Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This thesis is an examination of how the themes of adultery and regeneration are interwoven and explored by selected English novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. It is essential to establish that Ford, Lawrence, Waugh and Greene do not adhere to the ‘archetypal' pattern of the adultery novel established in the nineteenth century and, in fact, turn that pattern on its head. Ford's The Good Soldier and Parade's End provide two differing perspectives. The first uses adultery as a metaphor for the disintegration of English society, mirroring the social disintegration that accompanied the First World War; Parade's End, however, presents an adulterous relationship as being a regenerative force in the post-war society. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover also uses an adulterous relationship as a means of addressing the need for social, and national, regeneration in the inter-war years. Waugh's A Handful of Dust presents a woman's adultery as the ruin of not only a good man, but also civilisation in general; Brideshead Revisited is more religious in tone and traces the spiritual regeneration of its central character, whose conversion, ironically, is made possible through his adulterous relationship. Similarly, Greene's The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair portray the process of spiritual regeneration; in both novels this movement towards salvation is intertwined with an exploration of adulterous love. The ultimate question probed in this thesis is how the twentieth century novel of adultery overturns the traditional literary approach to the subject. Adulterous unions and illegitimate children are no longer presented as being exclusively socially destabilising or subversive in these novels; most intriguingly significant is that, in some of these novels, the illegitimate child becomes a symbol of hope, and, indeed, of regeneration.

"June 2003." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-301). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

D. H. Lawrence believed the individual psyche to consist of two parts: the active unconsciousness and the mental consciousness. The active unconsciousness is a sort of life force within the individual, and one that allows the individual a true connection to the world. It is also closely related to the body, and sometimes called “blood-being” or “blood-consciousness.” The mental consciousness could be said to be the “intellect” in the individual psyche, dealing with abstractions and ideas. Lawrence insists that contemporary society’s prioritizing of the functions of the mental consciousness leads individuals to allow it too much influence over their life. This ultimately leads them to become dominating, willful and deadly. Lawrence’s 1920 novel Women in Love is an allegory of what Lawrence saw as the detrimental effect on individuals by the over-emphasis on rationality in contemporary society, and also of the struggle to find a way back to a more natural way of existing in the world. This essay argues that the processes of, and struggle between, the mental consciousness and active unconsciousness, are illustrated in images of water. Surface and merging imagery connotes denial of or loss of contact with the active unconsciousness, eventually leading the individual to seek death. Flood and submersion imagery connotes a possibility to find a way back to a life lived in and through the active unconsciousness. Fountain imagery and images of water connoting growth and openness connote the strong, creative life force inherent in the active unconsciousness. However, some water imagery in the novel also contradicts any notion of a stable balance—Lawrence universe is one where death and destruction is a necessary component of life and creativity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation studies certain similarities between some early Bildungsroman of D. H. Lawrence and André Gide. In Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, and Gide's L'lmmoraliste and La Porte étroite, the authors explore the destructive effects of cultural "Icons", narrowly codified gender roles, upon sensitive young European women at the turn of the century. Through an intricate subtext of allusive imagery, postures, language, and "mythical" patterns, Lawrence and Gide imply that a patristic Christianity had somehow enlisted certain strains of Romance to fashion a pervasive cultural code that encouraged young women to be virginal, passive, and receptive to suffering. The young female protagonists look to their roles as Madonna, Maiden, and Martyr as an escape from a provincial world that offers little to their "over brimming" souls. Ironically, it is their Knight-Christs, the "mentors" who propose to teach them about the higher world, who imprison them further. Pretending to elevate them to the status of Spiritual Muse to inspire the male quest for selfhood, the lovers demand of their Madonna-Maidens a passivity whereby suffering is their only "heroic" act. Male-sculpted models of femininity, then, make it impossible for young women to pursue their own quests for the authentic "self". The final tragedy for the young women comes when their opposite numbers awaken from Romance's pregenital spring to what Lawrence calls "blood-consciousness". The Maidens' Knight-Christs now find restrictive their spiritual lovers and desire instead the initiation into the "flesh" preached by a new cultural code, that of Nietzsche et al. Lawrence's and Gide's young female characters, then, serve as exemplars of an entire generation of young women destroyed in this teleological shift to a new cultural ethos, one in which, suddenly, their "virtues" are judged vices, all they had been presented to them as "natural" is deemed "unnatural".

My dissertation argues that the writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence are animated by a shared belief that the way human beings experience and understand their worlds needs to be radically transformed. Their works expose how human experience is canalized by habits reinforced through education and custom, and they explore the ways people might overcome these limitations to expand the receptive possibilities of their experience, illustrating more fruitful ways their readers might engage their worlds. Their novels offer a radical recasting of the human subject and its situation in the environment, one that valorizes a turn away from the fixity of conceptual certainty and an embrace of experiences that trouble clean distinctions between the human being and its world. Reading through the lens of radical empiricism, this project makes the case that Woolf and Lawrence are together engaging in a similar project: they are working from a shared interest in intensive explorations of the seemingly ineffable qualities in concrete human experience and in bringing those accounts into language to suggest the relational constitution of the human being with other people and the environment. They are working experimentally to discern the extent to which the human being can know first-hand its place in the extensive world. In doing so, the authors come to understand such a human being differently, as simultaneously discrete and non-discrete. By examining the methodological and philosophical intersections of these two authors, this project serves as a first step in suggesting a radical empirical British modernism. Woolf’s and Lawrence’s approaches to experience have philosophical implications that become more apparent when read in conjunction with William James’s philosophy of radical empiricism and the related philosophies of Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead. While “radical empiricist” is not a common moniker for these philosophers, my project makes the case for the consideration of several of their works as reflective of a line of confluent thought that illuminates the concerns of some modernist literature with developing a new understanding of the human situation through an inclusive attention to lived experience. The project is organized into four chapters. In the first chapter, I establish the radical empirical philosophical situation of Woolf’s and Lawrence’s writing, revealing in their novels how the dispositions of the characters facilitate different worlds, and elaborating the attentive approaches that they valorize through their novels. In the second chapter, I explore their critiques of abstraction, elaborating their concern with fixed abstract forms while countering readings of their work as anti-intellectual or apophatically mystical. In the third chapter, I examine how in and through their novels they engage the difficulty of articulating preconceptual experience, and I explore how they productively use ambiguity towards this end. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine the relational situation of the human individual that their novels disclose and the sort of self-understanding that they champion through their work.

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Young Ada. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-139). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 摘要 --- p.iii / Acknowledgments --- p.v / Introduction / "Crisis Unveiled: ""All that is Positive Melts Away""" --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter I --- "Crisis in Interpersonal and Intrapsychic Realms: and ""England, My England""" --- p.17 / Chapter Chapter II --- Crisis in Interpersonal and Intrapsychic Realms: Desire and its Perversions in Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain --- p.37 / Chapter Chapter III --- "Crisis at the Societal Level: in Women in Love and ""England, My England""" --- p.64 / Chapter Chapter IV --- Crisis at the Societal Level: From the Corrosions of Meaning in Life to the Dislocations of Societal Order in Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain --- p.94 / Coda / Crisis (Un)ended: The Great War and its Aftermath --- p.122 / Notes --- p.129 / Works Cited --- p.134