Texte remanié de: Doct. diss.--Edinburgh, 1983--University. / Bibliogr. p. 244-247. Index.

Thesis (M.A.) -- Memorial University of Newfoundland. 1973. / Typescript. Bibliography : leaves [235]-243. Also available online.

This thesis argues that a preoccupation with space is a characteristic feature of English fiction in the years following the outbreak of the Second World War and, more specifically, that the war's events caused this heightened interest in the spatial. Writing from the 1940s exhibits an anxious perplexity in its spatial descriptions which reveals an underlying philosophical uncertainty; cultural assumptions about spatial categories were destabilised by the war and this transformation left its mark on literature. Writers in London during the war were among civilians shocked by new sensory assaults and dramatic changes to the urban landscape. These material facts exerted pressures on the collective imagination and a major part of the literary response was an urgently-renewed interest in the problematics of space. The primary literary focus here is on Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, though work by other writers including Graham Greene, Mervyn Peake and William Sansom is also discussed. I draw on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to illustrate the challenge phenomenological thinking posed to prevailing cultural conceptions of space in this period and to suggest how the war directed writers' attention to the role that embodied perception plays in composing spaces. I also examine how technological change, particularly development of the V2 rocket, shook established spatial thinking and I discuss how conceptual categories such as adjacence, linearity and sequence were further disrupted by the political divisions of post-war Europe. Documentary and diary sources are used to support literary evidence. English fiction changed abruptly and significantly in the 1940s because of a fresh spatial understanding emerging from the war which shaped the culture of the Cold War and the space race. This change demands reassessment of a decade often dismissed in literary history as a dull interlude between temporally-dominated high modernism and a postmodern ‘turn to the spatial.'

The “dialogue novel” is best understood as an ongoing novelistic experiment that replaces narration with dialogue, so that such basic narrative constituents as character, setting, chronology, and plot find expression not through the mediation of an external or character-bound narrative consciousness, but through the presented verbal exchange between characters. Despite sustained critical attention to the variety and “openness” of the novel form, dialogue novels have been largely ignored within English studies— treated as neither a sustained tradition within, nor a perverse manifestation of, the novel. This study seeks to address that absence and to situate the dialogue novel within narrative and novel studies. Drawing from analytic philosophy, narratology, literary theory, and the dialogue novels themselves, this study demonstrates how the unique formal texture of the dialogue novel opens onto valuable discussions about such topics as cooperative language communities, narrative desire, the power dynamics implicit in talk, and the relationship between time and narrative. Overriding these concerns is an attention to how the social nature of conversation determines how the dialogue novel represents institutional power and character agency, as well as how the dialogue novel establishes a dynamic between reader and text for the refiguration of meaning and the reconstruction of fictional worlds. Chapter One uses Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle as a baseline for delineating how communities are formed and maintained through dialogue in Henry James’s The Awkward Age. Chapter Two considers Henry Green’s late dialogue novels alongside his novel theory and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to illustrate how both character and readerly desire function as imitative practices. Chapter Three considers the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett through Aaron Fogel’s theory of “forced dialogue” to argue that dialogue’s constraints can offer liberative structure to the novel form and those who are subject to these strictures. And Chapter Four reads dialogue novels by William Gaddis and Nicholson Baker through Paul Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis and Lubomír Doležel’s possible-worlds theory to argue that the dialogue novel presents an ideal form for examining the complex intersection of formal texture and history, as well as the dialectic between narrative configuration and human time. / English

This dissertation seeks to identify, contextualize, and explain the achievement of late modernist novelists. Late modernism represents a significant, under-examined chapter in the development of the twentieth-century novel. Unlike the majority of their peers in the decades after modernism’s height, novelists such as Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Elizabeth Bowen—and the best-known, Samuel Beckett—continue to innovate in prose rather than returning to realism. Unlike their predecessors, late modernists move towards doubt, eschewing the sometimes ultimately redemptive ethos of high modernism. They do so without the insistence of later postmodernists, however, or their playful mood. The result is something new, strange, and “in between.” The aims of this study are to specify the nature of late modernist style, place it in its aesthetic and historical context, and explain its significance. Each chapter is a close reading of key works by one writer: each novelist uses different techniques to add to the late modernist aesthetic, but they all move in the same direction. The first chapter explores Henry Green’s work, analyzing the textual omissions and narrative construction that make his novels so evasive. In Compton-Burnett’s case, the focus is on how dialogue creates a constantly shifting moral world in which nothing can be taken for granted. The chapter on Beckett explores repetition, both as a microscopic stylistic tool and an organizing device that prevents the text from reaching conclusion. In examining Bowen, the centre is how her syntax circles continually around various kinds of “nothingness” and self-reflexively suggests ways to explore it. This study arranges late modernist novelists in a new continuum alongside Samuel Beckett, with the result that Beckett seems less a unique genius, and the other late modernist writers seem less eccentric and more profoundly challenging. They all seek ways to go on writing when doing so seems impossible. Late modernists bring something new to the novel. Through the smallest stylistic gestures, their works make and unmake themselves, refusing to allow the reader finality. They avoid the aesthetic and philosophical associations of either consolation or utter uncertainty; late modernists matter by refusing to matter in a familiar way.

This dissertation seeks to identify, contextualize, and explain the achievement of late modernist novelists. Late modernism represents a significant, under-examined chapter in the development of the twentieth-century novel. Unlike the majority of their peers in the decades after modernism’s height, novelists such as Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Elizabeth Bowen—and the best-known, Samuel Beckett—continue to innovate in prose rather than returning to realism. Unlike their predecessors, late modernists move towards doubt, eschewing the sometimes ultimately redemptive ethos of high modernism. They do so without the insistence of later postmodernists, however, or their playful mood. The result is something new, strange, and “in between.” The aims of this study are to specify the nature of late modernist style, place it in its aesthetic and historical context, and explain its significance. Each chapter is a close reading of key works by one writer: each novelist uses different techniques to add to the late modernist aesthetic, but they all move in the same direction. The first chapter explores Henry Green’s work, analyzing the textual omissions and narrative construction that make his novels so evasive. In Compton-Burnett’s case, the focus is on how dialogue creates a constantly shifting moral world in which nothing can be taken for granted. The chapter on Beckett explores repetition, both as a microscopic stylistic tool and an organizing device that prevents the text from reaching conclusion. In examining Bowen, the centre is how her syntax circles continually around various kinds of “nothingness” and self-reflexively suggests ways to explore it. This study arranges late modernist novelists in a new continuum alongside Samuel Beckett, with the result that Beckett seems less a unique genius, and the other late modernist writers seem less eccentric and more profoundly challenging. They all seek ways to go on writing when doing so seems impossible. Late modernists bring something new to the novel. Through the smallest stylistic gestures, their works make and unmake themselves, refusing to allow the reader finality. They avoid the aesthetic and philosophical associations of either consolation or utter uncertainty; late modernists matter by refusing to matter in a familiar way.

Este trabalho procura compreender a relação entre as culturas literárias do Novo Mundo e a tradição ocidental em termos de idiomas, espaços geográficos, unidades políticas, regiões culturais e centros de população. A partir dessa perspectiva, são analisadas as abordagens históricas do australiano Henry Green, do estadunidense Harold Bloom, do brasileiro Antonio Candido e do argentino Jorge Luis Borges em relação aos seus respectivos contextos intelectuais: Sydney, Nova York, São Paulo e Buenos Aires. Ao fim, se propõe um projeto para elaborar uma história da literatura no Novo Mundo a partir da comparação das perspectivas de várias regiões dos Novos Mundos latino e anglófono. / This study aims to comprehend the relationship between the literary cultures of the New World and the Western tradition in terms of languages, geographical spaces, political units, cultural regions and population centres. On the basis of this perspective, it compares the historical approaches of the Australian Henry Green, the US American Harold Bloom, the Brazilian Antonio Candido and the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges in relation to their respective intellectual contexts: Sydney, Nova York, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Finally, it proposes the elaboration of a history of literature in the New World on the basis of the comparison of perspectives from different regions of the Latin and Anglophone New World.

Este trabalho procura compreender a relação entre as culturas literárias do Novo Mundo e a tradição ocidental em termos de idiomas, espaços geográficos, unidades políticas, regiões culturais e centros de população. A partir dessa perspectiva, são analisadas as abordagens históricas do australiano Henry Green, do estadunidense Harold Bloom, do brasileiro Antonio Candido e do argentino Jorge Luis Borges em relação aos seus respectivos contextos intelectuais: Sydney, Nova York, São Paulo e Buenos Aires. Ao fim, se propõe um projeto para elaborar uma história da literatura no Novo Mundo a partir da comparação das perspectivas de várias regiões dos Novos Mundos latino e anglófono. / This study aims to comprehend the relationship between the literary cultures of the New World and the Western tradition in terms of languages, geographical spaces, political units, cultural regions and population centres. On the basis of this perspective, it compares the historical approaches of the Australian Henry Green, the US American Harold Bloom, the Brazilian Antonio Candido and the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges in relation to their respective intellectual contexts: Sydney, Nova York, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Finally, it proposes the elaboration of a history of literature in the New World on the basis of the comparison of perspectives from different regions of the Latin and Anglophone New World.

Este trabalho procura compreender a relação entre as culturas literárias do Novo Mundo e a tradição ocidental em termos de idiomas, espaços geográficos, unidades políticas, regiões culturais e centros de população. A partir dessa perspectiva, são analisadas as abordagens históricas do australiano Henry Green, do estadunidense Harold Bloom, do brasileiro Antonio Candido e do argentino Jorge Luis Borges em relação aos seus respectivos contextos intelectuais: Sydney, Nova York, São Paulo e Buenos Aires. Ao fim, se propõe um projeto para elaborar uma história da literatura no Novo Mundo a partir da comparação das perspectivas de várias regiões dos Novos Mundos latino e anglófono. / This study aims to comprehend the relationship between the literary cultures of the New World and the Western tradition in terms of languages, geographical spaces, political units, cultural regions and population centres. On the basis of this perspective, it compares the historical approaches of the Australian Henry Green, the US American Harold Bloom, the Brazilian Antonio Candido and the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges in relation to their respective intellectual contexts: Sydney, Nova York, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Finally, it proposes the elaboration of a history of literature in the New World on the basis of the comparison of perspectives from different regions of the Latin and Anglophone New World.