published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

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The marriage of English and French in nineteenth-century English-Canadian fiction is a trope reflecting anglophone nationalism and the anglophone desire for identity in a united nation. / The marriage metaphor can be understood within the conservative, idealistic context of nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian intellectual history. / This study examines marriage imagery in a number of novels--most of them historical romances--published between 1824 and 1899.

This thesis examines the inward turn of the contemporary Chinese novel: a tendency in fictional narrative to move from representing social reality and political events from an "objective" point of view to exploring personal experience, especially the interior world of human beings, from a subjective point of view. I take three novels published in the early 1990s as examples: Yu Hua's Crying in the Fine Rain(1991), Ge Fei's On the Margins (1992), and Wang Anyi's Fact and Fiction: One Way to Create a World (1993). I demonstrate a new narrative mode emerging, with thematic innovations and formal changes, against the background of the collapse of Communist collectivist ideology and the "master narrative" of socialist realism. In these three works, first-person autobiographical narrators are employed to explore personal experience and private life, a space once repressed and forbidden in modern Chinese literature. Reflections on growing-up, personal memory of the past and the imaginative search for identity can thus be read allegorically as a Chinese Bildungsroman of the awakening consciousness of Self. This new narrative not only emphasizes the importance of inner territory, but also ushers in a subjective writing which has greatly altered the appearance and conception of the Chinese novel. Chronological line is broken up into a psychological temporal order; plot and event become obscured within mental scenes; and omniscient didactic voices are replaced by self-conscious, reflective minds. Such individualistic, modernist narratives challenge the former collective, socially-oriented "realist epics" produced since 1930s, providing an alternative form and function for the modern Chinese novel.

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viii, 317 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1980

There were two principal aims which inspired the writing of this thesis. The first was to fill a gap in English scholarship by presenting, in necessarily attenuated form, to English readers what scholars like Edouard Dolléans and Michel Ragon had provided for the French; namely, a description, in Part One, of the background to the proletarian involvement in literature and especially in novel writing which gathered rapid momentum during the quarter century before the First War. In so doing, this thesis attempts to analyse the connection between the proletarian novelists of the late nineteenth century, and middle class naturalist, realist, romantic and classical writers who had earlier made use of the j working class theme. It was the intention to demonstrate that, while offering new insights into the life of the indigent-masses, these writers often relied heavily for style and theme on those established by their predecessors. The comparison could only be made by treating in detail selected representatives of this new development in literature, and this was aided by examining the opinions of contemporary critics. The precise reasons for choosing the five authors who appear in the title and for subjecting them to greatly varying degrees of examination are given at the beginning of Part Two. In general, however, these five may be seen as the group which exhibited at once the greatest similarity to established literary conventions and also the most striking originality in the development of their subject. The second and predominant aim of this thesis was to present to an English readership the works of hitherto largely ignored novelists. Because of their obscurity, greater use of quotation and paraphrase was made than would have been necessary to discuss works of widely recognised authors. Part Two is a systematic evaluation of all the novels written by the five during the period 1890-1914. The limits of one thesis did not allow exhaustive treatment of any of the novelists and it is hoped that one of the results of this study will be to stimulate further research into them. To that end as extensive a bibliography as possible has been compiled and appears in two sections at the end of this work.