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Includes bibiographical references (pages 236-271). / It is my purpose to show that in Southern Africa African English literature as defined above has absorbed the culture of the West and has begun to reciprocate by adding its own distinctive features. My contention will be based on an investigation of the trends and ideas which appear in the novels, short stories, poetry, drama, autobiographical and critical writing of Africans.

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The prayers and oaths of the Middle English verse romances draw upon a range of pious formulae. These stock invocations rehearse key episodes from salvation history. Such formulae are widely viewed as mere line-fillers and they are rarely credited with stylistic influence. Yet the startling power of their apposite usage in charged narrative moments prompts further investigation. The thesis aims to demonstrate how the use of pious formulae in the romances is not inevitably mechanical. It comprises a catalogue and stylistic study of such formulae. The catalogue records all examples appearing in a single witness to each of the pre-1500 verse romances. By furnishing information on prosodic context, it offers a reference tool with which to measure the extent of technical determination in the appearance of a formula. The thesis analyses this material and advances claims for the aesthetic value of pious formulae. Chapter 1 reviews the evidence of the catalogue. It is shown how pious formulae embody an impressive range of devotional imagery. Chapter 2 illustrates that cognate formulae are widely employed in Middle English religious literature. It is shown how therein they exhibit a theological significance and a stylistic saliency. Chapter 3 shows how intermittent reflections of this serious stylistic usage are apparent in the pious romance, Guy of Warwick. Chapters 4 and 5 show how the affective resonance of such formulae is consistently exploited in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and William of Palerne respectively. Chapter 6 provides a brief summary. It concludes that the pious formulae of the romances can convey a strong aesthetic charge. They serve as more than mere line-fillers. Three appendices are included. Appendix A explores the relation between pious formulae and medieval profane oaths. Appendix B lists the variant readings of the formulae of four romances. Appendix C comprises the catalogue.

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This study deals with the events after 1895 which led to a major reshaping of the Church of England's policy and organization in 1919. Those events, which included debates in Parliament, a Royal Commission, Prayer Book revision, special Church committees, and Private negotiations by Church leaders, finally resulted in the British Parliament passing the Enabling act of 1919. Significant persons and powerful influences were at work during these years to prevent, as well as promote change in the Established Church. This study will show what those influences were, and discuss persons significant in their work for or against reform.

D.Litt. et Phil. (English) / Although children's theatre has been recognised internationally as an important twentieth-century movement, in South Africa it has tended to be an activity with little prestige, few dedicated artists, and a limited core of dramatic texts that has largely been overlooked by literary scholars. The neglect in this country of children's theatre, a formal category of legitimate theatre, and the lack of investigation of its literature, provide the motivation for this thesis. The documentation of a chronology of productions that have been presented in English in South Africa from the earliest recorded performances to the present time, established in Appendix A, suggests the shape of this study and reveals the existence of a nucleus of children's playscripts. Commentary on, and analysis of, a selected number of these illuminates the genre and its development in South Africa. The Introduction to the work describes a methodology of empirical research. It works towards a broad definition of the concept children's theatre - by examining factors that gave rise to its establishment as a world-wide phenomenon; by establishing the relationship between children's theatre and the development of the child; by placing it in the wider context of theatre generally, and drama for children specifically; and by analysing accounts of three representative productions - one from the United States, the second from Britain and the third an indigenous South African play. Parameters are drawn and set to indicate the extent of the study and the layout of the chapters. Chapter One establishes a pattern from brief outlines of the development of children's theatre in Britain and the United States. In the scheme of the work as a whole, this chapter serves as a point of reference against which the development of South African children's theatre and <its literature can be measured and evaluated. Chapter Two isolates theatrical channels of entertainment and information for children in Victorian times, prior to the term 'children's theatre' first being used. These were not necessarily actual theatre presentations, but can be termed 'amusements' with special attraction for the youth of the community particularly. The marvels exhibited range from flea circuses to elaborate mechanical extravaganzas. Within the framework of analysing specific key texts and determining the markers of a history of children's theatre in South Africa, the purpose of Chapter Three is to document the contributions made by individuals and organisations to the development of children's theatre and its literature in South Africa; to trace the rise and growth of certain identified categories of plays at particular points in the history of children's theatre; and to follow the development in procedures and approaches to productions in an attempt to periodize them into a literary-historical overview.

This study is concerned with a particular kind of short story in South African English literature - a kind of story variously called the fireside tale, tall tale, yarn, skaz narrative, frame narrative, or (the term used in this study), the 'oral-sty Ie story.' This kind of story is characterised by the use of an internal narrator (a fictional narrator or storyteller figure), the cadences of his or her speaking voice, and a 'reporting' frame narrator. Stories by A. W. Drayson, Frederick Boyle, J. Forsyth Ingram, W. C. Scully, Percy FitzPatrick, Ernest Glanville, Perceval Gibbon, Francis Carey Slater, Pauline Smith, Aegidius Jean Blignaut and Herman Charles Bosman form the principal body of primary sources examined in this study. The Bakhtinian notion of "simple" and "parodistic" skaz narratives is deployed to analyse the increasing complexity to be discerned in the works by these writers, which roughly span the 100 years from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the present century. A "simple" use of the skaz narrative is evident in the early or 'ur-South African' oral-style story, represented here by Drayson, Boyle and Ingram. With Scully and FitzPatrick the form is still used 'artlessly,' although the beginnings of a greater self-consciousness can be discerned. The' Abe Pike' tales by Glanville introduce a more complex use of the fictional narrator, a process taken a step further by Gibbon in his 'Vrouw Grobelaar' tales. With the latter, in particular, the complex or "parodistic" skaz narrative makes its advent in South African literature. The oral-style stories of Slater and Smith are largely a regression to the ear lier form, although there are aspects of their stories which anticipate Bosman. With Blignaut and Bosman, however, the South African oral-style story comes into its own. In their Hottentot Ruiter and Oom Schalk Lourens characters is invested all the complexity and 'double-voicedness' that was latent, and largely dormant, in the earlier oral-style narratives. Through Blignaut, and Bosman in particular, the South African oral-style story achieves its most economical, sophisticated and successful form of expression. The study concludes by looking briefly at the use of an oral style in short stories by black South African writers and argues that their stories are not, formally speaking, to be categorised alongside those by the other~ writers examined. The oral-style story, the study concludes, achieved its apogee in Bosman's Oom Schalk Lourens sequence and went into sharp decline after Bosman's death in 1951.

The plan of this thesis is to examine the dramatic treatment of evil as deception or false appearance in a representative selection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century morality plays. The structural core of these plays Is based on the Psychomachia, or conflict between good and evil in man’s soul, which forms the dominant theme of Medieval allegory. In the morality plays, this conflict Is most characteristically presented as a plot of deception In which Vice masquerading as Virtue tempts Mankind by sophistical argument into believing that evil is good. Theologically, this theatrical metaphor of disguise is rooted in the Medieval concept of Satan as the arch-deceiver and father of lies who can take many Protean shapes in his efforts to ensnare man's soul. Psychologically, the metaphor also embodies a simple but profound description of man's efforts to “rationalize” his own wrong-doings and to dress them in a more palatable name and guise. In this contest0 the plays may also be interpreted as allegories of self-delusion within the soul of man. This archetypal disguise of evil offers a supreme opportunity for a drama of Intrigue and deception based on the elemental human problem of recognizing evil in its true nature. The central dramatic problem of the morality plays is therefore twofold: to make the plot lively enough to hold the interest of the audience, and at the same time to make the nature of the deception clear to them even while the victim on stage remains deluded. Such clarification is vital to the homiletic intent of the plays, for the (spectators must net be deceived along with the hero but must be constantly reminded of the moral lesson. The dramatic methods arising from this problem may be summarized in three general categories to be examined in the course of this study. First, recognition is indirectly enforced by conventional devices reflecting the traditionally deceptive nature of evil: its theatrical mode of disguise and its "diabolically" clever mode of argument. These conventions, which will be discussed in the first two chapters, would be familiar to the Tudor and the Elizabethan audience through the widespread appearance of this theme in non-dramatic as well as dramatic literature of the time. Seconds the original theological allegory becomes overlaid with apparently secular warnings against social and political fraud and pretense. This surface move toward secularization may also reinforce the theological recognition of evil by placing it in a familiar everyday setting! and the morality plays share in a general Tudor preoccupation with fraud and hypocrisy which is rooted in Medieval conceptions of the nature of evil. Third, the authors continually exploit the ironic contrast between appearance and reality within the plays, allowing the informed audience to triumph over the deluded victim without forgetting the moral behind the deception. This two-dimensional relationship between actors and audience imparts a distinctive atmosphere to the morality plays, based on the use of dramatic irony for moral ends. It will be suggested that these dramatic methods may largely account for the continued vitality and popularity of the morality plays over a period of more than 150 years merging into the age of the major Elizabethan playwrights and providing them with important native examples of a drama based on intrigue. In the moralities, these methods give rise to a lively and flexible form of theatrical presentation, exploiting a dynamic relationship between the audience and the characters on stage, and possessing both artistic and psychological validity in reflecting the original allegory of evil disguised as good. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate