Time and place are the media through which the eternal is manifested for the comprehension of fallible man. It is the response to environment which has determined and shaped the human attitude toward ultimate mysteries. The patterns of nature are translated by the artist and philosopher into the ritual behaviour of man. The challenge of adversity and the joy of the morning or the new season are motivation for the restless desire to overcome the imperfections of human and geographical landscape. The Canadian prairie, virgin and elemental, as old as the world and as new as the twentieth century, determines a particular kind of response which is both immediate and universal. It provides the traditional challenge of the desert with the inherent possibility of a Promised Land for the regenerate. The writers who have translated the prairie experience into words have tended to fuse traditional with personal mythology, elevating the moment in mutable time to time eternal. The prairie, for them, is at once the desert of the Old Testament and the modern wasteland. The response, although archetypal, has relevance for the individual. The quest motif, which is an aspect of the romantic tradition of all cultures, is central to prairie fiction. The optimism of the journey toward the light is felt even in moments of darkness, during drought or a dust storm. There is a prevailing sense, in the Canadian prairie novel, that man, through regenerate behaviour, will overcome. As he wanders through the physical and metaphysical landscape of the prairie, the individual regenerate behaviour, will overcome. As he wanders through the physical and metaphysical landscape of the prairie, the individual learns to know God and to know himself. As environment takes on traditional aspects of Godhead, the fictional characters find their analogues in the Bible and in traditional mythological figures. The sick king, the fisherman, the god, the messiah and the prairie farmer become fused in the symbolic struggle for identity. The names of the original pioneers in the Old Testament are given new vitality by the particularly contemporary dilemmas of their modern namesakes. In the major fiction of the Canadian prairie, the quest takes on many aspects. Sometimes it is a direct search for transcendental reality, as in Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell, and sometimes it is an effort to find heaven on earth, outside of the spiritual context, as in Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. Mitchell's journey after the meaning of God in Who Has Seen the Wind is primarily simplistic. He believes in the direct route. Reality is a means and not an impediment to supernatural revelation. For Sinclair Ross, whose characters in As For Me and My House are obsessed with transcendental reality, the quest is not so simple. Psychological realities distort divine ecstasy into grotesques. The Promised Land is circumscribed with irony. Margaret Laurence, who has rejected the vertical quest after God, is concerned with the voyage toward self knowledge. Her paths lead into the self. The individual is responsible for his own salvation. A tragic example of irresponsibility related to the horizontal quest motif is that of Abraham in Adele Wiseman's novel The Sacrifice. The questor is not always successful, but the knowledge he gains contains the promise of salvation. That promise is often realized in the messianic motif which is a corollary of the quest. Outsiders with the power to heal, like Gwendolyn MacEwen's magician and George Elliott's kissing man, have the traditional properties of the saviour. Their love embodies the promise of spring and the new season. The major and minor fiction of the prairie share a common vocabulary of optimism which is inherent in the quest literature of every tradition. Landscape is the objective correlative through which man learns by association about God and about himself. His struggle to comprehend particular environmental mysteries is analagous to the universal quest after truth. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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by Christina Lee Ka-pik. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 163-168. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowedgments --- p.ii / Chapter Chapter1 --- Introducion --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter2 --- Orthodoxy vs Anti-orthodoxy --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter3 --- Historicity vs Fictionalization --- p.52 / Chapter Chapter4 --- Ordinary vs Unexpectedness --- p.97 / Chapter Chapter5 --- Conclusion --- p.151 / Notes to Chapter 1 --- p.156 / Notes to Chapter 2 --- p.157 / Notes to Chapter 3 --- p.160 / Notes to Chapter 4 --- p.161 / Notes to Chapter 5 --- p.162 / Works Cited --- p.163

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This thesis is an investigation of the thematic and stylistic similarities in three novels: Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, and Women in Love. The most outstanding similarity is that all the novels focus on the idea of the Unity behind all created things, a Being above, through and in all created beings. In Wuthering Heights this Unity is described in terms of the Eternity of Love; in Moby-Dick, it is Infinity; in Women in Love, it is the Reality which lies beneath the surface manifestations of all things. In each of these novels, also, the protagonist gains knowledge of this Unity through love. Inspired by love, he moves from perception of unity, through purgation of the self, to union with Being. The visionary novels express essentially the same ideas as many philosophic and religious works which deal with the union of man with the Infinite, or with man's attainment of the eternal Ideals. But the visionary novels contrast with such religious or philosophic works in that they present the way to union in purely human, purely material terms. In the visionary novels, also, characteristics of poetry, such as symbolic language and heightened rhythm, are used to focus the reader's attention on the infinite which shines through the finite world of the novel. In the visionary novel, both in theme and technique, the infinite and the finite become one. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Wong Chun-chi. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-98). / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

In much dystopian SF, the city models a society which represses the protagonist's sense of historical time, replacing it with a sense of "private" time affecting isolated individuals. This phenomenon appears in dystopian SF novels of 1960-75--including Thomas M. Disch's 334, John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit, Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, J. G. Ballard's High-Rise, and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren--as well as some precursors--including Wells, Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In these novels the cities also reveal in their chronotopic arrangement the degree to which revolutionary forces can oppose the dystopian order. While the earlier dystopias see revolution crushed by despotic state power, those of 1960-75 see it thwarted by the dehumanizing effects of capitalism. The period from 1960-75 ends in resignation to an existence in which individual action can no longer effect political change, at best tempered by irony (Disch, Delany).