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This critical introduction to the works of John Fowles focuses upon his three novels, with secondary attention to his poetry, essays, and The Aristos, his non-fiction book of personal philosophy. Giving some biographical detail, the first chapter treats the influence of other writers upon Fowles's work and discusses his thought--especially as it appears in The Aristos, the poems, and the essays. The second chapter is a study of The Magus, Fowles's first novel, although published second. The Aristos is especially important to an understanding of this consolidation of personal philosophy into a fictional structure; the two key influences upon The Magus are Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and Jungian psychology. The third chapter deals with The Collector, revealing much of Fowles's feeling about the artist in society and the imbalance of social justice that spawns ignorance and cruelty. The fourth chapter examines his most successful novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, unusual for its combination of thematic modernity with Victorian narrative style. The final chapter summarizes Fowles's leading place in contemporary fiction three months before publication of The Ebony Tower, his forthcoming collection including four short stories and one novella. Fowles's fiction has established him among the finest of today's artists in British fiction and one of the leading writers in the world. Both critical and general readers have accepted his three novels with enthusiasm, and his distinctive poetry and essays may someday further enhance his reputation.

While capitalism is thought by many to enable male homosexual identity to emerge, this same economic system creates a class hierarchy that promotes a heteronormative worldview, which marks homosexual men as the outcasts of society. In England during the years leading up to the First World War, a man’s character and persona were determined by his social class position. As a result homosexual men of the upper class, who held power, respectability, and masculine virtues in society, used class to mask their sexuality. In this sense the upper-class position enabled men to portray a public identity that abided by the constraints of heteronormativity despite their homosexual desire, which remained suppressed for fear of losing their power within society. Even when homosexual men displayed effeminate traits that opposed masculine ideals, the upper-class position worked to reinforce their heteronormativity, showing the power of capitalism’s class system to infiltrate and influence a man’s identity. E. M. Forster’s Maurice and A. T. Fitzroy’s Despised and Rejected provide two examples of how the upper-class position worked to mask the recognition of male homosexuality by society in early twentieth–century England. Written in 1913, but not published until after Forster’s death in 1971, Maurice has become a canonical text in the gay literary tradition. Through depictions of male intraclass and cross-class relationships, this novel suggests that class position worked to maintain a public heteronormative identity where stepping outside of strict class boundaries could disrupt the very thing which enabled one to keep one’s power. While the posthumous publication of Maurice complicates its place as a representation of homosexual identity and British society at the time, A. T. Fitzroy’s Despised and Rejected gives a clearer picture of both through its focus on homosexuality and pacifism. Through this investigation of homosexuality and pacifism, Fitzroy acknowledges a connection between male sexual identity and a refusal to go to war. While this failure to participate in militarism indicates a man’s opposition to heteronormativity, particularly normative masculinity, the upper-class position redirects this difference away from homosexual identity and onto effeminacy. This effeminacy does not indicate homosexual identity, but rather a failure to embody masculine ideals of the time. Ultimately, both novels portray the power of the upper-class position to define identity by supporting heteronormativity and masking homosexuality.

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The dissertation focuses on the contemporary British fiction discussing books that in a certain way reflect the changing perception of history and the relationship between historiography and fiction. Several thematic aspects of this reflection are examined, namely, attitudes towards the Victorian era, city, country, archive (relation between fictional narrative and historical sources - meta-textuality) and history as a "palimpsest", i.e., as a set of multiple, mutually permeable layers of text. The changing attitude to the past, which finally leads to doubts on strict division between historiography and literary fiction, is mostly discussed in books published mainly in the last thirty years, the only exception being John Fowlesʼs The French Lieutenantʼs Woman which the author of the dissertation perceives as a book of major importance for the subsequent re-evaluation of the attitude to history. Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore (London), Michel Faber (the Victorians), Graham Swift, Bruce Chatwin and Adam Thorpe (country), Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith (novel and history), A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes (archive, literary heritage) are also discussed. " For the authors of historical fiction, history is, above all, a rich source of stories. These stories are told and retold, they are rediscovered and adapted for...

This thesis concerns the novelist John Fowles and analyses his seven novels in the order in which they were written. The study reveals an emergent artistic trajectory, which has been variously categorized by literary critics as postmodern. However, I suggest that Fowles's work is more complex and significant than such a reductive and simplistic label would suggest. Specifically, this study argues that Fowles's work contributes to the reinvigoration of the novel form by a radical extension of the modernist project of the literary avant-garde, interrogating various conventions associated with both literary realism and the realism of the literary modernists while still managing to evade a subjective realism. Of particular interest to the study is Fowles's treatment of his female characters, which evolves over time, indicative of an emergent quasi-feminism. This study counters the claims of many contemporary literary critics that Fowles's work cannot be reconciled with any feminist ideology. Specifically, I highlight the increasing centrality of Fowles's female characters in his novels, accompanied by a growing focus on the mysterious and the uncanny. Fowles's work increasingly associates mystery with creativity, femininity, and the mythic, suggests that mystery is essential for growth and change, both in society and in the novel form itself, and implies that women, rather than men, are naturally predisposed to embrace it. Fowles's novels reflect a worldview that challenges an over-reliance on the empirical and rational to the exclusion of the mysterious and the intuitive. I suggest that Fowles's novels evince an increasingly mythopoeic realism, constantly testing the limits of what can be apprehended and articulated in language, striving towards a realism that is universal and transcendent.

The diploma thesis focuses on diverse representations of the house in selected British novels since 1906. The novels have been chosen in reference to the importance assigned to houses in terms of plot, characters, and setting, each offering a unique vision of the house. A house is perceived as a home, as a possession or as a work of art. The novels by E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy and Simon Mawer are viewed through the prism of Phenomenology, namely the essays of Martin Heidegger, Jan Patočka and Anna Hogenová. This type of analysis provides an insight into the motivations of the individual characters, but also a deeper understanding of the function and role of the house in fiction as well as in reality. All the works are studied accordingly in the context of a wider social, cultural and aesthetic background. Key words: British fiction, Phenomenology, House, Home, Modernism, Work of Art

O Gabinete de Leitura, Serões das Famílias Brasileiras, Jornal para todas as Classes, Sexos e Idades foi publicado no final de década de 1830 no Rio de Janeiro. O principal objetivo de seus redatores era o de difundir o hábito da leitura de ficção. Por conseguinte, publicaram textos ficcionais traduzidos de periódicos estrangeiros, principalmente europeus. Este estudo investiga os textos ficcionais e não-ficcionais britânicos presentes no Gabinete de Leitura: 1) tendo como ponto de partida como a nação britânica era vista pela jovem intelectualidade brasileira; 2) relacionando a ficção britânica ao conjunto ficcional do Gabinete de Leitura com o objetivo de averiguar algumas de suas peculiaridades. Dessa forma, pretendo contribuir para a discussão sobre a presença da ficção britânica nos periódicos oitocentistas brasileiros. / The Gabinete de Leitura, Serões das Famílias Brasileiras, Jornal para todas as Classes, Sexos e Idades was published at the end of the 1830\' s in Rio de Janeiro. Its editors aimed at developing the habit of reading fiction. Accordingly, they offered translated fiction from foreign periodicals, notably European. This study investigates the British fictional and non-fictional texts of the Gabinete de Leitura: 1) by taking into account how the British nation was regarded by the young Brazilian intellectuals; 2) by relating the English fiction to the body of fictional texts offered by the periodical in order to detect some of its peculiarities. Therefore, I intend to contribute to the discussion of the presence of British fiction in nineteenth-century Brazilian periodicals.

This dissertation investigates representations of betrayal in works by Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Hollinghurst. In rethinking "bad" acts of betrayal as embodying an ethical desire not for the good but for "the better," this dissertation challenges the simplistic good/bad binary as mandated by neo-imperialist, late capitalist, and heteronormative society. In doing so, my project intervenes in the current paradigm of ethical literary criticism, whose focus on the canon and the universal Good gained from it runs a risk of underwriting moral majoritarianism and judgmentalism. I argue that some contemporary narratives of betrayal open up onto a new ethic, insofar as they reveal the unethical totalization assumed in ethical literary criticism's pursuit of the normative Good. The first full chapter analyzes how Kureishi's Intimacy portrays an ethical adultery as it breaks away from the tenacious authority of monogamy in portraying adult intimacy in literature, what I call the narrative of "coupledom." Instead, Intimacy imagines a new narrative of "singledom" unconstrained by the marriage/adultery dyad. In the next chapter on Fury, a novel about Manhattan's celebrity culture, I interrogate the current discourse of cosmopolitanism and propose that Rushdie's novel exposes how both cosmopolitanism and nationalism are turned into political commodities by mediafrenzied and celebrity-obsessed metropolitan cultural politics. In a world where an ethical choice between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is impossible to make, Fury achieves an ethical act of treason against both. The next chapter scrutinizes Mark Renton's "ripping off" of his best mates and his critique of capitalism in Trainspotting and Porno. If Renton betrays his friends in order to leave the plan(e) of capitalism in the original novel, he satirizes the trustworthiness of trust in Porno by crushing his best mate's blind trust in business "ethics" and by ripping him off again. The last full chapter updates the link between aesthetics and ethics in post-AIDS contexts in Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. In portraying without judgment beautiful, dark-skinned, dying homosexual bodies, Hollinghurst's novel "fleshes out" the traditional sphere of aesthetics that denies the low and impure pleasures frequently paired with gay sex.

This dissertation examines the trope of filiation in novels by three contemporary British writers: John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The trope of filiation and the related theme of inheritance has long been central to the concerns of the British novel, but it took on a new significance in the twentieth century, as the novel responded both thematically and formally to the aftermath of the two world wars. This study demonstrates the ways in which Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro each situate their work in relation to this legacy, by means of an analogy between the inheritance structures figured within their novels and the inheritance performed by their engagement with the genre itself. This study relies on an instructive analogy to similar treatments of the larger problem of cultural filiation by the theorists Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Levinas exposes in his work the ethical and political problems of modernist temporality by critiquing modernity’s rejection of filiation, a rejection modeled also in the lost children, and barren and celibate men and women of modernist novels. Derrida meanwhile provides a way forward with his representation and performance of inheritance as a critical and transformative act, which is characterised on one hand by an ethical injunction, and on the other, by a filtering or a differentiation which changes the tradition even as it reaffirms it.