This study constitutes a single strand of a wider argument for a thorough-going reassessment of the place of fantasy literature within the canon. In particular, it aims to redress a marked lack of critical attention paid to the distinct movement towards fantastic modes of representation in the mid-twentieth century.

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. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis discusses Christian orthodoxy in the English novel during the time period from 1930 to 1950.

Although Derrida, Deleuze, and others have shown the centrality of Friedrich Nietzsche's work for contemporary philosophy, the breadth of his influence is only just beginning to be understood in literature. Nietzsche saw himself as a philosopher and as a poet, and wrote in all his major works of the importance of understanding the vital interaction of conceptual thinking and its "practical" application by the litterateur. The place of the philosopher/poet, modelled on Nietzsche himself, was to be considered the highest attainable by man. Yet Nietzsche's elevation of poetic thought contains a dynamic paradox, which he himself not only saw but which was for him a--perhaps the --pivotal aspect of his philosophy: since both thinking and writing occur in the same place, language, man must acknowledge that to engage in either is to accept the destruction of his "unity," and to place his attention "out" into language. To articulate, then, is to establish a double focus, an outer one first (in language), and then an inner one posited in that outer medium. The paradox is that this distancing is both necessary to man and disruptive to his sense of himself. Once one perceives this condition as, after Nietzsche, endemic to man, one can begin to see how pervasively the dilemma can be used as a strength, a source of power, by the writer. This study explores applications of Nietzsche's etrangete. Part One considers Nietzsche's writings themselves, selectively, and some precursors on whom he depended for his insights. Part Two applies these ideas to criticism of a number of contemporary writers, showing how the Nietzschean triangulation of articulation, etrangete, and power (Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence," "Overman," and "will to power") informs such diverse writers as Joyce, Faulkner, John Fowles, and Samuel Beckett. Each of the chapters of Part Two explores an aspect of Part One's conclusions relative to a particular writer, showing how he works within the Nietzschean paradigm whether he would repudiate that paradigm (as in the cases of Faulkner and Fowles), or acknowledge it (as with Joyce and Beckett). The dissertation's effort is to demonstrate that Nietzsche's pervasive influence on contemporary literature is systematic, indigenous, and inescapable.

No description available.

Lee, Tin Yan Grace. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [106-111]). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Laughter and Man --- p.15 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Laughter and Man's Obligation to Persist in Beckett's Endgame --- p.37 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Laughter and Self-Knowledge in Pinter's The Birthday Party --- p.68 / Conclusion --- p.100

No description available.

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis explores contemporary (post-1980) British constructions of Canada or "Canadianness" as these have been conceived through the reading and reception of English-Canadian literary texts in Britain. I am arguing that in recent years Canada has been construed in Britain as an ideal, and furthermore, that this idealization has taken place in response to a perceived cultural and socio-economic malaise within contemporary British society. I use a combined postcolonial and object-relations approach to discuss the psychic investment involved in this construction of Canada as a post-imperial role model. These readers engage with the Canadian object as a sort of phantasy space, projecting onto Canada a self-image which expresses the British desire for postcolonial diversity. Canada thereby enables the dodging of the quagmires of imperiled national identity (and personal subjectivity), for its diffuse and decentralized makeup is balanced by an essentialized notion of cultural and national uniqueness. Throughout I take issue with the ways Canada tends to get celebrated in these writings as a postmodern ideal of unproblematized pluralism and endless diffusion, knowable by the sheer extent to which it seems to defy collective identity. These celebrations of Canada as a new (postmodern) Eden succeed only in emptying the Canadian domain of anything remotely contestatory or political. Indeed, this vision of Canada utilizes a limited version of postmodernism as an idealistic play of pluralities without any sense of accompanying political strife or contradiction.

This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.