Using historical characters and themes has been a most popular approach in drama among English playwrights of the twentieth century. While fairly extensive scholarship has been done on history plays from the Elizabethan world to about the mid-1970s, more recent plays dealing with historical subject matter have yet to be fully explored as a group. / A select few English playwrights using a variety of techniques link political and social concerns with such topics as gender stereotyping, family relationships, sexual oppression, the divisions of labor, ethnocentrism, and class struggles. Looking closely at these trends in recent British theatre demonstrates how these playwrights reveal contemporary ills through the popular English tradition of combining historical data with dramatic form. / This dissertation examines and compares selected works of the recent British playwrights Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, and Pam Gems whose social and political dramas explore questions of sexuality, power, and values through their use of history. While a fair amount of scholarship has addressed connecting themes within their canons, little work has been done on a common thread in Edward Bond's The Woman, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, David Hare's Plenty, and Pam Gems's Queen Christina: questions of myth and history are central to their explorations of gender-related issues. This dissertation shows not only why a group of recent playwrights has focused upon historical, mythical themes and characters but especially how they have demythologized particular notions of gender by examining social and political issues from a historical perspective. This examination and comparison of these playwrights and their works between the years 1977 and 1985 contribute to our understanding of the continuing tradition of linking dramatic art with historical consciousness. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-09, Section: A, page: 3227. / Major Professor: Karen Laughlin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Studies of Virginia Woolf's experimental prose tend to follow the modernist paradigms which privilege spatial form and transcendence at the expense of narrative temporality. Studies of Woolf's historical interests generally look to the Victorian perspective of her father, Leslie Stephen, as they focus upon the novels written in realistic prose. Recent theoretical developments by Dominick LaCapra and Fredric Jameson provide new ways to consider time, narrative and history together in Woolf's fiction, and to make new connections between her historical and experimental impulses. / LaCapra provides a framework which illustrates Woolf's contextualizing strategies, the ways in which she weaves factual and experiential subject matter into fictional discourse. These strategies can be seen most clearly in the project which began as The Pargiters and was finally published as The Years. Jameson performs a new shape of narrative which offers a language in which to discuss Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts. / The interpretations prompted by LaCapra and Jameson question the applicability of a poetry-based aesthetics to the high modern novel as they indicate new directions for historicizing modernism and its art. Among these new directions is a belated appreciation of Woolf's innovations in fictional historiography. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2385. / Major Professors: S. E. Gontarski; Janet Burroway. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Shakespeare's plays contain many instances of the Renaissance conflict of reality and illusion, a theme that has drawn the attention of scholars over the years without, however, yielding a systematic philosophical interpretation. My study offers the view that Shakespeare's treatment of illusion in his plays reflects his aesthetic philosophy, in which he is deeply indebted to the idea of redemption through poetic illusion as set forth in Sir Philip Sidney's essay The Defence of Poesie. Shakespeare's redemptive aesthetic is manifested in a series of protagonists who are symbolical poets and whom I identify as "redeemer-illusionists." / The magus Prospero of The Tempest is the prototype of the redeemer-illusionists: the poet in a universal sense and Shakespeare's realization of the Vates or "right poet" of Sidney's Defence. This vatic figure is essentially a teller of higher truths in a fallen world; his object is to redeem the fallen world through moral enlightenment, yet he must set himself apart from this base world because of its inherent mortality. This he does by adopting the medium of illusion, which emphasizes the mutability of the world and the power of divine truth to govern the moral sphere. / Prospero comes late in the Shakespeare canon and is the most fully developed vatic figure among Shakespeare's redemptive protagonists. But there are other vatic figures that precede and foreshadow Prospero; thus I trace the development of the vatic character in Prince Hal, Hamlet, and Vincentio (the Duke of Measure for Measure). These characters are forerunners of Prospero as redemptive figures and illusionists, though they do not possess his ultimate advantage--the vatic power to shape the illusory world and guide the soul toward truth via language. / Though most scholars have stressed the Aristotelian elements of Sidney's Defence, I find that his concept of the Vates and his theory of divine truth in poetry are primarily influenced by Plato's Ion. Shakespeare inherits Sidney's Platonic concepts but alters them substantially in his redeemer-illusionist, whose illusions are finally the source of his ethical dilemma. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-07, Section: A, page: 2356. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

Wessex Poems is the first volume of poems that Thomas Hardy wrote, and printed in 1898, marks the end of his career as a novelist. Although the corpus of Hardy's poetry is extensive, none of his volumes has been examined separately and formally. His stature as a major poet, the lack of criticism on Wessex Poems, and the premise that traditional criteria can serve to evaluate his poetry all justify the investigation of these poems. Many of the poems are similar to balladic form because they incorporate native material, employ the dramatic mode, and imitate the prosody and musicality of the folk genre. A few of the poems are noteworthy, but most of these verses are too lengthy and too historical in treatment to strictly qualify as folk ballads. The non-balladic poems are lyric in form and are grouped according to their use of natural imagery, their love theme, and their meditative mode, all of which elements are often found in the later poetry. Because of their formal conventions, the non-"inspiring" function of the poet's imagination, and the non-alienation of his poetic characters, the poems in this first collection provide the evidence that Hardy is neither romanticist nor modernist, but can be definitely classified as a poet of the English ballad and the traditional personal, meditative lyric. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-09, Section: A, page: 2774. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.

John Fowles's experiments with technique, which have become a hallmark of his style, develop from his audience perception. Just as an observer's presence in atomic physics alters an experiment's results, so Fowles considers the text to be co-created by the reader during the reading process. Instead of mere ostentation or decoration as some detractors have charged, these experiments represent instead the author's attempts to demonstrate rather than to tell the co-creative reader of the themes and concerns, enumerated in The Aristos, that underlie his fiction. For example, he illuminates not only the Few-Many dichotomy, which his protagonists initially misunderstand because they confuse talents with privileges and they substitute art, taxonomy, or pornography, for life, but also clarifies the corollary Adam-Eve confrontation that characterizes the heterosexual relationships of the novels when he encloses Miranda's narrative within Clegg's. In Fowles's fiction the female in her guise as Eve leads the willing male to fall into self-awareness. This integrating experience, usually consummated in the sexual act, as in The French Lieutenant's Woman or Daniel Martin precipitates a role reversal in which the male protagonist develops a more feminine outlook that perceives relationships rather than objects, whereas the female becomes an Adam-woman combining masculine will with feminine compassion. Fowles uses his experimentation, therefore, to lead the reader through the protagonist's choices and actions to appreciate the true meaning of being elect, that life is engagement in, not a retreat from, reality. Because Fowles's technical experimentation forms an integral part of his fiction, this study treats his works holistically to ascertain the effects his experimentation achieves and charts its progressive development in his first four novels. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-07, Section: A, page: 2592. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1986.

Beginning with a consideration of the Sophoclean play in its original historical and philosophical context, this work compares the Greek drama with the first two English dramatic versions of the Oedipus Tyrannus. In order to dispel the common misconception that the Oedipus is about sin and punishment, the play is analyzed as a demonstration of the fifth century notion that the protagonist's ultimate destiny is an outgrowth of his character. A cultural examination of the play is followed by a compendium of critical works. The criticism is divided into two schools: the fatalist, which interprets the play deterministically; and the humanist, which interprets the play according to more appropriate fifth-century aesthetics and philosophies. / The second chapter is concerned with the first English version of the play, the Dryden and Lee adaptation of 1678. The British drama is examined according to contemporary criticism and compared to Sophocles' play, to Seneca's Oedipus Rex, and to Alexander Neville's Oedipus. These comparisons reveal that the Dryden and Lee version exhibits late seventeenth century dramatic techniques and is closer, thematically and tonally, to Seneca's play than to the original Greek work. / Lewis Theobald's translation of 1715 is treated in a similar manner. Although Theobald's work is ostensibly structured after the Greek play, it, too, was influenced significantly by various Latin-inspired interpretations of the Oedipus Tyrannus. Important themes in the Sophoclean play were obscured considerably by eighteenth century religious and philosophical concepts. The primary aims of the dissertation are to explore the British plays as representations of the ethos of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England, and to compare the themes expressed in them to those developed in the Sophoclean original. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-01, Section: A, page: 0159. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh are modern rivals to the satiric genius of Jonathan Swift. Their separate but contemporaneous series of novels also reflect a radical shift in tone and style from the preceding era. After 1918 in Britain there ensued a "steel blue" decade in which Victorian/Edwardian sentimentality was virtually taboo. The range of this postwar writing ran from the brittle (Noel Coward) to the sardonic (T. S. Eliot), and at its center was the testing of "modern" life styles. Huxley and Waugh put these to the test, found them inadequate, then began seeking values to replace those found lacking. / Chapter I provides an overview. Chapter II compares the first novel of each author (Huxley: Crome Yellow, 1922; Waugh: Decline and Fall, 1928), in which farce prevails and no moral norms are deducible. Chapter III compares Huxley's second novel (Antic Hay, 1923) to Waugh's second (Vile Bodies, 1930), to show a moral stance rapidly developing as a pattern of follies and vices emerges. Chapter IV examines Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928) and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), to reveal satirical parody giving way to trenchant moral statement as a firm moral stance arrives. Chapter V analyzes each author's further drift towards allegory and didacticism. Chapter VI discusses Huxley's post-Point Counter Point fiction as he seeks ethical constructs with which to formulate a "final solution," and Chapter VII explores Waugh's parallel attempts after Brideshead Revisited to seek to sacred amid the profane in his fictions. / Finally, Chapter VIII concludes that although these two novelists diverged in their search for a moral ground--Huxley gravitating towards mysticism, psychophysical exercises and drug experiment (Island, 1962); and Waugh towards Catholicism and aristocratic tradition (Sword of Honour trilogy, 1952-1961)--they both came to embrace a romanticism earlier rejected in order to combat the sterility and barbarism they felt to be pervasive elements in the modern world. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-07, Section: A, page: 2599. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1986.

Since the publication in 1894 of Thomas Hardy's Life's Little Ironies, critical commentary has tended to dismiss it for a variety of reasons. Thus, this study contends that the formative influences on Hardy led to his creation of a unified set of stories in the book, both in the literary and traditional mode, that the stories thematically and structurally unify Life's Little Ironies, and that Hardy's rearranging of the stories in the 1912 edition gives added significance to his purpose and to the iconoclastic power of the volume as a whole. Using an eclectic approach, this interpretation contributes to a fuller understanding and appreciation of this volume. An editorial introduction establishes the need for a reliable text, notes the differences between the 1894 and 1912 collected editions, and proposes that Hardy's rearrangement of materials creates a unified whole. Chapter 2 focuses on the formative influences that helped shape Hardy as a writer, defines Hardy's conception of the short story, and gives an overview of his ironic vision. Chapter 3 distinguishes both the similarities of and the differences between the 1894 and 1912 collected editions and analyzes each of the first six literary stories thematically, structurally, and cumulatively, in relation to Hardy's conception of the "literary" story and his use of the ironic mode, while making connections with external information to enhance understanding of the story and its ironic vision. Chapter 4 also examines the seventh story, "The Fiddler of the Reels" and shows why this story occupies a central position in the volume and its significance in that position. Chapter 5 shows how "A Few Crusted Characters" reflects the oral tradition and explains why it makes a fitting conclusion, while collectively reaffirming Hardy's ironic view of life. Chapter 6 argues that the combination of Hardy's use of irony / with his narrative stance produces an artistic whole, which is enhanced by the rearranging of the stories for the inherent iconoclastic purpose of presenting a metaphor of sexual significance. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-04, Section: A, page: 0970. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

In the 1920's, the literary critic Morris Croll first applied the art term Baroque to the "curt" and "loose" styles of English "anti-Ciceronian" prose of the latter sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Several subsequent critics, those writing during the period from the mid-'40's to the la / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-10, Section: A, page: 4405. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-09, Section: A, page: 5062. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.