Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [331]-346.

In his earliest work, American writer Delmore Schwartz takes his cue from the writings of T. S. Eliot. Schwartz's experience is representative of his generation's experience, but his intense devotion to Eliot's work and person is highly idiosyncratic. Eliot's legacy soon becomes troublesome. Schwartz watches Eliot create a distant, authoritative persona in exile, yet as he narrates his own family's stories of emigration, Schwartz wonders if one can ever truly transcend determined identity. Exile for Schwartz is primarily an attitude toward experience. Eliot exemplifies that attitude. We thrives on the distance of exile; his poetry is seen by Schwartz as a striving for ideal order. Schwartz begins during the 1940s and 50s to mistrust such idealism and find value in the disorderly actuality of American life. He looks to new artistic heroes like James Joyce to replace Eliot. The new aesthetic of celebration, however, coexists uneasily with Schwartz's instinct for criticism.

Flannery O'Connor based what she called her "anagogic vision" on the medieval way of seeing the world that allowed the reader of a text to discern "different levels of reality in one image or one situation." In my thesis I focus on the ways in which O'Connor revives this literary strategy and adapts it to address the modern cultural context. Accordingly, I examine in particular how her fiction engages Descartes' worship of consciousness and Nietzsche's supposition that "God is dead" by anagogically endowing her characters' bodies with two layers of signification. The first signified body is the spiritually-dead body, which belongs to the character who believes he is a god unto himself by virtue of his intellect. Since the character accepts his mind as his essence of being, his body appears in O'Connor's stories as the image of a soulless identity, a corpse. When the character recognizes the rightful place of the soul, the whole person emerges from the second signified body.

Abstract Not Available.

Utopias and dystopias are forms of social criticism in which the author draws on an existing society to create a perfected (utopian) or exaggerated (dystopian) projection which is set in a different time and/or space from the original. As reactions to problematic, or potentially problematic, situations and developments, utopias and dystopias are always connected to change---they explicitly or implicitly present an argument for change, and/or they embody a response to it. This thesis focuses on four English authors who wrote utopias and/or dystopias between the latter part of the Nineteenth Century and the middle part of the Twentieth: Richard Jefferies, William Morris, H. G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley. In each case they not only responded to recent, endemic, or continuing change, but also implicitly or explicitly sought it. The narratives they wrote are founded in change and emerged during a time of flux. Jefferies responded to a declining rural culture, Morris to an expanding industrial culture, Wells to the material uncertainties evoked by evolution theory, and Huxley to the post-Darwin, post-War metaphysical incertitude which appeared to him to have decentred the culture. Each author also sought appropriate change to remedy the particular circumstances of which he was critical. This thesis looks at these authors, not simply in terms of their response to change, but in terms of their attitudes to the relatively enduring structures of nature and history. Nature, in its various manifestations, had different connotations for different authors. To Jefferies, nature---as local landscape and cosmic immensity, as ears of corn and universal life force---offered, amongst other things, an essential continuity that modern life was eroding. For Morris, nature offered inspiration and the possibility of a harmonious interrelationship with humanity once the restless era of capitalism had been succeeded by a restful future in communism. To Wells, both external and internal nature offered a dangerous unpredictability which must be controlled, while Huxley believed that humanity's struggle with the environment and consequent negative impact on it could be dissolved in the possibility of epiphanic fusion with the cosmos. Central to all their various conceptions of, and attitudes toward, nature, however, is the question of what are the shaping characteristics of humanity's relationship with nature. The unfolding of history, in the simple sense of time passing, was not synonymous with progress for these writers, and the perception that the temporal current was actually carrying society, or elements of it, toward regression and/or fragmentation inspired their remedial dystopian and utopian texts. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Christian Signol est l'un des écrivains français contemporains les plus lus en France aujourd'hui. L'auteur d'une quinzaine de romans de terroir, il bénéficie d'un succès phénoménal. Pourtant, à ce jour, l'intérêt critique pour son oeuvre est très limité. Est-ce que Signol est la victime de son propre succès? Avant tout, ses romans plaisent au grand public. Cette étude propose donc d'examiner les rapports entre le roman du terroir et le roman populaire et de mettre à jour les enjeux du roman du terroir. Comme le roman populaire s'adresse plus à un large public qu'à l'institution littéraire, nous nous proposons d'analyser la mission de Signol. Dans un deuxième temps, nous nous pencherons sur la représentation de la femme dans la littérature du terroir. Dans les romans Les Cailloux bleus et Les Menthes sauvages le personnage féminin est mis en valeur. Philomène, le personnage principal, se montre habile et ingénieuse et n'hésite pas à prendre des initiatives pour parvenir à réaliser son idéal. C'est une héroïne à la forte personnalité qui apparaît comme l'antithèse des personnages féminins des romans du terroir. À la lumière des théories de l'héroïne, cette thèse vise à montrer comment Signol réussit à faire ressortir une héroïne moderne.

Trop souvent dans l'ombre des contes populaires merveilleux et des contes de fées ou bien situés dans le sillage des fabliaux et du Décaméron , les contes populaires français de la Renaissance n'ont pas toujours été appréciés avec justesse. Ils sont appréhendés sous diverses approches et perspectives qui tendent généralement à les définir à l'aide de critères préétablis et plutôt stables, lesquels ne rendent pas compte de leur complexité et mènent, par conséquent, au conformisme. Il s'agit donc dans un premier temps de procéder à une description des contes populaires en France qui respecte leurs différences en même temps qu'elle souligne leur parenté. Après quoi, on s'intéressera à la question du passage de l'oral à l'écrit des contes populaires qui s'effectue à une époque où l'imprimé conquiert de plus en plus de territoire. Nous prêterons une attention toute particulière à la façon dont les contes populaires réagissent à ces nouvelles conditions de production qui leur sont étrangères alors qu'ils relevaient auparavant de la tradition orale.

Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce all have a deep interest in the problem of the mother, and especially in the problem of the mother figured as a problem of the self. The main focus of their work is the identity of the self and how problematic it is to find or preserve that identity. In this quest, they raise some of the general concerns of modernism about origins. Since origins are a major aspect of self-definition, here is where the problem of motherhood begins. This thesis explores the mother figure as seen through the psychoanalytical lens of Freud. By using such Freudian concepts as narcissism, melancholy, and the death instinct, it focuses on the mother figure as she relates to the child or child figures, to the world, and to her own function as a mother and shows how Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce cooperate with Freud in defining for mothers a central role in the modern self's investigations of its origins. For Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce, the mother figure is something other than a specific person. Although the actual mother in the novels I study is physically out of reach, she is still present as a psychological projection of the self, so that even though the self can grow out of its biological need for the mother, it is impossible to grow out of the epistemological need for her. Thus, my analyses of the mother figure are concerned with what the mother is not, or should not be---since inheritance, history, and identity can emerge only if there is something beyond the mother as a specific person, some continuity leading from the mother outward to what is beyond her. And it is precisely this function of continuity, rather than the individual physical experience of having a child, that I define as motherhood proper. All three authors investigate the relationship of a specific female human being to motherhood, and the degree to which the mother as a concrete human being is more, less, or other than motherhood, as well as the ways in which motherhood is something more than the individual. The mother figure is ontologically dead/unavailable as origin for Woolf, physically dead/sexually unavailable for Lawrence, and historically dead/unavailable as inheritance for Joyce. For Woolf, there are doubts that the mother ever existed in the past (lack of continuity); for Lawrence, that she exists in the present (lack of contemporaneity); and for Joyce, that she will be reincarnated in the future (lack of chronology). But in all three of them, motherhood emerges as problematic and ambivalent, and, if its status and authority are restored, it is only through the struggle and growth of the individual self.

This thesis analyzes Constance Beresford-Howe's novels in terms of their place in the contemporary feminist debate over women's traditional roles as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. Her treatment of these roles supports Andrea O'Reilly's assertion that Beresford-Howe espouses what Angela Miles has called "integrative feminism", "a feminism which affirms and celebrates women's specificity and asks not for the eradication of women's traditional roles and values but for the recognition of their importance" (O'Reilly 69). Chapter One deals with a range of feminist literary criticism and particularly with the notion of "integrative feminism" and its applicability to the novels of Beresford-Howe, as well as entertaining complementary and divergent readings of this theory offered by such critics as Germaine Greer and Judith Stacey. Chapter Two considers the portrayal of sisters, daughters, and other female "helpers" in such novels as Of this Day's Journey (1947), The Invisible Gate (1949), My Lady Greensleeves (1955), A Population of One (1977), and Prospero's Daughter (1988). Chapter Three examines the portrayal of the institutionalized roles of mother and wife in such novels as The Unreasoning Heart (1946), My Lady Greensleeves 1955), The Book of Eve (1973), and Night Studies (1985). Chapter four extends the discussion of mothers and wives, with an emphasis on the protagonist's successful redefinition of those roles in The Marriage Bed (1981) and A Serious Widow (1991).

This Master's thesis contains a study of the clerical figures in the novel La familia de Leon Roch, by Benito Perez Galdos. Its main objective is to determine to what extent the author has utilized these characters as ideological vehicles for the expression of a particular attitude with regards to the "religious question," which aroused much concern and debate in the Spanish society (and prose fiction) of the Restoration. To this end, the two priest figures (Luis Gonzaga Sudre and Father Paoletti) who play roles of certain import in the novel have been analysed, considering the manner in which they have been characterized, their participation in the plot events and dialogues, and their relationships with, and influence on, other characters; in other words, all textual references which might in any way help to clarify the ideological function performed in the novel by these two ecclesiastical figures have been carefully considered. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)