This study investigates the relation between faith in a transcendent reality and faith in language, both verbal and visual, in the work of English novelist and critic Antonia Byatt. Her ideal conception of communication combines the immediacy and primal vigour of the visual with the methodical pragmatism of words. However, Byatt's characters who exemplify this effort at double vision - in particular Stephanie Potter Orton in the 1985 novel Still Life - find in their quests frustration and even death rather than fulfillment. My investigation focuses on A. S. Byatt's presentation of the way language attempts to represent and interact with three particular areas: fundamental personal experiences (childbirth, death, love), perceptual and aesthetic experiences (colour and form, painting), and transcendent experiences (supernaturalism and Christian religion). I consider all stages of her career to date - from her first novel The Shadow of the Sun (1964) to Babel Tower (1996). Although Possession: A Romance (1990) has garnered most of the critical attention accorded to Byatt, I argue that this novel is not generally representative of her principles or style. A neo-Victorian romance, part parodic and part nostalgic, combined with an academic comedy, Possession shares neither the sombre mythological and psychological fatalism of her 1960s fiction nor the modified realism of her middle-period fiction. Still Life and The Matisse Stories (1993) are the works that best elucidate Byatt's major preoccupations; they intently strive to combine the most powerful aspects of verbal and visual knowledge. The methodological basis for this study is pluralist; it emphasizes close reading, combined with phenomenological, biographical, and thematic criticism. As Byatt does, I rely principally on the ideas of writers and artists rather than theorists; she cannot be understood without specific reference to George Eliot, Donne, Forster, Murdoch, Van Gogh, and Matisse (among others). Byatt's quest for truth and transcendent meaning and her investigation of the trustworthiness of words have undergone recent changes; she seems more sharply aware of the limitations of language and the unattainability of absolute truth. Her writings in the 1990s about paintings and colour emphasize their intrinsic value rather than their ability either to revitalize the word or suggest the numinous.

This thesis is focused on the new writers who appeared in Shanghai during the Japanese Occupation between December 1941 and August 1945. The rise of these new writers to fame and their subsequent disappearance from the literary scene were consistent with the fall and liberation o f Shanghai. In the meantime, their appearance and disappearance were parallel with the success and decline of magazines published in Shanghai during that period as well. Both the magazines and their editors played significant roles in promoting the new writers into the literary arena. The war disrupted the development of literature, their writing "nourishment" mostly depended on the literary resources which had been stored up in Shanghai since the late Qing. My discussion of these eight new writers, Zhang Ailing, Shi Jimei, Cheng Yuzhen, Tang Xuehua, Zheng Dingwen, Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi, progresses through an analysis of the elements of region, literature, and war. While most of the female writers' themes were focused on love, mundane love or God's love, the male writers were either more interested in setting their stories on Chinese native soil like Shen Ji, Guo Peng, and Shi Qi; or personal concerns and anxieties regarding the future such as Zheng Dingwen. Among her contemporaries, Zhang Ailing is the most successful and the most influential. These new writers did not go through the baptism of the May Fourth Movement, and had less of a moral burden than their predecessors did. Thus they had more freedom to develop their writings— although the freedom was confined due to a depressed political and social climate.

This dissertation comprises a historical survey and thematic analysis of the various regional and temporal expressions of Chinese and Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue (“nativism” or “homeland literature”). Chapter One traces Chinese xiangtu wenxue from the rural stories of Lu Xun through the 1920s generation of writers of xiangtu wenxue (xiangtu zuojia f’g). These writers used two different narrative modes to analyze China’s deepening rural crisis. One of these was the antitraditionalist mode inspired by Lu Xun; the other was a positivist mode formulated from new concepts and intellectual thought prevalent in China at the time of May Fourth (1919). The narrative configuration established by this decade of xiangtu writers is characterized by nostalgia and is based on the migration of the Chinese village intellectual to large urban centres. This configuration set the standard for subsequent generations of writers of xiangtu wenxue who used an urban narrator to describe a rural area which was either the author’s native home, an area he/she knew well or one which was idealized. Chapters Two and Five discuss Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue from the 1920s to the 1970s. The emergence of this fiction is linked with Taiwan’s insecure status in the forum of international relations. In Taiwanese xiangtu wenxue, the countryside is a refuge from the forces of modernization; it is also a storehouse nurturing ancient traditions which are threatened by new and modern ways. Taiwan’s xiangtu writers valorize traditional culture and seek in rural Taiwan a transcendent China predating Taiwan’s invasion by the West. These works are all narrated by an urban narrator who rejects modernity and desires to counteract foreign influences. The focus of Chapter Three is China’s rural regional xiangtu wenxue of the 1930s. In this decade, rural fiction became a general trend in China with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, Japanese aggression and China’s increasing urbanization. The shift away from China’s urban-based fiction is characterized by an increasing concern for the peasants, regional decay under the onslaught of Westernization and the life, customs and lore of China’s hinterland. In many of these regional works, concern for the nation is interwoven with non-nationalistic interests. Chinese xiangtu wenxue of the 1940s and 1950s is discussed in Chapter Four. The xiangtu wenxue of this period took on a distinctly Communist guise in the wake of Mao Zedong’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Chinese Communist xiangtu wenxue is primarily defined as revolutionary realism and is concerned with the construction of Chinese socialism which takes place in the countryside through the forced implementation of draconian Party policies. The peasants in this fiction often attempt to evade these policies. Occasionally, these stories and novels slip into a hardcore realistic mode conveying a peasant reality which strongly dissents from the orthodox Party view. At least one writer of this period was persecuted and killed for his putatively disloyal beliefs. Finally, with the passing of Maoism in China, a new form of xiangtu wenxue emerged in the mid-1980s. This is the subject of Chapter Six. In these works, traditional Chinese culture supercedes Maoism as the basic fabric unifying Chinese life. Many of the writers in this period evince a psychological bifurcation arising from their conflicting views about the value of traditional Chinese culture. This bifurcation stems from the narrator in this fiction who is caught up in the process of urbanization and is unable to fully integrate his vision of the countryside into a larger vision of modernity. The ambivalence about Chinese culture in xiangtu wenxue is a leitmotif which underlies xiangtu wenxue’s many, disparate forms.

The thesis is a record of the writing and rehearsal process which led to the British premiere of the full length Canadian play, Danceland, at The Old Red Lion Theatre, London, in November of 1994. The first chapter is a discussion of the dramatic theories and historical research which informed the initial creative writing process. The second chapter is the final draft of the play itself. The third chapter is a record of the rehearsal and production process, as well as an overview of the major dramaturgical problems which the actors, director and designers encountered during rehearsals of the play. A full cast and crew list and the reviews from the British press are contained in the appendices. The playwright's "experiment" which sits at the heart of this production record is that Aristotle's idea of "place" is essential to the creation of an indigenous, Canadian dramatic literature. The writing process, however, is only the beginning of the translation of drama from the page to the stage; and it is this final, rehearsal and production process which demands that all dramatic theory be placed within the context of believable characterization and dramatic action.

Modernism and Post-Modernism in Canadian poetry have been introduced and developed in the pages of non-commercial "little magazines", beginning with F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith's McGill Fortnightly Review in 1925. Subsequent generations and schools of poets have made their first appearances and they have developed their ideas by producing their own magazines. / The aim of this dissertation is threefold: to investigate the phenomenon of the little magazine, its role as an essential alternative to commercial publications, and the sociological and aesthetic necessity for its survival; to investigate the progress that has taken place in Canadian poetry in the pages of the little magazine, as well as the evolution of the little magazine itself; in light of the fact that literary Modernism and Post-Modernism have not developed in Canada in isolation, to investigate the influence of European, English, and American poetic development in the twentieth century on Canadian poetry.

This project examines the 'mother-writer problem' within contemporary Canadian fiction by women. Using three novels that tell the story of a mother who is also a writer, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, Audrey Thomas' Intertidal Life and Carol Shields' Unless, I will outline the manner in which the roles of mother and writer are negotiated by the authors and their central characters. Further, I will investigate how creating a narrative about a female artist who is also a mother challenges and changes the structure and content of the standard female kunstlerroman. Finally, this thesis will attempt to determine how or if such challenges and changes improve the portrait-of-the-female-artist novel.

Little is known about the literary quarrel in Quebec between the regionalists and the "exotics". This study, based mainly on a systematic analysis of periodicals, examines in detail and as objectively as possible the different arguments presented by the participants. After outlining the development of the two opposing parties, it describes their confrontation in 1918-1920 and the subsequent diversification that ends the quarrel in the thirties. This conflict can be divided into four distinct periods, beginning with the reaction of critics like Camille Roy and Louis Dantin to Emile Nelligan's poetry in 1904 and going up to the "canadianisme integral" of 1930. The argument concerned much more than literature, having important ideological implications related to French-Canadian nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is in this relationship between literature and French Canadian society that the specific nature of this debate can be £ound.

Note: Pages have been removed from this digital copy due to copyright restrictions. A print copy is available in the McGill Library. / This dissertation presents the history of space in the musical thought of the 2Othcentury (from Kurth to Clifton, from Varèse to Xenakis) and outlines the development of spatialization in the theory and practice of contenlporary music (after 1950). The text emphasizes perceptual and temporal aspects of musical spatiality, thus reflecting the close connection of space and time in human experience. A new definition of spatialization draws from Ingarden’s notion of the musical work; a new typology of spatial designs embraces music for different acoustic environments, movements of performers and audiences, various positions of musicians in space, etc. The study of spatialization includes a survey of the writings of many composers (e.g. Ives, Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage) and an examination of their compositions. The final part of the dissertation presents three approaches to spatialization: Brant’ s simultaneity of sound layers, Xenakis’s movement of sound, and Schafer’s music of ritual and soundscape. / Cette thèse présente l’histoire de l’espace dans la pensée musicale du vingtième siècle (de Kurth à Clifton, de Varèse à Xenakis) et retrace le développement de la spatialisation dans la théorie et la pratique de la musique contemporaine (après 1950). Le texte souligne les aspects perceptuels et temporels de la spatialisation musicale, reflétant ainsi le lien étroit entre temps et espace t!ans l’expérience humaine. Une nouvelle définition de la spatialisation tire son origine de la notion de l’oeuvre musicale d’Ingarden; une nouvelle typologie des plans spatiaux prend en considération des musiques pour différents environnements acoustiques, diverses positions des musiciens dans l’espace de même que le mouvement de ceux-ci et des auditeurs, etc. L’étude de la spatialisation inclut un survol des écrits de plusieurs compositeurs (Ives, Stockhausen, Boulez et Cage, par exemple) de même qu’un examen de leurs oeuvres. La dernière partie de la thèse présente trois approches compositionnelles de la spatialisation: la simultanéité de strates sonores ,:hez Brant, le mouvement du son chez Xenakis et la musique du rituel et l’écologie sonore chez Schafer.

Note: Page 387 is missing from this electronic document because it is missing from the original archival version. / This study presents an Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry from 1945 to 1984, selected and translated into English, containing poems by thirty-five poets who represent diverse regions of the Arab world. A critical introduction was designed to provide the Western reader with a brief overview of the literary, cultural, and political factors which have shaped the modernist movement in Arabic poetry of the past four decades. The “new poetry” is discussed in terms of form, the expansion of mythological interest which provided a common ground for the talents of the influential “Tammuzi poets,” and the relations between politics and poetry. Theories of Arabic poetic modernism have been examined with reference to modernist movements in the West which have both inspired and repelled Arabs in the search for a contemporary poetic form and idiom. / Cette etude presente une anthologie choisie de la poesie arabe moderne de 1945 a 1984, traduite en anglais, et regroupant des oeuvres de trente cinq poetes qui representent des regions diverses du monde arabe. Une introduction critique offrira au lecteur occidental un survol des facteurs litteraires, culturels et politiques qui ont fagonne Ie mouvement moderniste dans la poesie arabe des quatre dernieres decades. La "poesie nouvelle" est commentee en termes de forme, d' elaboration des interets mythologiques qui ont fourni un terrain commun aux influents poetes "Tammuzes," et de relations entre politique et poesie. Les theories du modernisme arabe en poesie sont etudiees en rapport avec les mouvements modernistes en Occident, mouvements qui ont a la fois inspire et repousse les Arabes qui cherchaient un langage et une forme poetiques contemporains.

John Corigliano's Etude Fantasy (1976) is a significant and challenging addition to the late twentieth century piano repertoire. A large-scale work, it occupies a particularly important place in the composer's output of music for piano. The remarkable variety of genres, styles, forms, and techniques in Corigliano's oeuvre as a whole is also evident in his piano music. This profusion of sources and its application to the Etude Fantasy are explored in the introduction, which is a general discussion o f the composer's background and aesthetic stance. The intriguing title of the Etude Fantasy implies the coexistence of two genres and raises the issue of the role of each genre in the thematic and structural organization o f the work. It is this issue which is the principal subject of inquiry in the thesis. Chapter I examines the historical background o f the etude genre, discussing similarities between the pianistic techniques employed in Corigliano's work and those found in specific historical instances of the etude genre over two centuries. Chapter II focuses on the historical background of the fantasia genre, emphasizing contrasting characters, textures, and keys as the main indicators o f a free form, and at the same time drawing attention to thematic transformation as a device of structural unification. Chapter III concentrates on elements that produce structural and formal coherence in John Corigliano's Etude Fantasy. These elements are motivic, intervalic, melodic, and harmonic in nature.