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The aims of this thesis are to investigate the use of artifice in John Fowles' The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and show how, through the manipulation of illusion and reality, Fowles explores his own belief that the purpose of the artifact is in revealling the truth. In the Introduction, Fowles' vision of reality is examined with particular reference to his philosophical work, The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas. To Fowles, the universe is ruled only by hazard and flux; and therefore, the meaning of life is, in the absence of a comprehensible force of causality, an eternal mystery to man. But it is a positive and omnipresent mystery that can bring to the individual an existential awareness of his own freedom to create meaning through choice and action. In Fowles' vision, the truth that the artifact conveys is this transcendent reality of mystery that lies behind the appearance of the phenomenal world. In his novels, John Fowles is chiefly concerned with the manner in which conscious artifice brings the knowledge of this truth. Toward this end he imposes a pattern upon his novels that involves the creation of two central characters in a complementary relationship. One serves as the agent of a fiction within the tale, the other as the elected victim who, through the imposition of that fiction, is brought to an awareness of the truth. Fowles' three novels to date, all moving toward a similar revelation inevitably reveal the recurrent pattern of the search for truth. Chapter II examines the quest for this truth in The Collector. When Clegg, himself a victim of self-imposed illusions, becomes the agent of a fabricated situation into which he brings Miranda, he unwittingly plays the "godgame", and becomes the living embodiment of the absent 'God.' Through him Miranda finds the truth of the mystery posed by the absent 'God’. Chapter III examines The Magus and considers the expanded form that Fowles employs to bring the reader a different perspective. Conchis is examined as the confidant of the author and as the agent in the "godgame". Through his mask of illusion and his portrayal of the "god-novelist" in the tale, he brings to Nicholas the truth that the artifact can offer - the truth of the omnipresent mystery created by the absent 'God'. Nicholas, like Miranda before him, loses him selfhood and enters into an understanding of the greater truth which Conchis brings him. Chapter IV examines the nature of the quest in The French Lieutenant's Woman. The central problem of time and history is considered and the novel's relevance to the present is affirmed. The role of the authorial narrator is discussed as a further expansion of Fowles’ investigation of the artifact, and Sarah's roled as the embodiment of mystery is examined in her approach to the "godgame". In this, the most advanced point of development in Fowles' scheme, the reader shares the quest with Charles and is not provided with the privileged information that will give meaning to the mystery that Sarah poses. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Etudes anglophones : Lyon 2 : 2005. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. Index.

This critical introduction to the works of John Fowles focuses upon his three novels, with secondary attention to his poetry, essays, and The Aristos, his non-fiction book of personal philosophy. Giving some biographical detail, the first chapter treats the influence of other writers upon Fowles's work and discusses his thought--especially as it appears in The Aristos, the poems, and the essays. The second chapter is a study of The Magus, Fowles's first novel, although published second. The Aristos is especially important to an understanding of this consolidation of personal philosophy into a fictional structure; the two key influences upon The Magus are Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and Jungian psychology. The third chapter deals with The Collector, revealing much of Fowles's feeling about the artist in society and the imbalance of social justice that spawns ignorance and cruelty. The fourth chapter examines his most successful novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, unusual for its combination of thematic modernity with Victorian narrative style. The final chapter summarizes Fowles's leading place in contemporary fiction three months before publication of The Ebony Tower, his forthcoming collection including four short stories and one novella. Fowles's fiction has established him among the finest of today's artists in British fiction and one of the leading writers in the world. Both critical and general readers have accepted his three novels with enthusiasm, and his distinctive poetry and essays may someday further enhance his reputation.

This study analyzes the development of the major characters in Fowles's novel - Charles, Sarah, and Sam - in terms of the heroic quest motif. Using the basic pattern of the heroic quest, the monomyth, that Joseph Campbell sets forth in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I attempt to show that Fowles's novel may best be understood as the story of three separate heroic quests whose paths cross rather than as the story of a single hero or heroine. This reading seems to account best for all elements of the novel and to explain best the final positions of the characters in question as well as providing a rich appreciation of the novel's wealth of imagery.

M.A. (English) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Existentialism and Darwinism provide a means of viewing the development of personal freedom in a young English gentleman, Charles Smithson. Guided by Sarah Woodruff, a social outcast, Charles approaches freedom through the existential conditions of terror, anguish, and despair; he encounters alienation, human finitude, and the loss of a relationship with God on the way. The realization of his trapped state is aided by the Darwinian analogy present in the novel: the monied leisure class to which Charles belongs is presented as the species approaching extinction because it fails to make the changes necessary to survive changed conditions. The novel's two endings combine existential and Darwinian elements to present to Charles the choice that can help him escape his trapped state and gain freedom.

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New, old novels, contemporary fictions that parody the forms, conventions, and devices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, form a significant and increasingly popular subclass of postmodernist fiction. Paradoxically combining realistic and metafictional conventions, these works establish an ironic dialogue with the past, employing yet simultaneously subverting traditional fictional techniques. / In this dissertation, I subject five new, old novels--John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor and LETTERS, Erica Jong's Fanny, T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman--to a detailed analysis, which compares the parodic role of archaic devices in each contemporary novel to the serious use made of such devices in the past. I argue that new, old novels, by juxtaposing old and new world views, foreground the ontological concerns of fiction and suggest that literary representation is constitutive rather than imitative of reality. Their examination of the relationship between fiction and reality places them at the centre of contemporary concern.