No description available.

The purpose of this study was to present an analysis of the corpus of Harold Frederic's short fiction published between 1876 and 1898. A search of Frederic criticism revealed that little interest had been shown in this short fiction. Few of Frederic's tales had been analyzed or commented upon. In addition, no study considered the entire body of twenty-five stories and novellas. A review of dissertations concerning Frederic's works disclosed that, except for two studies, scholarly attention had been focused entirely upon Frederic's novels. The two studies which included selected short works associated this fiction with Frederic's efforts as a novelist. This study analyzed all of Harold Frederic's published short fiction, identifying themes, literary techniques, and subject matter developed by him.The works were considered chronologically and placed into three groups. Each group spanned approximately six years beginning with 1876. A 'brief summary of each story was given including plot development, major characters, artistic devices and techniques, themes, and characteristics of Frederic's writing. Each group of stories was then summarized, and the short fiction was compared with traditional literary classifications of realism, naturalism, local color, and romanticism.The majority of Frederic's stories was written in a realistic manner. Frederic's descriptions of setting, his dialogue techniques, and his character depictions placed his stories in the tradition of literary naturalism. But his plot development, presenting optimistic points of view, was in the romantic tradition. Hence, Frederic's short fiction was fundamentally in the tradition of literary romanticism.This study revealed Frederic's development as a writer of fiction. His early characters were stereotyped; his later characters were individualized. Early stories concerned landedgentry and other idyllic characters; later tales developed believable and memorable, naive, middle-class characters.This analysis showed that the settings in Frederic's tales became more distinctive. His early tales were set in conventional fictional areas. In the later stories, Frederic created his own characteristic fictional areas of the Dunmanus Bay for his Irish allegories and of Dearborn County in York State for his Mohawk Valley stories.The analysis also revealed that Frederic modified his use of artistic devices. Frederic reduced the span of time in his an evening. Also, he reduced his early, lengthy, descriptive passages, full of alliteration, consonance, and assonance, to carefully detailed descriptions of locales, battles, buildings, characters, and climate in his later work. In addition, Frederic mastered the use of historically accurate details and specific places, which gave believability to his stories.The study showed that, as Frederic developed as a writer of short fiction, his plots became less complicated and that he regularly employed the youthful naive-narrator as a frame for his characteristic frame-story technique. Also, Frederic used humor in his fiction, changing the early humor directed toward a character to the more subtle humor of name imagery and character development.The analysis indicated that Frederic's early tales were simply narratives, but that his later writings developed to include allegorical and symbolic tales concerned with individualism, home rule in Ireland, and the triumph of romance over realism. Other recurrent themes included the triumph of good over evil; the virtues of hard work, truth, innocence, loyalty, faithfulness, and honor; and the vices of vanity, treachery, dishonor, unfaithfulness, avarice, and usury.The analysis showed that, in his short fiction, Frederic developed a set of moral, social, and political standards which were appropriate to his era and to his contemporary reading public.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 327 pages. / Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) is an important work of American fiction that deserves greater critical attention. My intention in creating a website devoted to Frederic's masterpiece is not only to promote awareness of the novel but also to provide high school and undergraduate students, as well as their teachers, with a resource that will situate The Damnation of Theron Ware within an historical as well as a literary and cultural context. Significant events and discoveries in the fields of science, technology, religion, philosophy, art, and literature shaped Frederic's thinking and writing, particularly the events and characters of The Damnation of Theron Ware. An understanding of this milieu is critical to understanding the issues of the richly complicated novel. / ABSTRACT: The Damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination as it is known in England, is the story of a Methodist minister who loses his faith when he makes the acquaintance of a Catholic priest, a post-Darwinian scientist, a New Woman, and a pragmatic con artist. In the end, critics are in disagreement as to the extent of Theron's damnation or illumination. A best seller in the 1890s, The Damnation of Theron Ware was heralded as both "the great American novel" and as "anti-American" in its sentiments. Conceived as an ongoing project and research tool, my thesis is an online study guide with annotated bibliography of criticism devoted specifically to The Damnation of Theron Ware. / ABSTRACT: The website is divided into six main sections: (1) the home page, which briefly introduces users to the site, identifies the scope of the project and provides links to other pages; (2) "Harold Frederic," which includes a biography of the author, a timeline of significant events during his lifetime, a select bibliography of his writing, and a sampling of interviews with and articles on Frederic as author and critic; (3) "Bibliographical Studies," which lists bibliographies, checklists, catalogues, critical overviews, and online resources; (4) "The Damnation of Theron Ware," which includes a discussion of the contemporaneous critical reception of the novel, an annotated bibliography of criticism in list form and broken down by subject, a bibliography of dissertations and theses, and recommended discussion questions or topics for essays; (5) a "Glossary," which includes terms that may be unfamiliar to students; / ABSTRACT: and (6) "Links of Interest," which directs users to other websites relevant to a study of The Damnation of Theron Ware. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.