This thesis is a thematic study of the work of the early Twentieth Century Chinese writer Xu Dishan (Luo Huasheng) (1894-1941). The title, "Mending the Web," is at once a reference to a specific story by Xu and an indication of the importance he placed on spiritual values in a changing world. His work represents a modest search for a solution to the dislocation of his society - his own attempt to mend the broken web of modern China. In his work Xu promoted personal solutions and individual salvation rather than the whole scale transformation of society. He stressed the importance of working for change within a given framework - he was a reformer, not a revolutionary, a moderator searching for a synthesis based on universal values rooted in both the Chinese and Western traditions. The values upheld in his fiction are uncompromising - one must follow one' s conscience, accept duty and responsibility calmly, show charity and forgiveness and, above all be true to oneself. Xu1s stress on personal and spiritual solutions marks him out from the majority of his iconoclastic contemporaries who advocated wholesale social change. In Chapter One, I try to provide an historical and ideological context for Xu, a comparative background from which to examine him in relation to his contemporary writers and the times in which he lived. The value Xu placed on a unifying framework, or a sense of order to replace chaos, is made apparent in Chapter Two, where I discuss his quest for values and the romance and mythopoeic modes which inform much of his work. In particular I look at the quest themes which influence the structure and message of his stories, concentrating primarily on an analysis of "Yuguan" and "A Daughter's Heart" based on an extrapolation of the "monomyths" of Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye. I examine the influence of Christianity on Xu's work, his emphasis on a strongly moral vision and his search for an affirmation of life and the individual's potentiality for goodness. In Chapter Three I analyse Xu's attitude to life and fate in relation to his use of the coincidence motif which acts in his stories as a catalyst and test for action. The coincidence makes the world small, and thus provides a testing ground for characters' actions. A vital element in this is the concept of baoying or requital, whereby an individual is responsible for his or her actions and is judged accordingly. Xu believed an individual has a responsibility to make the best of an unknown fate, but still to work within given limits to have an influence for the good. A strong moral grammar informs Xu's work, providing a framework for judging the acts of his characters. In Chapter Four I look at Xu's use of female protagonists to embody his philosophy of life. Women like Yuguan and Chuntao represent Xu's ideals in their most specific form, embodying that sense of affirmation and hope so central to Xu' s work and offering models of human potentiality, an optomistic vision of life as it could be. In the conclusion I touch on the role of morality in Xu's fiction. His work is deeply moral in orientation and offers an interesting contrast to that of his contemporaries equally engaged in writing fiction for a purpose. Xu's concern for spiritual values was almost unique among writers of that period. His fiction is primarily a fiction of ideas and his themes and messages dominate. He was searching for a solution to the dislocation of his society, as were his contemporaries, but he did not suggest a radical social transformation but rather to work within the existing framework. He looked for personal solutions, believing in the innate capacity of the human being to change for the better. He advocated change, but stressed that it must first come individually, through the development of self-knowledge, on a modest scale, before the world can be transformed. His solution was modest yet profound, and filled with hope. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fufilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at the University of Zululand, 1999. / The objective of this study is to affirm the presence of the intentional consciousness / stance in texts which purport to depict reality or real events. Intentionality, in the context of this thesis, is not conceived as a pre-existing thought or idea, which precedes the text, but as something, which inheres in the text and is produced in it. The Cartesian split between consciousness and being which the former conception enacts is here elided and authorial intention is read and produced in the process of writing itself. This distinction is significant because the main argument of this thesis is that authorial intention in texts that purport to depict real events and intervene in a particular socio-historical process for mobilizational purposes, leads to the production of a certain kind of text which deploys specific narrative strategies that consolidate its reading and rendering of events and re-inforce narrative closures. These intentionally motivated closures are embedded in narrative strategies, which are seen as both necessary and imperative for the consolidation and legitimation of the message and to foreclose other readings. Authorially motivated closures are predominant in classic realist texts in which as Roger Webster (1990:70) argues "there is a clear hierarchy of discourses controlled by a privileged central voice or narrator". This narrative voice or, to quote MacCabe, this "authorial and authoritarian 'metalanguage' judges and controls all other discourses in the text". And in classic realist texts in which the author does not seek to mask his presence by using other narrators and overtly seeks to move his audience in a specified direction, these closures become even more evident within the texture of the text. Texts of this nature are seen as means of achieving particular ends rather than as autonomous, independent units existing in a self-referential world of significance. Much of contemporary critical theory has unfortunately tried to efface the author from the text and/ or tried to marginalize the role of the author in the text. This thesis, however, seeks to re-inscribe the agency of the author in his / her intentional stance with regard to the text, more specifically in texts which depict real events and seek to impact upon the real world and the target audience. This thesis shows how this agency is enacted within the world of the text. Very briefly, this agency, I argue, is reproduced in narrative strategies which revolve around the twin poles of authority and legitimation; and these strategies operate at two levels within the text and these are the levels of the real events depicted in the narrative and then the prevailing discursive paradigms of the times. A narrative dialectic is thus erected between these two levels in the texts and this is mediated at every point by the active presence of the authorial engagement. The first chapter, which is largely introductory, serves as the theoretical clearing ground for the thesis. In it, I argue the case for intentionality by reviewing various critical positions in contemporary theory in relation to the author and the interpretation of texts. Thereafter I move on to spell out the ways in which authorial intention is embedded in realist narratives of the kind I have described. In my argument, I draw upon the critical practices and theoretical positions of postcolonial, feminist and Third World writers and critics whose work constitute an alternative tradition in which is inscribed specifically overt socio-political agencies. In the chapters that follow, I adopt the strategy of sketching out the historical and discursive context of the text. Thus chapter two focuses on the historical and discursive context of Luke's Book of Acts while chapter three focuses on the analysis of Acts. In the same manner, chapter four focuses on the historical and discursive context of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa while chapter five focuses on the analysis of the text (Native Life in South Africa). A brief conclusion sums up the argument of the thesis. / University of Zululand

This thesis aims to re-examine the first decade of Rebecca West's literary and journalistic career, based on an analysis of a newly discovered novel West began writing in 1909/1910. "The Sentinel", although incomplete and unrevised, is a key text to an understanding of West's early literary and feminist apprenticeship, helping to enrich reconsiderations of West's oeuvre in recent criticism. The recovery of West's writing into a female modernist canon provides a useful starting point, although the intertextual analysis of West's fiction and non-fiction during this period will show that this kind of categorisation is an inadequate representation of the complexity of her work. The limited time-frame of this study, 1910 to 1922, magnifies West's writing processes to reveal her self-conscious negotiations as a woman writer with the ferment of ideas and changes arising during the pre-war and war period, particularly in relation to contemporary feminism and an emergent male modernist aesthetic. The first chapter is concerned with identifying, dating and examining the significance of "The Sentinel" as source material for West's later published fiction and non-fiction. Many of West's pervading interests are already evident in the novel, illustrating in retrospect how her writing was shaped by differing literary contacts, feminist affiliations, the war and personal experience. Chapters Two and Three consider the impact on West's journalism and fiction of her associations with the radical feminist journal, The Freewoman, and her introduction to avant-garde writers. West's unsuccessful attempt to rewrite "The Sentinel" as the novel, Adela, is discussed in relation to selected feminist articles and the short story, "Indissoluble Matrimony", illustrating her attempts to adapt her feminist interests to aesthetic ones. Chapter Four shows how the war provided a cutting edge and a point of definition in West's writing at this time, both in her consideration of the role of art and of the gendered structures of society. The influence of writers such as H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford and Henry James is discussed in relation to West's preoccupation with the role of women during the Great War. This material provides an important context for the analysis of The Return of the Soldier in Chapter Five. Chapter Six is a transitional one, describing the effect of the war and its aftermath on contemporary feminist ideology, and evaluating Rebecca West's attempt to position herself as a writer and a feminist in relation to these changes. Chapter Seven argues that The Judge (1922) offers a cumulative history of West's literary and feminist apprenticeship, at once completing the cycle begun with "The Sentinel" and initiating a different stage of writing for West during the twenties.

The thesis examines Urizen in relation to Blake's intellectual, religious and artistic background. The ideas of jealousy, possessiveness and the cruelties of Kings and Priests are already present in early Blake. These various kinds of restriction contribute to the notion of the 'bounded', the sources of which are traced to empirical philosophy, though it has a very wide reference in Blake. It is central to the meaning of Urizen, whose name probably derives from a Greek verb meaning 'to bound, limit'. But Blake also believed in firm outline. Is this not a limit? The difference between the two notions of 'bound' is examined, with reference to the Neoplatonists: the contrast is very close to that between the 'mechanic'and the 'organic'. Urizen develops in relationship with his antagonists, Ore and, more subtly, the Bard. Ore and Urizen are both described in terms of the serpent and Satanic imagery, which suggests that they are part of the same malaise. The Bard looks like Urizen, for the Priest derives from the Poet, as Blake would have learned from contemporary primitivist writers. Urizen, like the Priest, abstracts the Infinite from the world of Forms. The sources of this idea are to be found in Fludd and the Gnostics. The Ore-cycle finds its fullest expression in Vala. Blake may have thought of Urizen and Ore as the opposed poles of the cycle of Melancholy and Mania: Urizen owes much to the iconography of Saturn and Melancholy. It is this cycle of alternating and divided Reason and Energy which Blake now thinks the true evil: Satan the Selfhood. There are many alchemical sources for a divided Satan, such as we see in the guises of Urizen and Luvah in Illustrations of the Book of Job. But Blake also comes to value the qualities of a redeemed Urizen, who had always had the grandeur of the Creator about him. The Priest may become the Bard again, as in the Job illustrations; or to put it another way: the 'bounded' may become Living Form.

Paul Heyse (1830-1914) is a writer who, despite achieving considerable celebrity in his own age, has since failed to stand the 'test of time'. The aim of this thesis is to account, by means of a study of his novels, for his former importance and subsequent neglect. The last critical work to appear on Heyse's novels was Gustav Kemmerich's <u>Paul Heyse als Romanschriftsteller</u> (1928), which is mainly concerned with Heyse's style and with the influences shaping his technique as a novelist. My own monograph concentrates rather on the thematic structure of the novels: my description of works with which I cannot assume the reader's prior acquaintance is necessarily a detailed one. I adduce material from Heyse's correspondences and examine the reception of the novels in contemporary journals. The principal theoretical question discussed is the distinction between the Heysean Roman and Novelle. I then analyze the narrative techniques of the novels; consider the relationship of the works to the tradition of Realism; and try to account for the function of the love interest. The central chapters which investigate the novels' idea content show Heyse to be a moral subjectivist, strongly opposed to the heteronomy of Church and State; and an unashamed élitist in his opposition to literary Naturalism and his cult of 'high art'. For all their social and aesthetic criticism, the novels remain, with their emphasis on the self-fulfilment of the hero, in the tradition of the Bildungsroman. Their popularity was due to those features which had ensured Heyse's success in the Novelle. Their historical importance and present-day interest lie principally in the way in which they formed a vehicle whereby topical and controversial ideas were disseminated amongst a wide reading public.

M.A. (English) / Much scholarship dealing with works belonging to Athol Fugard's first decade as a writer does so distortedly or inadequately. This study traces and evaluates Fugard's formative and underexplored first decade, which has only recently become available in its entirety for scrutiny, by means of a systematic study of themes and the evolution of narrative and theatrical techniques, and, in some aspects, relates it to works of later phases which fall beyond the scope of this study...

D.Phil. (African Languages) / This study examines the works of one of the most gifted writers of Sesotho, Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng. He wrote SENKATANA, a drama, LEETONG, a collection of short stories and PELONG VA KA, a volume of essays. In this work we trace the link between his writings and his real lived life because we have a hunch that his works are autobiographical. Our informants about his real lived life are his family, friends and associates. In our analysis we are guided by the principles and conditions of autobiography. Our emphasis is on the elements of autobiography as presented by Howarth (1980) namely, character, technique and theme. We do find that a link exists between the characters in the books written by Mofokeng, and Mofokeng himself. For instance, we do see through the characters Mofokeng the poor man, the achiever, the selfless person, the leader, the teacher, the oppressed man and so on. Secondly, through his style, we are able to see a portrayal of himself. He succeeds to do this because as he establishes his past he is at the same time revealing himself to us readers. This goes along with Starobinski's declaration that every autobiography is a self-revelation. Lastly, through his themes, we get to know what Mofokeng's aspirations and visions were. We learn for instance that he longed for freedom, was against evil, was full of hope, was a staunch christian and wished that all should live their lives in full.

M.A. (Greek) / This text is divided into two basic parts. The first part gives an account of the function of the Platonic dialogue, how the dialogue attempts to fulfil this function, and consequently, how it should be read. The core idea is that the Platonic dialogue aims to be transformative, not informative; it aims to bring about an ethical reorientation of the reader rather than his acceptance of certain philosophical doctrines. The second part is a commentary on Plato’s Meno. It attempts to enact the account of the Platonic dialogue given in the first part. The proper way to engage with a Platonic dialogue is to become a commentator, to participate in the discussion, to use the discourse as a lever of philosophical learning and self-understanding

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Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries