This thesis explores the typically cited character flaws of Macbeth and Hamlet and asserts that these flaws are not the main cause of their tragic downfalls, but, rather, it is the immense psychological and corporeal stresses created by the inexorable progression of time on the chief characters of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth and Hamlet, which lead Macbeth and Hamlet to their destruction. This thesis begins by examining the typical “character flaw” interpretation of Macbeth and Hamlet, which many critics assert, led to their eventual ruin and deaths of many around them. Subsequently, I cite substantial critical evidence from major literary critics, as well as my own close readings of these two plays, both of which quite strongly support my novel argument that the extreme psychological and bodily stresses of time experienced by Hamlet and Macbeth, and, to a lesser extent, by the other main characters in these two plays, rather than simply their character flaws, ultimately lead to their tragedy, loss, and death. I elaborate on my argument by showing how it fits quite well with other major types of critical approaches to literature, including gender-based literary criticism and psychoanalytic and Freudian analysis of Hamlet and Macbeth. I conclude by demonstrating via a novel approach that only through a comprehensive analysis of the emotional and physical tolls of the inescapable progression of time as experienced by Hamlet and Macbeth, and other chief characters, can one achieve an accurate understanding of these two Shakespearean tragedies.

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Joyce Cary's earliest novels address a whole range of "inadequate" ideas which he depicts as derived from romanticism and as fundamentally related to one another. These include the secularisation of divine providence as Hegelian dialectic, as a deterministic unconscious, and as the "life force." Furthermore, he depicts the romantic Utopianism of philosophers such as Rousseau as rooted in the same error as Social Darwinism. The ground of Cary's rejection of these notions is his belief that they all limit the freedom and responsibility of the individual. Having examined Cary's wholesale rejection of these ideas, this thesis discusses his novelistic dramatisations of specific notions adapted from the works of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Kierkegaard. Cary is indebted to Carlyle for a notion of history as a cycle of decay and subsequent new creation of public institutions and symbols which embody cultural traditions. But history also exhibits a linear development, fueled by the desire of all people for greater "richness" of experience. Carlyle suggests that an important role in this development is reserved for exceptional individuals who are providentially selected "heroes" and who have a right to command absolute obedience in the realisation of their creative visions. In contrast, although Cary depicts "Promethean" iconoclasts as the inspirers of historical development, he suggests that the cooperation of other free individuals is necessary to bring their imaginative visions to actualisation. Cary's notion of the manner in which such a responsible and self-fulfilled individual develops is very similar to that of Wordsworth, with one important exception. Whereas Wordsworth attributes primacy to the relationship of the developing self to nature, Cary depicts the relationship with other people as paramount. Nonetheless, Cary's infants and children strongly resemble Wordsworth's in that they pass from a state in which they fail to differentiate between their own existence and that of the world, to a state in which they regard all of the world as animate but as separate from themselves. Furthermore, Cary's notion of memory is strikingly similar to Wordsworth's. Cary depicts the acquisition of a moral sense as an important facet of personal maturation. The mature person transcends the self to engage in compassionate relationships with other people, while respecting their separateness. Furthermore, the ability to transcend the self is fundamental to the exercise of creativity. It is involved both in the intuition which inspires artistic creation and in the engagement with material reality that is necessary to "translate" such intuition into a concrete symbol. In his final novels, Cary depicts the dire consequences of failures of self-transcendence. Many of Cary's characters who subscribe to such "inadequate" notions exemplify the existentially "pathological" states described by Tillich, Buber, and Marcel. Cary's examination and critique of specific romantic texts leads him to adopt a position that can be identified as "existentialist." His ideas diverge at revealing points from those of Sartre, and display a remarkable affinity with those of Nikolai Berdyaev. In the light of these divergences and affinities, the position exemplified by Cary's novels can be located within the heterogeneous existentialist movement. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Repeatedly in eighteenth-century fiction, the widow embodies a narrative agency that has as its actual counterpart the directive relation to property granted to widows by English law: unlike a wife, a widow had a separate legal identity and could hold real property as could a man. Common law dower granted her a life interest in her husband's estate, but over the course of the eighteenth century, dower was increasingly barred by jointure, a monetary provision negotiated in the marriage settlement. Jointure was contractual in nature, often unconnected to land, subject to the ideological vagaries of the Courts of Equity, and violable in ways that dower was not. Running parallel to this legal alteration is a demographic decline in the rate of remarriage for widows. These historical phenomena together provoke speculation about the widow's disadvantaging through jointure over dower. From the perspective of a feminist reading, the replacement of a common law right with a discretionary claim, and its corollary substitution of mobile for real property, indicate an anxiety about the widow's potential might in accumulating wealth in land. This uneasiness infuses contemporary representations of widowhood. Satirical treatments both mock the widow's lubricity and apprehend a re-allocation of property through remarriage. Conduct manuals advocate the strictest modesty to contain the widow's energy. The thesis elucidates, within the context of these representations, the legal and historical developments affecting the widow and reads, accordingly, a range of British fictions. Short fictions by Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Eliza Haywood, and novels by Frances Sheridan, Sarah Scott and Clara Reeve are analyzed to assess a widow's entitlement to desire, to examine her capacity for narrative agency, and to question her security in a transactional economy. Although the widow exerts a consequential narrative authority in the texts under consideration, a familiarity with eighteenth-century law reveals what the novelists imply: the contemporary valorization of acquisitive inclination over disinterested civic virtue, and its legal parallel of unchartered contract over entrenched status right, register a diminution of the widow's proprietary might.

This thesis traces the trajectory of a number of Virginia Woolf's daughter figures in their struggle to achieve selfhood. The four chapters of this project thus examine Woolf's early daughter figures, Phyllis and Rosamond, title characters of a 1906 work of short fiction; Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of the 1915 novel The Voyage Out; Elizabeth Dalloway, the daughter of the central figure of Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, and, finally, the various daughter figures of the 1937 novel, The Years: Eleanor, Delia and Rose Pargiter, Kitty Malone, and Peggy Pargiter. The thesis is structured around my close readings of these texts, and is informed by psychoanalytic and feminist theory. The central focus of this project is a study of Elizabeth Dalloway, who I read as Woolf's pre-eminent daughter figure, as this character alone transcends the fixed gender roles which limit each of the other daughter figures studied in this project. I look to Woolf's concept of "moments of being" to explain this character's vision of a future outside of the marriage plot and domestic existence in which her fictional predecessors and successors are inescapably inscribed. My examination of the motifs that recur in each of the texts, particularly images of silence and self-abnegation and of the strained mother-daughter relationship, allows me to analyse the author's revision of the developmental stories of her daughter figures over the course of her career. Moreover, Virginia Woolf's narrative strategies, most particularly the question of closure in Mrs Dalloway, as well as the representation of female characters who defy the standards of conventional femininity, provide insight into Elizabeth Dalloway's position as a figure of affirmation, emancipation and potentiality.

This dissertation explores the poetry of three women included in Jonathan Swift's circle of friends in Dublin. The demands of chastity and related tensions for eighteenth-century women provide a context for the poems and reputations of Constantia Grierson, Laetitia Pilkington and Mary Barber. Chapter 1 provides personal histories and an overview of their relationships to Swift. Chapter 2 explores familial and gender issues alongside the problematic implications of appearing in print. The final chapter deals with the persona each poet created in order to realize her ambitions, and the dubious success with which publication was accomplished. Images of near-saint, coquette and righteous matron have informed speculation about Grierson, Pilkington, and Barber respectively, originating in Grierson's apparent lack of ambition. Pilkington's divorce and audacity in printing her memoirs, and Barber's emphasis that she wrote "to improve the minds of (her) children". Simplified versions of the lives of writing, women are a produce not only of (frequently misogynistic) misunderstandings; they also result from taking these poets at their word, believing the re-creations on the page.

During the period in which Maria Edgeworth wrote novels, novel-reading was a disreputable activity, and it was generally thought that women in particular enjoyed an illicit sexual excitement through their novel-reading. This widespread view among reviewers, parents, clergymen, and so forth generated a trope of female reading, which represented women's responses to literature as forms of gluttony, intoxication, or sexual arousal. Confronted with this cluster of troubling associations, Edgeworth constructed an alternate and opposing trope of domestic reading. She displaced the erotic associations of women and reading by situating reading within the domestic sphere. The resulting trope of domestic reading became the foundation of her presentation of the proper lady and the proper gentleman, of the domestic circle, which balances reason and emotion, and, ultimately, of rationally ordered civil society. Chapter One outlines the trope of female reading and its relationship to domestic ideology. Chapter Two establishes the parameters of domestic reading by examining Edgeworth's earliest published work, Letters for Literary Ladies. The domestic readers of this early work regulate their own passions and the passions of others, and they are thus able to draw men away from the disruptive competition of the public sphere into a domestic literary salon. Chapter Three examines Edgeworth's construction of a trope of fashionable reading in her account of the transformation of Belinda's Lady Delacour into a domestic woman. While the female reader indulges in solitary excess, the fashionable reader indulges in highly public and highly theatrical demonstrations of her literary skill. Chapters Four and Five turn to the problems that men who are unable to read domestically pose to civil society. Chapter Four traces the reformation of the hero of "Forester," who refuses to abide by the conventions of gentlemanly behaviour. Forester's ungentlemanliness is encouraged by his reading of Robinson Crusoe, and his reformation is marked by his adoption of a more suitable model for the man in civil society, Franklin's Autobiography. Chapter Five examines Ormond, where the hero's reading of Tom Jones leads to sexual transgression and where his reformation is initiated by the reading of Sir Charles Grandison. Through his association with an exemplary domestic family, Ormond learns to conform to the Grandisonian model, and he adopts the patterns of rational masculinity informing Edgeworth's concept of the landowner. Chapter Six turns to Edgeworth's last novel, Helen, in which the power of domestic reading is both reasserted and questioned. Although the heroine is able to use her skills as a domestic reader to distinguish between the merits of two suitors, domestic reading fails when she becomes associated with a transgressive female writing. While Edgeworth's earlier novels suggest that the threat to domestic order resides in female reading, Helen suggests that female writing (an active, illicit, and ultimately public articulation of sexual desire) is a far more pressing threat to the individual and to society.

This study examines the grounds of dissonance in the comic novels of Barbara Pym (1913-1980) from a pluralist critical perspective. Pym's restrained and indirect style is considered as a manifestation of the marginal positioning of a middle-class woman writer within the specific cultural milieu of pre- and post-war Britain. Structuralist, post-formalist and feminist criticism are utilized in an attempt to shed light on the contradictory forces discernible in her subtle prose. Six books were published between 1950 and 1961, followed by her publisher's rejection of a seventh novel in 1963. Pym's career was eclipsed for sixteen years but she was rediscovered in 1977, enabling three additional novels to be published before her death in 1980. Four complete novels, along with three finished short stories and three novel drafts, have been printed posthumously. The introduction provides an overview of the common preoccupation of Pym criticism to date with the ambiguities and tensions in her work. Chapter One presents the argument for a pluralist approach and discusses scholars whose work illuminates Pym's style. These include Northrop Frye, M. M. Bakhtin, Frank Kermode and anthropologists Edwin and Shirley Ardener. Anglo-American critics Elaine Showalter, Nancy K. Miller and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, among others, contribute a feminist perspective. The remaining four chapters explore the language of Pym's protagonists, the characterization of her "excellent women," the fruitfulness of applying dialogic analysis to her prose, and the revisions of plot teleology which she initiates. Pym finally is seen as an essentially optimistic but divided woman writer negotiating painful compromises for her marginal comic heroines within the formidable constraints of the dominant culture.

Abstract Not Available.

Abstract Not Available.