For many years the novels of Robert Kroetsch have been canonized as paradigmatic Canadian postmodern and postcolonial texts. This thesis argues that Kroetsch’s texts are antimodernist works which reveal his reaction against modernity. This thesis explores each of Kroetsch’s novels in chronological order, from the unpublished text When Sick for Home to his most recent novel The Man from the Creeks, arguing that Kroetsch’s novels should be viewed as texts that demonstrate his antipathy towards modernity, which is manifested in Kroetsch’s nostalgic idealization of the imagined organic wholeness of a world existing prior to modernization. Throughout this thesis I discuss the parallels between the writings of Robert Kroetsch and Marshall McLuhan, emphasizing the antimodernism that underpins their works. I argue that their antimodernism signals their participation in a tradition of the critique of modernity. By foregrounding the idea of the modernist critique of modernity, which comprises an important element of artistic modernism, I question the privileging of the qualifier “post-” in constructions of the Canadian postmodern canon. In foregrounding the antimodernism evident throughout Robert Kroetsch’s fiction, I interrogate the construction of Canadian postmodernism in his own works and those of other Canadian critics including Linda Hutcheon. Through my analysis of the recurring motifs of the wilderness and the rural environment in Kroetsch’s work, I locate his fiction within Western antimodernist tradition, interrogating cultural nationalist constructions of Canadian postmodernism as an autochthonous phenomenon.

Pilgrims are so frequently encountered in the pages of medieval literature that their presence (and significance) can easily be overlooked. Moreover, the visiting of holy places formed such an integral part of medieval religion that critics often assume it to have constituted the primary meaning of pilgrimage in medieval thought. Pilgrimage is consequently treated as a given fact of medieval life, a pious exercise which some writers, more creative than the rest, chose to craft into an image of life and inward growth. The reality is more complex and fascinating by far. Pilgrimage, as understood by the medieval church, was not a monolithic concept but a mosaic of ideas which had evolved through the centuries, the product of both syncretism and heated debate. In order to assess the use which individual authors made of the pilgrimage motif it is essential to establish the range of concepts which they inherited. This study therefore charts the development of Christian pilgrimage through the Bible, the writings of the Fathers, the influences of classical pagan religion and the impulses of popular devotion, before tracing the ways in which the resulting multiple meanings of pilgrimage were incorporated into the spirituality and literature of the Anglo-Saxons. It then re-examines the use of this multi-faceted image in selected Middle English texts. In the process several key perspectives emerge, chiefly the pre-eminence of the concept of life as pilgrimage and the existence within it of three strands which the Church has struggled to reconcile through the centuries: interior, moral and place pilgrimage. These perspectives, together with a clearer understanding of the manner in which different modes of pilgrimage combine and conflict with one another, offer new approaches to particular problems of interpretation, such as the role of the Parson's Tale and the apparently contradictory attitudes to pilgrimage manifested in Piers Plowman.

The general perception of the Siege of Jerusalem is best summed up in Ralph Hanna's phrase that it is "the chocolate-covered tarantula of the alliterative movement". Only one critic has moved away from this consensus of opinion, Elisa Narin van Court, who argues "that in addition to the graphically violent anti-Judaism of the poem, there is a competing sympathetic narrative strand that complicates what has been considered a straightforward and brutal poetic." I follow Narin van Court in rejecting the standard opinion of the poem as a univocal narrative of unsavoury anti-Semitism and proceed to examine the poet's conception of his work, and how this poem differs from other accounts of the destruction of Jerusalem and the legend of Veronica. Pertinently, he uses different sources in an effort to bring out the contradictions latent in the story of the destruction of Jerusalem. He juxtaposes historical elements from the Polychronicon, such as the allusion to the tribute, with religious material in an attempt to query the necessity of war, even if the cause is ostensibly noble. Most notably, he raises the question of the motivation behind the campaign in Judaea. He avoids expressing value judgements, unlike texts such as the Vindicta Salvatoris and Titus and Vespasian which interpret the destruction of Jerusalem as the justifiable punishment of the Jews for the death of Christ. Not only is the poet's approach very different from that of literary and religious works, it also differs from that of historians. He is interested in people's motivation and how they react to the situations in which they find themselves. Hence he does not try to find overarching patterns in the siege of Jerusalem. The poem's literary context is of vital importance, for although the text bears certain similarities to works of crusading interest, such as the Charlemagne romances, it is nonetheless very different from them in terms of its attitude to non-Christians. The poet is anti-Judaic in that he believes that the Jewish religion is based on error and that the Jews were manifestly wrong in crucifying Christ, but he is still capable of making a distinction among them, seeing only their leaders as evil tyrants and expressing sympathy for the common citizens of Jerusalem. Thus he is not motivated by the anti-Semitism of the later Middle Ages, which led to accusations of host desecration, ritual murder and historiographic crucifixion being levelled against them. In this he differs from other redactions of the story of the destruction of Jerusalem, such as Titus and Vespasian and the accounts of medieval drama, which are virulently anti-Semitic as well as anti-Judaic in sentiment. The intricacy of the narrative, which incorporates historical and religious elements raises a series of implications as to how we classify the poem. It has been variously designated as a romance, history, religious tale and a combination of two or all of these categories. It is my contention that the poet is stretching the limitations of genre, presenting religious and historical topics in the format of a romance, as it is his intention to explore the nature of Christian-Jewish relations, the personal experiences of the protagonists and the moral issues involved in warfare in his account of this traditional and popular story.

The focus of the thesis is on maxims and gnomes in Old English poetry, but the occasional occurrence of these forms of expression in Old English prose and in other Old Germanic literature is also given attention, particularly in the earlier chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 are general, investigating a wide range of material to see how and why maxims were used, then to define the forms, and distinguish them from proverbs. The conclusions of these chapters are that maxims are ‘nomic’, they organise experience in a conventional, authoritative fashion. They are also ‘proverbial’ in the sense of being recognisable and repeatable, but they do not have the fixed form of proverbs. Chapters 4 to 7 are more specific in their focus, applying techniques from formulaic theory, paroemiology and the sociology of knowledge to the material so as to better understand how maxims are used in their contexts in the poems, and to appreciate the nature and function of the Maxims collections. The conclusions reached here are that the maxims in Beowulf 183b-88 are integral to the poem, that maxims in The Battle of Maldon show how the poet manipulated the social functions of the form for his own purposes, that there is virtually no paganism in Old English maxims, and that the Maxims poems outline and illustrate an Anglo-Saxon world view. The main contribution of the thesis is that it goes beyond traditional commentary in analysing the purpose and function of maxims. It does not merely focus on individual poems, but attempts to deal with a limited aspect of the Old English oral and literary tradition. The primary aim is to understand the general procedures of the poets in using maxims and compiling compendia of them, and then to apply insights gained from theoretical approaches to the specifics of poems.

This thesis aims to provide a critical re-evaluation of politics and ideology in the work of D.H. Lawrence. The thesis brings a number of authors (including the Marquis de Sade, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells and Raymond Chandler) into dialogue with Lawrence - fIrstly in order to interrogate Lawrentian assumptions, but also to relocate a writer often seen as being eccentric to literary circles and to society generally. My Introduction surveys two broad schools of Lawrence criticism: first, the 'Lawrentian' kind, which inspects Lawrence's fiction through an often uncritical appreciation of the non-fictional writings - his 'philosophy' - and consequently is often reduced to an echo of the primary material. While recognising, in the manner of my second, socialist school of criticism, Lawrence's philosophy as ideology, a challenge is also made to the conventional left-wing judgement that such ideology indicates Lawrence's political 'failure'. Chapters One and Two provide extended analyses of, respectively, the novels Women in Love and Kangaroo: the first of these novels sees Lawrentian individuals attempting to 'solve' the problem of an oppressive industrial society by escaping it; the second shows the shortcomings of the 'freedom' won by such a supposed escape. Examining the contradictions of Lawrence's individualism, I argue the case that these texts present a rich commentary upon the economic and social contradictions of capitalism. My third chapter takes a broader view of Lawrence's shorter, ironical and satirical works, and argues that an openly satirical mode allowed Lawrence to break free from his contradictory 'philosophy' and engage in a critical dialogue with his own work that is much more penetrating than any critique by his Lawrentian admirers. Finally, the conclusion looks at the persisting problem of the 'Lawrentian' attitude in Lawrence studies, and at the enduring significance of Lawrence to our postmodem world.

This study responds to a double call. Firstly, it aims to develop an empirical and pedagogical perspective on the integration of language and literature teaching. Secondly, it attempts to construct a language awareness (LA) assessment tool to keep pace with developments in reading. To this end, the study investigates the extent to which a stylistic exploration of Shakespeare's language can enhance EFL students' language awareness, which is defined for the present purpose in terms of a number of stylistic devices (e.g. metaphor) which potentially contribute to the 'literariness' of a text. Pedagogical materials and activities were designed accordingly in order to raise awareness of a group of 22 Taiwanese university students over a 10-week period of intervention. Extracts from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays were used as the medium to sensitise students to various linguistic devices and their literary functions. Further non-Shakespearean materials, both literary and non-literary (e.g. advertisements, newspaper headlines, political speeches) were drawn upon as backup resources to consolidate the stylistic exploration done in the classroom. At the end of the course, students' LA development is demonstrated qualitatively in their course diaries, quantitatively in the researcher-developed LA Test, and different forms of questionnaires students filled in. The study concludes with suggestions regarding the refinement of assessment tools, with implications for future research into the scholarship of teaching.

This thesis is a developmental and comparative study of marriage in the novels of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. Although this subject is frequently alluded to in recent criticism of both authors, it is rarely discussed in detail. The main interest of the study here is to show how marriage and its sub-themes of love, sex and women, as well as society's perceptions of them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the period between 1870 and 1930, have developed in their social and psychological dimensions, and how these developments are reflected in the novels. Partly for biographical reasons Hardy and Lawrence have different motives in exploring the theme of marriage: one seeks to deconstruct it for its failure to bring fulfilment to husband and wife, the other attempts to reconstruct it anew in order to bring fulfilment to man and woman's relationship. This approach is reflected in the thesis by dividing it into three major parts: Part one is concerned with marriage in reality as it was understood by society and experienced by Hardy and Lawrence; Part two deals with marriage from two points of view; and Part three is allotted to the consideration of marital patterns. While Chapter one surveys the social history of the period and the conceptual changes in the institution of marriage which took place in English society, Chapter two shows how these changes are reflected in the lives of Hardy and Lawrence, particularly in their relationships with women. As a transitional link between reality and fiction, Chapter three examines marriage in two "autobiographical" novels, 'The Return of the Native and Sons and Lovers, in order to show the novelists' conscious and unconscious perceptions of their strong attachments to their mothers and the influence of this on their love and marriage relationships. The following two chapters investigate the presentation of marriage from two different points of view. To demonstrate how Hardy and Lawrence use different methods to tackle the issue of marriage, Chapter four discusses marriage from a female point of view in Far from the Madding Crowd, the Woodlanders and the Rainbow. Chapter five examines marriage from a male point of view in the Mayor of Casterbridge, Aaron's Rod and "The Captain's Doll", trying to show how important it is for the individual to reconcile his 'male' and 'female' elements in marriage. Chapters six and seven examine how Hardy and Lawrence, by the use of a similar marital pattern, reach opposite conclusions which justify their intentions, the sixth chapter focusing on Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Women in Love, the seventh on Jude the Obscure and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

This thesis calls upon ideas from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to disrupt readings of the plays and prose of Samuel Beckett predicated upon metaphysical presuppositions. The Introduction focuses upon such presuppositions in the criticism of Martin Esslin. In Chapter one, substantial passages of Kantian exposition are given to prepare the ground for a parallel between Kant's critique of metaphysics and those Beckett texts examined through Chapters One, Two, Three and Four. In this first chapter, the limits which Kant places on possible knowledge are compared to the frustrations imposed upon the investigative duo of Beckett's Rough for Theatre II. Chapter Two considers Krapp's Last Tape as a parody of both Proustian and Manichaean metaphysical profundities. Chapter Three examines the consequences of staging the fabrication of a recognizably `Beckettian' image of the human condition in Catastrophe. Chapter Four engages with the textual specifications of The Lost Ones via an ‘immanent' method of analysis, in opposition to `transcendent' or allegorical readings capable of promoting themes of metaphysical import. Chapter Five marks a turning-point in the thesis. It investigates why analysis of The Lost ones should prove as troublesome as it does in Chapter Four. As a response, it details Beckett's efforts toward narrative ‘indetermination' and links this process to the equally troublesome `noumenon of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Chapter Six reassesses the parallels drawn between Beckett and Kant thus far. The paradoxes and flat contradictions contained in Chapters One to Four provide the materials for Chapters Six's re-appraisal of the main thesis pursued here, that a critique of metaphysics can be found in Beckett's works analogous to that supplied by Kant. A secondary thesis is that a tendency toward self-defeat during such an interpretation is inevitable. The Conclusion reassesses this contention.

This thesis is a cultural materialist exploration of the trans-generic work of D. H. Lawrence. Combining formalist analyses with this historical approach, I provide perspectives on Lawrence which attend to the particularity of his texts' form while revealing their constitution as historical and material products. The consequence is neither a "radicalized" Lawrence nor a right-wing caricature of him, but a politically hybrid Lawrence whose texts are sites of struggle with the socio-historical contradictions of modernity. In chapter 1, I show how Lawrence can critique bourgeois culture and its material foundations more profoundly than has been assumed. Pansies, whose dialogical poetics undermines conventional literary genres and assaults a bourgeois "literature" which suppresses its materiality, is read as a critique of its own conditions of production. In chapter 2, I illustrate how Lawrence's post-war work is more embattled than• is usually realised, in its intense exploration of the contradictions of liberal capitalism; the notion of Lawrence's post-war texts as largely monologic and reactionary is radically undermined. In chapter 3, I argue that Lawrence's life as an exile does not signify, as it is normally understood to, a sustained hostility to England and nation-ness. Rather, Lawrence's articles on Englishness offer an abstract, bourgeois myth of England which occludes the conflicts of class and gender. Finally, in chapter 4, I illuminate the darker cultural roots of Lawrence's unconscious, which is commonly perceived as a liberatory force, opposing hegemonic cultural ideologies. While Lawrence critiques the hypocrisy and repression of modern democratic idealism, his positing of an extra-cultural unconscious is haunted by an intensified version of the very cultural repression he assaults.

Numerous studies of landscape in the works of Wordsworth and his predecessors exist; very few books, however, are concerned with its significance in modern and contemporary poetry. Works on Auden and Heaney make reference to local elements, but do not consider the overall and continuous importance of landscape in their writings. It is hoped that this study goes some way towards remedying these deficiencies. The philosophical and imaginative cohesiveness of successive poems relating to single specific landscapes in the works of Auden and Heaney suggests the term 'myths of place'. In according landscape a central role in the major dialectics of their poetries, Auden and Heaney make the most valuable contributions to the local mode since Wordsworth's advances beyond the picturesque. Important parallels exist in the developments of their myths of place. Each produces localized poems embodying radical ideologies and complements such work by mythologising landscape into a sanctuary for ideal values. Landscape constitutes a structural principle adequate to the sustained expression of the dominant psychological and ethical intuitions of their writings. Ultimately, Auden and Heaney neutralize their myths of place by deconstructing the significances that have accrued to their landscapes. Chapters One and Two consider Auden's varied treatments of the limestone moorland he knew in childhood; Chapters Three and Four investigate his figurative adaptations of landscape. Heaney's early utilisations of landscape and their culmination in his myth of the bogland form the subjects of Chapters Five and Six; Chapter Seven examines his idyllic localizations, while his imaginatively liberating re-evaluations of his native region are described in Chapter Eight. The study concludes with an assessment of the implications for present-day poetry of Auden's and Heaney's achievements in the use of landscape. Text-centred methods are used throughout, supplemented with geographical and biographical information where this is directly relevant.