities to literature with burlesque elements. Focusing on his greatest satire, "Absalom and Achitophel ," this study shows Dryden's political, intellectual, and literary appropriateness for incorporating in the poem sexual and scatological imagery which is hidden by syntactical ambiguity. Dryden's satiric style is unified by this burlesque and ambiguity, and thus, the conservative appearance of "Absalom and Achitophel" is shown as hiding its true kinship with the vulgar comedy of "Mac Flecknoe" and the savage satire of "The Medall." Dryden's covert analogy in "Absalom and Achitophel" is revealed as equating King Charles II's physical body with the "Body Politique" of his politically troubled State, and Dryden's own analogy between himself and the physician/ satirist thus leads to his prescription of a purge to restore the State's good health. This burlesque image is in keeping with the traditional elements of satire, the intellectual and social environment of Restoration England, and also the conservative ideology of Dryden, for his purge metaphor constitutes a defense of the King's control, despite the burlesque elements. Furthermore, despite the iconoclastic appearance of this reading, Dryden scholarship supports it in many ways, especially recent criticism on Dryden's ambiguity, for which this study is a comprehensive test case. / Master of Arts

Given the importance of an accurate, well-documented base text for any kind of literary or linguistic analysis, my thesis will consider how the editorial bias forced on a popular and influential medieval romance, the Auchinleck Guy of Warwick, by its EETS editor Julius Zupitza misrepresents the romance's manuscript presentation and has therefore prejudiced scholarship on fourteenth-century bookmaking. When Zupitza edited the Auchinleck version of the Guy romance, he seems to have had in mind the conventional textual principles upheld by his fellow Victorians. Unfortunately few of these Victorians produced texts which would today be considered acceptable. Though Victorian productions of many works have been replaced by modern editions, Zupitza' s Guy is the only available text of the romance. The failure of Zupitza's text is complicated by the fact that the Auchinleck Manuscript and the Auchinleck Guy, because of its unique division into three poems, figure prominently in medieval bookmaking theory. While three medieval bookmaking theories focus on the Auchinleck, none of the prominent Auchinleck scholars - Laura Loomis, Pamela Robinson, or Timothy Shonk - has recognized how Zupi tza unintentionally manipulates the Auchinleck Guy with his textual presentation of the romance. By indicating the errors and misleading practices which have shaped Zupitza's presentation of the Auchinleck Guy, I plan to establish the necessity for a new, more accurate critical edition of the Auchinleck Guy and to suggest how a more accurate critical edition can influence literary and bibliographical studies. / M.A.

This thesis attempts to demonstrate the harmony between technique and meaning in the work of James Purdy, a contemporary American short story writer and novelist. Four major themes are explored and examined in depth: the universal human need for love and recognition; the desire to escape the past and achieve rebirth; the failure of the family unit to promote the growth of its children; and the dream-like perception of internal human reality. Purdy's use of dialogue, imagery, characterization, grotesque scenes, and written versions serves to complement the analysis of the themes. Among the works discussed are five novels and a novella: Malcolm, The Nephew, Cabot Wright Begins, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, Jeremy's Version, and "63: Dream Palace." Some attention is given to selected short stories in Color of Darkness and Children Is All. In addition, Purdy's importance as a significant voice in American fiction is given consideration. / Master of Arts

Although Stephen Crane developed out of an ancestral and moral chemistry that might have produced a minister rather than a writer, he abandoned the letter, though not the spirit, of his parents' Methodism. Crane's studies of society, Maggie and George's Mother, are works of a writer who expresses a viewpoint through a concentrated moral vision. In these works Crane's major target was the drunkard, and particularly, the hypocrisy, the moral weakness, and the capacity for destruction embodied in the nature of this character. But Crane seemed to be imposing his views upon his material, dramatizing predetermined assessments of man and society; thus we detect most clearly in his early work the outlines of the Christian minister. Crane soon realized, however, that preaching could be fatal to literature. Later Crane was to travel in the American West and, as a result of his experiences there, an awareness, a perception of reality occurred in Crane's writing that had not been present in the earlier works. No longer would Crane's characters be controlled by his personal vision of reality, so severely restricted by his moralistic viewpoint. Through his exposure to the very new and different Western society, Crane would change his conception of the drunkard and adopt a more objective view of reality. No longer would the drunkard take on the one-dimensional characteristics of a temperance-novel character, but would mature with Crane's new vision into a cleverly developed literary device. / Master of Arts

Although William Makepeace Thackeray is praised by critics for the realism of such characters as Becky Sharp, his novels also prompt complaints about their moral bleakness. It is felt that Thackeray's view departs from the "middle ground" of realism to a depiction of an always-selfish and corrupt mankind. To be sure, Thackeray includes such characters, seen in Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Blanche Amory and Sir Francis Clavering in Pendennis, Beatrix and Lord Castlewood in Henry Esmond, Barnes Newcome in The Newcomes, Barry Lyndon in Barry Lyndon, and the Earl of Castlewood in The Virginians. Few critics perceive, however, that these characters represent only part of Thackeray's view of mankind. Even good characters (e.g., Amelia Osborne) have faults, however, appropriate to Thackeray's literary realism. Oftentimes these good characters suffer unduly, while selfish or corrupt characters prosper. This temporary triumph of good over evil perplexes critics, and moves them to complain about the aforementioned bleakness. The purpose of this study is to illustrate that Thackeray's novels do indeed include a force that raises good characters above evil ones, an escape, as it were, from Thackeray's Vanity Fair. That force is love, and beginning with Barry Lyndon, continuing in Vanity Fair and Pendennis, Thackeray consistently "rewards" with happiness characters who love sincerely and openly. With the last three major novels, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes, and The Virginians, come explicit statements that love is immortal. Through love, there is salvation from Vanity Fair. / Master of Arts

<i>Cane</i> is already recognized as the most significant landmark of the Harlem Renaissance, and as one of the first major contributions to black literature. However, critics have neglected to address its similarities to nineteenth-century American literature, and specifically how it continues a celebrated tradition dedicated to penetrating considerations of American identity. This study attempts to re-focus the critical perspective to illustrate that <i>Cane</i> deserves recognition as a major work of <u>American</u> literature because it calls for an Adamic personality to combat the complexities of the enigmatic American scene. Moreover, the study suggests that <i>Cane</i> belongs among those famous American writings by Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Twain, and Melville because it too investigates the tensions between individuality and social continuity that are so important to an ongoing American dialectic. Finally, the study explains that <i>Cane</i> is in fact worthy of acceptance into the exclusive forum of American writings because ( in Roger Rosenblatt's words) it “is not conceived of in terms of what an individual human being may strive to overcome or accomplish, but rather in terms of where that individual may be spiritually and culturally located.” / M.A.