Before drawing together composite elements from his works of novelistic art, as well as his life in writing, the intention of this thesis is to argue that Duiker's realism is an 'authentic' one. Furthermore, Duiker's 'commitment' as an authentic literary realist is to 'articulate' an oppositional world outlook that I am codifying as 'alter-native'. The alter-nativism is expressed not only by the 'interplay' of the 'lumpen' protagonists of the novels but by Duiker himself in the extra-generic marginalia to his short literary career. In order to give 'value' to the contention of this thesis as a whole I will utilize a number of theorists working critically with the relation between language and consciousness, and therefore, as I argue, the 'zero point' of social being.

This dissertation examines detective fiction as a form which has evolved in close relation to the modern city from the nineteenth century to the present. The argument runs that the link between the urban setting and the detective story is an essential characteristic of the form which has been undervalued in the study of detective fiction. The importance of this relationship to the genre is delineated and emphasized through the use of representative examples, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe and then moving to Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett and finally a number of later writers in the field, all of whom use the city as setting for the narrative, as well as a problematizing element. The city can be a comfortably known environment wherein the detective operates, but it can also be a labyrinth of confusing forces and misleading clues. For the detective, whose goal is the solution of the puzzle, this environment causes by turn reassurance and distress. In a comparison between these authors, fundamental differences pertaining to the detective as individual and his interaction with the city are explored, and a development is described which sees the detective becoming increasingly unsure of the city and of his position within it. In terms of the genre, this relation shows how the detective becomes a figure who has to be dealt with in ever more complex terms, a shedding of the sureties of the past. On the personal level, the detective becomes a symbol of the modern individual in the city, who tries to make some sense of the living environment which the city offers, and the difficulties which the city creates for perception of the environment and the development of self-realization in terms of this environment. The study therefore operates on three levels: the formal, where the epistemology of the detective form is traced from early confidence to later manifestations of disruption of these confidences; the socio-urban, where the representation of the city is described as it changes; and the linked concern operating on the individualistic level, the development of the detective as unitary individual and "hero".

The present study is not biographical. It does, however, attempt to suggest the main lines of Ford's life and their immediate effect on his writing. Concentrating principally on his fiction, to which he gave himself most wholly, it examines his novels in chronological order and attempts to trace a course of development in them. This seems particularly necessary to do in the light of the legend Ford himself, with some excuse, spread that The Good Soldier, in fact his seventeenth independent novel, sprang from him unheralded in his forty-first year. The conclusion of this study is that The Good Soldier, probably the finest example of literary pure mathematics in English, is, as Ford considered it, his best achievement; but it attempts to trace in earlier novels experiments without which The Good Soldier would have been impossible.

This thesis studies William Gibson's ""cyberspace trilogy"" (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). This was an extremely interesting and significant development in 1980s science fiction. It was used to codify and promote the ""cyberpunk"" movement in science fiction at that time, which this thesis also briefly studies. Such a study (at such a relatively late date, given the rapid pace of change in popular culture) seems valuable because a great deal of self-serving and mystifying comment and analysis has served to confuse critical understanding about this movement. It seems clear that cyberpunk was indeed a new development in science fiction (like other developments earlier in the twentieth century) but that the roots of this development were broader than the genre itself. However, much of the real novelty of Gibson's work is only evident through close analysis of the texts and how their apparent ideological message shifts focus with time. This message is inextricably entwined with Gibson's and cyberpunk's technological fantasias. Admittedly, these three texts appear to have been, broadly speaking, representations of a liberal U.S. world-view reflecting Gibson's own apparent beliefs. However, they were also expressions of a kind of technophilia which, while similar to that of much earlier science fiction, possessed its own special dynamic. In many ways this technophilia contradicted or undermined the classical liberalism nominally practiced in the United States. However, the combination of this framework and this dynamic, which appears both apocalyptic and conservative, appears in some ways to have been a reasonably accurate prediction of the future trajectory of the U.S. body politic -- towards exaggerated dependency on machines to resolve the consequences of an ever increasingly paranoid fantasy of the entire world as a threat. (It seems likely that this was also true, if sometimes to a lesser degree, of the cyberpunk movement as a whole.) While Gibson's work was enormously popular (both commercially and critically) in the 1980s and early 1990s, very little of this aspect of his work was taken seriously (except, to a limited degree, by a few Marxist and crypto-Marxist commentators like Darko Suvin). This seems ironic, given the avowedly futurological context of science fiction at this time.

This study focuses on the representation of prostitution on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. After delineating the historical, religious, and juridical contexts of medieval and early modern whoredom and prostitution, this study provides a close reading of representations of prostitution in several late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plays, including works by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson. Arguing that the theatrical convention of transvestitism allows pre-Interregnum playwrights to use the sexual ideology of whoredom as an analogy, the dissertation traces the playwrights' use of prostitutes to indict various "social ills," from the chaotic proto-capitalist market to the class-climbing of the middling sort. The study concludes by claiming that these analogies are foreclosed when the Restoration actress takes the stage. Once the female body inhabits these roles, these roles are no longer analogous; instead, the staged prostitute is limited to the embodiment of the patriarchal nightmare of uncontrolled feminine sexuality. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2007. / April 9, 2007. / Boy Actor, Middleton, Theater, Drama, Shakespeare, Prostitutes / Includes bibliographical references. / Bruce Boehrer, Professor Directing Dissertation; W. Jeffrey Tatum, Outside Committee Member; Celia R. Daileader, Committee Member; David Johnson, Committee Member; Gary Taylor, Committee Member; Daniel Vitkus, Committee Member.

Publishing William Carlos Williams: Selected Correspondence is a critical edition of William Carlos Williams’ communication with The Four Seas Company, which records the publishing of Al Que Quiere! (1917), Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), and Sour Grapes (1921); Richard Johns on starting the “little magazine”, Pagany: A Native Quarterly, as well as Williams publishing his novel, White Mule (1937); and The Cummington Press, publishing The Wedge (1944), The Clouds: Aigeltinger, Russia, &c (1948), and negotiations for printing the long poem, “Two Pendants: For the Ears”. The letters are mostly unpublished and are here provided with contextual and textual notes, restoring material previously censored or otherwise omitted. A historical and literary engagement with American Modernist culture, this edition explores Williams creating a distinctive voice and identity for American poetry, alongside an exploration of twentieth-century publishing of books and journals. / 2025-11-30T00:00:00Z

The purpose of this study is to examine the development of W.B. Yeats's concept of woman as it is revealed in his poetry and to evaluate its literary treatment. It is generally accepted that women played an important part in Yeats's life and that they exerted a significant influence in various directions - a fact that is borne out by the numerous friendships and relationships with women throughout his lifetime. It is not sufficiently realized, however, that they provided him with both a powerful source of poetic inspiration and an important subject matter throughout his poetic career. Woman, as an object of contemplation and speculation, forms an integral part of the very stuff and fibre of Yeats's poetry, as is testified to by the range, depth and inclusiveness of his vision, which comprises not only the expression of his personal dreams and longings but a more far-reaching and penetrating study of women's relationship to society, history and ethics. It is surprising, therefore, that the significance of woman in Yeats's poetic development has been so scantily treated by Yeats's critics.

This dissertation has three aims. First, the establishment of the theoretical foundations of deconstruction and its appropriation by literary criticism. Second, the application of deconstruction to the novels of Nabokov; it has to be stressed that this application is not itself a deconstructive reading, rather that deconstruction offers the interpretative horizon for an analysis of the inner logic of self-reflexivity in the novels in question. which is defined with de Man and against Derrida as a procedure of textual self-deconstruction. The procedure, evident in the proliferation of textual strategies in Nabokov's work, marks the point at which literary modernism transforms itself through the radicalisation of the critique of narrative, subject and meaning into a postmodern aesthetics of deconstruction. The interpretation of the novels then serves thirdly to pose the question of the value of the theory of deconstruction for the task of interpretation, or more generally. the value of deconstruction for literary theory. The interpretation of Nabokov's novels reveals a paradox: selfdeconstructive literature does not require a deconstructive reading. On the contrary, the textual deconstruction of meaning and reference requires the non-deconstructive standpoint of a coherent literary analysis for its demonstration. Comparably and conversely, a deconstructive reading presupposes a text and/or an author committed to the intention of a meaningful whole (however ambiguous). The author's distinction between deconstruction as a method of interpretation and as a literary theory thus points to the limitations of deconstruction as interpretative method in relation to modern and postmodern texts precisely because of their metafictional affinity to deconstruction. Beyond this, however, deconstruction's treatment of the text as pretext for its own operations, taken to its logical conclusion, would dissolve the very cognitive object and interest of literary studies.

Bibliography: 344-355. / In the last two decades there has been a growing interest in the English poetry of the First World War. One of the products of this interest has been a great deal of literary criticism culminating in three major studies: by John H. Johnston in 1964; Bernard Bergonzi in 1965; and John Silkin in 1972. All of these critics have felt the need to look back to the past to establish the literary forebears of the trench poets. Johnston believes that the roots of war poetry are in the Germanic and Greek epics; Bergonzi that they are in the anti-heroic poetry of the Elizabethans; and Silkin, in the liberal, humanitarian poetry of the Romantics. Their approaches are valuable in giving new insight into the poetry of the First World War and helping to place it in an historical perspective, but their surveys seem inadequate and even misleading. There is, for instance, no epic war poetry in English literature, and so Johnston's criticism of the trench poets for failing to maintain epic standards seems unjust; and while it is true that Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg's work proceeded from the same impulse that stimulated the humanitarian poetry of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, neither Bergonzi nor Silkin recognizes that the dominant tradition in English war poetry, from the Battle of Maldon to the outbreak of the First World War, was an heroic one, and that the poets of the Great War wrote largely in reaction to this tradition.

This minor dissertation explores the reader's reception of Samuel Beckett's Trilogy. Often considered obscure and even unintelligible, I argue that to read the Trilogy is to affirm Beckett's slippery style of writing. Through a close reading of the three novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, I examine how Beckett's narratives deny the reader any sense of finality in the act of reading, while also affirming the reader's freedom in each unique reading of the literary text. In addition to other key Beckett critics such as Hugh Kenner, H. Porter Abbott and Simon Critchley, I use Maurice Blanchot's critical writing on literature, especially those essays contained in The Sirens' Song, as a framework through which to engage with the three novels. Blanchot underscores the necessity of the reader to let the literary text be and not to attempt to subsume the narrative within his/ her hermeneutic expectations. To read the Trilogy and interpret it with any sense of finality is to misread the novels. Instead, my argument calls for a reading that affirms the singularity of the literary text and the elusive nature of Beckett's narrative voices.