The Man of Property, first published in 1906, later became the first volume of John Galsworthy's extended portrait of the Forsyte family, The Forsyte Chronicles. Composed of two trilogies with transitional interludes, the Chronicles is a unified, sustained work of art in the tradition of what Joseph Warren Beach calls the "sequence novel." Although the novels following The Man of Property were written and published in the 1920's, the entire work is essentially an Edwardian product. John Galsworthy as an apprentice writer in the 1890's was exposed to the historical and literary influences of the crucial period often known as "The Age of Transition." His literary technique and aesthetic later emerged during the Edwardian decade as a curious blend of the "old" and the "new," the Victorian and the modern, and they never changed. The philosophy which pervaded both Galsworthy's life and all his works was liberal humanism, a philosophy representing a break with the early Victorian belief in duty and God but without rejecting the idea of progress. This essentially secular philosophy led Galsworthy to criticize those institutions, conventions, and individual personality traits which he saw as stifling man's ability to improve himself and others. Thus, Galsworthy's belief in liberal humanism found perfect expression in The Forsyte Chronicles, which can be categorized as a work of social protest. The entire series is unified by common characters and themes. Young Jolyon, Irene, and Michael Mont, for instance, are positive liberal humanist models; and the entire work is a protest against two recurring ideas: possessiveness and declining morality. / By the 1920's, however, Galsworthy's philosophy of liberal humanism seemed increasingly superficial to many avant garde authors, such as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, who were turning in their own works to a different vision of truth. They focused on an inner psychological reality and denounced the philosophical doctrine of progress. Ironically, during the Edwardian decade when The Man of Property appeared, Galsworthy himself had been considered an avant garde writer. In the 1920's, however, The Forsyte Chronicles became a best seller, exemplifying one of the many crucial splits during "The Age of Transition"--the gap between "popular" or "middlebrow" fiction and "elite" or "highbrow" fiction. / The Forsyte Chronicles, not seriously examined as a unit since a 1933 study, thus has significance in three areas: the historical, the sociological, and the artistic. Its historical value is twofold. The six novels exactly mirror topical occurences and attitudes from 1886 to 1926, and they are therefore of interest to the historian as a literary reflection of actual events. They are also significant in the history of ideas because as novels whose philosophy and literary technique are neither wholly Victorian nor wholly "modern," they shed significant light on "The Age of Transition" and on the English literary tradition itself. From a sociological perspective, The Forsyte Chronicles as a best seller reflecting Edwardian values in a post-world-war era, is valuable because, as James Hart notes, "In some way or another the popular author is always the one who expresses the people's minds and paraphrases what they consider their private feeling." Finally, in an artistic sense, the Chronicles, when closely examined as a unit, is revealed to be a carefully structured literary work, balanced by vital characters and significant themes. The Forsyte Chronicles is therefore of more than passing interest in the modern world. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-06, Section: A, page: 2687. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

Although Johnson's achievements as a journalist, lexicographer, and critic have been given considerable attention, his career as a dramatist has been largely overlooked. But Johnson's tragedy Irene deserves the consideration given in this study to its sources, theatrical history, and influence on Johnson's later writing. At twenty-six, to begin his first major work, Johnson relied on the earlier versions of the story of Mahomet II's Greek captive, especially Richard Knolle's Generall Historie of the Turkes, William Barksted's Hiren or the faire Greek, and Gilbert Swinhoe's The Tragedy of the Unhappy Fair Irene. Additionally, he turned to the homiletic tragedies of the sixteenth century to flesh out his portrayal of apostasy. / Between 1736 and 1749, Johnson worked on the play extensively, creating at least four rough drafts which demonstrate his ability to turn disparate sources into his own original work. These drafts provide important insights into Johnson's writing process and the maturation of his ideas. And, the thematic and structural decisions that he made for the revisions had a major impact on the view of the drama expressed in his later criticism. His appreciation of plays which could "make the world better" and which contain domestic situations was developed through his tragedy. While Johnson learned from writing Irene, he also gained insights into the theatre from the contemporary reactions to it. Although many reviewers approved of Johnson's moral emphasis, they objected to his formal dialogue and use of the dramatic unities. Their opinions contributed to Johnson's decision to criticize these theatrical traditions in his later writing. / Not only is Irene valuable as an indication of Johnson's methods of composition and his dramatic theory, but also it is a worthy example of eighteenth-century tragedy. Although the play has not been well received since its production, and it has been frequently denounced as a simplistic early project, it should be recognized as a penetrating view of the complexity of men and women. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-03, Section: A, page: 1155. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

This dissertation provides an introduction to the criticism, autobiography, and poetry of the distinguished modern British poet Kathleen Raine. Carried out with the poet's cooperation, the study sets forth the informing principles, essentially Neoplatonic, of all of Raine's work, extracting these from the poet's critical essays and her letters to the dissertation writer. The function, scope, and nature of her criticism is examined in the light of her eclectic vision and the traditional (Neoplatonic) philosophy of the beautiful. The section on her autobiographies posits the "perennial philosophy" as their touchstone and traces in her three major books of Yeats and Jung, particularly the autobiographical method of Yeats and the individuation process described by Jung. Finally, the poet's journey is traced from the early period of personal, Christian, or Platonic content through a rejection of the immediate and ultimately to a fusion of the immediate and the universal. Raine's controlling purpose in all of her work is demonstrated as that provided by her intuitive vision of the perennial world of the imagination, a vision which compells the artist to shape her poetry and autobiography in images, form, and language befitting the unchanging golden world of her Neoplatonic Eden. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-07, Section: A, page: 3120. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.

The main contention of this chronological study covering Wordsworth's poetical career is that solitude as a condition remains a viable source of nourishment for the soul throughout the poetry. Solitude as a defined condition undergoes alterations in character as the poetry develops but is never abandoned and is always regarded by Wordsworth as a benevolent state in its final outcome. / After Wordworth's initial character of solitude, an isolation in nature which enables the narrator of such early poems as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches to exercise conventional sensibility toward rural nature and its inhabitants, the poet developed the dark and fearsome solitude of Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers, a condition of the soul through which crimes are exposed and eventually expiated, a painful punishment but eventually benevolent, leading to a cleansing of the spirit. However, Wordsworth of the 1798 lyrical ballads vacillates in his attitude toward solitude, finally arriving at the profound character of solitude seen in such poems as "Tintern Abbey" and the 1798-99 Prelude, a solitude providing a spiritual medium through which individual man or child holds a mysterious communion with the eternal spirit of the universe. / Wordsworth's middle and later years produced poetry redefining and modifying the character of solitude and the vision it proliferates. As the years progressed, solitude became the medium in the poetry through which endurance and humility is taught, Wordsworth defining the spirit communed with as that of God. This is the lesson taught through the solitary experience of The Excursion and later poems. Nature is reduced in emphasis as the communication between man and God is focused upon. Having arrived at the stage of spiritual definition, Wordsworth not unpredictably endorses and feels a kinship in his last poetry with monastic life, the ascetic existence that strives through solitary meditation for a communion with the presence of God, though several of his late poems show that Wordsworth had not recanted his earlier faith that the common man feels the eternal spirit through solitude in nature. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-11, Section: A, page: 4831. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

In "A Vision of the Last Judgment," William Blake states: "The Nature of my Work is Visionary or Imaginative; it is an Endeavor to Restore what the Ancients call'd the Golden Age." Later in "A Vision" the poet names the tools which humanity has for effecting its restoration into that state of incorruptible redemption. He speaks of "Poetry, Painting, and Music, the three Powers in Man of conversing with Paradise, which the flood did not Sweep away." Such archetypal hopes--to restore the Golden Age, to converse with Paradise--are as basic to the pastoral, from Virgil to Robert Frost, as they are to Blake. Blake's use and modifications of that mode are a vehicle for his spiritual, moral, political, and humanitarian goals. The pastoral envisions a world transformed by the imagination into a Golden Age Arcadia of unification and contentment, a New Jerusalem wherein, as Blake states, "Mental Things are alone Real" and man's divinity is at last triumphant. Just how the pastoral would imaginatively transform the world, and how Blake in his artistic vision perceives the emergence of the apocalypse out of our fallen state, are remarkably similar issues. This dissertation presents a more thorough analysis of pastoral elements and aims in Blake's poetry than has been written to date. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-06, Section: A, page: 2683. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

Professor George Mills Harper writes in his recent book The Making of Yeats's 'A Vision': A Study of the Automatic Script that, despite his copious quotations from these unpublished manuscripts, "nothing but the whole will satisfy the truly involved reader." Perhaps the most comprehensive occult papers that have been preserved in the history of psychical research, the 3627 existing pages of the Automatic Script are of extreme interest to Yeats scholars, not only as the source for A Vision but also as documentation of the creative collaboration between Yeats and his new wife George during the 450 sittings held between 5 Nov 1917 and 28 Mar 1920. This critical edition provides the complete text for that portion of the Automatic Script written during the Yeatses' first visit to Ireland following their marriage. (Under the direction of Professor Harper, Steve L. Adams has edited the first two months of the Script as a doctoral dissertation in 1982, and Sandra Sprayberry is preparing that portion of the Script written between 2 Jan 1919 and 28 Mar 1920.) Included in this dissertation is an editorial introduction describing the methods used by the Yeatses in the automatic writing and its subsequent "codification"; the relationship of the Script to Yeats's 1918 poetry and plays; and the synthesis of his life-long involvement in the occult Yeats achieves in the two versions of A Vision. Extensive endnotes relate the Automatic Script to Yeats's Card File and Vision notebooks as well as to his poetry, plays, and the two versions. Of special note is the emergence of the tower as a major symbol as the Yeatses first occupied Thoor Ballylee, and their growing conviction that their expected child would be the Irish Avatar. The 1918 Script demonstrates clearly that George Yeats was an equal partner in the amazing collaboration that produced A Vision and that provided her husband with metaphors for his later poetry. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-05, Section: A, page: 1619. / Major Professor: George Mills Harper. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.

This dissertation brings together essays written on various texts by Charles Lamb, Mary Anne Lamb, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt and Paul de Man. In Chapter One, I draw on Bakhtin's ideas of heteroglossia and dialogism to argue that the meaning of Charles Lamb's "Confessions of a Drunkard," published in seven different contexts, depends to a great extent on the various professional discourses--utilitarian, evangelical, and medical--and everyday communicative practices that existed in the public discourse before the essay was written. / In Chapter Two, I use Michel Foucault's work on sexuality and madness to re-read Lamb's essays "Confessions of a Drunkard" and "Edax on Appetite" and William Hazlitt's novel Liber Amoris as confessions that partake of the pedagogical imperative to produce truths about the body. In Chapter Three I draw upon Bakhtin, Jurgen Habermas, and Foucault to help elucidate the public and private bodies of desire in Hazlitt's Liber Amoris and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal of My Trip to Scotland. In Chapter Four, I use Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject and Foucault's concepts of the regulated body to show through Mary Lamb's writings how the regulatory discourses of madness, nationalism and empire, and the family silenced and suppressed the violent body of Mary Lamb as well as countless others in the process of expunging the mad body from the text of Romantic culture. In my final chapter, I take up some of Paul de Man's later engagements with Romantic writers to show how de Man in his later work re-presents Romanticism and how Romanticism re-presents de Man in confrontation with the unconscious. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-12, Section: A, page: 4789. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

This study examines Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable as metafiction, fiction which raises questions about the relation between fiction and reality by continually frustrating the reader's expectations of plot, character, language, time and space and by presenting a narrative voice that self-consciously creates fiction. Thus, metafiction makes an issue of the ability of fiction to convey reality. In focusing on the workings of metafiction, three factors are considered: the unconventional qualities of the narration, the text's breakdowns in communication, and the reader's role in establishing meaning. The study concludes with an examination of the influence of O'Brien and Beckett on later American metafiction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-08, Section: A, page: 2750. / Major Professor: Fred L. Stanley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

Johnson never visited the Middle East nor did he have any competence in the oriental languages, yet he felt the influence of the literature more than any other writer of the early eighteenth century. His interest in that literature and the civilization it represented began at an early age through his careful and intensive reading, probably in his father's bookshop, and continued throughout his life. The extent of his knowledge of the Middle East, the importance he attached to it and the nature of its contribution to his inspiration have never been established sufficiently to support a critical appreciation of the oriental elements in his oriental tales. To this problem five chapters of this dissertation are devoted, with a view to placing these tales in perspective and uncovering essential materials which can be used in their analysis. Whereas most critics consider Johnson's Rasselas unfinished, this study explains why Rasselas' conclusion is the more satisfying one. Chapter six analyzes the two sequels to Rasselas: Dinarbas; A Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, by Ellis Cornelia Knight in 1790; and The Second Part of the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by Elizabeth Pope Whately in 1835. / Among Samuel Johnson's contributions to the oriental tale are five in The Rambler, three in the Idler and, most important, Rasselas. This dissertation attempts to reassess and re-evaluate the literary value of these tales. By examining the shorter tales critically, it seeks to determine whether their contribution to English literature is permanent. It also attempts to re-assess and re-evaluate Rasselas, which continues to be widely read and which has contributed greatly to Johnson's literary reputation both in England and in the rest of the world. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-03, Section: A, page: 0692. / Major Professor: Bertram H. Davis. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

As the final third of a triad of Florida State University doctoral dissertations transcribing William Butler Yeats's four-year experiment with automatic writing, this transcription, with textual/critical notes, follows the editorial principles established by Professor George M. Harper, general editor of all of the Vision papers to be published by Macmillan of London. Keyed to Professor Harper's study of the Automatic Script, The Making of Yeats's 'A Vision': A Study of the Automatic Script, and to the revised manuscripts of the first two dissertations in the triad, edited by Steve Adams and Barbara Frieling, the extensive notes offer textual and critical commentary on a manuscript simultaneously difficult to read and to comprehend; the transcription offers a reproduction of the manuscript as faithful to the original as possible. / With the completion of this critical edition a comprehensive text of the Automatic Script (some 3627 manuscript pages) is available for the first time. Of interest and import for the new insights this primary Yeats material will afford, the text of the Automatic Script supplements and magnifies the already extensive texts (both primary and secondary) which offer insight into Yeats the man and poet. / Begun by his wife, George, to calm Yeats during a period of personal turmoil, the Script spiraled into a means by which Yeats developed the complex theories of personality and history which form the basis for A Vision and his poetry as a whole. Yeats himself described the impact of the Script in the 1937 edition of A Vision (8): "after some half-dozen such hours (I) offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences." / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4134. / Major Professor: George Mills Harper. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.