Diss. de mestrado : Educação : Campinas. - Bibliogr. p. 219-224.

Most commentators on Robert Graves’ writings agree upon the importance of his ideas on mythology to the development of his unique theories on poets and poetry. Few critics have undertaken to apply the same approach toward an understanding of his fiction. This thesis undertakes to fill that gap by investigating Robert Graves’ historical fiction in order to test whether his theories on mythology and poetry can also be found to play a part in his conception of history and historical legends. To that end, Graves’ historical novels have been analysed from various narratological perspectives in order to uncover the often complex relationship between the author, his narrators, and the reader. Robert Graves’ heroes as autobiographers, and narrators as biographers, are found to suffer psychological neuroses that are usually the result of an overly acute awareness of history. They seem to be aware of the process by which actions and events are ascribed mythic qualities which pollute the story of their real lives. Some of Graves’ heroes fall victim to this process whilst others attempt to gain from it. Invariably, as the thesis demonstrates, they all fail because they lack an awareness of the single true story to which Graves himself subscribed: that of the White Goddess

Dan Billany (1913-1943?) published only four novels, yet in those novels he engages in the debates that preoccupy Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Billany’s view of the period, however, differs from that of his more famous contemporaries. As a young working class man, he challenges contemporary assumptions about this literary period, arguing that the more bourgeois writers have a false view of the working class. This study aims to recast the political and literary memory of the 1930s and 1940s in order to show how a young working class writer from the North of England defines and shapes Marxist and literary tradition to further his revolutionary ideals. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to provoke the debate that will give Billany, badly underrated, the attention he deserves. Due recognition of his fiction will help to expand the critical view of the 1930s and 1940s. Billany actively engages not only with the period but with those writers who have traditionally been seen as defining that literary period. His attacks on writers such as John Galsworthy and W.H. Auden show that Billany is trying to develop a truly radical Communist working class literary tradition. As an educated working class man and a committed Communist, Billany offers an alternative view to the traditional and conservative attitudes associated with pre-war and wartime writing

This dissertation examines Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet in its various Egyptian contexts. It contests the idea that the Alexandria of the Quartet is essentially a city of the imagination which bears little or no relation to the real city of history. It argues that various strata of Alexandrian history, from antiquity to the nineteen- fifties, are deeply embedded in Durrell’s Quartet. Of particular interest is the tetralogy’s representation of the history of Egypt’s Wafdist independence movement in the years 1919 - 1952, and Britain’s responses to it. The dissertation argues that the tetralogy can be read as an allegorical treatment of historical events that took place in colonial Egypt. Chapter One of the dissertation provides an over-view of Durrell’s Quartet and of the main critical and scholarly approaches which have been used in the study of the tetralogy, Chapter Two continues the exposition, with particular reference to T.S. Eliot’s concept of “tradition”, and Edward Said’s “Orientalism” as keys for the understanding of the Quartet. This chapter then applies these two concepts to the analysis of the Quartet, and proposes a “tradition of Orientalism” with the tetralogy as the paradigmal text of “late Orientalism”. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is proposed as an important precussor. Chapter Three examines the ways in which the Quartet makes use of the history of Alexandria from the city’s founding by the Ptolomies until early modern times, with particular reference to the British occupation of Egypt 1882 - 1956. The chapter then examines the tetralogy’s treatment of British Imperial selfhood and the Egyptian “Other”. Chapter Four examines the Alexandria Quartet, in particular Mountolive, in parallel to the history of the Egyptian Wafd party and the struggle for Egyptian independence. It argues that Mountolive should be read as an allegorical treatment of events that took place in Egypt between the years 1919 - 56. Chapter five investigates the relationship between the Alexandria Quartet and the three phases of Durrell’s “Egyptian” poetry: that written between 1938 - 40, which utilises themes from ancient Egyptian mythology; that written during Durrell’s Egyptian exile between 1941 - 45; and that written in the immediate post-war period 1945 - 50. In this way the historical context brought up to the early nineteen-fifties. Chapter Six concludes the dissertation by asserting the importance of the Alexandria Quartet as a key literary text from a period that saw the end of Empire and the beginnings of de-colonisation, and argues that the tetralogy should be given an enhanced status in the study of colonial and post-colonial English writing

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With a language, landscape and culture unfamiliar to the majority of British readers, Latin America is a puzzling and anomalous presence in British modernist fiction. Yet, in the work of Conrad, Lawrence and Lowry it is also a setting that constitues a minor tradition in its own right and one that offers a distorted reflection of the concerns an anxieties back home: from uncertainties over the future of the British Empire to the traumatic recogntion of loss that attended the First and Second World Wars. In addition to these political and historical concerns, the representation of Latin America in British modernist fiction is also entangled with a corresponding crisis of culture. Consistently Latin America offers itself to writers in English as a suitable correlative to concerns which range from disturbing visions of the natural worls to the disorientation that attended the engagement with the culturally unfamiliar along with the uncertainties that were related to the emergence of a truly global economy in which Britain modernist fiction is far from static. As this interest in Latin America matures, there is a progressive movement from the initial sense of doubt (Conrad) along with a contrary sense of desperation (Lawrence) towards a final sense of resignation (Lowry). As such, Latin America can be thought of as a fictional space in the British modernist novel - in the end, more of a fantasy than a reality - that reflects the frightening apprehension of a new world in which British fiction had found a suitable place to come to terms with some of its deepest fears and anxieties.

v, 645 leaves ; 25 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of French, 1973

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No description available.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.