It is the purpose of this paper to outline the development of O'Neill's characterization of women from the loving, submissive Mother in the early plays to the Mother turned Destroyer in the later plays. This is accomplished through a chronological examination of the women characters in eight of O'Neill's major plays--Beyond the Horizon, The Staw, Anna Christie, Welded, Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra.

La musique est nouée au corps humain par le vivant qu’elle y suscite ou res-suscite. Des musiciens des camps de concentration aux gamins des rues du Vénézuela, la musique, expérience individuelle d’être pour chacun, peut advenir, pour certains, comme transmission et faire lien social lorsqu’elle est émanation du féminin. Il y faut pour cela une écriture (musicale) spécifique, consistante et architecturée. / Music is tied to the human body by the life force it creates or re-creates. From concentration camp musicians to Venezuelan street urchins, music, our individual experience of being, may become for some a conveyance and encourage philanthropic empathy when it is an emanation of the feminine. This consequently necessitates specific, consistent and structuredmusical scoring.

George Bernard Shaw exercised an above-average level of authorial control, which even extended to his relationship with his biographers. Shaw crafts a persona, with the help of his "authorized" biographer Archibald Henderson, which displays a process of evolutionary development and progress along the lines of the Shavian philosophy of the Life Force and the Superman. In essence, Shaw is casting himself as a prototype for the Superman through the autobiographical manipulation of his biographers and aesthetic modes of self-fashioning.

La nouvelle étant un récit bref, elle est à même de représenter le tragique de l'existence : elle attrape sur le vif tous les événements de la vie et les présente dans une économie restreinte. Theodor Storm et Guy de Maupassant ne manquent pas à cette règle et proposent des récits marqués par l'empire de la fatalité. Celle-ci est la manifestation du destin et/ ou du hasard qui transparaissent à travers la description de paysages réalistes et à travers la mise en avant d'objets clé qui entraînent avec eux la décrépitude des personnages. La technique narrative est également au service de la mise en scène de ce déterminisme, ainsi, l'un et l'autre auteur se permettent d'enchâsser les histoires, de revenir en arrière dans la narration pour mieux faire peser le poids du destin et/ ou du hasard afin de souligner que chacun fonctionne comme un mécanisme à ressort se déroulant tragiquement. Pourtant, même si tout laisse supposer le contraire, ces nouvelles ne sont pas qu'imprégnées de pessimisme. En effet, de cette fatalité empreinte de destin et/ ou de hasard se dégage un élan vital caractéristique de la pensée philosophique et sociale du XIXe siècle. Le destin et/ ou le hasard est en fait l'expression aveugle d'une volonté qui détermine le choix des personnages. Aussi ces nouvelles mettent-elles l'accent sur l'illusion du libre arbitre des personnages qui pensent pouvoir se déterminer eux-mêmes. De là, l'élan créatif issu de l'écriture permet une suspension de ce déterminisme. Ainsi, ce sont ces mécanismes de la fatalité qui sont démontés dans ce travail afin de repérer cet élan vital, salvateur et libérateur propre à la conception philosophique et littéraire du XIXe siècle. / A short story is a brief narrative and therefore can represent the tragic of existence : it catches on the spot all the events of life and presents them in a restricted economy. Theodor Storm and Guy de Maupassant obey the rule and offer narratives marked by fatality, which is the demonstration of fate and/ or chance shown through the description of realistic landscapes and through the emphasis of key objects which pull with them the decline of the characters. The narrative technique also serves the fabrication of this determinism. So, both authors allow themselves to intersperse stories, to go back into the narration, so that the weigh of fate and/ or chance is heavier and works as a spring mechanism taking place tragically. Nevertheless, even if everything suggests the opposite, these short stories are not so pessimistic. Indeed, a life force typical of the philosophical and social thinking of the 19th century arises from this fatality marked with fate and/ or chance. Fate and/ or chance is in fact the blind expression of a will which determines the choice of characters. So these short stories emphasize the illusion of characters' free will who think they can decide of their life. From there, the creative impulse stemming from the writing allows a interruption of this determinism. So, it is those mechanisms of fate that are defused in this work to observe this saving and liberatoring life force, inherent to the philosophic and literary concept of the XIXth century.

The aim of this thesis is to arrive at a characterisation of twentieth century poetry and science by means of a detailed study of the work of four poets who engaged extensively with science and whose writing lives spanned the greater part of the period. The study of science in the work of the four chosen poets, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 – 1978), Judith Wright (1915 – 2000), Edwin Morgan (1920 – 2010), and Miroslav Holub (1923 – 1998), is preceded by a literature survey and an initial theoretical chapter. This initial part of the thesis outlines the interdisciplinary history of the academic subject of poetry and science, addressing, amongst other things, the challenges presented by the episodes known as the ‘two cultures' and the ‘science wars'. Seeking to offer a perspective on poetry and science more aligned to scientific materialism than is typical in the interdiscipline, a systemic challenge to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is put forward in the first chapter. Additionally, the founding work of poetry and science, I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), is assessed both in the context in which it was written, and from a contemporary viewpoint; and, as one way to understand science in poetry, a theory of the creative misreading of science is developed, loosely based on Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The detailed study of science in poetry commences in Chapter II with Hugh MacDiarmid's late work in English, dating from his period on the Shetland Island of Whalsay (1933 – 1941). The thesis in this chapter is that this work can be seen as a radical integration of poetry and science; this concept is considered in a variety of ways including through a computational model, originally suggested by Robert Crawford. The Australian poet Judith Wright, the subject of Chapter III, is less well known to poetry and science, but a detailed engagement with physics can be identified, including her use of four-dimensional imagery, which has considerable support from background evidence. Biology in her poetry is also studied in the light of recent work by John Holmes. In Chapter IV, science in the poetry of Edwin Morgan is discussed in terms of its origin and development, from the perspective of the mythologised science in his science fiction poetry, and from the ‘hard' technological perspective of his computer poems. Morgan's work is cast in relief by readings which are against the grain of some but not all of his published comments. The thesis rounds on its theme of materialism with the fifth and final chapter which studies the work of Miroslav Holub, a poet and practising scientist in communist-era Prague. Holub's work, it is argued, represents a rare and important literary expression of scientific materialism. The focus on materialism in the thesis is not mechanistic, nor exclusive of the domain of the imagination; instead it frames the contrast between the original science and the transformed poetic version. The thesis is drawn together in a short conclusion.