This thesis examines theories of translation which are explicit in the themes and implicit in the rhetorical uses of form in the work of Joyce, with a focus on the French translations of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake produced with his collaboration between 1921 and 1931. Philosophies of translation from Jerome through Benjamin plus work in translation theory by Even-Zohar and Toury inform this study of the ethics both of translating and of being translated in the modernist idiom. In identifying a translation ethic arising out of the modernist aesthetic, the thesis postulates a rhetoric of translation by analogy with Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. To this end, key issues in translation studies are addressed: the critical status of the authorized collaborative translation; accounting in translation for persuasive (versus purely expressive) functions of literary works as text types; translation strategy as a contribution to the debate between essentialism or universal grammar and cultural relativism; the translation imagined as a frame narrative, and the translator as an implied frame narrator of varying invisibility and reliability; and translation as a model of cognitive processes such as reading, understanding, memory, and the growth of consciousness. Via a combination of descriptive, historical, and textual study, this set of topics in translation is shown to explain many thematic and technical preoccupations of Joyce - just as Joyce proves to be an ideal case for descriptive translation studies, not in spite but by virtue of his notional untranslatability. The thesis also seeks to contribute to Joyce studies proper: to an understanding of how Joyce's fiction both does and does not depart from conventions of western narrative; to a portrait of the implied author and undramatized narrator in Ulysses; to an appreciation of translation both broadly and narrowly defined as a recurrent theme in his work; and to a recognition of the influence of Joyce's many contemporary translators and their languages, cultures, and personalities upon his own innovating uses of language and narrative.

This thesis aims not only to set Proust's treatment of childhood in the context of his work as a whole, but also to set that work in the context of contemporary writing about childhood. Chapter 1 reveals the existence of a fashion in Proust's time for literature devoted to childhood. This genre has a tendency towards technical innovation, despite repetition of the same subject matter, or 'myths'. One particularly important myth, that of the 'child-artist', is seen to be influential - not only on Proust's work but also on contemporary scientific attitudes to childhood. Chapter 2 traces the origins of the genre to the earlier literary form of the Pastoral. It examines residual elements of the Pastoral, or the myth of the pastoral childhood, in later works which may have influenced Proust. Combray, it is concluded, both affirms and questions this myth. Chapter 3 examines the mythology of play. Although play generally has a significant role in the genre, it is peculiarly absent from Combray. In Proust's novel, the usual functions of play are fulfilled by reading, while apparent examples of play that remain are in reality strategies for obtaining sexual gratification. Chapter 4 shows how Proust's use of metaphor represents a partial return to the syncretism characteristic of childhood impressions and the essentialism of the child's beliefs about proper names. The final chapter verifies the impressions of earlier chapters that Proust's work simultaneously affirms and denies the child-artist myth, and that his hero can only become a narrator when a process of fusion between child and adult is complete. This process permits a reinterpretation of A la recherche, its structure, and themes (such as society and love) in terms of childhood. Thus, the importance of childhood and its associated genre to Proust's work as a whole is confirmed.

The study explores the hypothesis that the High Victorian ideal of Culture, and Carlyle's response to his own Condition-of-England question, represent efforts to combat, in roughly opposite ways, what T.S. Eliot termed dissociation of sensibility.' It offers an explanation of the persistent impulse towards holistic views of society in the face of technological and social forces moving ever more decisively in the opposite direction. Chapter One defends the intelligibility and consistency of 'dissociation' in relation to influential criticisms by F.W.Bateson and Frank Kermode. The apparent anomalies these critics point to are explained by examining the source of the concept in Eliot's study of F.H.Bradley, and suggesting the relation of 'dissociation' to arguments of Jack Goody and lan Watt concerning the interaction between oral and literate culture. Chapter Two outlines some of the dimensions of 'dissociation' in the nineteenth century: its relation to romantic notions concerning the vision of the child, to various theoretical expositions of the relation between thought and feeling, and to accounts of the personal experience of 'dissociation' given by Darwin and J.S. Mill. Chapter Three examines what some of his contemporaries felt to be Carlyle's impractical response to the Condition-of-England, showing it to be essentially an extrapolation of his own experience of the romantic revolution as described in Sartor Resartus and adumbrated in the early essays. Carlyle's tussle with anomy and heroic emergence into the 'Everlasting YEA' are discussed as a revulsion from literate consciousness. Chapter Four suggests how Newman's idea of harmonious intellectual cultivation depends on the individual maintaining a proper balance between 'implicit' and 'explicit' thought. Newman's account of the relation between these modes in the Grammar of Assent is related to the educational system he expounds in his educational writings. Chapter Five shows how Arnold's emphasis on intellectual consciousness constantly threatens to destabilise his theory of Culture and turn it into a merely subjective ideal. The chapter ends by suggesting how the philosophy of F.H. Bradley tends to heal the breach between consciousness and experience, providing a basis for Eliot's own understanding of the unified sensibility. The Conclusion affirms the value of 'dissociation' as a means of illuminating the holistic impulse, which might otherwise be conceptually unassailable.

There are three appendices - an analysis of Erasmus Schmid's policy in establishing his text of the first Pythian, a note on Milton and Pindar, and a transcription of Thomas Gray's notes on Pindar.

Charlotte Brontë wrote some memorable criticism of Jane Austen. What particularly affronted her was Jane Austen's treatment of emotion. This suggests grounds for comparison. If conducted historically the comparison makes more sense. It also helps to consider the novel as 'conjectural history', i.e. to assign (some) novels not to the category of make-believe (creating imaginary worlds which only make sense if certain conventions are accepted), nor that of lying (evoking possible but partial worlds for consolation), but that of guesswork (considering what might have happened in this world).

In Ireland's divided society in which everything is political except solutions, the evaluation and redefinition of the governing metaphors of political and cultural identity is a matter of public concern. For nationalist Ireland, the traditional centrality of the poetic imagination to the development of the legitimating tropes of national identity endows representative status upon all subsequent poetry which treats of these themes. The heated public and critical debate about the poetry of Seamus Heaney derives from the recognition that as nations are "imagined communities", so the form and content of the poet's imaginative process is heavy with political and social implications. Heaney's poetic negotiation between the given collective traditions of his community and the transfigurative appeal of the individual imagination engaged with modernity, produces a sustained reflection upon the nature and implications of cultural identity in modern Ireland. What is implict in the tenor of the debate surrounding Heaney is explicit in Heaney f s compelling poetic, namely, that in the modern age cultural identity remains central to social and political definition. But whereas the fact of cultural identity is central to social definition, the form (either hegemonic or inclusivist) of any such expression of identity is dependent upon the discursive practices which imagine and construct such definitions. In this context what begins for Heaney as a lyric flirtation with the possibilities of language, becomes a critical reappraisal of nationalist ideology's governing metaphors of place, history and belonging. In order to situate and define Heaney's contribution to the preoccupying question of identity it is necessary to evaluate the history and discursive evolution of nationalism as an ideology. Such an evaluation demonstrates that nationalism as a product of post-dynastic modern societies, is dependent upon a number of figurative habits and discursive practices for its universal and universalising appeal. By identifying these formations and by establishing the connection between these figures of thought and the expression of cultural identity as a hegemonic or inclusivist narrative, criteria may be determined against which the status of Heaney's own expressions of cultural identity may be assessed. Against the contemporary background in which nationalism appears to have acquired the status of a political metaphysics, Heaney's candid engagement with the cherished illusions informing this perception reveals him for what he is - a definitively modern poet announcing to those who will listen that there is and must be, poetry after Auschwitz.

A major issue in William Gaddis' novels, The Recognitions and JR, is the problematic role of art and the artist. The thesis traces this theme to certain classic and romantic ideas about art in the nineteenth-century American romance, as well as to the literary theories of such modernists as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and to the theories of such disparate writers as, among others, the New Critics and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The ideas and structure of Gaddis' novels are located and discussed in relation to this context. Like many contemporary novelists, Gaddis transposes his themes into the reflexive structures of his works. His development of self-referring form culminates in JR, a novel in which language is itself the structural and thematic focus. This thesis shows that, although Gaddis' novels demonstrate the modernist tenet that art vindicates life, they are also powerful satires which express the writer's concern for the social relevance of art.

The reason why I have studied the way Milan Kundera appeals to poetry inside his novels is that I did the opposite in my creative text by subjecting a poetic form to certain novelistic constraints such as narration, the presence of characters and the use of prose. Out of these constraints, the poetic obsession about images and shapes leads to a story. / These four "Short geometrical proses" appear as "short stories" all of which tell a moment, a situation or the life of characters obsessed with geometrical figures such as the rectangle, the triangle, the square and the circle. This "nature of geometrical figures" brings forth sweet reveries which translate various feelings in a playful tone.

This thesis examines the trope of anthropology in the Canadian poet Anne Carson's work. This trope functions as an extended metaphor to describe the study of cultures, texts, and the "alien countries" of other human souls. Anne Carson rejects anthropological practices that aim at the "invasion" of the other, and associates such practices with the actions of seeing, projecting and even "devouring." Instead she favours anthropological approaches that foster mutual "encounters", such approaches being typically charged with the actions of listening, absorbing and breathing. This distinction becomes crucial when we consider its implications for reading and writing about Anne Carson's work. Can a reader encounter rather than invade a poem? What meaning can the reader find in such an encounter if, unlike the practice of anthropology, it is undertaken in written form and in isolation? Might we conclude that all responses to poetry emerge not from the fullness and immediacy of an encounter, but precisely from the impossibility of ever undergoing the experience of such an encounter?

This thesis examines the novels of quebecois writer Marie-Claire Blais from a North American feminist literary critical perspective. It challenges the assumption that francophone women writers should only be studied from a French Feminist perspective by attempting to situate Blais' writing within a North-American "female literary tradition". Issues of Blais' cultural specifity as a quebecois writer are also addressed.