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The purpose of this study was to present an analysis of the corpus of Harold Frederic's short fiction published between 1876 and 1898. A search of Frederic criticism revealed that little interest had been shown in this short fiction. Few of Frederic's tales had been analyzed or commented upon. In addition, no study considered the entire body of twenty-five stories and novellas. A review of dissertations concerning Frederic's works disclosed that, except for two studies, scholarly attention had been focused entirely upon Frederic's novels. The two studies which included selected short works associated this fiction with Frederic's efforts as a novelist. This study analyzed all of Harold Frederic's published short fiction, identifying themes, literary techniques, and subject matter developed by him.The works were considered chronologically and placed into three groups. Each group spanned approximately six years beginning with 1876. A 'brief summary of each story was given including plot development, major characters, artistic devices and techniques, themes, and characteristics of Frederic's writing. Each group of stories was then summarized, and the short fiction was compared with traditional literary classifications of realism, naturalism, local color, and romanticism.The majority of Frederic's stories was written in a realistic manner. Frederic's descriptions of setting, his dialogue techniques, and his character depictions placed his stories in the tradition of literary naturalism. But his plot development, presenting optimistic points of view, was in the romantic tradition. Hence, Frederic's short fiction was fundamentally in the tradition of literary romanticism.This study revealed Frederic's development as a writer of fiction. His early characters were stereotyped; his later characters were individualized. Early stories concerned landedgentry and other idyllic characters; later tales developed believable and memorable, naive, middle-class characters.This analysis showed that the settings in Frederic's tales became more distinctive. His early tales were set in conventional fictional areas. In the later stories, Frederic created his own characteristic fictional areas of the Dunmanus Bay for his Irish allegories and of Dearborn County in York State for his Mohawk Valley stories.The analysis also revealed that Frederic modified his use of artistic devices. Frederic reduced the span of time in his an evening. Also, he reduced his early, lengthy, descriptive passages, full of alliteration, consonance, and assonance, to carefully detailed descriptions of locales, battles, buildings, characters, and climate in his later work. In addition, Frederic mastered the use of historically accurate details and specific places, which gave believability to his stories.The study showed that, as Frederic developed as a writer of short fiction, his plots became less complicated and that he regularly employed the youthful naive-narrator as a frame for his characteristic frame-story technique. Also, Frederic used humor in his fiction, changing the early humor directed toward a character to the more subtle humor of name imagery and character development.The analysis indicated that Frederic's early tales were simply narratives, but that his later writings developed to include allegorical and symbolic tales concerned with individualism, home rule in Ireland, and the triumph of romance over realism. Other recurrent themes included the triumph of good over evil; the virtues of hard work, truth, innocence, loyalty, faithfulness, and honor; and the vices of vanity, treachery, dishonor, unfaithfulness, avarice, and usury.The analysis showed that, in his short fiction, Frederic developed a set of moral, social, and political standards which were appropriate to his era and to his contemporary reading public.

Habilitationsschrift--Bonn. / Bibliography: p. [259]-269.

The purpose of this study is to establish the thesis that Shaw, the noted iconoclast, was actually much influenced by nineteenth-century theatrical conventions, and that his use of hackneyed forms as bases for satire and subjects for revitalization was often not wholly successful, especially in his earlier plays, because formal conventions tended to confine and constrict the fresh themes he was attempting to develop in the old stage material. The Introduction summarizes and argues against lingering critical attitudes toward Shaw which imply that he was not a playwright but an author of stage debates, and that he should therefore be held exempt from the type of criticism accorded dramatists' in the 'tradition'. Chapter One is a brief critical survey of plays current in London in the Nineties and the English and continental forebears of these plays, and includes some discussion of Shaw's campaign against the 'old' drama, his opinion of the pseudo-realist 'new' dramatists, and the differences between his aims and techniques and those of the post-Ibsen, post-Shavian playwrights. Chapter Two deals with Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses, and two other sociological plays the relatively early Mrs. Warren's Profession and a play of Shaw's maturity, Major Barbara. These three plays demonstrate Shaw's progress from mere inversion of stock sentimental romance to more positive treatments of initially orthodox situations. Chapter Three is concerned with Shavian transformation of conventional melodrama and men of action and discusses the conflict between orthodox techniques and devices and Shavian ideas in the 'hero' plays. Chapter Four deals with two exceedingly popular plays -- Candida and Man and Superman -- in which Shaw developed his views on the Life Force and the relationships between the sexes. Like Chapter Two, this chapter seeks to prove that Shaw exhibited growing skill in adapting popular stage subjects to his own purposes while sustaining interest and comedy in the eternal conflict he perceived between vitality and system. In Chapter Five, two semi-tragic plays, Heartbreak House and Saint Joan, are discussed as the final steps in Shaw's movement toward achieving harmony of story and theme. Heartbreak House, a disquisitory, symbolic drama, is an improvement upon earlier, less unified discussion plays, and Saint Joan combines the elements of philosophical discussion and powerful story in a play that undoubtedly benefits from the poignancy and melodrama of the legend on which it is based, but is also a triumphant blend of the traditional elements of drama and qualities uniquely Shavian. The chapter and the thesis close with a short comment on Shaw's contribution to modern drama. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The political extravaganzas dominate Shavian drama of the 1930's, Shaw's last really productive decade. They form a fairly large and coherent group, but their topicality and their abstract, seemingly non-dramatic techniques have prevented most critics from examining the plays on their own merits. This thesis attempts to show how Shaw, in his political plays, not only chronicles his very close involvement with the urgent social problems of the interwar years, but also how he develops special artistic devices to embody his themes. Shaw's political plays offer a continual flow of analysis and criticism of an age which he thought was heading for disaster and war. In Too True to be Good (1931); he analyzes modern man's sense of directionlessness and indicates that he must re-evaluate his aims and goals, his morality and economics, and discard worn out values which no longer describe either human nature or contemporary problems. This play introduces a theme which prevails in all Shaw's political extravaganzas of the period: that men must overcome their limited frames of reference and must cultivate an open-mindedness in their search for meaning and direction in a complex world. In On the Rocks (1933), he investigates governmental problems In England and implies that in a world of selfish insularity, democratic government founders, needing more than ever a strong leader to impose a direction on the country. Recognizing the sinister implications of even an interim dictatorship, Shaw is almost driven to despair. In The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934), Shaw retreats from the ugly and almost insoluble problems of the immediate world, to define and examine in abstract and symbolic terms the problems dis-cussed in the earlier plays. Shaw reaffirms his faith in the Life Force, again stresses that life-will continue to evolve, and asserts that if man wants to be the vanguard of evolution he must be able to adapt to the unexpected . Having expressed his ultimate thoughts and allegiances in The Simpleton, Shaw seemed to abandon his concern "with political problems in his plays, until the urgency of world developments in the late thirties brought the preacher in Shaw to the pulpit of the stage again in Geneva (1938). But in this play Shaw's inability to maintain an aesthetic distance from world events interfered with his artistry so that he produced a play lacking the unity of theme and structure found in the earlier plays of the period. But while the political plays of the thirties chronicle Shaw's very close involvement with complex social problems, they also reveal Shaw's attempt to develop special dramatic techniques to render an artistic expression of his thoughts. The seemingly chaotic structures, weak characters, and garrulous speeches really are in many ways well suited to the topical themes. Shaw utilizes a symposium type of discussion, which is appropriate for the searching for direction, the open investigation of all aspects of a complex problem. But perhaps the most characteristic and least understood technique in these plays is Shaw's use of structure as a major thematic device. Once understood, the seemingly random structures are not evidence of "imitative fallacy", of using negative techniques to express negative themes, hut of an artistic handling of technique to enhance thematic comment on the chaos. In the best of Shaw's political plays there is a well integrated mating of theme and structure which belies any idea that these plays are the products of a man in his dotage. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-16T09:23:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0Bitstream added on 2016-01-08T19:38:47Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 103103.pdf: 11579476 bytes, checksum: 7aee5e7c237f303a0593ac2ee9464235 (MD5) / Estudo descritivo das origens da imprensa catarinense no biênio 1855/56, objetivando vislumbrar como - através das provações entusiamos de seu fragmentário discurso cotidiano e das referências factuais concretas - surgiam os dois polos fundamentais que mantinham em tensão o jornalismo e o ambiente a ele referido: a polêmica política e o processo civilizador.