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Iris Murdoch believes she writes in the English realist tradition and cites the creation of real characters as the main problem which confronts the modern novelist. Yet her own characterization, which this work explores (in relation to her aesthetics and moral philosophy) provides her greatest contribution to the development of the novel.An understanding of Murdoch's concept of characterization requires a knowledge of her philosophical heritage, its metaphysics, and consideration of the resulting theory of man with his capacity for reason, for communication, and for approaching truth. Accordingly, chapter I of this work introduces the critical writings which provide the theoretical background for Murdoch's characterization.Chapter II examines the factors which influence man's consciousness, thus establishing the difficulty which the change of consciousness proposed by Murdoch for moral development presents. These factors include the contingency of life, the loss of common religious background, man's historic past, and the inadequacy of language for communication.Chapter III considers the elements denoting man's moral status and development, as revealed through characterization, and concludes that Murdoch's characters reveal a degree of vision consistent with their moral status. Included here are characters from the twenty-one Murdoch novels who display six different levels of spiritual awareness: the Good, the nearly Good, the nice, the mediocre with knowledge, the fat egoists, and the black figures.Chapter IV considers the treatment of aesthetics and its relationship to moral philosophy within three novels which discuss writing, portrait painting, and the theatre at length: The Black Prince, The Sandcastle, and The Sea, The Sea.Finally, three appendices are intended to serve as useful sources for both Murdoch readers and scholars. Appendix A contains the bibliography of primary sources and some two hundred critical works about Murdoch's writing; Appendix B is a subject index for the topics common to the sources in the bibliography; Appendix C-is an annotated character index and guide for the twenty-one Murdoch novels to date.

The purpose of this study was to show five methods by which John Knoepfle effectively communicates aspects of place in his poetry. Analyses of many of Knoepfle's poems helped to reveal his techniques and vocabularies of place and to show how his uses of place are significant elements in the interpretations of his poems. He shows place through details of its physical properties; he repeats place terms in reference to the body; he gives a quality of time to dimensions of place; he uses nouns of place; and he puts place within the context of history.The first chapter of this study dealt with Knoepfle's uses of the details of physical place. It explored his method of enhancing each poem's portrayal of place through descriptions of the actual objects, landscapes, structures, and forms of the properties of locations. Knoepfle's definitions of places and portrayals of physical things which occupy these poetic locales were shown through the interpretation of phrases and words which were identified as keys to the reader's ability to view places as they are pictured in Knoepfle's poetry.The second chapter addressed Knoepfle's unique use of the body as a place. Not only the spirit but also the intellect and the flesh and blood are parts of the place which is the body, as Knoepfle describes by time. A place can be different to one's perception of it according to this concept in some of his poems. The body no longer is strictly outside of a place, but also is a place itself; and it is both an occupant of a place and a part of a place. This chapter investigated the paradox of the body's being both actor and spectator.Chapter Three reviewed the ways in which place is shown to be shaped the time of day or season of the year. A location during the early morning is not the same place as it is during the afternoon; nor is a midwinter location the same place as it is during the end of summer. This chapter demonstrated, through examinations of certain Knoepfle poems, that specific words used by Knoepfle actually portray and develop a sense of time for a reader of Knoepfle's temporally depicted poetry.The fourth chapter was concerned with Knoepfle's use of nouns to signify places and the qualities of places. In order to locate places and to make their existence more understandable, Knoepfle was shown as having used both proper and common nouns to define these locations. This chapter consisted of explications of many of Knoepfle's naming poems. Attention to nouns of place was emphasized. Various enhancing definitions of places achieved through the use of both concrete and abstract nouns were investigated.The fifth and final chapter was a study of Knoepfle's uses of histories of places in order to create more definite poetic renditions of them. As in the present, places also change with the passage of years, of centuries. Several Knoepfle poems were studied in this chapter to show how his uses of history are significant in representing places.A complement to this study was an extensive bibliography of Knoepfle's published works, plus writing about Knoepfle by critics, reviewers, editors, and other poets. This bibliography was added to serve as a checklist for persons who desire to pursue their own interests in John Knoepfle as a poet, essayist, and teacher.

In each of her Canadian-set novels, Margaret Laurence features a female protagonist searching for her identity. Hagar, in The Stone Angel; Rachel, in A Jest of God; Stacey, in The Fire-Dwellers; and Morag, in The Diviners--each one, in her own way and with a different degree of success, attempts to discover who she is and what her life means. Through these characters, Laurence expresses her faith in the power of language, for it is at least partly through language that each achieves her measure of victory and comes to terms with herself and her life.For Hagar Shipley, words used precisely, cleverly, and artistically constitute a source of pleasure and pride. Yet Hagar often uses language to assert her superiority and otherwise to distance herself from others and from life. Her epiphany arrives late, but not too late for her to speak at least once "the heart's truth." Rachel Cameron, like Hagar, demonstrates a keen sensitivity to language. Rachel, however, listens to the words and voices which she hears in an effort not to control others but to discover an authentic voice, and thus an identity, of her own. As she learns to speak of herself to others, she also learns that disclosure is not always necessary, for silence can heal as well as threaten.Rachel's sister Stacey also learns to accept silence. Terrified by the violence of modern life, Stacey seeks to build bridges between herself and those she loves. Her frequent failures to communicate lead her to question the efficacy of language, but in the end she affirms language as a means of communication as she also comes to see that "the silences aren't all bad." Her conclusions are shared by Morag Gunn, who has as a successful "wordsmith" made words her life, yet who has learned to accept occasional silences. Morag's relationships with others and her achievements as a novelist have convinced her of the power, as well as the limitations, of language, a conviction that we can assume her creator, Margaret Laurence, shares.

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