The Canadian is a social, geographical, psychological and literary phenomenon who in his never-ending search to define himself has only succeeded in adding acute self-consciousness to the list of his maladies. But no Massey Report, no article by a member or the Canadian Authors' Association, and certainly no sociological treatise, will ever tell the impatient Canadian what he is. In the period of the past twenty years, particularly since 1939, the Canadian has examined himself with morbid and adolescent curiosity forgetting that his growing nationalism can beat be studied in the books his countrymen are writing, that it is through its art that a nation defines itself.

In Blake's work there is a consistent statement concerning the unity or man's psychic, ethical, and cognitive experience which, we believe, is still largely valid. The purpose or this study is to discover, by an investigation or all Blake's writings -- his lyrics, epics or prophecies, marginalia and letters -- what this statement is, and to set down its skeletal structure. Blake believed that man's imagination forms and gives unity to his experience.

When George Moore wrote these words in his preface to the revised 1904 edition of his youthful autobiography, he still had almost thirty years to live. On the other hand, he had passed all the crises of his career, domestic, financial, amorous, and literary, and was firmly on the course he was to follow all his remaining years. [...]

In George Eliot's first full-length novel, Adam Bede, she planned to write "a simple story." She wished to paint "faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence," that would be "the faithful representing of common-place things." (p.183) This determination to write of ordinary people, and more specifically of the working class, was part of the reaction of Victorian writers against the romantic hero; George Eliot takes great pains to remind the reader that she is writing of common-place people, not of "the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions."

The critic facing Andrew Marvell's ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ is beset by a number of problems. Although it is but a small collection, its range of subject-matter, of style, and of quality is enormous. It is difficult to see how the lyric perfection of some of the more famous poems can have come from the same pen as the shapeless inanities of ‘A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda’, or how the delicacy of feeling and sensitivity of expression of ‘On a drop of Dew’ and ‘The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun’ can have been born out of the mind that was guilty of the callousness and grossness evinced in the satires. Just as noticeable is the disparity between the metaphysical intensity of some of the lyrics and the bantering, cavalier levity of others.

This annotated checklist of Pater's works is to be thought of as preliminary to a critical edition of his works. The purpose is to locate and identify Pater’s prose works so that an editor can collate the different versions; but not to provide technical bibliographical description. Listed chronologically in Part I are the appearance s of his works - those published during his lifetime (1839 - July 1894) and those first published posthumously. Pater seems to have made textual changes in his works whenever the opportunity occurred. Without any attempt at collation, works with two or more appearances have been compared only to ascertain that they were essentially the same.

The purpose of this thesis is the study of the four novels of Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe’s work is centered in a single protagonist; a figure that is largely autobiographical, and is dominated by a number of themes. In ‘Look Homeward’, ‘Angel’, the important themes are, the isolation of individuals and their inability to communicate with each other, the influence of chance in men's lives, and the effects of the passing of time. ‘Of Time and The River’ continues these ideas, but the dominant themes are those of Eugene's search for an external and permanent image of strength and wisdom, his Faustian hunger for knowledge, and the problems that beset him as an American artist.

The history of Canadian poetry also must have much to do with “untamed nature and the countryside” and cities will come into it, too, but late. The proportions, however, of rural to urban concerns, are different for the literary and the social historian. The social historian may properly begin with the French regime in the early seventeenth century, proceed to the British Conquest in 1763, and on to the effects of the American Revolution in 1775, and through to Confederation in 1867 and to the establishment of “The Railway” and the opening up of the Canadian West, all this time - nearly three hundred years of history - being concerned mainly with topics related to a predominantly rural mode of life.

In Victorian England George Eliot “must needs occupy a central place. Probably no English writer of the time, and certainly no novelist, more fully epitomizes the century.” Many, including William Hale White and Lord Acton, have considered her the greatest Victorian. G. M. Young makes the reason for such tributes clear. George Eliot was, he says, “a light to thousands who had learnt from her that, in the darkness deepening over all ancient faiths, the star of duty shone clearer than ever. Grave and wise men thought that George Eliot had, single-handed, by her ethical teaching, saved us from the moral catastrophe which might have been expected to follow upon the waning of religious conviction. They were not altogether wrong. George Eliot did give body, and expression… to her time. In doing so she shaped a generation.”

He awoke in the fuzzy half-dark of his room to muffled little noises. From the kitchen only a passage width away came the clink and the scraping of a pot in the sink, the discreet slushing rise in pitch of the tap water filling the pot, the tempered shuffle and heel click on the linoleum of his mother’s moving about. Up already, he thought. He listened hard for a moment. Her voice, still as young and fresh as a spring, gurgled in an endless flow of Yiddish past his closed door and into his room, punctuated every now and then by an indignant "Ah!" She was talking to herself. He couldn't hear what she was saying, but there was something wrong. He could tell.