The female characters in four of Eudora Welty's five novels, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Delta Wedding (1946), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist's Daughter (1972), undergo initiation experiences which are significant elements in the content and structure of the novels. Only in The Ponder, Heart (1954) is female initiation notably missing. This study identifies and interprets the patterns of female initiation in these novels, showing Welty's refining of her understanding and presentation of female initiation. While Welty embraces certain traditional elements of initiation, which this study identifies in anthropological, mythological, and psychological studies--the loss of innocence (discovery of evil), crisis and confrontation, the gaining of wisdom however painful, becoming an outcast, yet reuniting with the community--she also adds her own elements regarding female initiation-an underlying tension between males and females or between females and a shadowing of the Demeter/Persephone (Kore) myth. In addition, her female initiates lack the mentor traditionally found in male initiation. Also reflected in Welty's fiction is the separation involved in female initiation in primitive cultures, mythology, and psychology. Not all of Welty's female characters in these novels undergo initiation; someremain static and unchanging, while others are at the threshold, eagerly waiting to cross over. While Welty's initiates make the dark journey alone to gain knowledge of themselves and the world however painful, their initiation does not signify the end of their growth. / Department of English

Conditions in the field of American literature during the first four decades of the twentieth century were not always helpful or encouraging to aspiring writers in the United States. The literature which may be called characteristic of this period began with the novels which writers like Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser were publishing around 1900. These men initiated a new period in American writing, which developed in power and maturity especially during the twenties and thirties. For the first fifteen years of the century, however, neither academic criticism nor journalistic opinion were prepared to favor the new growth. Taking American universities as a measure of the prevailing attitude toward writers who were interested in becoming part of the new movement, Bernard De Voto pointed out that even as late as 1920 few universities provided any encouragement for the man (at the time he would hardly be called a scholar) who was interested primarily in literature written in the United States. Universities on the whole provided favorable climates only to that scholarship and criticism which was devoted to English literature of a respectable age, and looked upon American literature as “at best only a pleasant brook flowing toward the stream of English literature and acquiring merit only as it drew near.” Similarly the critical journals were not much interested in the American literary output. Even important periodicals like The Nation and The Bookman followed trends [...]

Known in the United States for his critical studies of twentieth-century fiction, Malcolm Bradbury is himself a creator of fiction, the author of four novels. All four are satires. All confront well-meaning but feckless English liberal humanists with the doctrinaire. All reveal that meaning well and doing justly are not the same, and that private values--a belief in the dignity of the individual and in his right to work out his own destiny--are insufficient, even, sometimes, harmful. Yet Bradbury consistently reveals the doctrinaire as far more harmful, concerned not at all about individual men. The doctrinaire is ruthless and inhumane, whether presented as a formulaic version of liberal humanism itself, in Eating People is Wrong (1959); as the politicized liberalism of post-McCarthy America, in Stepping Westward (1965); as the radicalism of the early nineteen seventies, in The History Man (1975); or as the Marxism of a Soviet satellite, in Rates of Exchange (1983). His novels all depict something that Bradbury himself named in a commentary upon his first: "an ironic world, a world without real deliverances." Several critics maintain that Bradbury's novels are profoundly, deceitfully, conservative beneath a surface liberalism. However, as this first long study of the novels attempts to demonstrate, their conservatism is not so much political as cultural. The great Western systems, capitalism and communism, no longer offer much that is conducive to man's well-being; only liberal humanism, in its respect for the individual, holds forth some faint hope for humanity. So implies Malcolm Bradbury, whose stance in the novels is largely apolitical and who exposes the folly of his liberal humanists and the wickedness of their more doctrinaire antagonists with equally devastating wit. / Department of English

Pythian 4 is Pindar's grandest ode. It was commissioned along with Pythian 5 to celebrate the chariot victory at Delphi of Arcesilas IV of Cyrene. The lengthy myth of Pythian 4 narrates the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, long established in the Greek mythic tradition. Pindar's treatment of this tradition to create his myth is examined. It reveals much about his aims in writing the ode, in particular in the characterisation of his hero, Jason, and his opponent, Pelias. The poem's structure and the narrative technique employed in the myth are also examined. A remarkable feature of Pythian 4 is its epic flavour. Analysis of Pindar's production of this effect reveals many different devices which would remind his audience of epic, not least a singular concentration of epic language in the ode. The epilogue of Pythian 4 refers to the contemporary political situation in Cyrene. The poet's presentation and use of this material is assessed in the light of his treatment of contemporary allusions elsewhere in the odes. The complex relationship between the two odes for Arcesilas is considered in the light of other double commissions. Pythian 4 contains an unusual plea for an exile, Damophilus. He may have paid for the ode. The unusual features of Pythian 5 are examined: an extraordinary tribute to Arcesilas' charioteer, Carrhotus; vivid and numerous details of the topography of Cyrene and details of religious cult practice there. Pythian 5 also raises the question of the identity of the first person in Pindar. The poet's treatment of Cyrenean history, especially the figure of Battus, the victor's ancestor, who features in the myths of both odes, is also considered.

Faith for Milton is primarily a matter of man's access to God. Such access entails God's involvement in mankind. Faith is that which guarantees that God is accessible to men and also that God actively participates in the lives of his people. Milton's work exhibits a preoccupation with such a concept of faith, and wavers through the course of his life between dualist and monist formulations. Monistic faith suggests that God is directly accessible to man, while dualistic faith means that God may only be accessible in a mediated way. In the course of his career, Milton proceeded from an early dualistic faith to the declared monism of De Doctrina Christiana. This thesis examines the monistic impulse within Milton's poetry, focusing on the poems written during his mid-career (c. 1637-1653) when his outlook on faith turned. The thesis finds that although Milton expresses his monism in increasingly clear terms, he is never quite able to eliminate dualistic implications or tendencies from his faith. The thesis focuses on two strategies which Milton employs in his attempts to define a monistic world view and a monistic faith, namely, tradition and translation. These strategies represent points of confrontation between dualism and monism. They both assert monistic continuity in the face of dualist disjunction. Tradition attempts to overcome the disjunction perceptible between two remote events in time. It incorporates both the recovery of lost history as well as geographical and linguistic translation. Translation (taken as separate from tradition) attempts to overcome the disjunction between languages. It manages, however unsuccessfully, to carry meaning over from a source text to a target text while simultaneously altering every single word in the source text. Both these strategies thus provide textual and linguistic means for examining Milton's faith or his sense of divine access. This thesis examines Milton's deployment of tradition by means of a close consideration of Lycidas as well as several other early poems. It examines his 1648 and 1653 psalm translations and the unique manner in which they reveal Milton's understanding of faith. The thesis concludes that Milton's monistic faith never quite breaks free of the dualist tendencies against which it struggles.

Fiktion der Handlung? This highly conventional genre can, I claim, through both embracing and problematising its very conventionality express itself with irony and subtlety that is at least as effective as open self-praise by poets in comic genres that allow it.

This study argues that Samuel Beckett's works in English and French reveal the organising energy of a "bilingual consciousness". Bilingualism is no personal eccentricity but the foundation for Beckett's mature art, without which it could not have developed. He has never been a unilingual writer; at every stage of his career his two languages have enriched, challenged and opposed each other. Bilingual art has allowed Beckett to move between linguistic circles, claiming as his own a transitional space that has protected his need for imaginative solitude. Gradually abandoning the cultural specificity of his early works in favour of archetypal settings that "translate" successfully to other contexts, he has focussed directly on what unites rather than divides human communities. Yet his writing retains an evident alertness to, and love of, the linguistic and cultural resources of English and French. His alternations between languages and his frequent activities as translator and self- translator contribute to a detachment from generic conventions that encourages innovation. Thus the often-criticised marginality of the bilingual has become for Beckett a source of strength. This analysis draws on a close reading of certain key texts, crossing languages freely to follow Beckett's own development. The prose has central place, because it spans his entire career, and because his most radical innovations have occurred in prose to be, subsequently, transferred in new forms to the drama. Chapter I presents Beckett's dual language-use in a wider context, exploring the early exposure afcd later suppression of "bilingual awareness, the implications of bilingualism for his artistic outlook, and the bilingual aesthetic he has developed. The remaining chapters draw on a new chronology of his writing and translating activities to show the development of his dual language-use and how it has interacted distinctively at each period with his artistic goals and practice.

This comparative study of the response of Donne and Milton to a selection of theological doctrines is made in an attempt to reach a deeper understanding of their imaginations. It is divided into three main sections, dealing with the creation of the world; the soul; and the Incarnation of Christ. In order to establish first the position of their theology in relation to Christian tradition, I begin each section with a discussion of the development of the beliefs with which it is concerned, dealing with classical, patristic, scholastic, and Reformation writers. The purpose of this is not so much to trace influences, as to show what beliefs were available to the poet, and thus what personal choices he made. But if a poet is to be understood as a poet, rather than as a theologian, we must look not only at what he believes, but at how he believes it. The mere statement of belief, faithfully held, does not indicate in itself either its imaginative or emotional significance to the poet. Therefore, the comparison of one poet with another reveals more clearly the imaginative response of each to his beliefs; and both Donne and Milton have left ample evidence both of what they believed, and of its imaginative expression. Thus I make a careful, chronological study of what Donne and Milton state themselves to believe, based particularly on Donne's sermons, and Milton's De Doctrina Christiana, and then I exa-nine how consistently these beliefs are upheld both explicitly and implicitly in their poetry and prose works. I discuss the aspects of doctrine which seem most attractive to them, and the images in which they choose to express them. Thus their attitude towards quite minor points of dopma can be seen as part of a much wider imaginative emphasis, and certain preoccupations may be found afrain and afain in the context of different doctrines.

The aim of this study is to make an original contribution to the body of scholarship on the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) by presenting a text-based investigation of his five-part autobiographical cycle (Die Ursache (1975), Der Keller (1976), Der Atem (1978), Die Kälte (1981), and Ein Kind (1982)), and the prose narratives, Beton (1982) and Auslöschung (1986). In the Introduction, I detail the method adopted to construct the argument of the thesis, after discussing pertinent aspects of Bernhard criticism and its reluctance to approach the prose fiction from a textual perspective. Chapter I examines specific stylistic devices and themes found in the autobiographies and relates them to the emergence of a greater narratorial desire to communicate with the reader and a nascent sense of personal hope. After the tortuous narratives of the sixties and early seventies which made Bernhard's reputation as a nihilistic, negative writer, the autobiographical pentalogy gives evidence of a lighter, more direct expression. The second chapter, on Beton, focuses on a number of themes (human contact, perfectionism, and music and literature) which reveal a more positive outlook in the aftermath of the autobiographical project. The third chapter, on Auslöschung, concentrates on a protagonist who has achieved considerable personal fulfilment and who manages to overcome the emotional and psychological obstacles which his predecessors in Bernhard's prose were unable to surmount. The aim of the thesis, to expose and analyse the aspects of communication and hope recurrent in Bernhard's prose works after 1975, is achieved through close reading reinforced by pertinent biographical and literary evidence. It is hoped that, by undertaking a critical examination of selected narratives, this thesis fills a critical lacuna in the substantial secondary material on Bernhard.

The Introduction surveys previous work on the Meidias Painter and his Associates, and outlines the form that the present study is to take. In Chapter I the Painter and his Associates are introduced; their style is briefly assessed, and an attempt is made to establish their dates and their artistic, social and historical background. In the following Chapters, the Meidian scenes are grouped together by subject and mood. Each group of scenes is similarly treated; the representations are first described and then discussed. Reference is made to the literary and artistic traditions behind each subject, and attempts are made to account for any unusual or especially interesting features of the scenes, and to determine the factors which influenced their design. In Chapter II the more violent scenes are discussed, the Amazon-, gigant- and centauromachies, the Minotaur, Persians chasing women and Oedipus slaying the sphinx. Chapters III and IV discuss the 'heavenly garden' scenes which are most characteristic of the Meidian group, scenes set in paradise gardens from which all violence is excluded. In these Chapters the Meidias Painter's name vase and related scenes, Phaon and Adonis, Thamyris, Marsyas and Mousaios, Personifications, Chryse, Apollo and Artemis, Asklepios, Eleusinians, Dionysos and Aphrodite are all discussed. Chapter V is reserved for non-violent yet non-heavenly garden scenes - Nausikaa, Amymone, Ixion and Trojan themes. Chapter VI deals with non-mythological scenes, those of women and cult. In the Conclusion it is suggested that the two major characteristics of Meidian iconography are its interest in nature and its concern to soften and romanticize mythology, and it is argued that both may derive from the contemporary social and political climate. A catalogue of vases attributable to the Meidias Painter and his Associates is appended.