Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2004. / Bibliography: leaves 270-277.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2004. / Bibliography: leaves 270-277. / Introduction -- George MacDonald's religious heritage -- George MacDonald's philosophical and literary roots -- Of friends and teachers -- Conversion studies and critical application -- Children on the path -- Waking from slumber -- Courageous stances -- Toppled pride -- Broken vessels -- Implications of MacDonald's conversion depictions. / Victorian author George MacDonald is best remembered for his writing in the genres of fairy tale and fantasy. MacDonald was, however, most popular during his own time as a writer of realistic adult fiction. He was widely read but critically dismissed as a writer whose works were both didactic and predictable in plot. MacDonald was primarily a teacher who used the novel as a means to convey to readers his Christian message of hope and transformation. -- This thesis begins with a study of those individuals and ideas that influenced MacDonald's thoughts and beliefs. The second part of this thesis is an overview of studies of spiritual conversion, with particular emphasis on the works of V. Bailey Gillespie, Lewis Rambo, John Lofland, and Norman Skonovd. Their works in the field of conversion studies include several schemata which are helpful in explaining specific depictions of conversion within MacDonald's adult fiction. -- The remainder of the thesis focuses on MacDonald's portrayals of characters who experience conversion in his novels. They are placed into the following categories: Children on the Path; Waking from Slumber; Courageous Stances; Toppled Pride; and Broken Vessels. The experiences of the characters are thoroughly examined and justification is offered for their inclusions in their respective categories. -- This study counters the criticism levelled at MacDonald during his own time that he was caught in repetitive plots for lack of skill or inspiration. My findings suggest that MacDonald's depictions show a deep as well as wide understanding of the process of conversion, an understanding which seems to have encompassed a broader understanding than those of most of the religious writers of his own day. I suggest that his focus was on his message rather than his art. Therefore, his adult realistic fiction constitutes a very substantial literary achievement and offers contemporary readers and writers a benchmark against which to measure both their own understandings of conversion and their own expressions of it. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / 277 leaves

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 283 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-280).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2007. / Thesis directed by Chris Vanden Bossche for the Department of English. "July 2007." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-236).

Wilderness landscape, a setting common in Romantic literature and painting, is generally overlooked in the art of the Middle Ages. While the medieval garden and the city are well mapped, the medieval wilderness remains relatively trackless. Yet the use of setting to represent interior experience may be traced back to the Neo-Platonic use of space and movement to define spiritual development. Separating themselves as far as possible from the material world, such writers as Origen and Plotinus avoided use of representational detail in their spatial models; however, both the visual artists and the authors who adopted the Neo-Platonic paradigm, elaborated their emotional spaces with the details of the classical locus amoenus and of the exegetical desert, while retaining the philosophical concern with spiritual transition. Analysis of wilderness as an image for spiritual and emotional transition in medieval literature and art relates the texts to an iconographic tradition which, along with motifs of city and garden, provides a spatial representation of interior progress, as the medieval dialectic process provides a paradigm for intellectual resolution. Such an analysis relates the motif to the core of medieval intellectual experience, and further suggests significant connections between medieval and modern narratives in regard to the representation of interior experience. The Divine Comedy and related Continental texts employ both classical and exegetical sources in the representation of psychological transition and spiritual conversion. Similar techniques are also apparent in English texts such as Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon elegies, in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and Troilus and Criseyde, and in the northern English The Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These literary texts, further, include both ideas and techniques which are analogous to those of visual arts, where frescos and altarpieces show the wilderness as metaphor for transition, and where manuscript illuminations relate this visual concept to texts. Thus, the wilderness as a landscape of personal crisis becomes in the Middle Ages a significant part of the representation of interior experience in painting and in literature.

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