Terry Pratchett, author of the best-selling Discworld series, and winner of multiple literary awards, writes satirical fantasy for adults and children. The academic community has been slow to accept Pratchett's work as worthy of notice. Factors that contribute to this reticence include writing fantasy, writing for children, a high volume of work, and popularity in general society. This thesis will provide a comparison between Pratchett's work and that of Evelyn Waugh by focusing on their academic satire, shedding new light on Pratchett's work from a literary perspective, thus lending greater value to his Discworld series as a collection of novels with measurable literary value to the academic community.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, August, 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2008. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

This dissertation corrects the notion that fiction written in the late 1920s through the early 1940s fails to achieve the mastery and innovation of high modernism. It posits late modernism as a literary dispensation that instead pushes beyond high modernism's narrative innovations in order to fully express individuals' lived experience in the era between world wars. This dissertation claims novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett, as exemplars of a late modernism characterized by invocation and redeployment of conventionalized narrative forms in service of fresh explorations of the dislocation, inauthenticity, and alienation that characterize this era. By deforming and repurposing formal conventions, these writers construct entirely new forms whose disfigured likenesses to the genres they manipulate reveals a critical orientation to the canon. These writers' reconfigurations of forms--including the bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, and autobiography--furthermore reveal the extent to which such conventionalized genres coerce and prescribe a unified and autonomous subjectivity. By dismantling these genres from within, Bowen, Waugh, and Beckett reveal their mechanics to be instrumental in coercing into being a notion of the subject that is both limiting and delimited. These authors also invoke popular forms--including the Gothic aesthetic, imperial adventure narrative, and detective fiction--to reveal that non-canonical texts, too, participate in the process by which narrative inevitably posits consciousness as its premise. I draw upon Tyrus Miller's conception of late modernism to explicate how these authors' various engagements with established forms simultaneously perform immanent critique and narrative innovation. This dissertation also endorses David Lloyd's assertion that canonical narrative forms are instrumental in producing subjectivity within text and thereby act as a coercive exemplar for readers. I invoke several critics' engagements with conventional genres' narrative mechanics to explicate this process. By examining closely the admixture of narrative forms that churns beneath the surfaces of these texts, I aim to pinpoint how the deformation of conventionalized forms can yield a fresh and distinctly late modernist vision of selfhood.

This dissertation examines narratives about racialized gender, sexuality, and class through media images of black Americans with HIV/AIDS. Through textual analysis of media sites featuring HIV/AIDS and blackness (The Announcement, Precious, and Marvelyn Brown’s website, www.marvelynbrown.com), this project analyzes how the politics of respectability—a set of precepts that govern how black men and women can present themselves in public spaces to align with white ideals of gender and sexuality—construct black people in media representations of HIV/AIDS. This work examines how respectability politics deployed in media representations of HIV/AIDS and black Americans reclaim notions of acceptable black sexuality by reifying age-old stereotypes of black masculinity femininity. I argue that the goal of respectability politics in countering anti-blackness through limited parameters for acceptable presentations of racialized gender and sexuality continue to challenge and complicate media representations of HIV/AIDS and black Americans.

After the civil conflicts of the seventeenth century, England during the Restoration period began to emerge as a modern nation. As Charles II understood, and as James II was to learn at the cost of his throne, absolute monarchy was no longer acceptable to the kingdom. Although Englishmen might henceforth tolerate the trappings of absolutism, the substance was irrevocably gone. This was as true of absolutism in religion as it was in government. It was only a question of time before the demands of Englishmen for freedom in belief and for participation in government would find expression in parliamentary democracy and in religious toleration. At the same time that England was developing new patterns of government and social behaviour, great events were happening in the cultural life of the nation. Literature and drama broadened their horizons by absorbing continental ideas and by renewing the inspiration bequeathed by native sources. Though the new literature and drama did not soon attain the excellence of their earlier counterparts, they were striking out in new directions. Scientific attitudes, too, were being revolutionized. In 1662, the formal organization of the Royal Society under royal patronage provided a meeting ground for those of inquiring mind. Soon the achievements of such men as Robert Boyle in chemistry and Isaac Newton in mathematics and physics established the framework of modern science. If art produced no comparable luminaries, architecture had in Christopher Wren only the most outstanding of a number of notable architects. Music, though less spectacular in its development than some of the other arts, soon produced Henry Purcell, whose compositions have rarely been equalled by those of any other English composer. The seventeenth century did not suffer from that proliferation of knowledge which in our own day has forced men to specialize in a narrow field of inquiry in order to be able to speak authoritatively about anything. A cultivated Englishman of the Restoration could still aspire to a reasonable understanding of all learning. Men like Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and John Dryden, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, even men like the King himself in his dilettante way, were what the century called virtuosi—in the sense that they had a special interest in and aspired to a knowledge of art and science. Their intellects moved, more or less profoundly,over the entire range of human achievement and endeavour. This thesis is concerned with Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Its particular purpose is to examine their diaries and other relevant sources to discover how each responded to the cultural and social environment of Restoration England, and to establish to what extent they were representative virtuosi of their period. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (S.B. in Literature)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-66). / Introduction: Last Fall semester I had only a very vague idea of a thesis topic: with a broad interest in the conflict between romantic love and religion inspired in part by a summertime reading of Brideshead Revisited, I spent a few evenings sharing company with St. Augustine, Abelard and Eloise, and Julian of Norwich. My interest in serious religion was quickly satisfied. Soon after choosing to focus on twentieth century British Catholic novelists-Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh-I realized the extent to which my enjoyment of Waugh greatly surpassed that of all my other readings. Jabe, I told myself, if you are going to spend a year of your precious young time on a literature thesis, you had damn well better have fun. Evelyn Waugh it was. His work is often noted for its contradictory nature. A devout Catholic, he was also somewhat of a misanthrope; across and within works he mixes bitter, hilarious satire with authentic, often quiet, human concern to a powerful effect that proves remarkably difficult to analyze. The distant narrator of many of his works and the romantic narrator of others both seem at odds with the public Waugh, a crotchety, outspoken conservative to whom critics often refer. Thus it was somewhat with the interest of finding a "new voice" in Waugh that I began my project. I did not find the voice I expected, but eight months, countless hours of reading and discussion, and many drafts later, my interest in the complex workings of Waugh's work has only deepened, surely the sign of a successful topic choice. While there have been numerous biographies of Evelyn Waugh in recent years, with another due to be published in several months, there has been a notable dearth of full-length, or indeed even article-length, critical texts on Waugh's work. This phenomenon can perhaps be explained in part by the seemingly autobiographical nature of his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited, which was adapted in 1981 into an enduringly popular BBC miniseries and in 2008 into a full-length feature film. However, it is not only the popular imagination that seems to be captivated by Waugh's life; numerous critics of Waugh attempt to understand his work through the lens of his biography, using details such as his conversion to Catholicism early in his career or his political writings and public statements to inform their readings of his novels. The themes and qualities of Waugh's novels are not easily unified across his career; the cynical work of his early career seem very much at odds with the sentimentality and overtly religious concerns of much of his later writings, of which Brideshead Revisited is the best-known example. Accordingly, Waugh's career is often divided into two sections. The first section begins in 1928 with the publication of his first novel Decline and Fall and ends before the publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1945, while the second section begins with Brideshead Revisited and continues to the end of Waugh's career, encompassing the historico-religious novel Helena and the Catholic war novels of the Sword of Honour trilogy. Attempts at reconciling these "two Waughs" recur throughout the criticism; many studies of Waugh as an author either read the later novels as representing Waugh's "true concerns" and attempt to fit the early satires into this model, or dispense altogether with trying to unify the concerns of Waugh's early and later works. According to James Carens, "in Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh turned from the nihilistic rejection of his early satires to an affirmative commitment; to satisfy the other impulse of the artist-rebel, as Albert Camus has described him, Waugh affirmed a vision which he believed gave unity to life." According to Frederick L. Beaty's reading of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh's "affirmative commitment" is a belief in God and Catholicism: The chaos that surrounds [Waugh] becomes not only tolerable but meaningful as he views from a radically changed perspective a universe he once saw in ironic terms. Relativism, paradox, and indeterminacy give way before the conviction that an immanent, transcendent Deity is the ultimate reality. Waugh's enunciation of this positive credo marks a conscious turning away from philosophical irony-with its essentially skeptical vision-as the underlying world view for his fiction. The conclusion of Brideshead Revisited thus functions as an articulation of Waugh's religious beliefs and a rejection of his earlier secular works; Beaty secures meaning in Waugh's writing by aligning each novel with Waugh's presumed personal philosophy. In contrast, non-biographical criticism of Waugh often fails to find consistent themes or concerns across the novels. Michael Gorra articulates this phenomenon well in the following argument, which begins with criticism of to Jeffrey Heath's The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing: Like most of the explicitly Catholic criticism of Waugh, [Heath's book] places too much weight upon his comic prefigurations of his later beliefs. Most treatments of Waugh as a satirist tend, similarly, to read his career backwards.. .A useful corrective to accounts of Waugh as either Catholic apologist or satirist is David Lodge's argument in Evelyn Waugh that his early novels in particular contain "a mosaic of local comic and satiric effects rather than a consistent message." In this paper, I propose a different reading of Waugh: one that finds neither dogmatic affirmation nor disparate ingenious effects but finds rather the performance of a complex expression of the insecurity and energy of the modern world that disintegrates the traditional interpretation of Waugh's work as strict ironic satire. / S.B.in Literature

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Le corps, objet d’analyse duel pris dans une série de dichotomies souvent qualitatives [nature vs culture, discursivité vs expression inédite de soi], entretient des liens étroits avec le langage. Centrée sur les mécanismes de « corporalisation » [Judith Butler], qui sont abordés à travers le prisme de la différence sexuelle, cette étude comparative interroge certaines oeuvres écrites par deux auteures autrichiennes contemporaines : Evelyn Schlag et Elfriede Jelinek. Leurs écritures, bien que nourries par une évidente critique du langage, laissent apparaître de profondes divergences qui dénotent une conception différente du masculin et du féminin. Favorisant une approche heuristique et critique des théories féministes énoncées dans les années 1970-1980 avant d’ouvrir une réflexion sur les fondements textuels de la culture [Kulturwissenschaften] et, surtout, sur leurs implications au sein des études de genres [Gender Studies], ce travail s’attache aux processus de « mise en texte » du corps. La méthode adoptée se situe en effet à l’intersection d’une analyse des genres sexuels [psychanalyse, déconstruction, métarécit] et d’une analyse des genres littéraires [romans, pièces de théâtre, poésie, etc.] afin d’éprouver, dans une perspective plus large que ne le serait la stricte corrélation entre féminité et subversion du logos, les stratégies de confirmation, de détournement ou d’abolition des frontières génériques auxquelles obéissent les poétiques de chacune des deux auteures. Parallèlement sont étudiés les effets provoqués par de tels maniements textuels dans l’optique d’une « resémantisation » [non-essentialiste] du corps féminin par le littéraire. / Analysing the body often entails a series of – often qualitative – dichotomies [nature vs. culture, discourse vs. novel self-expression], and invariably intertwines with language. This comparative study centres on “embodiment” mechanisms [Judith Butler], and broaches them through the prism of sexual differences, in books by two contemporary Austrian authors: Evelyn Schlag and Elfriede Jelinek. Their writing self-evidently criticises language but likewise unveils deep divergences that denote different conceptions of male and female. This work favours a heuristic approach, which critiques the feminist theories from the 1970s and 1980s before homing in more specifically on the textual foundations of culture [Kulturwissenschaften] in general, and their implications for gender studies in particular. This study zooms in on the process of producing text about the body. The method is at the crossroads between an analysis of gender [psychoanalysis, deconstruction and metalanguage] and of literary genres [novels, plays, poetry, etc.]. It probes strategies to cement, twist or eliminate the generic frontiers that each of these authors’ poetic angles follow, from a wider perspective than the strict correlation between femininity and logos subversion. It simultaneously questions the effects of literates handling text with a view to “re-semantising” the feminine body in a non essentialist manner.