CHRISTINA STEAD (1902-1983) is a major Australian woman writer, and this thesis explores one of the least known periods in her life and work, the years she spent in the United States (1937- 7946). During this time she wrote her two best known novels, The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone, both based on autobiographical material. This study explores contextual aspects of Stead's life and work in New York, drawing on a considerable amount of new material. (Chapters I and II) During this period Stead wrote partly out of a personal need to understand her own life situation, and psychological readings of three novels, The Man who Loved Children, For Love Alone and Letty Fox, seen as a 'father trilogy', are designed to open up new lines of enquiry into aspects of all of these novels. (Chapters III and IV) The thesis also discusses formal aspects of Stead's work, beginning with her own formulation of an esthetics of the novel, which occurred during a course she gave in New York in 1943 called Workshop in the Novel. (Chapter V) The relevance of this course for her own practice as a novelist is also explored, with particular reference to the two later American novels A Little TeA, A Little Chat and, The People with The Dogs. (Chapter VI) In Chapter VII an exploration of Stead's interest in the genre of the novella, focussing on the collection The Puzzleheaded Girl, continues the formal lines of enquiry opened up in the previous two chapters, and in the following chapter the same collection provides a starting point for a consideration of Stead's deep interest in the situation of women in modern society, especially the recurrent figure of the wanderer or female rebel. The last chapter concentrates on the literary self-portraits which appeared in Stead's American fiction after The Man who Loved Children and For Love Alone, and their curiously limited characterization is compared with the more vigorous portrait of her provided in one of the novels of her husband, William Blake. This thesis, then, argues that Stead's life fed her fiction, especially in her American period, and that her work was part of a broader personal quest. Understanding this quest is relevant to a discussion of her literary style, and to her personal use of autobiographical material in her fiction, and it illuminates aspects of the creative process itself. Stead's need to understand her own life not only shaped her fiction, it also provided it with the 'intelligent ferocity' she aimed for, and resulted in a major 'realist' writer.

The text which follows is a critical modern spelling edition of ‘Wit at Several Weapons’ devised according to the principles established for the editors of the Revels series of English Renaissance plays. Punctuation has been altered from the original 17th Century edition to conform as far as possible with current practice. Elisions in verb endings have been quietly expanded thus the forms “-ed” and “-est” appear throughout, except where the metre demands their retention. Speech headings too have been slightly regularised, in an abbreviated form, throughout the play. Where a single line is divided between two or more speakers the second (or subsequent) speaker’s portion of the line is indented. Obvious errors in the copy-text have been emended and the emendations recorded in the collation. Any editorial insertions such as scene-headings and added or altered stage-directions, are placed within square brackets.

This thesis explores the conceptualisation of subjectivity, the past and language in the work of one particular English novelist and critic, A. S. Byatt. In doing so, it examines significant points of overlap between Byatt's fiction and criticism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the discourses that have contributed to their formation. Whilst Byatt's work is inflected by recent critical examinations of the three concepts, this thesis is less concerned with how it reflects prevailing notions of subjectivity, the past and language, than with its participation in an ongoing examination of each. Although I do investigate the interplay between Byatt's fiction and criticism, my focus is on how this is played out in Byatt's fictional texts, in particular the novels. The Introduction offers a brief summary of other criticism on Byatt's work summarises the recent definitions of 'text' and broader discussions of postmodernism that have impacted on my approach to her fiction, and proposes a reading of these texts that accounts for their ambivalence. In Chapter One, I focus on the reconfiguration of subjectivity in Byatt's writing, particularly as it relates to textuality. Chapter Two explores the relationship between present and past in Byatt's fiction that is partly enacted through the texts' own engagement with past literatures, in particular nineteenth-century literature, and the related issues of historiography, linearity and memory that these texts investigate. Language, in particular Byatt's interest in its relation to 'things', is the focus of the third and final chapter of this thesis. Throughout each of the chapters is an exploration of Byatt's engagement or reexamination of a persistent 'thread of two' in Western discourse. Although each chapter focuses on one of the three concepts, each also explores the issues that arise from the conjunction of 'two things' in these fictions: text and subject, present and past, language and the world. Related to this is my consideration of how Byatt's fiction is characterised by a number of contradictory impetuses. Of particular interest is the ambivalence that arises from Byatt's partial engagement with recent critical theory - not only because it reflects larger cultural and discursive movements, but also because it contributes to a productive forging of new forms of fiction that combine an awareness of the concerns of literary and cultural criticism with a desire to evoke pleasure in the texts.

This study is twofold in purpose: (1) to examine the full range of William's writing, a task which has not been undertaken by anyone since Vivienne Koch in 1950. Necessarily, Miss Koch could not consider the poems of William's final, greatest, period, (2) to examine Peterson particularly in relation to draft material at Yale and Buffalo. Many studies of the poem have been published (including Sister M, B. Quinn's important essay and recently, Walter Scott Paterson's book length analysis), but none hitherto from this particular point of view.

The principles of form in ‘mosaic’ poems such as The Cantos, Paterson, Maximus, or even ‘The Waste Land,’ are not yet clearly understood. Criticism needs to bring its various ideas of ‘musical form,’ ‘non-linear form,’ or ‘the poem as a field of forces’ into sharper focus. Mosaic poems are characterized by sudden changes of direction, heightened contrasts of style and texture, a complex use of quotation, and strange effects of fluidity where the usual distinction between the ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ of metaphors is dissolved. To decide what features (if any) of the modern mosaic poem are new, the thesis examines possible precedents: so-called ‘pre-logical’ poetry, the associationism of Romantic poetry, Leaves of Grass, Rimbaud’s poems, Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, etc. the work of European avant-garde poets of the 1910s (Apollinaire, Cendrars, Marinetti, et al.) is considered in detail, and the supposed originality of Pound and Eliot’s poetry is somewhat diminished when it is viewed against this European background. Nevertheless Pound and Eliot do contribute some technical innovations, particularly in the way their poetry combines ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ textures (to use Pound’s terms). The thesis examines Pound’s special ‘breakthrough’ in 1919, and also the close interaction between his work and Eliot’s during this period – the two men advancing ‘like mountaineers roped together.' Mosaic poems demand a new style of ‘reading by field.’ Criticism needs to develop ways of talking about the experience of discontinuity as sensitively as it now deals with continuity. Approaches to The Cantos that emphasize ‘ideogrammic logic’ tend to be over-intellectual and not able to deal adequately with the more fluid or discontinuous aspects of the poem. The thesis explores the procedures of mosaic poetry, its various styles of ‘jumping’ (to use Robert Bly’s term), ways of using fragments evocatively, and ways in which gaps or silences in a poem can be charged with meaning. Since collage is an important feature of mosaic poetry, the thesis attempts to survey this development historically, distinguishing it in some respects from traditional styles of quotation and allusion. The mosaic poem is compared and contrasted with earlier types of poem-sequence. The doubts expressed by Eliot, Tate, and other critics about the coherence of the modern long poem are answered by such essays as ‘Dr Williams’ Position’ in which Pound proposes new ideas of order. But Pound’s poetic practice was still more subtle than his theory, a discrepancy also noted in Eliot’s work. The thesis looks cautiously at the analogy often drawn between mosaic poetry and modern painting or film-making. It also examines the ways in which the music of pre-modern composers such as Bach and Beethoven has been used as a formal model by mosaic poets. The thesis offers a detailed analysis of ‘Canto XLVII’ as a critical experiment in analyzing the reader’s temporal experience of mosaic poetry, his ‘shifting gestalts’ as he explores the ‘field’ of the poem. The analysis seeks to clarify the way in which The Cantos combines ‘Imagist’ hardness with the fluidity of Symbolist poetry.

The purpose of this dissertation has been to investigate the significance of urban imagery in the work of seven American poets: Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Although I have concentrated on the poetry, I have also ranged freely over the published writing of all these men. My conclusions can be reduced to these two propositions: 1. That the significance of a literary city can be understood only in conjunction with an attempt to explore the significance of other literary landscapes. 2. The significance of the city (and other landscapes) as metaphor is to be understood in terms of a basic process whereby the self is realized. This process is most simply represented geographically by a pattern of withdrawal and return, with the city and wilderness figuring as poles between which the self moves. The second proposition can be elaborated as follows: The process begins with the individual in a condition of alienation from his culture. This is culture, not just as a system of meaning and value, but culture as a way in which experience is ordered. At this point in the process, the city becomes a metaphor for the structures whereby a culture orders its common experience. The most basic ground for social alienation is that these structures serve to cut the individual off from experience. The response to this alienation is a desire to undergo a reductive process whereby orientative structures are simplified or demolished. The aim of such a process, which has a corresponding metaphor in the geographical metaphor of withdrawal, is to restore contact with experience. The experiential world is characterized by the absence of structure. Its cardinal metaphor is nature as wilderness (wildness), though, again, the city as oceanic and dislocative can fulfil a like function. It is in the unmediated intercourse with such a world that the self is realized. At this point a sense of meaning and value arises as experience is assimilated and integrated. The result of such an integration is a structure valid for the self—a structure, we might note, with no claims to permanence or finality. What is discovered in the wilderness is not so much a final structure, as a way of structuring. Which is what the realized individual brings back to the society from which he remains alienated. As the city can serve as metaphor for social structures, so it can serve as a metaphor for the structure (and the way of structuring) that might be--an ideal city. The final task is the discovery of a role that might facilitate the realization of this authentic culture.

This thesis offers a detailed reading of the fiction of the Dalmatian New Zealand author Amelia Batistich and the Danish New Zealand author Yvonne du Fresne from the perspective of multicultural literary criticism. It draws strongly throughout on interviews and discussions with the authors themselves, and on their personal papers. The Introduction explores the term "multicultural literary criticism", examines its significant development in theory and practice in Australia (especially in the writings of Sneja Gunew), and discusses the challenging issues raised by its use in a bicultural context, in New Zealand. The body of the thesis is organised into two parallel sections, the first (of five chapters) on Batistich and the second (of four chapters) on du Fresne. Each section begins with an introduction to the writing life of the author concerned, with particular reference to the forces. Shaping her sense of identity as a New Zealander from an ethnic minority community. Subsequent chapters then discuss chronologically the development of the author’s work from short fiction and articles through to the later novels. Each author's struggle to find a fictional voice which expressed her identity as a hybrid New Zealander is highlighted. The role of editors and publishers in shaping the migrant voice of both authors is also explored, and the reception of both authors' works by critics often unwilling or unable to read for difference in a literary landscape dominated by the perception of New Zealand as socially homogeneous. The thesis argues - in an extended enquiry into the constructedness of identity - that both authors have struggled throughout their careers to find a place for both themselves and their characters in New Zealand literature. The bibliography contains a checklist of the published writings of both authors, primary and secondary material related to the field of ethnic minority writing, and a checklist of other migrant writings and creative multicultural works in New Zealand. “No matter how far fate has blown the frail tree of my life across foreign lands, its roots have always sucked nourishment from that little barren clod of soil from which it sprung." Ivan Meštrović (Dalmatian sculptor, 1883-1962.) “The earth is our mother, wherever we find ourselves." Amelia Batistich, The Olive and the Vine. “Today a gap had closed; I felt my two countries firmly under my feet. Both equal." Yvonne du Fresne, Motherland P.205 My Two Countries Here is the fern, the kauri sapling straight as a larch Young, like my county, strong. There is the olive, grey with dreams Crouched over the stony land - like a woman in childbirth. Both gave me life - the kauri and the olive. Here my father ate the bread of exile. There my grandfather ate the black bread of poverty- By the blue Adriatic But what matter now? My grandfather sleeps in his own earth- His bones have melded with his own soil- Alien, my father sleeps on Hillsborough Hill overlooking the Manukau. But here was his work- Here was his home. Amelia Batistich (1985) / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

The first three chapters of this thesis deal with the development of André Malraux's thought in the fields of politics, culture and aesthetics. In the light of Marxist thought, the writer's work as a whole shows a conception of history as fundamentally irrational and non-progressive, governed by existential forces such as the passions of nationalism and class feeling, denounced by Julien Benda. Against History as Fate, Malraux appeals ultimately to the will to consciousness, whose chosen field of expression is art, Malraux's recourse amidst a dying Western culture. The final chapter of this thesis concerns the images that haunt Malraux's work, and sets up a model of the myth underlying the conscious thought of the writer. This 'personal myth' throws light on the writer's inner world, and on the direction his intellectual thought took. Consequently, the theological function of art in Malraux's aesthetical conception stems from his unconscious personality, which gives a profound meaning and unity to the contradictions apparent in the writer.

This thesis is an edition of a manuscript of medical remedies, MS X3346 (now stored in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington) which belongs to the Medical Historical Society of the Auckland branch of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. The manuscript is one of five known copies of a compilation by a sixteenth century Benedictine monk, John of Feckenham, who became Abbot of Westminster during the reign of Mary Tudor. In the dedication to the manuscripts, which is almost identical in each, the Abbot states that 'This Book of Sovereign Medicines' Named for convenience throughout this edition, 'The Book of Sovereign Medicines' was collected by him for 'the poor who have not at all times the learned physicians at hand'. The scribal handwriting, and the names of various people in MS X3346, indicate that it was penned between 1665 and 1675, or about seventy-five years after Feckenham's death. Research into the life of the compiler was undertaken, as was an overview of the medical ideas of the period, together with a study of the popular genre of which the Abbot's work was an example. Also included in this thesis is a Provenance of the manuscript, a description of its state, a comparison of it with the other known copies, and the story of its donation to the Medical Historical Society. A transcript of the manuscript was prepared, maintaining the scribal spelling, punctuation and capitalization as accurately as possible. Following this, a modernized version was made, aiming at a readable text. The layout of the original manuscript and the transcript was maintained as far as possible, to facilitate keying of annotations and comments to the text. The Oxford English Dictionary was used as the standard for spelling and grammar, and an attempt was made to conform to the principles used by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in the compact edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works. A glossary was prepared defining herbs, ingredients, medical terms and so on. Annotations to the remedies indicate the same or similar examples in other works, especially in the Folger edition of 'This Booke of Sovereigne Medicines' (edited by E.R.Macgill in 1990). Also in the annotations are explanations of words and phrases specific to a remedy, and identification of many of the people mentioned in the work. Quotations from authors of the time of Chaucer to the modern day are included in the glossary and annotations to help define and illustrate medical terms and ingredients perhaps not familiar today. Early herbals were studied, especially those of William Turner and John Gerard. As Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (The Old English Herbals, p.98) has pointed out, Gerard was justly condemned by critics of his own time as well as modern ones for 'having used Dr Priest's translation of Dodoen's ⎂Pemptades⎁ without acknowledgement'. Nevertheless, this editor, like Rohde, has found such pleasure in Gerard’s delightful language, his descriptions of plants, with their habitats and their virtues, that many quotations from his Herball have been included. There is an index of authors and quotations, and also a general index to the contents of the modern version.

This thesis discusses two characteristics of language which affect translation, using English and Japanese examples. However, the general points made in the thesis are not specific to these two languages. One characteristic of language is that it encodes particular perceptions of experience by its users. Word meaning is defined in this thesis in terms of the typical experience the language user associates with a word. Concepts for which there are no single lexical items are encoded by putting together words which the speaker thinks best characterise the concept. This particular characterisation of a concept may become established in the language community. If the members of a language community form a habit of characterising a concept in a particular way, it may become difficult to perceive the concept in any other way. In translation, this may lead the translator to impose characterizations established in her own language on the other language. However, such difficulties can be overcome because of the creative capacity of people everywhere to learn new ways to perceive the world. And language provides the mechanism to encode such novel perception. This is the other characteristic of language discussed in this thesis. We can use an existing word to encode a new kind of experience which we perceive as having some connection with the kind of experience associated with the word. Such novel application of a word can be understood because upon hearing the word, the typical experience associated with the word is evoked in the hearer's mind, and using her knowledge, the hearer constructs a mental model which she thinks best accounts for the combination of experiences evoked in her mind by the linguistic forms. Defining word meaning and sentence meaning in terms of mental images allows us to understand the process of translation: Upon hearing/reading the source language text, the translator constructs a mental model based on the text. She then bases her translation on this mental model, which becomes a rich source of information. Because the translator is not moving directly from one language to the other, no direct correspondences between the linguistic forms of the two languages need to be sought. This also explains why it is relatively easy to translate between two languages whose users share similar experiences and therefore can build similar mental models, even if the languages are typologically very different from each other.