Systems of Order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh is a study of Evelyn Waugh’s satire. It offers a contextual reading of eleven works by Waugh, presenting revisionist readings of familiar novels and according attention to previously neglected works. It aims to sketch out the main features of Waugh’s satire, including Waugh’s lexis and the use of certain key images and motifs. Comparative analysis of Waugh’s satirical novels with works by contemporary writers such as Clough Williams-Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Gibbons and T.S. Eliot brings into sharp relief the techniques and targets of Waugh’s satire. ¶ This thesis argues that despite Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek denial of satire’s efficacy in a complacent modern world, he did indeed write satire of a peculiarly twentieth century kind. Waugh’s apparently anarchic novels reflect, behind the detached insouciance of their narrators, the moral standards which the novels ostensibly claim are absent in the modern world. ¶ In Waugh’s writing, satire is effected through the creation of systems of literary order. The structure and patterning of his novels, and his masterful use of the rhetorical techniques of satire, mete out punishment on a formal level. Waugh’s satirical novels dramatize the tension between truth, order and civilization, and their oppositions, disorder and barbarism. Systems of Order suggests that from the very first, Waugh’s satiric project aimed toward the repudiation of modern disorder.

Ever since Joseph Conrad chose fin de siecle London as the place to begin and end his Heart of Darkness, the city of London has been host to literary meditations on the darker aspects of empire and imperialism. The decline of the British Empire in the twentieth century has had far-reaching consequences for the former heart of empire. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have transformed Britain into an ethnically and racially diverse nation. The colonies have 'come home to roost.' / Following Conrad's narrative in Heart of Darkness, my thesis begins in London and then moves to the margins of the empire. The long shadow of imperialism shapes the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Bessie Head. In their works these two writers depict the evils of apartheid South Africa and reflect upon the complex psychological mechanisms that underlie encounters between different groups. Such encounters result in a pattern of nonrecognition and misrecognition that in turn create relations based upon domination and servitude. Coetzee's and Head's works speculate on the psychological structures that have shaped the history of colonialism in Africa. / Returning to London, my thesis then examines the works of two writers who combine experience of the colony with knowledge of the centre of Empire. Doris Lessing's experience of coming-of-age in Southern Rhodesia supplies her with powerful insights into both the plight of new immigrants to Britain and the concerns and prejudices of native Londoners. Her knowledge of identity politics in Southern Africa deepens her fictional response to post-war British society. The detective writer Mike Phillips came to Britain from Guyana as a child and he now resides in London. While his novels reflect the concerns of a first-generation black immigrant to the United Kingdom they also depict the challenges and rewards of being black in the London of today.

Virginia Woolf's writing is aesthetically complex, politically engaged, and remains relevant today - an astonishing achievement. This thesis begins by asking how and why this is the case, and thinks through Woolf's relationship to history as a means of suggesting some answers. References to the past abound in Woolf's fiction in the form of meaningful names, stories, myths, and national histories. I am especially interested in allusions that are not immediately obvious, but still work to convey something about human nature. These were sometimes inspired by artifacts in museums, or by articles in magazines or newspapers, or literature she owned, or borrowed, or was being written by her contemporaries - sources that a careful researcher can track down. Other references are more difficult to prove; for example, they may have come from travel experiences related by friends, or personal experiences not recorded in her diary. In this case we need to balance circumstantial evidence, common sense, and an understanding of the spirit and concerns of the age. In the first chapter I highlight Woolf's early interest in the tension between fact and fiction as it is expressed in her 1906 short story, "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn". The chapter serves as way of demonstrating my process. I point out the interplay between form, content, and autobiography that is in her other work. In short, a good deal of what is imagined may have been inspired by personal experience and real historical material. The next three chapters reveal new character types and source material for Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves - the novels in which Woolf worked out what I have called her "mythical method". I end by inviting scholars to reconsider tensions in her work such as fact and fiction, self and other, art and politics from a new angle: not only as thematic preoccupations but also as crucial to thinking of - to borrow from Gertrude Stein - composition as a form of explanation. Woolf's project in fiction was to figure out what modernism can and should do. Although it is not necessary for all readers to do the kind of research demonstrated here in order to understand the novels, having an awareness of this work is important. This new way of looking at how and why Woolf wrote both in and outside of time as part of the process of composition makes us think again about the reasons that we should care so much about "Mrs. Brown". It helps us appreciate that the project of conveying both the ephemeral and temporal qualities of human experience is what makes the study of literary modernism (and its current global, transnational forms) a dynamic, political, and expanding phenomenon today.

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The founding hypothesis of the study is that creative writers translate jazz music and performance into discourse by recourse to a number of figurative domains. These translations map existential, anthropological and political spaces and situate jazz within these. The first chapter concerns the representation of jazz in the construction of alterity, focussing on the evocation of the Dionysian spirit of jazz, the parallels between jazz and Bahktin's carnival and the strategic deployment of 'blackness' in configurations. The second chapter applies the notion of 'existential integration' in tracing some of the fluid boundaries between the music, the body of the instrument and the body of the performer in representations. The final chapter looks at the contrary tendency: the representation of mystical transcendence in the course of listening to or performing jazz. Underlying each of the three chapters is a concern with the emergence and propagation of oppositional identities in jazz writing. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This thesis focuses on John Keats's most important aesthetic idea, negative capability, and by studying the history of this idea, argues that a non-egotistic poetic tradition can be found in English poetry, which can be traced back to Shakespeare and was taken over by Keats, and through Keats, carried on to the modernist poets. The introduction gives an anatomy of negative capability by looking at Keats's various references to it and summing up its key elements and their interconnections. It also provides a critical heritage of the concept and gives a review of the state of knowledge. Chapter one studies the genealogy of negative capability, focusing on Hazlitt and Shakespeare as the most important contemporary and historical influences on the formation of the idea. It first looks at those of Hazlitt's aesthetic, philosophical and poetic views that made the most significant impact on Keats, and then gives an account of Keats's reading of and reflections on Shakespeare, defining King Lear as the most important play in giving rise to his idea of negative capability. Chapter two gives a close reading of King Lear, exploring what in the play exemplifies negative capability, and how in turn the play illuminates the idea. Keats's reading is also discussed in the context of the Neoclassic and Romantic receptions of the play. Chapter three studies Keats's own poetry in the light of negative capability, giving a narrative of the evolution of the idea in Keats's poetic practice by following the chronology of Keats's poetry, concentrating on "Sleep and Poetry", Endymion, Hyperion and his key achievements in the Great Year of 1819. Chapter four explores the legacy of negative capability by focusing on Yeats's and Eliot's respective inheritance of the idea, suggesting that negative capability is deeply embedded in a much wider cultural and intellectual tradition. The thesis concludes that negative capability is an important part of both the creative and critical heritage, and ultimately, it is a way of being, conveying an attitude towards human experience. / Li Ou. / "July 2007." / Adviser: David Parker. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-01, Section: A, page: 0224. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-285). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

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This study investigates the relation between faith in a transcendent reality and faith in language, both verbal and visual, in the work of English novelist and critic Antonia Byatt. Her ideal conception of communication combines the immediacy and primal vigour of the visual with the methodical pragmatism of words. However, Byatt's characters who exemplify this effort at double vision - in particular Stephanie Potter Orton in the 1985 novel Still Life - find in their quests frustration and even death rather than fulfillment. My investigation focuses on A. S. Byatt's presentation of the way language attempts to represent and interact with three particular areas: fundamental personal experiences (childbirth, death, love), perceptual and aesthetic experiences (colour and form, painting), and transcendent experiences (supernaturalism and Christian religion). I consider all stages of her career to date - from her first novel The Shadow of the Sun (1964) to Babel Tower (1996). Although Possession: A Romance (1990) has garnered most of the critical attention accorded to Byatt, I argue that this novel is not generally representative of her principles or style. A neo-Victorian romance, part parodic and part nostalgic, combined with an academic comedy, Possession shares neither the sombre mythological and psychological fatalism of her 1960s fiction nor the modified realism of her middle-period fiction. Still Life and The Matisse Stories (1993) are the works that best elucidate Byatt's major preoccupations; they intently strive to combine the most powerful aspects of verbal and visual knowledge. The methodological basis for this study is pluralist; it emphasizes close reading, combined with phenomenological, biographical, and thematic criticism. As Byatt does, I rely principally on the ideas of writers and artists rather than theorists; she cannot be understood without specific reference to George Eliot, Donne, Forster, Murdoch, Van Gogh, and Matisse (among others). Byatt's quest for truth and transcendent meaning and her investigation of the trustworthiness of words have undergone recent changes; she seems more sharply aware of the limitations of language and the unattainability of absolute truth. Her writings in the 1990s about paintings and colour emphasize their intrinsic value rather than their ability either to revitalize the word or suggest the numinous.

Dramatic literature and film are often political and work to deconstruct and dismantle some of the assumptions of a dominant ideology. Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, show how gender roles are used in oppression and show that other social categories like race, class, and sexuality are interrelated and constructed. This shows the hollowness of the so-called inherent categories that cause “naturalized” divisions between people and groups. Through exploring these works I hope to draw attention to how these artists use theater and film to educate their audiences, as well as challenge them to take control over complicated issues surrounding power and oppression. These writers encourage their audiences to employ social criticism and to re-evaluate the social order that is often naturalized through dominant ideology and discourse. / v, 104 leaves ; 29 cm.

The founding hypothesis of the study is that creative writers translate jazz music and performance into discourse by recourse to a number of figurative domains. These translations map existential, anthropological and political spaces and situate jazz within these. The first chapter concerns the representation of jazz in the construction of alterity, focussing on the evocation of the Dionysian spirit of jazz, the parallels between jazz and Bahktin's carnival and the strategic deployment of 'blackness' in configurations. The second chapter applies the notion of 'existential integration' in tracing some of the fluid boundaries between the music, the body of the instrument and the body of the performer in representations. The final chapter looks at the contrary tendency: the representation of mystical transcendence in the course of listening to or performing jazz. Underlying each of the three chapters is a concern with the emergence and propagation of oppositional identities in jazz writing. / English Studies / M.A. (English)